LINUX Unplugged - Episode 103: OSCON Secret Sauce | LUP 103

Episode Date: July 29, 2015

Great interviews from the floor of OSCON 2015! How FastMail uses Linux, managing thousands of Apache instances, an open source Slack killer, Tizen on all the things & much more.Plus why the Ubuntu MATE project is dropping the Ubuntu Software, their replacement, the vLUG’s thoughts on Plasma Mobile, a Skunkworks project straight out of Las Vegas & more!

All right, but that's not what I want to discuss in the pre-show. You know what I want to talk about in the pre-show is this might just make Fedora work for me. You ready for this one? Yort in Fedora. You know that is the Arch User Repository Management Tool. What? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So basically the Arch User Repository in Fedora.

This is... Okay, that is like it right there. You think so? You think this could be it? I think that would be sweet. Yeah. So, yet another repository tool is what UART stands for. It's a wrapper for Pac-Man, which adds automated access to the AUR.

UART has the same syntax as Pac-Man. And now, Fedora users can use UART to install AUR packages in Fedora. This is no joke. I wonder if anybody in the chat room has tried this. This is amazing because Fedora 22 was really solid, but at the time I tried it, I was having a hard time getting a couple of apps I needed, Herupad, Mumble, and Telegram.

Yeah, definitely. Right. That's one reason I never really used it because I couldn't get the apps for it. Yeah. In fact, I think I just read somewhere that, what was it? I think they said that essentially, I can't remember where I just saw this,

but the Fedora repositories have essentially kind of stopped growing in terms of software. And this could really help that. I mean, the AUR in Fedora would be really, I don't know how well it could possibly work. So does it make native packages for DMF, I guess, now? I would think it downloads the Tar.gz stuff and builds it, right? You're just building it. So it's almost like our own version of ports from FreeBSD. Yeah, kind of like the AUR is, really.

It could be crazy. That would be cool. If you try it out there, dear listener, let us know. Maybe I'll try it. That's exciting. Yeah, I might try it, too. Put it in a VM. Well, and Fedora is so easy to recommend, especially people with Macs or other things where you just get a nice setup, built environment, but you don't have all the packages you need.

Yeah. Yeah, that is always the killer. Mm-hmm. a setup built environment, but you don't have all the packages you need. Yeah. Yeah, that is always the killer. Mm-hmm. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 103 for July 28th, 2015.

Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly talk show that's rounded the 100 mark. My name is Chris and we have a great show and I'm happy to say that Wes is in studio. Hey Wes. Hey Chris. Hey, how's it going buddy? Oh, it's going great. How about yourself? Hey, thank you for making it right after the big move to Seattle. That's pretty cool. Oh, I'm happy to be here.

So, are you good or are you exhausted? I mean, come on, be honest. This is my recovery session. Got a nice beer, hanging out with the fine folks in the bubble room. What could be better? Well, we got a great episode today, so we're going to do a couple of updates on some stories that are relevant in the community of the Linux Unplugged show and kick those around with our virtual lug. And then after that, I have some really awesome clips from OSCON. I went down there armed with a portable audio recorder

just to record interviews exclusively for the Unplugged show, and it turns out going down there with this tiny little recorder a portable audio recorder, just to record interviews exclusively for the Unplugged show. And it turns out, going down there with this tiny little recorder as opposed to a big camera, you get a lot more intimate, personal interviews with folks. This is exciting. We've got some really good chats coming up in today's episode of Linux Unplugged from OSCON 2015. Can't wait to play those for you. And then, later in the show, radio is about to be overtaken by an open source Skunk Works project right here in our community. And the very creator of that project joins us in the Mumble Room today to give us a little insight on his plans to overthrow the proprietary hold on radio broadcasts.

It's a big deal. And we're going to talk to him today. And maybe, maybe, just maybe, you might see it worked into a future Jupyter Broadcasting initiative. And then if we have enough time at the end of the show, I got a few things I want to reminisce about where we were just doing the back of the napkin math in the pre-show and we were like, wow, we are in the 10th year of the Linux Action Show. Unbelievable. And anytime you've been doing something for 10 years,

you get a little bit of an itch. Sorry, honey. I'm not talking about you. No, baby, baby, I love you. I'm not talking about you, baby. I'm talking about the show, sweetie. God, wait, you see that look I'm getting, Wes? I'm in trouble. You're in trouble. I'm in trouble, baby. I love you. I'm not talking about you, baby. I'm talking about the show, sweetie. God, wait, you see that look I'm getting, Wes? I'm in trouble.

You're in trouble. I'm in trouble, baby. Sleeping at the studio tonight. I love you, honey. Anyways, we're thinking about making some changes to the show, and if we have time later, I'll talk about that. If not, maybe we'll just cover it in a future episode. But why don't we start?

Our buddy Wimpy, who sometimes joins us from time to time, is the guy behind the Ubuntu Mate. Matai. Mate. Matai. Like the drink. And he made a lot of news this week, and I'm just curious. I wanted to kick it around with you guys.

Do you guys think this is a really huge deal or not? And why did this get so much traction? When Wimpy announces that the Ubuntu Mate version of 15.10 will not ship with the Ubuntu Software Center, it has been removed. Is it just me, or were you surprised? I mean, Wes, I'll throw it to you first, and we'll throw it to the Mumble Room. We haven't brought them in yet.

