LINUX Unplugged - Episode 102: Canonical, Dell & AMD Games | LUP 102

Episode Date: July 21, 2015

Noah joins us in studio for a fun edition of Unplugged! Updates are landing on Ubuntu Phones, the ridiculous work around for a major performance boost on AMD cards, the real problem with Dell’s latest Ubuntu laptops & more!

Nice open source alternative to Google Hangouts. Jangouts. Did you know there's an open source alternative to Google Hangouts? Here's the thing. All right, hold on. Before you look it up, hold on. Stop. Here's my prediction, okay?

It will be something that is slightly less reliable than Hangouts, offers no real actual production value over Hangouts, but will be open source. It's just kind of like the same thing with, like, when the guy was like, there was that web version of Jitsi. Yeah. And, yes, it exists. A web version of Jitsi. Yeah. And, yes, it exists. A web version of Jitsi exists.

It sucks. It's totally unusable and really gives us nothing that Hangouts didn't give us. But, yes, it exists. It does exist. So now let's go look at J-ing out. So this is a video conferencing software based on WebRTC and the Janus Gateway with a UI inspired by Google Hangouts. It's called J-ing outs. It's Janus Hangouts is what it stands for.

It's a solution for video conferencing on WebRTC. There you go. It's a JavaScript applicationAS Hangouts. It's JNAS Hangouts is what it stands for. It's a solution for video conferencing on WebRTC. There you go. It's a JavaScript application running exclusively client-side. The server simply needs to provide a bunch of static files through the web server. You have to have a JNAS gateway set up. Then you configure JNAS Hangouts by checking it out from their Git server. Then you install the required things like Node.js and NPM. And then you get up and running.

You get the Node.js server started. Okay, so it's definitely more work than Hangouts. So what do I get for... Yeah, your own self-hosted Hangouts. Okay. So it's a WebRTC, Jack. So hold on a second, though. We can already do a WebRTC.

I know, I don't get it. And WebRTC doesn't offer me the ability to specify codecs or video resolution or audio codecs or audio... I can't do that yet either, to the best of my knowledge, right? I don't know, let's go to... Yeah, you're right. No, you might, but see, this is why I'm surprised you're... But don't know. Let's go to OpenTarget. Yeah, you're right. No, you might. But see, this is why I'm surprised.

But don't you think you're never going to get those options unless it's something open? No, I don't. Well, I think they'll eventually get there. But until they do, there's no... Here's the thing. I'm all for using an open source solution. I'd be the first one to say I want to stop using Hangouts if an open source solution exists. But the problem is, it's not even that the proprietary solution is better.

It's that an open source solution doesn't even exist. It's not even that. Well, Jitsi. I can get Jitsi to work. I am 100% confident of that. And when that works, then. Can I tell you something, though? Please.

I don't even. I have a problem with that. I don't even want it. It's not perfect. I don't want it even in the web browser. I don't. That's why I'm not. Well, Jitsi isn't.

Well, WebJitsi is and this is. All these WebRTC things are even in the web browser. I don't. That's why I'm not. Well, Jitsi isn't. Well, WebJitsi is and this is. Like all these WebRTC things are all in the web browser. I don't want it in the web browser. You know what? On its surface, I agree with you. And for the same reason that I think that, for the same reason I haul around a laptop with me everywhere because I'm just stuck back in the time where that's what you did. But I think to some degree that's your and I's perception. No, hear me out.

you did but i think to some degree that's your and i's perception of no hear me out your and i's perception that a native application is more responsive is more reliable is more stable than something that then a plug-in that runs inside of a web browser because that's just a hack together solution to accomplish what we should be using a native client i i agree that there is i do i do carry a bit of that bias but and it does make me inclined to think that. However, I'm now going to just say I'm basing this on empirical data. Like you look at all of the video teleconferencing we do in this network to make remote hosts possible, and unquestionably, the least reliable solutions are always the web-based ones. Yeah, but you've also shoehorned a solution that was never meant to be. Hangouts is great for you and Angela to sit there and chat.

No, Hangouts is meant for group chat. Okay, fine, fine. Great for you and Dylan and Angela and a couple other people to sit inside of a Hangout and chat. It is not meant for transmitting broadcast quality content from one location to another. That's just not what it's there for. To be fair, neither is Jitsi, and we're shoehorning that into a solution as well.

But I think that the differentiating point is that Hangouts, is that it wasn't designed for it, not the fact that it's web-based. I don't think it would make any difference if Hangouts was a native application. I think it would be better suited to podcasts. In terms of the video codec quality and the audio codec quality, connection quality, and maybe even UI design. Maybe UI design, maybe not. All of that doesn't matter that's in the browser.

The browser doesn't change any of that. What the browser introduces is instability, because it is one more huge, gigantic piece of software that has all of the strategy attacks associated with it that Google has with Chrome, or that Mozilla has with Firefox, or that Apple has with Safari, or that Microsoft has with IE. There's all of this strategy attacks that's associated with these browsers that all get tugged and pulled in different ways that the market wants them to go,

well, you kick that guy out of the room. They want us to all go in different ways. They want to build a platform on their web browser. They're building in things like remote desktop and WebGL, all this really great technology that I don't need in my video communications program. I just need something that makes calls and does video. I don't need in my video communications program. I just need something that makes calls and does video. I don't need like this entire runtime. The browser is feeling like

the Java runtime to me. The browser is feeling like this entire like massive virtual environment I have to have now to run these web applications. I don't want that much dependency and that much room for failure and that much room for software bugs to sit between me and my call. Right. And there is something to that is that we do have, we do introduce a lot of unneeded overhead to get done what we want to get done. The advantage to that though, is that we get access to a wider variety of applications on this common platform, right? Which is the web browser. Totally. So, but I think that, I think that, I think that there, I think that whatever we do,

if we plan to do this on Linux, I think we have to accept that we're going to have to shoehorn some solution that wasn't really meant for broadcasting, kind of shoehorn it in. But I think that between you and Rekai and I, I think we can figure out how to do that so that most of the people won't notice. When Jitsi worked, it worked great. I know. It's just getting it to work. I want to see more effort behind native apps. I really do. But you're right.

There's less incentive for a lot of these people to make stuff natively for Linux. Absolutely. So a good web app is our best next option. Right. And I don't think we shouldn't have web apps. Right. I just wish it wasn't like, it feels like,

I guess maybe this is more to my point, to nuance down what I'm trying to say a little bit, is I feel like all of the really interesting development in video conferencing right now is all happening in the web browser. And there's really nothing happening on the native app. You've got Skype. You've got Jitsi.

You've got telephony apps, EkaGia, things like that. But there's nothing really interesting happening in the native client-side application for video conferencing. All of the interesting things, all of the development, all of the energy, all the time is being focused on these web-based solutions. And WebRTC is a huge part of that. And I'm just, here we are, you know, years into Web WebRTC and I'm still not super impressed. But it is getting close. And if you just want to hang out with some buddies while you're playing a game, it could be a real easy replacement

for Mumble. Right. Look at Noah and the kid. Mozilla, Firefox, hello, whatever. Which is an RTC solution. And it works great for that. So it's not that I don't want that to continue because I absolutely want that to continue. I just also want native apps to

continue too. I wish we wouldn't just chase the shiny so much. I wish we could continue to invest in technologies that have some good fundamentals behind them. So, and you know, Palasso asks a question in the chat room, and we've gotten this in numerous times in the feedback, which is why don't we use a separate video stream and an audio stream? And the reason for that is very simple. When you send two different pieces of information from one location to the other, they arrive at different times. And not only do they arrive at different times, that time changes. It

drifts. And so sometimes the audio's ahead and sometimes the video's ahead. And to make Rakai sit there, you would employ a full-time person eight hours a day just to do a show where they have to sit there and line that up. It's just not practical. It's just not practical. But yeah, I give you my vote.

You may not always – everyone may not always agree with – attack the same problem the same way just like I probably wouldn't solve the same problems that you would solve the same way. But I can tell you this. I have a strategy. I have an idea. And once I think I put it down, I think we'll have a reliable Jitsi solution that will work. You just have to approach that box as if it's – just pretend I am Production Co., and I just sold you a $5,000 video conferencing box. You don't know what software is running on it. It's a magic box.

Yeah, it's a magic box, and you just click on the button, and then it works. Yeah, that makes you make an appliance, and it stays reliable, and you don't use it for other things. Right, yeah. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 102 for July 20th, 2015. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's getting really hydrated because it's got some beer drinking to do tonight. My name is Chris. My name is Noah.

Hey, buddy. What are you doing in studio? I don't know. This is the show I belong on, though, because even if it's unplugged, I still like Linux. Yeah, you were on Coder Radio earlier today. I appreciate that, being a non-developer and all that. Yeah, you did good, man. You did good. Yeah, we've got a great show coming up today. We're going to do a quick update on the latest news for Ubuntu Touch in a little bit. And also, our friends over at the Ubuntu Mate project have an update. They're just asking people to test.

We'll do a little coverage on that. The Free Software Foundation and the Software Conservancy have announced a deal with Canonical, a little change to the contributor agreement. We're going to talk about that today because we've covered that before. AMD has a dirty secret, and I'll tell you it. It'll make your Linux games actually work a lot better. It's very easy. I'll tell you about that if you've got an ATI card.

I'll send them. Yeah, right. Ouch, dude. And then your good buddies, your friends over at Dell, they just took a crap on Linux users again. Oh, no. Right after they released that computer. That's the problem, actually.

Oh, no. No, no, it's not. That's the problem, actually. Oh no, no, no, it's not. Yes, it is, actually. So we're going to talk about that in the second half of the show. And then there's also something that I've been predicting for like two prediction episodes, you know, like we do them at the end of the year in Linux Action Show. Two years in a row, I've been predicting something, and we haven't really seen it take off today. So wouldn't that mean it's wrong?

Hey, hey, hey, hey! No, it was delayed. Oh, okay, all right, all right, delayed, delayed. All right, I hate you, Noah. So we're going to talk about that in the show today, and why Linux users will run and scream in fear, because look at that, they're actually, don't look at what it is, don't look at what it is. Okay, I'm not, I'm not, I'm just looking at the price.

I'm just going to say it was a Kickstarter, they had a goal of $50,000, and they've already raised $530,000, and it's going to replace the Linux desktop. Don't look. Not looking. All right, fine. All right, so before we get into that, I wanted to start. Hugo Silvia, who we met, I think, at one of the conferences before, writes for opensource.com. And he did a pretty interesting write-up about different open hardware platforms that are out there right now.

And I just wanted to show you this one, Noah, because I think you're going to like this one a lot. Now, there's a whole list. This one, though, from Old Spice. This is an open hardware platform. This is Old Spice muscle music. Have you seen this? No. You have not seen this?

Okay, good. So can you describe to the people listening what's going on right now? Well, I'm looking at a mostly naked man. He does seem to have something covering his band bits. And now he is flexing his muscles. And drums are going off. Oh, my goodness. Yeah.

Muscle! Muscle! Muscle! What? Muscle! So he's flexing individual muscles, and each muscle correlates to another instrument. So he's able to... Those are all drums, I would say.