I should do that. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Pip-pip. Hello. Hey, guys. Hello. So I'm going to ask you in a second, but I'll throw it to Wes first.

Wes, does it make sense to you to pull out the Software Center, and why do you think this made so much news when Wimpy announced it? I've seen it covered on pretty much every Linux news outlet. It was the top of the RLinux subreddit. I was in the Ubuntu subreddit. It was the number one voted story in our subreddit this weekend.

What do you think? Why? I mean, I do think that, you know, being a spin of Ubuntu itself, you know, the Mate edition, people do you know, they kind of assume there'll be a certain underlying familiarity in the architecture, the infrastructure, the underpinnings of it. Which you've come to know and love about Ubuntu.

Yes, exactly. And while many of us may not use the software center, I could see how people who are more into the Ubuntu community in general. Well, yeah, here's my question to you. It seems like if I'm a new user, so when we had Che switch to Linux, the first thing he did is anytime he wanted anything from Steam to Chrome, he went to the software center. That's just kind of like their expectation now.

And so if there's nothing there, let me ask you this. If there's nothing there, is that better than having something that's not very good? In fact, Rotten, do you want to start off? I can toss this to you. Rotten Corpse, do you think having nothing there is better than having something that's awful? Yes, but that's not what Ubuntu Monte is doing. So that's not even on the page right now because they're replacing it. They're not removing it.

Yeah. Well, don't go there yet because I want to get there. But just, yeah, we'll talk about that in a second. But, I mean. removing it yeah well don't go there yeah because i want to get there but just yeah we'll talk about that in a second but i mean but yeah if because the ubuntu software center is atrocious yeah it should be removed by ubuntu then yeah it is a bad thing because when someone's using something and it takes you know it the the software center to get new software takes longer to open than to install the software that's a big problem.

So you think, though, Rod, and honestly, I mean, bashing the Software Center aside, honestly, is it better to have nothing at all than to have... So the reason I'm asking is, this aside from what the Ubuntu Mate project is doing, is it maybe just better to just remove it than to have nothing at all? So Chase's experience, when he went to install Steam,

he got two different entries for Steam. He was then prompted to create a Canonical account, and then he had to try to give his address and his payment information to Canonical to download the free Steam installer. And he was completely lost, and it just stopped him dead in his tracks, and he had to come to me and say, what should I do? So, Rotten, do you think, is it better before there's a replacement to pull it? Yeah.

For that particular software center, it is by far the worst. And there are so many bugs with it that they've made one update in two years, and Canonical's fully aware that it's awful. So yeah, they should remove it.

Because people who are coming to Linux without having any connection to it before whatsoever, they're going to be Googling stuff anyway. of it because people who are coming to linux without having any connection to it what's before whatsoever they're going to be googling stuff anyway so all they're going to do is see the first example of a software center that is awful especially if it we've been conditioned with you know nicer mac stores even the windows store and now mobile and now mobile everyone thinks about it it might be easier to teach people we don't't do it this way in Linux than to give them the half-assed version that we might have. So, Wimpy, I'm glad you could make it.

So tell us about this update and where now the Ubuntu Mate project is going to take this. What's Ubuntu Mate's answer to this problem that we've kicked on for, I mean, it feels like since the inception of the show. Yeah, I've literally just joined the chat room. i i think i love you wimpy no excuses i want to know wimpy i want to give you a big hug and a kiss right now but i was just i just to recap really quickly i was just uh mentioning like first of all holy shit did you get a ton of coverage about this change congrats to you and number two you didn't are you joking you didn't notice maybe now i now i saw some of it i some of it. Because I follow all of the feeds for all of our shows,

to me, when a story shows up more than a dozen times, that's a lot of coverage. And your story got a ton of coverage. You got the top of our Linux. You were the top voted story on the Linux Action Show subreddit, which is actually a fairly large, generates quite a bit of traffic. You were on Softpedia. You got coverage all over the place. Plus, not only that, you got six reshares on Google+, so I saw it in my Google Plus feed constantly.

And you generated a ton of discussion in the Ubuntu subreddit and the R Linux subreddit. And the thing that got me the most about your post, Wimpy, is you say, we have something lined up by way of replacement, and it's not synaptic. And I was like, oh, what is it? So, Wimpy, why this change, and where are you going? You've got to tell me. Okay, all right, okay. So, there's a new... So, I've only seen a couple of articles on this,

and I've had some feedback through the Ubuntu Mate community. So, okay. I've written a new utility for Ubuntu Mate called Ubuntu Mate Welcome. Oh. And one of the features that that has is a simple one-click install for applications that are popular and or difficult to install and or proprietary and difficult to install. So in there, it's a highly curated selection of applications and the list of applications that are in there are built around tasks that myself and my immediate family and friends that are using Ubuntu Mate

need to accomplish and the software that they need to install to do it so my father-in-law said to me ubuntu mate is great and once you've set it up for me i can do all of these things i need to do but if you're not here i can't you know install the things i need yeah so i've just put those things in there that people need to get stuff done and that's really what it's about it's one click install get stuff done so i've developed the means of installing software and it doesn't necessarily have to be stuff that's in the official repositories so for example there's a one click installer for steam there's a one click installer for google chrome there's a one click installer for the hangouts plugins and so on and so on. And behind the scenes it enables the necessary