By flexing his chest, his gut... Oh, keyboard solo! And this is keyboard solo. Okay, alright. Never mind, not just drums. Nope. Oh my. Yeah, so this is the advantage of open hardware. You can build things like this.

Yeah, now he's playing flame sax. Those are saxophones that are blowing fire. For you audio listeners, you really do have to watch this. This might be worth sharing even online because this is actually pretty funny. Now they have a view behind him, too. Would you mind explaining what this has to do with Linux? Open hardware, buddy.

Open hardware. So this is over at opensource.com, and this is just to sync you. This is just to hook you. I'm going to recommend the rest of you go check out the article. They actually have a whole list of different types of hardware and different projects. All kinds of fun, like neuro-knitting, error writing. This will work if your body isn't made out of stone and then chiseled, right? How about this one?

This one we've talked about before. And they're actually developing this under Linux. We've talked a little bit more, but it's about controlling your devices using x-ray and sonar and stuff like that. So it's for people that have a lot of disabilities or just another way to interact with the computer, and they're developing all this under Linux. So you don't even have to touch the device in order to move the cursor and things

like that. They're going to try to build them into laptops. This is another example. There's a whole bunch over at opensource.com that was written up. I just played the Old Spice one because I thought that one was kind of funny. It's amazing. It was. And if you got to watch the video version, you know why I played it. Yeah, yeah.

So just before we went right on air, Popey jumped in the room, and I was just starting to pick his brain. I saw, I think it was you, Popey, that tweeted you're getting a new update coming out to your MX4, and it looks like this is the fifth over-the-air update since the device shipped. Is that right? Absolutely, yeah. Tell me about it. Yeah. So I've just pasted the link to the release notes in your IRC channel.

Thank you, sir. And so this update went live. It was tested over the last couple of weeks, and it went live today. And that goes straight out to MX4, Mazer MX4 users and the BQ phone users. Ah. 0.5 and E5. So wait a minute, hold on. You're telling me you can push out updates?

Hold on now. Now, like, the carriers are going to hold on to these updates, and, like, the BQ is going to get it in, like, a couple of months, right? That's how this works? No. So that's why. I mean, I've mentioned this before on the show, but we split the updates up. The bit in the middle that you have to worry about,

the Ubuntu stack, we update that and we put those updates out. We do partner with PQ and Meizu, and those guys do a lot of testing as well so you know we don't just push out updates to their customers because they are effectively their customers right um you know we we uh we get it validated first and it went out today and usually we do phased updates where it um it goes out over a 24-hour period and you know you may get it straight away or you may get it later on you know or you may get it tomorrow on, or you may get it tomorrow, but this time we did it all in one hit,

so everybody got the update at the same time. Yeah, it's cool. That is really nice. There's a bunch of fixes and UI improvements, new icons, new theme, but the big thing is shell rotation, which everything was mostly locked in portrait mode, but now we've made it so you can use it in portrait and landscape. And I thought maybe it was just my Nexus 5, and I still kind of write it off as just something on my Nexus 5, but I've heard it now from a couple of different folks that have, I think maybe they're using the BQ, I'm not sure, but huge, huge ranges in battery life.

Like some battery life is like unbelievably long, and some battery life is unbelievably short. What's going on there? Is that something? Yeah. So some of it is device specific so the bq ones that we worked on earlier and early on and discovered um some ways in which we can improve battery life and they can go for days and days and days on standby just sat on your desk not plugged in yeah these phones are on standby are like three days they're getting battery life of three days on these abunta phones one stand and then and then you turn it back on and it's oh, and you wake it up, and it's got 50% battery left, or some crazy amount of battery. Whereas the Meizu, we've got some known problems with it at the moment.

And that's a critical bug, high-priority critical bug that's being worked on at the moment. And I'm not sure the status of it. I've been on vacation for the last week, so I'm not sure the status of it right now. And I'm not sure the status of it. I've been on vacation for the last week, so I'm not sure the status of it right now. But I know there was talk of networking issues, holding, chewing up a bit of stuff. And I was almost wondering if it was just the display sensor. It almost seemed like a display bug, too. Like maybe it just wasn't reading the person.

There's stuff going on in the background. Okay. You know, it's not necessarily – I don't know the technical details. Okay. Yeah, it's being worked on. Yeah, it's cool. I'm waiting for Noah to get one. Yeah, here's the thing.

I get more and more convinced every time I see them. When we were at Self, I got a chance to play with the Ubuntu phone, and there was a couple people there that were using it as their full-time device, which back at scale, which, mind you, was just six months prior. They were showing it, but they're like, no way would we ever carry these as a full-time device. It's just not there yet. That was just six months prior yeah they they were showing up yeah like no way would we ever carry these as a full-time device just not there yet well i do remember six months and you remember at scale like they had to borrow somebody's phone yeah yeah yeah to come over and

do the demo yeah and now and now itself like people are using those full-time phones just in that amount of time yeah yeah it is it has crazy cool development you know and i guess development. And I guess I have two concerns. One is my one concern is will there be a competitive advantage that you'll be able to leverage against things like iOS and Android? But past that, if that can be solved and we can get actual decent apps on it,

I'm all in for an actual Linux-powered phone. You know, let's open this up to the whole Mumbroom. Time appropriate. Greetings, Mumbroom. The rest of you have any thoughts on the future of maybe you. Not the whole world. I'm not asking about everybody else. I'm not asking about all those different platform wars.

Just you. Is anybody in the room waiting for a device to come on sale in their country? Or is you almost ready to pull the trigger now? Anybody? Speak up if you are. Because I'm really curious to know if anybody else in the mumble room is walking the same fence that Noah is and is willing to maybe try taking a plunge. I'm buying the MX-4 as we speak.

Who's that? Who said that? That's great. Bikini. Very nice, sir. Will you come back? Will you let us know your opinions on it and how it goes for you when you do get it? Sure. I'll be on the whole experience now because I have a laptop on desktop running Ubuntu 15.04 as well now.

Very nice. You still can't use the MX4 in the US, right? On anything greater than 2G or whatever it was? I think, yeah. You only get a couple of the bands or something, I'm not sure. In the UK, so it's not so much of an issue because we're pretty much stuck on 3G and hints of 4G.

Razer, you want to try getting one? You're in the UK, could it's not so much of an issue because we're pretty much stuck on 3G and hints of 4G. Yeah. Razer, you want to try getting one? Now, you're in the UK. Could you pick one up? Yes, but for me, it's just finances at the moment. So I'm keeping an eye on eBay and seeing if I can pick up a Nexus 4 cheap. Oh, yeah. My phone is a Nexus 4.

I do actually have one, but it's my primary, and it's Android at the moment. It's a bit of wear and tear. So I would like to pick up another one just for a few quid and then root it and run it and see what it's like. You know, I've had a lot of fun with my Nexus 5, but I know it's not really, you know, I don't really use it to judge the quality of the release of the OS because I know it's not a target platform. So I use that on Ting. If something that was better than Nexus 4 and compatible with Ting's GSM network, I think I would get a dedicated device.

If I could get like maybe something that worked out. I want to have all the bands available because I don't want to be out there and be like, oh, this thing is so slow and have it affect my opinion of it. Right. Yeah, and it would. It would. And that's been my hesitation too. I'm still waiting for it to kind of get, I guess, a little more fleshed out. It does get more time in the oven.

Yeah, right. But the thing that is so crazy to me is how fast things are maturing. How fast things are going from not usable to usable to totally replaceable. I guess we didn't say this early in the show, but Noah's in studio today because we're going down to OSCON tomorrow. Did we mention that? Are we going to OSCON tomorrow? Yeah. Oh, that's good. We're going to be there Wednesday, and that's why we're recording on a Monday today for the Linux Unplugged show.

And I'm going to keep an eye out. I'm going to be seeing, like, what is, you know, we always do this anyways, but I'm going to keep an eye out and see if we see, what? You think we, Noah has a Red Book prediction that we'll see zero devices that are not Android or iPhone. Maybe. We'll see. We'll see. zero devices that are not Android or iPhone. Maybe. We'll see. We'll see.

Android. Did you say Android or iPhone? Yeah. Okay. I think they're all going to be Android or iPhone is my bet. You think we'll see any Firefox? Well, except for presenters. I think presenters might have something there.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well. I think you'll see, depressingly, I think you'll see a whole lot of MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros at OSCON. Yeah, we do. Sadly.

Well, that's true for a lot of conferences, too. Yeah. So that's true for, I think that's true for the conferences that are very business-oriented. I think that MacBooks tend to dominate that. I think for the community-oriented ones, I think that's very much not the case. So, for example, the email that went out to the presenters were, if you bring some freedom-hating device, bring your own adapters because we won't provide them for you and we won't help you set them up. The irony, though, is the

ThinkPad really any less freedom-hating? I think that Apple has a... Remember that wireless thing you talked about? Yeah, yeah, which apparently has gone away on the X series, which I don't know. Okay, good. So, Apple has a prescribed advantage to having people keep macOS on the laptop.

I agree with that. Whereas I don't think Lenovo really cares what OS is on the laptop as long as you're buying their hardware. I do agree that Apple in that regard – and I just meant from a totally like – from a fundamental standpoint. No. From an actual like – No. No. And I don't think i've ever

said otherwise unless you're buying a system 76 i don't or the librum i don't think you can or the uh the thing the thing penguin stuff i don't think you can truly make uh an argument that that you're you're significantly better one brand over the other that said if you have a glowing white apple on the back of your computer i feel like it's a beacon yeah right even if you're running linux on that i feel like you're advertising to everyone else that you don't that you're not particularly a fan of i heard you i heard you speak up for a second you have thoughts is is the thinkpad maybe more freedom respecting than the macbook or is it a silly metric or what do you think it's yeah i think it's a bit daft because they've all got non-free

blobs in them somewhere or other unless you like go full rms and get a mips right like funky laptop but the the difference is you're you're paying with your your dollars you know if you if you're buying an apple laptop then you're giving money to apple you know you are funding that system whereas if you go and buy a system 76 machine you are fundering the the smaller guy who is uh producing laptops which are more open more free and well there's also the aspect that they contribute to the community in regards and that they may be help further development of that platform like so in like in the vendors of like think penguin and system 76 they even if they have a proprietary blobs and they're not using some core boot or something like that,

they are still contributing to Linux in a greater capacity. Well, not only that, I think you're underselling that. When you buy a ThinkPad, you're buying a vote for a Windows license. I think you're underselling that a bit in that it's more than just that. I mean, there may be proprietary blobs in there, but they're not hindering proprietary blobs. So, for example, I can get to my BIOS and boot UEFI or native BIOS boot if I want to.

That is actually, as it turns out, pretty difficult to do in some of the newer computers. That is a nice thing to be able to turn on that. Yeah, I mean, and so there are a lot of, I think there's a lot of little things like that. And I think that ThinkPad gets its reputation, its positive reputation from Linux users in that

all the things I want to do on the ThinkPad, even if it's not totally a free computer, I can guarantee you, I'll go on record and say right now, you find me any ThinkPad, I'll plug a thumb drive into it, I'll boot into it, and it'll work out of the box. And it's been like that for a long time. Right. And I think that's what's built

that reputation up. Right. Not necessarily that they care about freedom, it's just that you can get Linux to work on it with almost as if it was right out of the box. And that is exemplified by Not necessarily that they care about freedom. It's just that you can get Linux to work on it with almost as if it was right out of the box. And that is exemplified by the fact that Red Hat issues ThinkPads to all of their employees, right? Yeah, I mean, I think the end practical result is you can't deny you're going to have a better bet if you just

go like to Best Buy and you have to buy a laptop at Best Buy. You're going to have the best chance with a ThinkPad. Right. I don't necessarily know if that's enough, though, for me. Yeah, in a perfect world it wouldn't be. Because I'm asking about personal use, not like what you recommend to people or businesses, just for my personal use. Yeah, so

personal use is you want to go with a computer that you're going to have the least amount of trouble. Then you would go with something like System76, but there are some hard limits of System76 in that, for instance, screen size. I don't like anything bigger than a 13 inch laptop right and i can't buy a 13 inch laptop from system 76 right um so i i like uh there are a lot

of people that like aluminum aluminum chassis to the best of my knowledge system 76 doesn't make a laptop with aluminum chassis what size screen is your lemur the A 14. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, so, yeah, I think, I guess to come back to sort of bring this all together is I think there's not a great option either way. And I guess what I kind of want to get to is I don't like that we sometimes shame people for their hardware choices. I just rather they run Linux. No, I agree. Yeah. I agree. This is actually what I told the Mozilla girl when we were at scale.

She had a MacBook Air, but she never actually booted. She never even booted macOS on it. She got it. She opened it up. She formatted it, wiped macOS totally off, and put Linux on it. To me, that's 98% effective. The only thing is when I walked by the Mozilla table for the first two days, I assumed she was running macOS because she had a glowing white app on the back of her laptop. But that's, like I said, in the grand scheme of things,'s like two percent out of out of the hundred yeah yeah that's true

uh you know whereas when i was at fosden there were people from mozilla giving talks at the fosden free open source developer european meeting giving talks from their macbook in os10 yeah i call people out like that yeah and i and yeah i as well. And I asked the question, do you not think it's hypocritical to tell us to use this freedom loving software like Firefox? Yet you're telling us that from that device running that OS. Do you not think you should be dogfooding your own stuff? For sure. And her answer was, I bought this myself. I like this product.

So you can't argue with that, can you? Well, so the most ridiculous answer I heard was, I was at, this was a couple years ago, this was probably four or five years ago. There was somebody from the Free Software Foundation running a Mac, and I thought that was particularly funny, and so I went up and said something to him. Here was his answer to me.

His answer was, I volunteer and work for the Free Software Foundation because I care about users' freedom to be able to choose whatever they want, and so I chose to run a Mac. Really? Really? Here run a Mac. Really? Really? Here's a sticker. That's not an answer.

It kind of is an answer, though. That's not an answer. Come on. If you are part of the one organization that literally just brutally badgers people for not running the most perfect lack of binary bounds, then you're not only going to show up

running not Linux, he's running MacOS on proprietary. Come on. Yeah, that's a little weak. That's a little weak. That was the most pathetic answer I think I've ever heard. I don't know. All right.

See, I was trying to get us away from judging people for the hardware they run. Oh, I'm sorry. Run whatever you want as long as it's Linux. That's kind of where I was going. But I will be curious. The only reason we even bring it up is it's just always such an interesting thing we observe before we go to OSCON or any other convention, any convention. It is a little bit of

practice what you preach, a little bit of dogfooding like Popey was saying, and it's a little bit of if you are in free software because of these Firefox developers, their argument would clearly be, well, I don't develop Linux. I develop Firefox, and I'm running Firefox on my Mac. But doesn't it come down to, well, don't you believe in the philosophy behind Firefox?

No. Well, maybe Firefox, yes. But you know what the reality is? I think a lot of people at OSCON, I don't think they do. I don't think they care about the philosophy. I think what they care about is I want to make money. I'm serious. I want to make money.

And I think that a large part of making that money is catering to the solutions that people want. And a lot of those solutions, open source has a lot of advantages that you can leverage those business perspective that's what I want to do I think that's a huge portion of the people at OSCON but then you do have like open source hardware alleys and stuff like that Brian's going to be at OSCON so Brian from the guy the gentleman we spoke

with that yeah so I mean people the laptop guy the wood laptop guy no no no we had an interview with him at self and he're talking about the wood laptop guy? No, no, no. We had an interview with him at Self. And we were talking about the core beliefs. He writes for opensource.com. Yeah, I don't think so. I think that was somebody else. But the point is that there are, certainly there are people that are there. But I think that the conference is primarily towards marketing open source. And to be fair about it,

I value that because I make a living off of selling open source software. And so if I didn't have those conferences – and the reality is when I'm going to make my living, whatever hardware they're using to present on or whatever hardware they're using to develop on, as long as I get a solution that I can sell, I can put food on the table. Now, I might not be particularly happy about how that food got there or the sacrifices had to be made for that to happen. But the end result is the same, right? Yeah. That's deep, man.

That's deep. You know what that deserves a little bit? Actually, I feel like that was so inspirational that I just want to give you a little. Thanks, man. That was nice. No problem. That was real nice. I'm here for you.

All right. We got to talk about. Well, actually, if you're going to stick around, maybe you have some thoughts on this, too. The change that the Free Software Canonical and the Software Conservancy just recently announced. But first, I want to talk about DigitalOcean. Go to DigitalOcean.com and use our promo code D-O-Unplugged. No, that's one word lowercase, so don't mess that up. I won't.

You know, you can go there and apply to your account right now and get a $10 credit, because if you probably forgot to at checkout, so you should go do that. So go to DigitalOcean.com and use our promo code D-O unplugged. Now, DigitalOcean is a simple cloud hosting provider dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way to spin up a cloud server. And, of course, you can get started in less than 55 seconds and pricing plans start at only $5 a

month. That'll get you 512 freaking megabytes of RAM, which Linux is a boss at managing. It's really, it's one of these things where you think, geez, 512, I would never put that on my machine machine and then you realize, of course, if I'm running it headless, I'm running services on it

and I take advantage of the Linux kernel's memory management, I can get a hell of a lot of work out of 512 megabytes of RAM. On Sunday, I was using 512 megs

to do my X2Go client. Nice. So that was my desktop had 512 megs and I had Thunderbird, Telegram, Firefox with a couple of tabs open

and it was all performing flawlessly. Not to mention the Core OS. And a big part of that is, you know, it with a couple of tabs open, and it was all performing flawlessly. Not to mention the Core OS. And a big part of that is, you know, it's because you're running on top of SSD drives. They're all SSDs, so that gives you a ton of performance. They have really, really good I.O. Like, for example, their data center in Germany, each hypervisor has 40 gigabyte E connections. 40 gigabyte E right to the hypervisor.

I mean, that's smoking fast. They've got data center locations in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, and like I mentioned, Germany and London. They have a really simple interface to manage all of it. So this part is sort of the thing that keeps you coming back. Every time Noah and I are like, oh, I need a server to do this, in the past, just the process of setting up the system, getting the OS loaded, getting the updates installed, getting everything configured, that's a couple-hour job.

DigitalOcean really has boiled this down to like 55 seconds. It sounds unbelievable, but it's true. And part of it is they're super intuitive and awesome control panel. And if you use our promo code D01plugged, you're going to try it out two months for free when you get the $5 rig. It's a very simple and intuitive control panel, and then you can replicate the functionality of it with their API. A lot of people in our audience that are smarter than me use it for really nice things.

I don't remember the exact details, but i think what he did is he set up so you know an app when you're installing packages you can actually have it run pre and post scripts yeah and he set up a pre-script and a post script that uses the api and he didn't even write all the code for it like there was already an example bash script out there i think maybe it's a python script i can't remember and it goes out and it it uses the digital oceancean API to create a snapshot, and it can make iterated snapshots of it, so it can iterate back to different versions. It installs all of the packages, and then does a completed snapshot. So the guy's got pre- and post-snapshots that are all taking advantage of the DigitalOcean

API, and if anything goes wrong, he just clicks one button, and he's right back to where he left off. That's a really nice peace of mind. And, you know, they have one-click deployments for all kinds of great applications. They got CoreOS, they got Fedora, they got Ubuntu, they got Debian.

They even have free BSD. Just use the promo code DOunplugged over at DigitalOcean and try it out. Go create yourself a droplet. Put something cool up there like an own cloud rig,

a Mumble server, Minecraft server, GitLab, Ghost installation. X2Go. X2Go is a great solution. That's what Wimpy uses too. Wimpy's up there.

You know, if you really want to get nuts, dude, you should consider doing this. In DigitalOcean, there's an option for private networking, and the transfer over private networking doesn't count against your terabyte. And so one of the things Wimpy has done, and you could do it too, is he has another rig on a private network that acts as a file server. So he X2Go's into his machine, and then he's got, like, file servers and all stuff, all over private networking, all up on DigitalOcean, all crazy fast speeds, and only one machine's got the public IP, and he's only paying for transfer on that, and it's one terabyte, so

it's like it's going to last forever. Right. But you know what? I have never once been hit with a transfer charge. No, no, never. Ever. No. So I'm just going to continue putting them on the internet until something bad happens.

No, it's just, it's a neat idea to, like, you could have... From a security perspective. Ever. No. So I'm just going to continue putting them on the internet and tell something bad happens. It's a neat idea to like – From a security perspective. Yeah. Like a droplet that is private networking that has your file server and all this back-end stuff all up in the cloud. But I mean – For $5 a month. Think about self-alone, how much data I moved over for all those footage. But even then I didn't hit a transfer limit.

And that, again, is on a $5 a month droplet. I know. It's great. I don't know. Promo code DLUnplugged and a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Unplugged program. You guys are busting it up. So I'm going to read this.

I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a lawyer, but I know that everybody was really upset about the contributor agreements around Canonical and licensing stuff and conflicts with the GPL. So the Free Software Foundation and the Software Freedom Conservancy have both put out statements about a change to Canonical's intellectual property policy that was negotiated over, they say, the last two years. Effectively, Canonical has added what they call a Trump Clause that clarifies the licenses of individual packages

that override the Canonical policy when there is a conflict. I want to read that again. This Trump Clause means that the Canonical policy is overridden if it's conflicting with another license, like, say, the GPL. They say, while a Trump clause is a reasonable way to comply with the GPL in a secondary licensing document, the solution is far from ideal. Redistributors of Ubuntu have little choice but to become experts in the analysis of canonical's policy.