PPAs only if that PPA is from the developer. So Rotten knows about this. I took him and said go and get your developer for U-Get to put a build for Wiley into the PPA and then I can turn this on

and you can have U-Get installed from the PPA, and then I can turn this on, and you can have you get installed from the PPA, and you then get a conservative, stable distribution with rolling applications. So now I have a plan. I love it. That's brilliant. And I love that you're basically getting the low-hanging fruit first there

with Steam and Chrome and things like that, which is going to be the checklist of the first apps that pretty much everybody I've switched to Linux And I love that you're basically getting the low-hanging fruit first there with Steam and Chrome and things like that, which is going to be like the checklist of the first apps that pretty much everybody I've switched to Linux asked me about. Yeah, I mean, Mateo is going to be a heads-up. Yeah. You know those articles that say, you know, the 27 things you need to do after you install XY? This is the antidote to that because those 27 things are all a button, you know. I love it. Lib, DVD, CSS2.

And kind of what you're doing too in a lot of ways is you're taking a lot of the distro tweak tools where you go out there and you copy a wget command that runs as root from their website and you paste it in your terminal and then it downloads and installs and adds stuff to your repo and then all of a sudden next thing you know like a Lua interface app comes up or

some GTK app comes up and you're like, what is this? Okay, I'll check these boxes. And you don't really quite know how legit it is. And what you're doing is you're sort of legitimizing that process and saying, well, here's a sanctioned way to get this low-hanging fruit, and it's brilliant. And it's also more than just the most common things people are expecting. So as Wimpy said, he mentioned to me about getting UGIT in the welcome as well, and we didn't have a 1510 branch. So when he asked for it, we immediately just launched one so we could get it in there.

So it's a lot more important than just the stupid 20 things after you install. Yeah. Because it's actually getting people to, in some ways, it's sort of greasing the wheels for 1510 when it lands because people are going to have to move forward on that. That's cool, too. Exactly, yeah. And the other thing is if there's an application, let's say, for example, Dropbox. Dropbox is a one-click installer in there. Dropbox has Android and iOS applications. So where there's an Android and or an iOS application, there are buttons to take

you to the app stores for those companion applications on the mobile platforms. And it tells you what they are equivalent to. So for GIMP, for example, it explains this is an alternative to Photoshop. You like that? Yeah, that's very nice. One of the things we've done is added the

CMYK plugins for GIMP. It adds all the extra bits and pieces. GIMP. Oh, wow. It adds all the extra bits and pieces. Dude, that's great. This is incredible. Wimpy, I love this. And so, Wimpy, are you, I mean, you know, this is not obviously.

This is not the replacement. Yeah, I mean, this is like a stopgap, isn't it? I mean, this is, you know, honestly, Wimpy, though, I could see companies that would be wanting to partner with your distribution to maybe get a button in there, too. Yeah, what would be the process for changing the software that's added for this? At the moment, it's the simplest thing possible. So effectively, Welcome is a very simple WebKit browser with my own protocol handlers to handle things like handling installations, handling software removals,

launching executables and doing things. So instead of having just hyperlinks that navigate, you have actions that trigger things off. Now, behind the scenes, it's using AppDemon, which is all the same technology that the Ubuntu Software Center uses for actually handling the business end of installing the software, you know, and resolving all of the dependencies and all of that stuff. But because I've now got this mechanism of saying, here is an application, click this button to install it. And the undercurrent of feedback that I've had from the Ubuntu Mate community up to this point, we'll get to that in a moment, but up to this point,

has been, why is the Ubuntu software included? You know, it's slow, it's bulky, people always explain what the alternative is that they install, it's often synaptic. So I thought, right, well, now I've got this option to install things after the fact, I'll remove the Ubuntu software center from the default install to satisfy all of those people that say they didn't think it should be there in the first place. And I'll add a link in the welcome to install it. So you can still choose to install it. But given that people have said they weren't keen on it, I've been out and I've looked at all of the alternatives that are out there. I've been out and I've looked at all of the alternatives that are out there. So I've looked at the Deepin Software Center and considered forking that,

but that's a bit too much like hard work, mostly because a lot of the comments in the source code are in Chinese and my Chinese is, well, I don't speak Chinese. Just a small area. It's a small problem. I've looked at the Lubuntu Software Center, which is nice and lightweight, but the problem there is that that doesn't have the facility to log in with your Ubuntu Software Center, which is nice and lightweight, but the problem there is that that doesn't have the facility to log in with your Ubuntu 1 account and access prior purchases. So that's why the Ubuntu Software Center is relevant.

Anyway, long story short, I've contacted the author of AppGrid, and he has agreed to me adding an install option for AppGrid inside the Ubuntu Marte Welcome. No. So now you'll be able to choose whether you want to install the Ubuntu Software Center or AppGrid and use that as your interface. That's perfect. That is perfect. Wow. You know, Wimpy, and I think what I love about

this is, I mean, what the hell do I know? But it seems like to me, you could develop out that welcome screen. If I was, I'm trying to think of a good fit, but let's just take the Mirror Media Player or whatever. If I was an open source project, I would, or

there's some really cool apps being built for the elementary OS, like some of you may have there's some really cool apps being built for elementary OS like some of you may have seen this weekend a newsreader for GNOME going around that's sort of built for elementary OS first

but it works on any platform. There's some really neat apps that are being developed these days and they could reach out and say, you know, we'd love a little time,

a little welcome, you know, a little welcome space here because, and of course your taste and preference would pick which ones get featured there

but it could be a really neat way to expose users to some, I guess, like curated, well-picked and well-placed apps. Are you thinking about that or are you resistant to that? No, I am thinking about that. So I've got a long list of applications that I haven't added yet, some that I definitely will and some that I'm considering. But basically the selection criteria is does this integrate well with the Ubuntu Mate desktop? So, so long as it installs and it works and it integrates.