That's their opinion. They must identify on their own every place where the policy contradicts the GPL. If a dispute arises on a subtle issue, Canonical could take legal action. Arguing the redistributor's interpretation of the GPL was incorrect. Now, this is all could-be-woody, would Canonical even do this? They're speculating. Even if the redistributor was correct that the GPL trumped some specific clauses in Canonical's policy, it may be costly to educate the issue, you know, take it to court. While backing the change made, both the Free Software Foundation and the Software Conservancy

recommend further changes to make the situation even more clear. There has been a very, very wide range of reactions to this, from elated to some folks like Jonathan from Kubuntu saying it's not enough, Benjamin saying it's a good start, it helps developers. There's a lot of different takes on this. But to me, it seems like a really smart move because essentially what this allows is if there's ever a conflict

between a canonical contributor policy and the GPL, the GPL wins. And it's kind of like this Trump clause and at the end of the day, the GPL wins. And that to me seems like a pretty big step forward. Popey, if you have any opinions on this, i missing any of the details is this about am i sussing it out quite right from what you know i i feel uncomfortable talking

about this because i'm not a lawyer and i work for the company that's how i feel i'm not a lawyer either so that's fine i know you don't have to say anything if you don't want to think the only thing i would say is that i i think people think that this is used for more nefarious purposes than it really is. It sounds like it. And I don't think there's any way in which we would use it for the ways in which many people think we would. and it's it's difficult because you know you can come up with a hundred different hypothetical scenarios where canonical will be the bad guy yet for the last 10 years arguably we've been the good guy we have been contributing we have a very open um trademark policy and and it's it's unfortunate that it's taken a lot of backroom conversations between Canonical, SFLC, and FSF that's resulted in one paragraph change at the moment.

I guess there may be more changes in the future, but I'm not party to those discussions, so I just don't know. Yeah, that's kind of where I think a lot of us sit. me watching this as an observer, it sounds like a lot of upset about what could happen, what Canonical may have the legal authority to do if they were so inclined, had the money, had the time, and wanted the bad PR. They could, in some cases, go after somebody for using a package in their redistribution of Ubuntu or something like that. It's more, from my perspective, while I work for Canonical, I'm kind of an outsider to this because I don't take part in any of these legal conversations. or a cloud vendor providing cloud images, if they say to you what we're providing is Ubuntu, then that should be something that is verifiably Ubuntu.

And it's not been monkeyed around with in particular ways that would make it not Ubuntu. And when I say not Ubuntu, I mean it might have nasty proprietary stuff added or it may have changed the configuration it massively or it might have backdoors in it or it might talk to their yeah some other server that you you wouldn't want and you would trust us not to do in official ubuntu images so you know it it's more if you think about how this might be used that's more how it would be used is to say well you know you're

supplying hardware and you're saying it's ubuntu well, you know, you're supplying hardware and you're saying it's Ubuntu, but actually is it? Or you're providing cloud images and you're saying that is Ubuntu. That gets in a weird spot for the brand and for canonical and user expectations. And I can see that. Daredevil, you wanted to jump in on the canonical defense side real quick? Yeah, just honestly, I think Baobab then finalized it

and expressed what I felt about the situation, but overall, yeah. Yeah, I do too. And I kind of come at it from a more pragmatic standpoint, like I actually, I'm really happy to see this much movement, and I'd love to see more movement on the issue. It just seems to be something that is a big hang-up for some people.

Yeah, lawyers don't work quickly, do they? It's not in their interest is it you know i have always felt on one hand i've always felt that if if somebody isn't going to use a power for you know you know if somebody isn't if if if the argument is well the cla would never be used uh for anything bad we would never actually you know force that on anyone, then I would ask why is that powering necessary? What that is, is there's only so many tools in the chest, right? And you have to write in a way where you can accommodate for future scenarios. Yeah, I mean, I've always been a little uncomfortable.

But on the other hand, here's the other side of that. Canonical is a company and they exist to make money. They have to pay employees. They have ongoing expenses. And let's face it, their biggest product, Ubuntu, they give away on the website for free. So, you know, there was a post a while back where somebody talked about the dynamic of open source and how if you're a paid developer, then you're given a paycheck and you write code and then the company owns that code. And they don't give anything back and this that and the other where it's open source there has to be a two-way exchange for that to be a profitable relationship right and i guess my instant thought when i heard that as a business

owner is i think aren't they giving back the the the the finalized product of ubuntu constantly away for free i mean it's it's not in the in as in beer, not as in free as in freedom sense. I see that there's a very clear distinction there. But I think to some degree what Canonical does is says we need to be able to protect our ability to make money. And so we find something we can profit on. Maybe, but only in a broader sense. I think what it is, what Popey was just saying, is think about, like, what's the main reason that Google hates it when the carriers take Android and they muck it up? Users come in with one expectation. Somebody else takes that.

They change it. They still call it Android. Right. But the buttons are in a different place. The things do different things. You know, my phone gives me a volume warning about my hearing every time I turn up the volume, but my Nexus doesn't. There's different changes. And as a user, I want to know that if I go in and I get brand A

of phone, I'm going to get the things that brand A has. It's the same reason why I like to buy Heinz ketchup, because I always know what Heinz ketchup has in it. It always tastes the same. And I want to know as a customer, Heinz ketchup will always taste the same. And I, as the Heinz company, if somebody else comes along, takes my Heinz bottle, empties it in a new bottle, and adds a bunch of salt and sugar and calls it something else or still calls it Heinz, that's even worse.

That's much worse, actually, if they still call it Heinz than me as a company. I've got to do something to protect what people expect when they buy Heinz ketchup. And again, excuse my ignorance if I'm missing this here, but doesn't open source provide for exactly that? If you fork a project, you can't use the original – I mean those – Well, that's where these tools and copyright like and trademark come in right but my understanding was the beef of the the cla was essentially that people were upset that they could make contributions to canonical and then they those wouldn't necessarily be submitted they could potentially be relicensed actually this isn't really related to the cla yeah this is more the intellectual property policy that is on Ubuntu's website

about using Ubuntu. And so this is more about, yeah, okay, so the CLA, still in effect. A lot of projects have contributor license agreements. A lot. A lot of them have it. So this intellectual property thing, this is more about, I mean, honestly, where I can see this coming up, and

let's just use our buddy Wimpy because he's not going to get any trouble. But, you know, a distro like Wimpy because he's not going to get any trouble. But, you know, a distro like Wimpy's Ubuntu Mate project comes along, gets a hardware vendor, and they start calling it an Ubuntu machine. But yet it's not an Ubuntu experience. Right. Yeah. Yeah, that's Ubuntu would say. So at some point, like, what if a really big company came along and did that? what if a really big company came along and did that?

They've got to have the tools possible to protect, because they could just become irrelevant if they didn't defend that. So I think that's what this is about. But if you relicense it, doesn't it then become the potential for not being able to contribute that back upstream? And so then, isn't it, so then I guess, and I realize we're getting further and further down the rabbit hole. Yeah, I really am. Because I don't know, I'm not a lawyer. But I guess the and I realize we're getting further and further down the rabbit hole. Yeah, I really am. Because I don't know.

I'm not a lawyer. But it just – I guess the concern I see is I could potentially write code and think I'm contributing to all of these projects. And in the end, Canonical could, as the way it's written, just take it and say, no, we own that. Well, you are again – you're confusing the life of the contributor agreement with what I am. But even the CLA doesn't say that. You get to keep the rights over your work you just grant us the ability to redistribute that work as well that's the difference you so you which does include a relicense by contributing like you

could like isn't it doesn't it does allow to relicense to like apache it doesn't allow for some relicensing to of code doesn't mean they can't contribute to their own code still though right potentially but you still get to keep the rights over your code. So you could still distribute it under the GPL or whatever license you had it under. Yeah, so they haven't changed the code then. They haven't changed the licensing then, right? I mean, so they forked it and changed it? They would fork it, relicense it.

Now, Canonical could continue to develop that version that's under a different license, and you would continue to have your version under your license. That doesn't seem egregious to me because at the end of the day, there is no way that somebody else can take a software and say this is Ubuntu if it's not in fact Ubuntu. And at the same time, you're not hindering the efforts of people contributing. Right. efforts of people uh contributing right so i think the the thing that people find egregious but not separate from the whole legal discussion is that potentially you as a as a manufacturer you could make a phone right and you could go and get all the pieces that make up ubuntu um the brand the distro you know the software you could go and get all those pieces and put

them on a phone and say hey look we've made a phone and it runs what you would normally call ubuntu but you couldn't sell that and call it ubuntu right until you talk to us but that's so we have a conversation with you about licensing that you know that brand the trademark and once you do have that conversation we're all golden but you can't until you've done that and that's and that's fair the same with laptops and cloud that's why i think it's a little silly that's such i mean i do totally get where people are coming from but uh i don't really think it's a huge of an issue as we made it out to be because the only time it would become a really really huge issue is if canonical got to the

size of google microsoft or apple but even then i i i guess i'm still seeing where even if they did get to be that big size and even if they did have nefarious ideas, what could they do? What could they – Okay. Then we're going to – I think we got to move on. But I'll just give you the worst case, total, not going to ever happen scenario. Let's say Canonical in 20 years is – they buy Apple. They're so big, right?

They're so rich. And let's stick with this. So say Apple buys Cups, this printing system that all linux boxes use right they get this program called cups they take it and they decide to really make ios and max really integrate super super well together they're going to fork and relicense cups and they're going to continue to develop cups separately they're not going to take away cups from the rest of the community because that's remains that's they'll just languish on github or whatever right but they take cups and they drew in a whole new direction that adds a whole bunch of really neat printing features.

Now, the rest of CUPS doesn't get any of that stuff. Right. And so the CUPS developers are like, oh, man, you took our code and you made it way more awesome and you never contributed back. That's a total waste. But they're doing that on their own dime. In today's world, in the way the world is set up today, if Canonical did that, a few million people would use that. The rest of the entire industry would still use the open standard, regularly licensed product that everybody else is using. And it doesn't really change the technology landscape.

It doesn't really change anything. So the only reason why this agreement on the CLA and all this stuff I think really would matter is if Canonical was so huge that they would be able to deprive the original source project from really any innovation, which is very unlikely to happen. Right, right. Yeah, that makes sense. So you could potentially stifle innovation, but even then – But you'd have to be at such a scale that essentially all of the majority of users in development would move to the other project. And then who's going to want to do that if you're relicensing it in the first place? It just doesn't seem like a super critical major problem. I guess the whole concept of open source to begin with

was the idea of having a license to begin with was that you couldn't change the license and if the license can be changed at any time, then it kind of defeats the entire purpose of it taking share and redistribute. Now, now that we've got the software license, I just, ugh, the lawyering stuff and the licensing stuff, man, it's just, like, it's not mine. Yeah, because let's be fair, neither

of us really have a clue. And we don't really care either. I know a lot of Linux users do, and I totally respect that. I'm not downplaying Yeah, because let's be fair. Neither of us really have a clue. And we don't really care either. I know a lot of Linux users do, and I totally respect that. I'm not downplaying it. But me personally, I've never been like that's not the first reason I jump in. Because we've got so many other more critical problems to deal with long before we ever get to them. I'm glad. Some people are worried about it, though. That's for sure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's good. And it's good to see some results, too. I think that's also really good. And it took them a couple of years. I bet some lawyers made some good money, and some donations were well spent. All right. Now, in the meantime, let's spend a little money on ourselves. Let's get a little more in our toolbox, a little more educated, a little better at something that could make us maybe more competitive in the workforce.

I'm talking about Linux Academy. Go to Linux Academy right now, won't you? And go get our discount. In fact, if you go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged, you get our 33% discount. Boom, Noah. That's a big discount. That is. That is.