And, for example, some applications, say some of the KDE applications, which are very nice, pull in so much of KDE underneath that it fills the menus and what have you with a load of KDE applications which makes it look a bit messy and confusing so it's not the back I have to have to dodge those yeah which is unfortunate because some of them are really good um so yeah so long as it integrates well so yes you know things like you know do we remove Thunderbird from the default installation and put that in Welcome alongside Geary, for example? Yeah.

But this is a way, because you know sometimes you get these derivatives of a distribution which are in name of distribution, ultimate version or whatever. Yes, gaming edition or whatever. Yeah, they've got everything imaginable installed. And it's great because you install this one thing and you've got everything. Well, this is a way for me to make Ubuntu

Mate do everything, easily access everything, but you don't actually have to ship a 5 gigabyte distro. Yeah, I get to pick. And you can choose what you want. And welcome's asynchronous as well and so just to clarify like api 984 and the chairman saying what are the sources you're

working in a lot of cases with these developers to say hey give me a ppa that i can you're going to develop and and for the 1504 directly right or i mean 1510 directly so in a lot of cases it's like it's best case scenario for the source right yeah so uh i'd say half of the applications that are in there are just coming out of the official archive at the moment. So it's just an app under the hood. It's doing an app install. Yeah, I'd say 25% are using a PPA, but it's the PPA from the developer. So I'm not just finding an app that happens to be in some random PPA and enabling a random PPA,

I'm actually going to the developers and finding their stable PPA, or if it doesn't exist, asking them to make one and using that. And then in other cases, for the likes of VirtualBox 5, for example, and Dropbox and Steam, it's actually enabling the Steam and Dropbox and VirtualBox third-party repositories and doing all of the stuff. So you get the updates right from them.

Yeah, so you are getting the official latest versions from their archives. That is cool. Nice, Wimpy. Well, I'm glad you were able to stop by and give us an update on that, because that's slick. Somebody mentioned, is an AppGrid proprietary? And the answer to that question is yes. AppGrid is under a proprietary license

which is why I contacted the author to ask if I could include an installer for it I'm more worried about the fact that it's an installer that I have no idea what it's actually doing and AppGrid's written in Python

so actually you can go and look at the source code oh if it's open i don't care what the license as long as if i get a little suspicious i can take a look is that what you're saying right yeah yeah yeah if something's installing something in my system i want to know what it's doing underneath but as far as it's as far as it's licensing i don't care yeah but that's why i'm going to continue to include a link to install the Ubuntu Software Center and clearly label that as an open source tool and then AppGrid as an alternative to that. which is a third-party proprietary application that is a google drive sync utility in my opinion it is the best tool for the job but it is a commercial application but it says so in there this is a commercial application after the evaluation period if you still want to use it

you will have to pay for it with a link to yeah you know how much it costs. Because there are open source alternatives, but my choice is the best-in-class application that integrates well with the Ubuntu Mate desktop. And I could go for Grive, but Grive is not the best-in-class application. And I've found out it's somewhat unpopular, but I don't think Ubuntu Software Center is the best-in-class software center for Ubuntu.

I think AppGrid is. There you go. Well put. And I support you 100% on it. And I like to see a little taste involved in some of these desktop app selections. And, you know, truth be told, people that think there's maybe, like, for example, NSYNC, if you think there's a better solution,

then you're probably the person that knows how to go get it and install it. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, including the plugins Like, for example, NSYNC. If you think there's a better solution, then you're probably the person that knows how to go get it and install it. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, including the plugins for the Kaja File Manager, for example. So it does all of that, you know, desktop integration. Now, this business about Ubuntu Software Center, considering how much, you know, I've heard, oh, we don't like it, we'd rather you choose something else. Now I've suggested that I'm going to remove it.

Man, am I unpopular. This is the biggest misstep I've made in Ubuntu since I've started the project. Really? The silent majority have risen up. And they're not so silent anymore, huh? No, no, they've all found their voice, and they're making it plain and clear that they're quite happy with Ubuntu. All I can imagine is cheerleaders popping up and screaming, No, I imagine it goes something like this.

The only reason I move people to Ubuntu is because they expect a software center, and it's the only one that at least has a software center for them to use, regardless of how good it is. Is that essentially what you get? Yeah. Yeah. It's your choice. You choose the Ubuntu software center, or you can choose AppGrid.

And a friend of mine has just popped in the chat room, Joe Ressington, and we've been exchanging some messages earlier on Hangouts. So, Joe, no, I won't be compiling AppGrid because AppGrid is written in Python and it's an interpreted language.

It will be installed from the AppGrid developer's PPA. Wimpy, you should give Joe the pro tip and have him join us in the Mumble room. I mean, come on. He could rib you right. Joe in the UK is known as the Linux podcasting superhero. Right. I mean, I know he has a microphone, so I know he probably knows how to make Mumble work.

I'm just saying. He does know how to make Mumble work. I'd love for Joe to come in and have this conversation because I know he's got some strong feelings about proprietary software being listed in there. This is the place. I'm just saying. I'm love for Joe to come in and have this conversation, because I know he's got some strong feelings about proprietary software being listed in there. This is the place. Wimpy, is there anything else you want to mention?

No, I guess I'm going to be how Joe says his wife is asleep. That's always a good excuse. I think he'd have been up for it. Well, keep his post on how it goes. I'm sure we'll check back in. He may have another chance to give it to Rivia, That's always a good excuse. But I think he'd have been up for it had that not been the case. Yeah. Well, keep his post on how it goes. I'm sure we'll check back in. He may have another chance to give it to Rivia because I have a feeling this is going to be something we'll follow with some interest.

Yeah. Joe's on at least four other podcasts, so he's got plenty of opportunity to call me out. I know. It just happens to be during this one, the wife is sleeping. I'll try not to take it personally. Honestly, I'll try not to take it personally. I know his wife has very good sleep sleep practice and uh she likes an early night oh good popey's joined in as well oh goodness all right let's let's change the topic all right well wimpy thank you very much i appreciate it uh as welcome as always um you know there was one story i wanted to get

to that maybe i'd like to poke popey about um but before we get to that, I'm not going to say it's about Plasma Mobile. But before we get to that, I want to talk about Ting, our first sponsor here on the Linux Unplugged program. Go to linux.ting.com to support the Linux Unplugged program and check them out. Because what I love about Ting is there's no contract for your service, and you only pay for what you use. So just put that in your brain organ for a second and think about that. It's a flat $6 a month for the line, and then it's just your usage on top of that. And that is slick. So when we went to OSCON, Noah had a Ting phone.

Noah's wife had a Ting phone. I had a Ting phone. My wife had a Ting phone. And we were rocking the communication down there. And what's super slick is Noah had a rental. And so we were driving from where we had the family staying to OSCON. And I turned on the Wi-Fi hotspot mode and connected Noah's car, his rental car, to the Wi-Fi hotspot on my S6 as we're driving down I-5.

And like the media system on his car is like pulling down track information from the internet. It's totally cool. and I don't care. I'm honey badger about it because I'm just paying for my usage. I don't have to be like in some sort of special shared data plan to have Wi-Fi tethering or anything like that. And you can try it out too. Go to linux.ting.com and try out the savings calculator and see how much you'd save by switching to Ting.

I'm saving over $2,000 every two years. No contract, right? So there's no early termination fee. And if you're in one of those duopoly contracts, Ting has an early termination relief program. Yeah, dude, they're crazy. They got an early termination relief program. They're going to help you get out of that contract.

And here's something else that's different about Ting. When you call them, you get to speak to a human being. You call them at 1-855-TING-FTW. It's any time between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. on the East Coast. In fact, check their site because they do move that window depending on demand. And you get to speak to that human being. A human being! And they also have one of the best control... well, they have the best. Not one of. They have the

best control panel in the business. That way you can manage your account, turn devices on and off, name them, check your usage, set alerts, set thresholds, transfer devices, deactivate devices. When Noah was heading out of here, at the end of our OSCON trip, I went into my Ting dashboard. I removed my Nexus 5 from my dashboard within an hour

or two. He was able to add to his dashboard and he had a Nexus 5. Never had to call anybody. All through their super slick website. No termination fees. No contract hoopla. It's like, hey man, you want to try out the Nexus 5 for a little bit? Here you go. And I just click a thing, click a thing, boom. We're done.

It's so nice because I just did it right from the Ting dashboard in seconds. And everything is like that with Ting. And just for $6 a month for the line, if you've got a few people in your family or you've got a small business, there's no cheaper way than going with Ting. But it's not the kind of cheap you're familiar with. It's cheap in the way that it's inexpensive, but still the service is awesome. And they have

something most carriers don't have. Two networks to choose from. They have a CDMA and GSM network. So you can figure out which one has the best coverage or data speeds in your area and pick that one. Like in my Nexus 5, I get to bounce between CDMA or GSM. And because they have a GSM and CDMA network, there's a ton of devices you can bring. And if you're going to bring a device, you go to linux.ting.com. They'll take $25 off your first month of service.

That more than paid for my first month. That's how I really, $25. That's a little, I mean, when I think about a smartphone, now that I got a couple of phones, I'm only down to a couple of phones now because I've been given a couple away. Now I'm like around $35, $37, $40 a month. That's still not that bad, though, for three smartphones

that with unlimited data just pay for what I use. I don't have to worry about going over some orvage and getting some crazy charge when I turn on my hotspot or tethering. And if I pay a little more one month, it all washes out because most months I'm saving a ton of money because I'm pretty Wi-Fi savvy. So I just, when I wrap my head around this, I think, how else would I have been able to do this? Especially for Jupyter Broadcasting, where we don't have the budget to spend hundreds of dollars a month on cell phone lines. I don't know how I would have done this without Ting. Go to linux.ting.com, try their savings calculator, see how much you would save.