Are you a Linux Academy user, Noah? Of course I'm a Linux Academy user. Yeah. You know what? The first thing that really hit me about Linux Academy when I signed up was how well it worked for the way I work. Like, I log in and I was like, oh, man, do I really want to take, do I really want to tap, like this case it was Ruby,

do I really want to tackle this topic? Like, to me, the idea of learning Ruby is like a commitment. Like, I'm going to, this is a life journey I'm going to take. I'm going to go learn Ruby. And when I logged into Linux Academy and I looked at the Ruby course and I was able to take this huge, ginormous, nebulous topic of learning a new programming language and I was able to put five hours and 35 minutes on it. Holy crap. You mean I can learn Ruby in five hours?

That is something my brain can not only process, but I know how to fit that into my life. Like that is something I can wrap my head around. It's no longer this huge thing that's an unaccomplishable task. It is all of a sudden. It's very laid out. It's step by step. Whatever what I'm going to do how long each section

is going to take me and it's like Because why even start a project if you know that halfway through it or even a tenth of the way through it you're going to run out of time

and you're not going to be able to finish it anyway. So why even bother starting? And it's super nice because they have availability selectors you can go and tell how much time you have available

they have seven plus distros you get to choose from so all of the courseware will match that and the servers that spin up during your courseware match that as well. It's really nice

you get to keep track of your progress right as you go and pick up right where you left off when you come back. They have so many great new OpenStack Essential courses, the best AWS courses out there with Scenario-based labs, Docker, Vagrant, I mean, the list goes on. I go through this list all the time, and it's like, I could just sit here and go off, but you don't need to. Go to Linux

Academy and go look at the courses. Go look at the nuggets. They got so many different things up there. DevOps courseware, I don't ever really talk about that very much. Learning Vagrant, Docker Deep Dive, Chef DevOps Deployment, Learning Puppet. All this kind of stuff is extremely, extremely handy. And it's not just Linux, it's all the stuff built around

Linux. You know, things like Puppet too, Chris, are one of those things that, that's a very difficult thing. It's very dry. If you're reading a tutorial, my god, to go through things like Puppet inside of a written tutorial, it's painful. And you can download the guides and stuff and the audio

and listen to it in the car and stuff. Forget that. They have the videos. They demonstrate how they're doing it. And when I can hear a person explain, now we're going to do this, and he breaks up that just monotonous block of text, that's hugely helpful. And there are certain things that I've learned on Linux Academy

that I would have never been able to get through if I was going out and searching tutorials myself. On top of that, they hold QA sessions through Hangouts and stuff, which is really nice. You can ask the instructor questions. They have a good community you can fall on, which are stacked with JB members if you have any tough spots or a success story you want to share.

And they have team accounts if you are a small business or a group of people that want to work together. And they're adding new labs all of the time. All of the time. It's such a great system because it's built by true Linux and open source enthusiasts who want to help spread the platform. And the way they want to help contribute to Linux and open source is by creating something that helps more people take advantage of it.

Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Go get our special 33% discount. And a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. You guys are the bestest. Now, this one I don't really know if we're going to get a lot of conversation about, but I pretty much buy NVIDIA cards

if I'm going to have a debt. It's either Intel or NVIDIA for me most of the time. Does somebody else make graphics cards? Well, ATI AMD's got it. Do you have any rigs with AMD? No. No. I bought one AMD or one ATI car, whatever it was, eight years ago.

Yeah. Yeah. And I had such a pain in the rear trying to get the stupid thing to work with. And even today, even like this is, you know, that was back in 1204 days. Yeah. Even on like 1404, 1410, I go to install it and it is such a pain to get drivers working for ATR. I feel like they keep teasing us with like new driver models. They're going to fix all of this.

Here's what you have to do. Nobody's ever done this. You have to kill X, go into the command line, take the.run file, modify the permissions so you can run it, run the stupid thing. It's just a huge thing. Yeah, they don't even mark it executable. They don't even mark it executable. They don't even mark it executable. So NVIDIA, I click on the little checkbox that says enable NVIDIA drivers and restart my machine, and then I have NVIDIA drivers. Until I don't even have to do that.

Anybody in the mumble room want to become an AMD ATI video card defender before we move on? I know some of you have success with the open source drivers. So what he means to say is, does anyone want to get kicked out of the mumble room? No. No, does anyone have a counter-argument? I'm just waiting for the arm cards also to get real i mean the arm space yeah it's coming along yeah yeah very true i really want to see that to become an also a platform for competition with a desktop market yeah i that would be very interesting all right so here is the pro tip if you're not getting enough performance out of your AMD card, Linux users, I have something for you.

This was discovered, as you would probably not be surprised to learn, I believe over at the Pharonix forums. Surprise, surprise. But, and it's been tested now, AMD Catalyst Linux drivers perform wildly different based on the file name of the game you're playing. What? Yeah. So in the past years, AMD Catalyst Driver has yielded better performance

if naming the executable Doom 3.x86 or Compiz. Like, if you just named it that. But these days, the application profile concept is made more absurd with games that are coming to Linux all the time.

So, the latest example, you can get a 40% I'm going to say that again. A 40%. People do massive hardware upgrades to get a 40% improvement'm going to say that again, a 40% People do massive hardware upgrades to get a 40% improvement, right? Less than that. 40% better performance by

renaming Counter-Strike Global Offensive on Linux. If you rename the CSGO underscore Linux binary to HL2 underscore Linux for Half-Life 2 within Steam, the frame rates suddenly increase across the board. This is with the latest Catalyst 15.7 Linux driver,

while CSGO has been on Linux for nearly a year now. Is this a thing on other graphics cards, or is this ATA-specific? Well, it's not totally uncommon. You know what it is? It's like it's a cat-and-mouse game, because the video card manufacturers are trying to compensate for crappy developers,

and developers are trying to compensate for crappy video card manufacturers, and so they're writing profile-specific settings for games, and the only way they can really figure out how to do it is by looking at the file name. But the question is, should they even be doing this at all anymore? It's a clown show. Yeah. Yeah, it really

is. What do you think, Daredevil? You think it's for maybe benchmarking? No, not just benchmark i think actually these has potential agreements between the graphics video card companies and the game company some games are successful and not others and this raises the question if they shouldn't be probed about this yeah i mean you've definitely like uh samsung samsung got busted last year when uh whenever you would run a benchmarking app on Android, they would detect that and overclock the CPU during the benchmark app's process time.

And then when you close the app, they declock the CPU. Very nice. Dirty, dirty, dirty. So maybe, and you know, some game manufacturers do get a little money from NVIDIA to put the made for NVIDIA splash screen that comes up. I don't know, though. I think it's more like AMD trying to be too smart and I think it's also a little bit of a hit and miss in 3D applications

under Linux over the last few years because these guys have a whole history of writing drivers for Linux for a long time. They've been through the bad days where this maybe was kind of needed. These situations have been targeted before for market competition laws. I pretty much

think this sounds extremely illegal. Because they should be focusing on making the driver for the graphics card to work. And the program should be doing the calls, not the driver. But, but, but, if you're ATI and AMD and you're getting all these reports about this game crashing only on your card, and

the developer of the game isn't releasing any patches to fix it, don't you feel some pressure to fix it on your end if you know how? To do something? To give your card a better name. Because you don't want the internet going, oh man, this Half-Life 3 game is so amazing it finally came out, except for on ATI cards. Like, that's not the story you want. So I guess, let's start with...

Here's what you do. You do an update system that is transparent to the user that it says NVIDIA is providing a special configuration for this game. And, you know, it's clear. You go to notify the users instead of trying to manipulate the driver. So I guess let's start with this. I guess I'm still back lost at what is the ATI market nowadays? Because there was a – Okay, hear me out. Price, dude.

NVIDIA was... No, that's Intel to me. To me, Intel integrated graphics is what AMD used to be, which is that you can do a reasonable amount of games with a little less performance, but it's at a drastically better price point.

And if I want a really good graphics, I'm going to go with NVIDIA. So, I mean, I suppose that ATI tries to split that down the middle, but... Yeah, exactly. They're more powerful than Intel's by a large margin. I think they're cheaper than NVIDIA's. I mean, I suppose that ATI tries to split that down the middle. Yeah, exactly. They're more powerful than Intel's by a large margin. I think they're cheaper than NVIDIA's.

Not by much. And nothing says, by the way, nothing says NVIDIA isn't necessarily doing this either. Right? And they could be doing it on Windows just as easily as they're doing it on Linux. This is something that driver manufacturers have done for a while. It's just that when they tested, they only found ATI doing it. But it could be NVIDIA, too.

We don't know. So we can't totally slam ATI. I agree. I don't know if you're a primary Linux user what the main advantage to an AMD video card is. I'm not. Although they do have a pretty new, cool open source driver model

they're working on where there's going to be most of it in user space and it's going to be a lot easier to update, a lot easier to install. You know what? Even the Windows guys I know, they're just sold on NVIDIA. I haven't met an ATI fan guy,

a fanboy, in a long time. If I'm not mistaken, and I could be wrong, please, I read a while ago that there was some probing between NVIDIA and Intel or something on market dominance, and I think ATI is being given a market share naturally because of these – instead of a fine, it's being applicable as per as many laptops as go in an X brand will have to go with ATI as well or something like that. That's competition laws, at least in Europe's side. But I'm not 100% sure. I need to recheck that. But definitely I remember reading something about this.

It's definitely an interesting take on this. I hadn't thought of it being a conspiracy, but I like that. It's fun nonetheless, either way. I just, yeah, it is right now. It doesn't appear to be, these particular profiles also don't appear to be affecting Windows users. And it comes down to if you're going to do crap like this, and now I'm talking to you, AMD, if you're going to do crap like this

and you're going to have specific application profiles, then it is incumbent upon you to keep that crap updated. You keep on top of it. If you're going to limit my games by 40 effing percent, then it is your gerb, because now they have the opposite of a problem. Now they're crippling all my games. So seriously, if you're going to do this crap,

you've got to stay on top of those application profiles. And also give me an option to turn it all off. Yeah, I was going to say, I don't think that's realistic. I don't think it's realistic that you can stay on top. I mean, think about what you're saying. It just comes out so fast. There's so many indie games. Exactly.

It's not practical. There's no hope of them actually... Not to mention open source games they've never even heard of. Yeah, there's no realistic expectation to be able to do that. I like your idea. Give me a button to turn it off. Call it game optimization for select games that we know about, blah, blah, blah, and then give me optimization if you want. Yeah.

Yeah. That, I think, is the way they should do it. We'll see. We'll see. We will see. And if you are an ATI user – or I'm sorry, AMD, and you want to defend them or you've got a really good reason, jupiterbroadcasting.com slash contact or go find 102 or in the Linux Action subreddit

or even better, the Mumba Room. They still get royalties, by the way, guys, on the x86-64 architecture. Yeah, yeah. A couple of their APU models, which is money. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that is their source of money, isn't it? I can't blame them.

They've got a good thing going there. They help develop a good technology. All right, Mr. Noah, let's talk about our next sponsor as we round out to the last minutes of the show, Noah. And what we're going to talk about is that Dell situation that we mentioned at the top of the show and also my prediction that's finally coming true. Finally, that's good. Yeah, I know, right? Linux.ting.com.