Remember, they have an early termination relief program on top of that, and give them a try. Tons of great devices, too, if you just want to buy a device. Starting around $60 for a feature phone, all the way up to the best devices in the market. linux.ting.com, and a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. So this week, one of the big stories that we saw hit the interwebs was Plasma Mobile, a free mobile platform created completely from scratch, totally from scratch. No other distributions or projects that they are sitting on top of. And it has hit the web, and images are ready for the Nexus 5, and it is based on freedom, user-friendliness, and privacy, and of course,

the Plasma desktop. Now, in reality, Josh, just like so many other great open source projects, they're standing on the shoulder of giants. I'm sure there is tons and tons of Ubuntu mobile work in here. We do know that. They're using Libhybris to get Android video drivers working under Linux, and of course, all of the work under Qt. But RodenCorp, you've had a little bit of heads up about this, a little bit of time to look at this. What were your first impressions

when you started to learn about this new project? I was really excited. They actually told me, I talked to a developer for Plasma Mobile, and they said that it is based on, it has a lot of ubuntu stack but it also has like one of the graphics drivers for android but everything else is all linux based so it's it is sharing some stuff that that ubuntu has they've also built a lot of their own stuff too for the shell um and and their their app system and the widget system is completely unique and uh there's the demo of it is pretty cool. So I'm actually looking forward to it.

The best part is that the plasmoids that are based on the desktop actually work in the phone too. Yeah, that's pretty nice. So those are ready to go. I guess – I mean I don't – I'm sure you have nothing but nice things to say. But what are your first impressions when you see a project that in a lot of ways is somewhat competition for Ubuntu Touch? Do you think this is good? I'm sure you do, right? I think it's great.

Yeah, of course you do. The whole idea of having lots of different, lots of diversity in the Linux mobile market is great. Why would I say anything otherwise? Well, so here's the, yeah, of course. Why else could you say anything else? You know what I've noticed is the particular group that is putting this out has been particularly vocal about their feelings about Canonical's efforts in this area. I would say perhaps they've been discouraging about those efforts, a lot of claims about duplicated effort, a lot of claims about reinventing code that already exists. But in reality – I'm not so sure i think there's a few i mean you can you can always hunt down individuals who can be vocal and negative about any particular project i could probably

find someone negative about anything of course of course you know i don't think i don't think it's fair to paint the entire you know kda or plasma community as negative towards one thing because they're a bunch of individuals who each have their own idea. I think it was interesting that one of the things they showcased in this video is out of the box, they're planning for support for Ubuntu Touch apps. Yeah, that's cool. I mean, you know, what you've got to remember is what we're using on Ubuntu Touch is, you know, QML. And I know there have been comments in the past like,

oh, look, Ubuntu have finally come around to Qt being the right way to do things. So it's no surprise that they support that kind of stuff as well on the Plasma mobile because that's their bread and butter. Yeah, I find it great that they put an image out for the Nexus 5. It makes me want to try it, although I don't have my Nexus 5 right now. But that's kind of neat. Has anybody in the Mumb room actually flashed a Nexus 5 with it and 5. It makes me want to try it, although I don't have my Nexus 5 right now. But that's kind of neat. Has anybody in the Mumbroom actually flashed a Nexus 5 with it and tried it? I'll have to try it later. I've got my Nexus 5 in my pocket.

Yeah, you should. You know what I'm doing tonight. That's neat. I guess I'm excited. Anything that puts more development momentum behind mobile Qt apps, I'm actually all for, because I really think that would be good for everybody in general. I think Qt's a great, great, great toolkit for this,

and I would love to see more Qt development, especially around mobile, because not only would it make great apps for Plasma desktop, but it would make great apps for Ubuntu Touch. It would make great apps for the Unity 8 desktop, I would imagine. I mean, I think it's an amazing toolkit

with a lot of runway, and so I love that about this. I also, the other thing I love about this with a lot of runway, and so I love that about this. I also, the other thing I love about this is actually getting more people to dog food Wayland. That's a really good thing, and that's something that Ubuntu Touch doesn't give us right now, and so that's awesome too. That all said, I don't know how far this is going to go, but I'm totally willing to sit back and willing to wait and watch, and I'm really curious to know what they have in the works, like app store-wise and integration-wise and partnership-wise. I really want to talk to them soon. And Rodden, we're kind of in the background setting up

something to talk to them in the future, but we just don't have it nailed down, right? Yep. Absolutely. It possibly could be available this week even. Ooh! Exciting. Stay tuned and find out. Yeah. So that's neat.

That's neat. So what's the web browser, says Peacemaker? I don't know. Does anybody know what the web browser is on Plasma Mobile? Rotten, are you up to it? I think it's the Ubuntu browser, but the one for their mobile version. But they haven't specifically said yet. They said that that's one of the options they're looking at.

The image, I tore apart the image to have a look at it when it came out. And there's some Ubuntu components in there. I wouldn't necessarily expect those to be in there forever. I would expect things like in the image and in the demo, there's our weather app and the music app and the calculator and the web browser. I wouldn't be surprised if those get replaced with more natural KDE bedfellows than the ones we have. But I'd love to share work with those guys. And if they've got patches for our apps that are appropriate for them or if we've got things that we need to do to make it work on their platform, that would be awesome.

Does it feel validating a little bit? To some degree, yeah. There's the fact that someone can take that image and if you rip the image apart, inside it there's a shell script and that shell script basically takes an Ubuntu touch image, rips out the mirror and unity and the bits that they don't want, adds a PPA and puts in you know the kde stuff which is exactly what you know many derivative linux distributions are is they

rip apart you know that's the that's what you do with your preview version is you rip apart somebody else's uh distro and then you put back in the the value that you want to put in and then you distribute that for people to play with people play with it and then maybe you'll make a more robust solution so i don't doubt they'll have image creation servers and all the kind of infrastructure that we have for ours, but they'll be generating their own images. And it may well be that they don't use Ubuntu Touch underneath

forever. They may well choose Mir or something else. Gen 2, who knows? That was the meta story I took away from this, is that the Ubuntu project has created something that a bunch of really smart people felt it was worth basing their project off of. Because I think in a lot

of ways, that's sort of one of the better validations of an open source project is that another group of really talented people can look at it and go, there's some serious merit here, and we want to incorporate this and start from here. And regardless of how long they use it as the base, I think in some ways it adds legitimacy to the efforts that Canonical's working on here, is that another group of really smart people use it as the base, I think in some ways it adds legitimacy

to the efforts that Canonical's working on here is that another group of really smart people think it's worth their time. And maybe inspires other people to do the same thing and create interesting other spins. Yeah. I think this is a prerequisite to maybe KDE taking a page out of Microsoft's book

and making KDE Hearts Canonical. I'm just waiting for my next KDE Metro app. I wouldn't care to follow that. I think you're pushing it a little. No kidding. No kidding, but maybe just a little softer touch. All right, well, that's fascinating. Thanks for the updates, guys.

I want to transition to OSCON. This is the meat of today's episode. I got some really great stuff down at OSCON. I'm really happy with the way everything turned out, and I want to cover that. So before we jump into our exclusive OSCON coverage in Linux Unplugged, I'd like to mention DigitalOcean, the next sponsor of the Unplugged program. And boy, did DigitalOcean come through all of the clips you're about to see, all of the interviews you saw on Linux Action Show, all of it.

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Go to DigitalOcean.com. Use our promo code DEOUNPLUG, one word. And a huge thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Unplugged program. It's a really great setup. I've got tons of droplets. Noah's got tons of droplets. Wes, you've got to go over there and create a droplet. I have one.

Oh, that's right, you do. What do you use DigitalOcean for? Well, a number of things. They have great pipes over at DigitalOcean. Very fast. I have a few servers over in Europe. This is my proxy server. Downloads things, stores them in a cache.

Good call. It works great. Good call. It also runs SyncThing on pretty much all of them, which keeps my data with me all the time. Yeah, SyncThing, BitTorrent Sync, and OwnCloud are great uses. I love the proxy idea. That's really slick. DigitalOcean.com, use the promo code DOUnplugged

and go build yourself something on a droplet. You'd be surprised how far you can get at just $5 a month. Okay, so our next segment, I'm really excited. We've got some great stuff. But first, I want to touch on a big conversation we had in Linux Action Show this Sunday around RFID tracking at OSCON. There was RFID printed in the badges, and then some of the major rooms you went through, they would track attendees to see which rooms you're in, how long you're in them, to kind of get heat maps of popular sessions and things like that.

Now, I have to clarify. Josh R. Simmons from O'Reilly tweeted us and said, your OSCON show had some inaccuracies around RFID. People could opt out and employers don't get the data. There's no reports that are sent to employers. So I want to make that clarification for some of you who are a little uncomfortable about the OSCON tracking. They don't send reports to employers and there was an option to opt out. I thought it was kind of a fascinating thing they were doing in the first place,

but I just thought for those of you who are concerned about that, we should make that clarification. Now, that's really the only mistake you're going to run into, because, you see, when Noah and I go down to events like this, we've been doing this for a while now. Professional. We are a well-oiled machine, Wes. Like, we get down there, we're strutting our stuff. What's up? Linux Action Show, biggest podcast in the Linux N world.

We're here, we're going to record some interviews. Get out of the way. And I tell you, it all goes really well until you realize we've showed up an hour early, and the Expo Hall hasn't even opened yet. When you told me you didn't have anything until 1.30, I thought, okay, well, then we'll just go do interviews until 1.30. You see, that's what I was thinking. That's not what you were thinking.

And not only wasn't that what I was thinking, it's actually not what I communicated to you. Because you see, what you communicated was, I don't need to be there until 1.30. I did, but I did specifically tell you that the expo hall wasn't going to be open until the afternoon. I think by that... Here's my mistake. My mistake was expecting to convey more than 15 seconds of information at one time. Important information.

No, it's just that you ramble. Exactly. Right, right. So I have to condense it down to 15 seconds and spit that out. That's just that you ramble. Exactly. Right. So I have to condense it down to 15 seconds and spit that out. That's not true. Well, you find that I have to come up with interesting other things to say to Phil. You do have to sell me. I'll keep that in mind for future videos. We got that

worked out, but there was a little bit of it's actually kind of nice at OSCON. They have a media room set up, so we were able to kill a little time in there. We got some things sorted out. We got some bad stuff resolved. And our first interview of the day was with one of the chairs of OSCON. And I asked her, like, for people who are listening from a community standpoint, what's the connection between O'Reilly and OSCON?