Go there, won't you, friends? Linux.ting.com. Go there, won't you, friends? Linux.ting.com. And go get yourself a device with no contract, no early termination fee, and you only pay for what you use. No BS here, guys. This is really slick. I love no contracts. I love only paying for what I use because it allows me to have a couple of phones to experiment with. You heard me mention earlier I have a Nexus 5. I'm able to keep that and use that and not feel bad about having a phone sitting on my desk that cost me $50, $60, $70, $80 a month.

Yeah. It feels really good. You know how many phones I brought with me? Zing phones I brought with me? No. Little Noah has one. I have mine. I have my backup.

Sarah has hers. We have a little hotspot. So that's like five devices? Yeah. We brought like five out of the nine that we have. Yeah. Yeah. It's nice.

And the MiFi is a great way to go with Zing because if you don't need need a ton you can just like turn it off when you don't need it and then when you do need it you just pay for what you use you know my backup for my sip system is the they sell this uh it's a home device that connects to the cellular network and then i have a jack on my on on this ting box that plugs into the fxo jack of my sip server so if the if my sip line ever goes down if i lose the internet I can still make phone calls. As long as my local network is working, I can make calls. Which it always is. Yeah, and it'll just send them out over Ting. Now, do I really care? Since I'm not

using any minutes most months, it costs me six bucks to have that box connected. That is a great idea. Yeah. So if anyone ever thinks they're going to be clever and they're going to cut my phone lines or they're going to cut the internet line, go right ahead. I can still call out. My alarm system can still call out because it's all going through. That's a slick backup dude i think we should set that up here at the studio so uh this is really nice because we should go to linux.ting.com

i want that no hey you're gonna get a lot more backups for your phone is that what you're telling no what i want is not interrupted enough we've had it we had a situation it was a year ago now but comcast went out all day yeah and we brought in my, I think I was at Nexus 5 at the time. With Alan, right? Yeah, and we just hot-spotted off that, got the show done. And I was like, gosh. But then, of course, Reekite couldn't do it. It would be nice to have something that was whole house wide,

and I'd pay $6 a month to have a backup internet connection. That's genius. Of course, I wasn't streaming on it. I'm making phone calls. Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, you know what? Actually, here, though, I get 20 up, 20 down over Ting here in the studio. Well, no, I'm not saying the speed wouldn't be good enough.

I'd be a little concerned if you were going to do internet broadcasting all day. Oh, yeah, yeah. You know what we did is we just recorded locally and just did the audio stream, and it was flawless. Oh, yeah. Yeah, just the audio stream, it worked fine. And actually, if you think about it, with all the money you'd save, because I saved $2,000 somewhere around there. If you add that up, even if it cost you $400 or $500 to have your show on the air, that's to you. One time?

Yeah, right. Exactly. One time, that's no big deal. If you average it over the two years, yeah. Now you've saved 25% less, and you still save 75% of your money. Yeah. And actually, this might go away, because Ting is awesome. Ting is changing up mobile.

They're hopefully going to break up the duopolies over time. But they're not stopping there, and this is kind of exciting. Ting is rolling out fiber internet, too. And they have it now in some locations. And I think a lot of you have heard me talk about this. You're probably wondering what's going on next for Ting's fiber internet service because, man, would I not just freaking love to have the Ting model come to my wired internet connection and have it be fiber.

So, yeah, I'm interested to see what's coming up next. And they're going to tell us they have a little video about it. Nicholas K asks for internet, are you more likely to expand outward from Charlottesville or step into cities in different parts of the country? I think that we're more likely in Charlottesville just to focus on the existing city area for the time being, you know, we think there's so much opportunity inside the city itself, and there's a lot of different places we can go with the network, and that's what we're really focusing on there for the time being in Charlottesville.

At the same time, we want to really expand into new markets in the U.S., so while we're doing that in Charlottesville, you'll see us looking to get into new cities across the U.S. as well. Man, that's going to be crazy. Seattle, Seattle, Seattle, Seattle. Come on, Ting, Seattle, please. Grand Forks, North Dakota. I can send you a map so you can figure out where it is.

Go to linux.ting.com. Get our $25 discount. That'll go off your first device if you don't have one. If you have a Ting-compatible device and they have CD-MA and GSM networks, they'll give you a $25 service credit, which paid for more than my first month. So go to linux.ting.com and change up your mobile service and start saving money right now. Tons of great devices

unlocked from $60 feature phones all the way up to the latest and greatest Android devices. They got the OnePlus there, too. I've been watching it. Yep, yep, yep. I know, yeah. That's why I mentioned it. Alright, so your good buddies, your friends over at Dell, have suspended the XPS 13 Developer Edition.

Oh, that's not what we're talking about. Oh, I'm talking about that. No, I know, but that wasn't the one. Oh, which computer were you talking about? I was talking about that cheap 303. Oh, yeah, yeah, that is nice. Well, that actually might be on suspend, too. Hold on.

So those of you who know, the XPS 13 Developer Edition ships with Ubuntu 14.04 from Dell, and they are currently putting it on suspend. Once again, we want to thank our entire community, they say, for your posts containing feedback and questions to the Dell Tech Center Forum and this blog regarding the Ubuntu-based XPS 13 and the M3800. Is that it? No, no, no. The M3800.

That's a precision series. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. So that cheaper $300 one is not being stopped. But the M3800 and the XPS 13 are being suspended. Last month, they posted four knowledge-based articles addressing wireless drivers, keyboard repeats, suspend and resume, and cursor freezes. And they feel that they need to temporarily pull the plug on this laptop while they work these issues out and try to resolve the problem.

So here's my initial thoughts on that. One is if there is a problem and they're actively going to work on it, that's a great thing. Now, personally, I kind of see through that, and I kind of get the impression that you do too, that that's not really what this is. Well, I own one, and I don't have those problems. Right.

So here's the other side. If Dell decided to pull the plug on that particular model, I would say that that is a totally justifiable decision in that a lot of times we say that they didn't really commit to it. They didn't really push it. They didn't really. You can't really say that about the XPS. The XPS, because I had the older version of the XPS, and I thought they completely contributed. I mean, they totally dove in on Linux. I mean, that was a Linux laptop. It was a good Linux laptop. And if the market doesn't respond, if people don't buy those computers, then yeah,

Dell's going to pull the plug on it. I don't necessarily disagree with any of that. Where I feel like Dell went wrong, and why I'm a little upset about it, not all that upset, but I had this impression when I got the XPS2, but it's undeniable. It was first and foremost designed as a Windows laptop. They looked

at the specs and went, well, I think we could also make Linux run on this, but we have to, you know, you had that Broadcom thing. We have to accommodate for this. We have to accommodate for that. It was first and foremost built to run Windows 8. And then they later retrofitted. I mean, that's why it has a touchscreen, right? I mean, why ship a Linux laptop today with a touchscreen, right?

It has all of these things that, like the 4K screen resolution didn't really work very well, except for now it's a lot better since the time I've owned it. But at the beginning of this year, 4K support under Linux was really shitty. And now it's gotten to a point where it's actually usable. Thank God Chrome's high DPI and things like that. But they shipped a product where the applications on it didn't even look right on the display. The touchscreen didn't really have a use.

The mouse requires a special driver. The wireless card requires a special driver. They didn't, I don't feel like, if they really wanted to go all in on building, I think with that first Sputnik, that was better. Like, it felt like that was maybe from the original drawing board, this is going to run Linux.

This one felt like, hey, it's been a long time since we updated the Sputnik. This laptop's pretty close that we're building with Windows 8, so let's make that our Linux one. So, but at the time that they actually released the Linux 8, so let's make that our Linux one. At the time that they actually released the Linux version, were those problems still persistent? Because remember when you...

For the first few weeks they had some issues, but they had some updates that resolved pretty much everything. And then Dell released two BIOS updates. And then after they released those two BIOS updates, they also released it for the original XPS 13 that was shipped with Windows. After they did those BIOS updates

and the latest Linux kernel, I've never had a problem anymore. Wireless works fine. Sleep and suspend works fine. Key repeat issue is gone. Mouse issues are all gone. All that stuff is cleared up. So there were problems through BIOS updates and stuff and kernel updates. I feel like if they had gone

at the approach where everything in this component needs to be Linux, every component in this machine needs to be Linux compatible, they wouldn't have ended up where they're at right now. Yeah. And the reason I don't like it is because, I mean, I'm super glad they're testing it, but I just wish, I wish if you're going to pull back on it, like they're sort of playing to all these stereotypes

about Linux on the desktop. Oh, you got weird issues here. We got weird issues here. In fact, they're so bad, we have these stereotypes about Linux on the desktop. Oh, you've got weird issues here. We've got weird issues here. In fact, they're so bad, we have to stop selling the product. And it just puts this message out there to other OEMs that this is a train wreck that you are going to get. It's a quagmire you're going to get pulled into if you try to ship this product. Boy, that's the truth. And the thing is, I believe, and I have believed for quite some time, that there is a market for a high-end, well-built Linux laptop.

Oh, yeah. That's why I tried the XPS 13. You and I. I actually think it's still a pretty great laptop. No, I agree. But I guess what I'm saying is I think that there's a lot of people that would say, well, Chris, no, you guys are the exception. Most people don't want that. Where Linux fits in is the crappy Celeron with 1366x768 and 120 gig SSD and 4 gigs of RAM.

Or a Spinny 5400. Yeah, right, right. And you can sell that for $300 or $200 at Best Buy. That's where Linux fits. And I don't agree with that. I think that that is one market. There's a range. I think there is a market for that. But I also think there's a big market for those Chromebook users that you were talking

about. I think that there is a subset of those, and I think it's a fairly large subset, that would spend three or four times the amount of money on a laptop if they could keep it for the next seven or eight years and it would work flawlessly. Popey, have you looked at the XPS 13 and what do you think? Is this sort of bad PR in a roundabout way?

He's lit up. Sorry, Popey. Go ahead. I'm sorry. I cut off the first few words you said. Oh, okay. It's a shame the quality assurance wasn't higher on the

linux shipping devices because you know i know a bunch of people who bought them both canonical and non-canonical people who bought them and you know experienced the same kind of issues as everyone else and were just as frustrated as everyone else and yeah i agree that probably if it had been a linux machine from the from the get-go, and everything was made to work on Linux on day one, maybe things would be different. But the problem with that is you have such a small market for, really, relative to the Windows market. It's a very small market so making a one-off specific machine given the low profit margin that they'll make on every machine anyway on any machine that's a huge amount of engineering investment in order to make a one-off machine that you know will work well with lennox what

so what generally happens with with oems is from our perspective at canonical we work with them to build the image so that that image that went on the the dell xps 13 that was shipping was a collaboration between dell and canonical so we take some of the blame for that not being as you know shiny as it could have been as it went out the door um and you know we talked to Dell a lot about these kind of issues, and there's a lot of feedback that goes back to them. And clearly they've decided that they need to stop selling the thing temporarily just so that they can integrate all these fixes so that the ones that go out the door are the best that they can possibly be.

But, Popey, I mean, so I can accept that to a certain extent, but the reality is, like, you're shipped with a Broadcom card, right? If you are building a computer to run Linux, that's almost the worst possible card you could put in there, save the ones that Dell themselves make. Here's, I guess, so I— Sure, like, name a wireless card that's fantastic on Linux and Windows. Well, the Intels are pretty good. No, that's bullshit. No, no, no, no.

I've never had an Intel card. Popey, I've never, ever had an Intel card that didn't work right out of the box with Linux and Windows. No, that's bullshit. I've never had an Intel card that didn't work right out of the box with Linux, ever. Well, well done you. Can you give me a model? For the last two years, the IWL Wi-Fi driver, you've had to blacklist N

to even stay on a wireless network. It's ridiculous. So making out wireless wireless card is somehow blessed by the gods and is way better than all the others is just bull because they are all i respectfully disagree with you i i i in in like and i don't mean like the one or two or three laptops had i've had over the year i mean like 50 60 different computers all of that intel cards and i've never had an issue so i am but you're not you're not alone and i i get people pm'ing me saying hey what's that thing

i put in etc modules dot d or whatever that disables wireless n on intel cards because i'm at a customer site and i can't get on their wi-fi and and this is a common problem can you give me a model that i can put in my computer whatever's in my whatever's in my x220 i've had one intel card i've had i have had issues with but for the most part they've been pretty good for me i have an x220 right and i don't have a problem with my wireless card i i love i love intel as much as the next guy right but you you can't put them up as hold them up as being the panacea of perfection because there there are issues with their with their wireless drivers and there are issues with their x drivers and to make out like they're somehow way more perfect than ati or nvidia is just missing

the point i can't speak to i can't speak to graphics but i'll tell you this if you order 10 intel wi-fi cards off of amazon different, and you order 10 Broadcom cards, I'll make a bet right now that 10 of the Intel ones will work on Linux right out of the box, and 9 out of the 10 of the Broadcom ones won't work out of the box. And 5 of those you'll never get to work. I wonder if the differences you guys are talking about is Noah's talking about actually turning the card on and connecting, like the driver seeing it. And I think Popey's talking about, like, reliability of connection to the wireless network.

Oh, that might be. Yeah, actually, you know. Okay, that might be. Here's the thing. And I think Popey's talking about like reliability of connection to the wireless network. Oh, that might be. Yeah, actually, you know. Okay, that might be. Here's the thing. I will deal with, so to that, here would be my answer. My answer would be,

I'll take the card that is less reliable than the card that gives me no Wi-Fi whatsoever. Well, I think Wi-Fi is just unreliable. I wanted to address the, so I think Popey made

a pretty fair point in that, you know, Dell doesn't really have the time, resources, or motivations to make that XPS laptop Linux first because really they're selling probably 99% more Windows laptops than they are going to sell the Linux version of that laptop. So from an entire company orientation standpoint, it makes a lot more sense,

a lot more practical sense to put your resources behind the product that's going to go to all of your profit. However, I think you could apply that same logic model and say, that's why it's critical that they make this machine their focus. They make it so important they get it right because they're coming into a new market, hat in hand, humble, saying, this is our entrance into this space. We want this to be the developer edition. People that are developing software for Linux, this is a machine for you. And if you want to come into a new market

and you want to bring a new group of people into your product and you want to show them that when you launch a product for them, you can do it right, it's absolutely important that you get all of the small details right. And I hate doing this,

but let's be honest. If Apple made this machine, they wouldn't care about that. They would say, if we're going to build a machine for these people, then we have to build it with all of these components. And of course, for us, it wouldn't match. It would have one port and it would be horrible. We wouldn't care about that. They would say, if we're going to build a machine for these people, then we have to build it with all of these components. And of course, for us, it wouldn't match. It would have

one port, and it would be horrible. We wouldn't like it. That's how they get the MacBook One. But they start at that spot, and they say, what does this group need? What do these people need? And they build the entire machine, even if it's going to be a tiny, tiny fraction of their business, because it's actually more important, right? Because you're introducing yourself to a new set of people,

a new set of potential buyers, and you're trying to carve out a new space in the marketplace that potentially in the future, as this market grows, they will come to you as one of the people that builds the best product for that. And I think if you don't come at that with that perspective, you will never break into that market. You always end up with what Dell has.

A pretty solid attempt, but the end execution just isn't right. And then what unfortunately happens, even though they work so hard, and there's people in the Dell Linux team that they just work with the best that they've been given. I've talked to them, and they're good people, but the reality is the product ends up not being

good enough. And over and over and over again, despite their hard efforts, Dell under-delivers, and then when they have to retract, they do it publicly in a way that is embarrassing to Linux. And that's super unfortunate so if you have three options given the state that they're in right now right they've got one part of the company the significant part that's making these manufacturing these laptops designed for windows 8.1 or 10 or whatever the latest thing is and a tiny tiny sputnik team who are doing their best to get Linux working on these machines and shipping from a global company like Dell and trying to get all the divisions of Dell around the world shipping those things.

Because not every division sells it. As you've seen, you can find it on Dell.co.uk, but not on Dell.com, for example. not on Dell.com, for example. And they're doing their absolute best, and they get to a situation where where they are now is a laptop that is not good enough to have the Dell brand name on it, right? So what do you do? Do you completely scrap that project and just forget it? Or do you carry on shipping those devices,

knowing that they're crap and that they shouldn't have the Dell name on them? Or do you stop shipping them, stop the line, fix it at the factory, and make sure that every machine that goes out from that point onwards is right? And I think that is the right option. Yes, they could have made different decisions in the past, but they are where they are. And where they are right now, I think they've made the right decision. And I agree with you if that's what actually ends up happening.

I guess what I'm afraid of is that they're not going to keep shipping them, that they're just pulling the plug and that's a polite way of them doing that. And if that's not the case, I hope to God I'm wrong about that. I think that part almost doesn't matter because it just feels like it's been fist-hammed so far. I don't know. Barton George is the head of the Sputnik team and he tweeted

it's on pause. We're fixing it. They say pause. They say pause. I believe it's a pause. I believe it is. That's not what I have issue with. I have issue with – the damage is done. That's what I have issue with. I don't know. Here's the thing. I think that exactly what Popey just said.

I mean given the environmental variables that they're put into, I think they did the best job possible. I don't think it's cost-effective build a 12, when you're a company that makes all of your money off of selling Windows laptops, I don't know that it makes a business. Actually, they don't make all their money

selling Windows laptops. Servers? No. Do you have another guess? SAN storage? It's not a piece of hardware. Oh. Dell doesn't,

no, then I have no idea. Now this was 2014 and this is 2015. I don't know if you knew that because I don't know if this is still true or not but I'm actually looking at the financial analysis of Dell and HP right now as we record this show.

And Dell makes primary the bulk of its income from financing. Oh, I guess that's not surprising. But financing what? Computers and servers. But that's actually what they make their money from is off the interest rates that people are paying when they finance Dell computers. Yeah, but they have to buy those computers to begin with. So the argument is – It's just something to kind of think about when you think about it. What they actually make money

from is being a bank. It's kind of funny. But they have to make computers compelling enough for people to want to finance them. But given those variables, then I'm inclined to agree with Popey that the best possible solution is to halt production, fix

the problems, and then pick it back up. That's the responsible thing to do. You mean the available options? Yes. And I think – and it's hard for me to kind of convey this perspective, but the perspective that I'm worried about isn't what you think or I think or consumers think. I'm thinking Lenovo and HP are watching this and they're thinking, boy, look at that shit show.

I'm not going to do that. Yeah, maybe. That's what I'm worried about. Maybe. But then you look at the way that Samsung has rolled out Chromebooks and really, other than the – That just validates that statement. In order for Linux to be successful, it has to be wrapped up in Chrome. It has to be Chrome OS.

If you try to ship actual Linux, you get this. You get a product you have to pull off the market. Yeah, but here's the thing. Samsung – and maybe this is just because – you really don't think that Lenovo sees that though? I mean Samsung built a computer specifically to run Chrome OS. You know what I mean? And so did Acer and so did HP and whoever else. I think they very closely watch their competitors and see other different products doing the marketplace.

Yeah. Well, I think HP's shipped Chrome first, but they subsequently ship them with Windows, like cut down Windows and Linux as well. I guess my point was that I don't think that Lenovo is going to look over and say, oh, that laptop failed. I don't think that the people at Lenovo are that dumb. They won't be able to figure it out. Maybe. Oh, you know.

I don't. I think they do watch their competitors and they see what products do really well, and then they execute based on what other markets are doing. Well, right. So Lenovo probably won't take an existing Windows product and put Linux on it and try and sell it. Or maybe they'll spend a little more time on Q&A. I mean, because really Dell could have avoided a lot of this with some proper QA. I mean not that they didn't. I know they QA'd it.

But they could have avoided a lot more harm. Yeah that's true. They are potentially poisoning the well for their own future products too. A little bit. Yeah. Now I think there's a market But don't forget this is just one of the Sputniks. Like this is like I don't know what the third, fourth generation

of the Sputniks and this is the only don't know what the third fourth generation of the sputniks and this is the only one that's had these kind of significant issues yeah that's true the first multiple sputnik devices that have been shipped to many people i have no idea what the sales numbers are but it's quite a lot of people i would love them to tell us yeah yeah i don't know commercial data i guess they probably won't yeah uh yeah they probably will never will but yeah so here's what my prediction coming true i think this is you know you got chromebooks now i'm surprised we haven't really seen this but this is an android pc that is actually doing pretty well on kickstarter it's got 8161 backers it's tiny uh it's got uh it's made 533 000 or 39 days

ago i'm just gonna play a little bit of it we'll just play a little bit of it just because it's sort of a good capper to this conversation where we keep going back between Chrome OS and getting Linux right. The way we think reflects the world we live in. Ideologies change with the times. In the past few decades, a thought evolution has happened. We've gone from expecting excessively more to embracing sustainably less. From expecting excessively more to embracing sustainably less. At Jide Technology, we're innovating the next evolutionary leap in personal computing that embodies less can be more. Less cost, more value.

Less design, more functionality. Less wasteful, more value. Less design, more functionality. Less wasteful, more sustainable. Less waiting, more doing. Less power, more performance. Less Windows, more apps. Introducing the Remix Mini. The world's first true Android PC. Finally, less can be more.

Starting at $20. I fundamentally disagree with everything that video just said. Also, it couldn't get any more pretentious. I know, right? Like, okay, so let's start with this. It couldn't get any more pretentious. I know, right? Like, okay, so let's start with this. I cannot believe that somebody would make a video to talk about how you should expect your computer to do less.

Oh, yeah, you can. Okay, that's where I'm starting there. All right, go ahead. Keep going. And you know what? For any of the advantages that that stupid piece of junk offers, my Linux box has done for the last 20 years. So why do I care again? So because finally less is more. It's what they're selling is the subtext.

The subtext is it's simplified. It's easier. Because if you tell an end user, end users look at computers as complicated. Too much going on. There's too much. Remember I was telling you about that user who's like, why do I keep getting notifications about updates? I don't care about updates to these apps I never use. Why do I keep getting – to them, it's too much.

So if you tell them it's simple, you can do more with less, the subtext is this is a computer that's just going to do the bare what you need it to do. That's the subtext. Here's what I hear. What I hear is here's a computer that you can spend less money on and it will do less because we don't – because the application environment is just so spread up. And we can't decide if we want right for Windows. Who knows what Windows is happening? Android has apps, man. You can get apps now.

Yeah, Android has apps. Some of them are crappy apps. And even the ones that people use in business are so bad. And we just shoehorn them into fit. Yeah, that's true. I watched a guy. Chris, I watched a guy. This is like three weeks ago, right?

And he's going to do his go-to meeting. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So he has his stupid Android tablet. Yeah. And he sets it up and the thing falls over. Of course.

Okay. So then he picks it back up and like sets. And then he's trying to edit. And he's tapping it. He's tapping it. Right. Because they're going to edit this Excel sheet. Right.

So he's trying to maximize the thing. And he's in the middle of explaining this. He's in there pinching and zooming while he's talking. Yes. While he's giving this business presentation on selling a $500,000 hotel. And I'm like, you've got to be the thing. And he's in the middle of explaining this. He's in there pinching and zooming while he's talking. Yes, yes. While he's giving this business presentation on selling a $500,000 hotel. And I'm like, you've got to be kidding me. You look like a dog.

Get a desktop. A laptop. Get a laptop. Like, why are you doing this on your tablet? And then he gets done. And this is what he says to me. He goes, man, isn't technology amazing? I can do all that from my tablet.

And I'm like, you're kidding me right now. That was horrible. That was horrible. That was a mess. That was a disaster. How can you say, I can't believe we can do that right now. I didn't brag about it afterwards. That's what this commercial embodies to me is this idea that, that we're okay. Just not caring about our computers. You know what I was thinking about the other day on the way over on the, on the flight over here, the way that ham radio works in order to actually use the ham radio, you can go buy one, but you have to get licensed before

you can do that. Right now, imagine this, actually use the ham radio, you can go buy one. Yeah, but. You have to get licensed before you can do that, right? Now imagine this. What happens, what would happen if we required a license before you could purchase a personal computer? You had to understand the basics of memory management, of hard drives, of how the file system works. Nobody would use them, dude. You'd have as many, just like as many, you'd have as many computers as you have hands. That's right. You would have very few people that used it.

But the people that used it wouldn't be so stupid. You would have people, users would understand the technology they're working with. I'm not actually advocating for that. It's kind of an interesting thing to think about. But the reality is that this just embodies how silly users have become. Well, Daredevil, don't you think it's a matter of just the systems are honestly too complex for the jobs they want to get done? No. Look, Android, people have the perspective that it just works. Yeah, it's easy.

You're used to getting a phone that it works. Sure, it's easy. But it's not just the easy part. It's the not set up part. It's no privacy issues. It's the update. It's the one button press. When it happens, it's like you're talking about an app store.

Yeah, all your apps are updated. It's a much easier paradigm for users. That has been sitting in my pocket. It's burning up. Why is that so hot? Your phone's on fire, dude. My phone's on fire. So what do you mean it just wears?

I pulled it right out of my pocket. I have not touched that phone in the last 40 minutes. And now you're just charging your batteries down to 30%. That's right. 30% down from 100 when we started the show. Not 60%. And what the heck is this thing doing? So don't tell me Android just works.

Come on. I mean, you're forgetting all the sensors and all the NSA probing the data. Come on. You have to be stoned that information. What I love about it, and I don't know if it has to be a simple computer. I love the idea of a cheap computer that's functional. that gets people online. Because that opens the door up to a whole lot of people.

It opens up to kids, schools, libraries, third world. How much is that thing? Well, they say they'll eventually be able to sell it for $20. So assuming that's right, how is that more advantageous than the Raspberry Pi? Because it's all set up. Yeah, that's true. That's true. You get it out of a box.

I don't know. This isn't the solution. I think what we're seeing here is there's something here. This isn't it. Raspberry Pi isn't it because it's too manual. But there's something in this area that I think some... And in order to get the price down here, it's going to have to be Linux-based, I think. Yeah. For the world's first true Android PC.

I don't actually think that's true either. Yeah, Nate points out you can make it a $20 Plex client. You know? Yeah, I mean, so I tried using both Raspberry either. Yeah, Nate points out you can make it a $20 Plex client. You know? Yeah, I mean, so I tried using both Raspberry Pis. I've tried using Chrome boxes. You know, a mouse bar? Yeah, and so here's what I found. Eventually what I found was the drawbacks to doing that,

it just makes more sense to buy the cellular on note for $140. And I'll tell you what, this is not, like Popey's pointing out, this is not the first Android PC, and I think the reason is they're not taking off. I joke about me predicting this because I actually thought somebody would get it. I thought somebody could nail it. It seemed like you have a great base OS, you've got some great apps, you just tweak it a little bit. Everybody likes to put a custom UI on there.

I bought the Ubuntu phone with the Ubuntu dock. But here's the other part of that, too, is that if I take a small ARM computer that's going to run Android, why would I bother putting that into a tower? I'll just build that into an all-in-one. And there are Android all-in-ones. And really, if you think about it, the desktop, the mobile operating system that just basically gets you online that is built into a

desktop or a tower, that is Chrome OS. That is the market that Chrome OS is, right? And it's got the brand. Yeah. There you go. And of course, I think that means there may be room For convergence one day Could be I think

If you don't want Something like this But you want also Something mobile I don't know What to say We'll save that Debate for a future episode

Yeah You can make that prediction Maybe in three years That won't come true Yeah Thanks man Thanks Alright so

That's going to wrap it up We are going to be at OSCON If you're listening to this And you're going to be In the Portland area Meetup.com Slash Jupiter Broadcasting For more information

We're going to be there Wednesday July 22nd Hup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting. For more information, we're going to be there Wednesday, July 22nd, hanging out, and we'd love to see you guys there. So meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting. If you have any feedback or comments for this episode, you can go to linuxactionshow.reddit.com or the contact form if you want to email us or just join us in the Bumble Room. We usually do the show on Tuesdays. But this week, this week week to make room for OSCON

We recorded on a Monday right after Coda Radio It was a back to back edition So I'm really thankful that you guys in the mumble Were able to show up on the Monday I really appreciate it Good turnout Noah thanks for coming in studio today Hey anytime

And you know Have a great time at OSCON Maybe I'll see you there Yeah maybe Maybe we'll bump into each other Alright cool Also you can follow Noah He's on Twitter

Noah give him your Twitter handle My Twitter handle is At Colonel Linux This guy over here is At Chris A. L. A. S. That's a fact You know what You changed it

But it's Now you confused everyone The same name Here let's see what you're up to now It's like not that much Don't It makes me feel bad Okay

I don't know It's like a thousand I don't know Alright everybody Thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode See you next Tuesday. All right, did you look? What is it? Is it 1,000? 1,200. 1,200? All right, did you look? What is it? Is it 1,000?

1,200. 1,200? All right, not bad, not bad. Not bad. That's not bad since it's a brand new account, really. Yeah, no, I think so, especially because I've had the same Twitter account for seven years,

and I'm up to 835. All right, jbtitles.com, let's pick our title for this week's episode of The Unplugged Show. I was watching this little airport, you know, they have the little videos that play over and over again That want to make you kill yourself because you hear them so much There's one about Twitter, and it was saying the way to get more Twitter followers Is to tweet, and I'm like, wow, what a revolutionary concept

I never thought of that It is true, and reply, and it really does Because I don't tweet very much When I have a free moment, my first thought is Ooh, let's update Twitter So here's been my thought on Twitter. Twitter's concept has always been, what are you doing right now? Here's my answer.

I don't care. I mean, most people. Let's face it. I don't care what you're doing right now. All right. JBtitles.com. A lot to pick from. A lot to pick from.

GPU hacks. The canonical Dell and AMD games. That's not bad. GPL gets trumped. That's not true. CDL gets trumped. CDL gets trumped. Noah's Home Ting Shop. DooWop.

DooWop, DooWop. JBTitles.com, JBTitles.com. Any post-show topics for the Mumble Room you guys want to talk about before we get out of here for the day? We didn't have a Mumble unplugged. What happened to a tight show? I'm not sure if you guys saw the biofuel. Do you think that they discovered they can use some energy from your sweat

and also form kinetic movement of your organs? Boy, I could power the shit out of some stuff in the studio right now. It is hot in here. It's getting warm, right? Hey, maybe you could power an air conditioner with your sweat. That would be amazing. Oh, man. Well, you could at least air conditioner with your sweat. That'd be amazing. Oh, man. Well, you could at least charge your watch.

Yeah, right? Yeah. So what do you guys think? Do you think we'll have sweat-powered watches one day? No? Okay. I think there's a lot more longevity in either. I think there's more longevity.

Good. I think there's going to be a lot more longevity. I love it. Don't have to get some money. I love it. I think there's going to be a lot more longevity in either solar-powered watches or, I forget the name, but the thing that... Where they remove and it charges. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right.

There's a name for that, though. Kinetic. Yeah, Kinetic. What do you guys think? Canonical Dell and AMD Games. Do you like that title? Love it. It's not too bad, really. Kinetic. Yeah, Kinetic. What do you guys think? Canonical Dell and AMD games. Do you like that title? Love it. It's not too bad, really.

The best one ever. Yeah, sure, sure, sure. On the whole Dell XPS thing, though, I got the 2015 developer edition, and one of the things I want to highlight is currently in the Linux world, there aren't too many laptops, high-end laptops. Well, not even that. It's the appliance. It's the laptop that just works.

Yeah, like I was able to get a tiny laptop with an i7 processor, an SSD drive, an Intel Iris graphics, and a 4K screen. Like, there's not a lot of Linux laptops that check all those boxes. Yeah, and that have the support from someone like Canonical and Dell behind it that are managing the update process for you, and you just use it.

Hey, man, that's why I bought it. Dude, that was like right up. Same. Yeah, and so that's why. But I don't. I run Arch. Probably not too surprising. And I literally don't have any of the problems that they were talking about in the article.

I ran Arch online for a period of time. Yeah, I did. And I switched back to Ubuntu. Now, I had to do that, too, until a kernel update, and I got the latest version of the BIOS. And then after that, I went back to Arch, and I've had no problems. Ooh. Try it, then. Yeah, it worked a lot better for me.

Hey, Chris. Yeah? When do you arrive at OSCON? We'll be down there Wednesday morning. We're going to be in the area Tuesday evening. Are you going to be doing any interviews or anything? Oh yes, oh yes You have somebody we should talk to? Yes, my boss

Oh, tell us Yeah, David Plano Hey, Popey Yeah Can you, you have me on Telegram, right? I unfortunately do, yes Well, you loser, when you have a chance If you can send me the contact info i i actually we have

a i have a i have a tentative schedule i think we're going to be doing the interviews on wednesday yeah and and i have a tentative schedule of people that have asked to speak with us in tentative times if you could get me his contact information totally adam that'd be great yeah yeah sure thank you we'll set something up and we'll make it happen awesome appreciate that