And can you give us a little information about how that all connects? We're walking around here at OSCON, and I ran into Rachel. Now, Rachel is a very, very interesting guest on the Unplugged show because she runs this whole thing, puts it all together. I'm really excited to talk to her. So Rachel, welcome to Linux Unplugged. Happy to be here. Thank you. So Rachel, I know that probably a lot of folks are somewhat familiar with OSCON, but I don't know if they really are familiar with how O'Reilly is involved with OSCON,

because I think we all know O'Reilly. So could you touch on just a little bit of O'Reilly and OSCON and how that is all connected? Absolutely. So O'Reilly's been around for about 38 years, and OSCON's been around for, this is the 17th one. And so we've always really been a part of open source before it was even called open source. And I believe we were part of coining that phrase, and when we did, that was something that we brought to OSCON. OSCON actually started as a Pearl event. And then as more and more people came to the open source community, it became more of a developer event. And so O'Reilly has many, many events at this

point. I think we have 18 per year, but we also have books books we have videos um and you know we distribute uh ebooks so yeah i think you guys are very very well known for the ebooks and uh the books online and the animals of course are a very iconic aspect to it so i i don't know though do people uh do people when they hear o'reilly do they think of that late that legacy in open source and how does oscon help sort of familiarize people with that i think they do think of the legacy. Like I said, so OSCON has been around for a long time, and you see a lot of people, if not come back every year, come back every couple of years to check in with the community.

So I think that it's something that people have been looking at for a while. What I want to make sure OSCON is, is that we're constantly bringing in new people so that they are a part of that legacy. Because even though open source has, quote, unquote, won, there's a lot of work left to do. Because it has to do with how do you bring that into your business? How do you make that work? How do you make money from it while still being a good open source community member? And, you know, that's such an interesting aspect there, too, because it is exploding every year.

It feels like the open source world has gotten bigger there's so many more technologies and you know we see really fascinating big huge companies like sap are in here and how they leverage open source but one of the interesting things about oscon for people that are uh not here right now that is hard to capture because we're on the floor all the time you get an idea in a sense of the activity what's really hard to capture is there's some really incredible sessions going on. And I know there's been some specific retooling around some of that this year. Could you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, absolutely. So we used to be set up by language. And I think that was because developers identified with a certain language, at least more so than others. And what we realized is that there's so many languages, frameworks, techniques,

all different open source pieces, that there's now the right tool for the job. So what we wanted to do instead was pick out what are the common problems that developers are having, either in securing their software, or scaling it, or how do you take it mobile, and giving them solutions and having those solutions be able to be applied to different frameworks, languages, so on. Absolutely. And there's also been some pretty intensive sessions this year that really, like you could come here and get really familiar with something.

What's the intent behind that? Well, we wanted to get, exactly, we wanted to get a little bit more intense. We had four two-day training courses. One was on Swift, another was on Go. Microservices is a big deal we really wanted people to be able to come in take two days not put it off any longer um focus focus be able to actually when they go back next week to work to actually solve a problem and give them those materials to solve that problem so we had those we had 38 tutorials which is like an amazing amount

of tutorials um and those were like three to six hours. And then, like you said, the sessions where you're just sort of getting a taste of what something is. Now, if I'm watching from afar, is there any kind of resources I can read up and get an idea of what's coming up next year so I know if I want to make it out here? Is there like a site I can watch or a feed to follow? That's a good question. So we have OzCon.com. like a site I can watch or a feed to follow? That's a good question. So we have OzCon.com and you can

go there and you can check out the keynotes. We'll be streaming, or not streaming live anyways, but they'll be there. You can check them out. And then you can check out O'Reilly's Radar and that's some, you know, I talked a little bit about what we were doing. I'll talk about what I did see. And honestly I want to talk to a bunch of people while I'm here

to see what they did like, what they didn't like. One of the things I'm thinking about for next year is making a track that's like the mind-blowing track, which is just like super advanced and like people can go in and be like, I don't know what just happened. Getting known for being really hardcore in there. Yeah, that's great. I'd love to see what you guys get to come up with. Rachel, thank you so much for coming on

Linux Unplugged. No problem. It was a pleasure. And that was interesting. They decided as the conference gets bigger, their solution to sort of becoming less relevant is to get more hardcore and focus more on content. We'll see how that works as they move to Texas. Now, this next clip I got here is called Matrix. And I don't know if you're familiar with like Stack,

which is like a collaboration tool for teams and stuff like that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's really popular these days. It's really taking off. And there is an open source competitor that you can either use as a hosted service or host yourself called Matrix. It's an open source stack killer, and it involves IRC, chat, WebRTC, persistent rooms and project

planning, calendaring, and integration with third-party services. And they're saying, stop using Stack and try out Matrix. It might just solve your needs. So we spent 12 years building SIP infrastructure and got quite depressed in the end because SIP was meant to be like this email, but for VoIP and video. Except in practice, nobody has SIP URIs on their business cards.

And the Open Federation, the open interoperability thing, just hasn't really quite taken off. So we went and wrote an alternative to SIP based on HTTP, just a really simple HTTP API, where if I want to set up a video call to somebody, I do one hit with the author of what media I want to talk, and you do one hit back with the answer, and that's it, we're in a call.

So none of the complexities of SIP, with all the, you know, is it UDP? Is it TLS? Is it TCP? This version? Is it that version? SIP is quite old and very fragmented. Just doing it in HTTP works a lot better. And that's one of the things you can use with Matrix. Except Matrix isn't just about voice and video. You can also use it for instant messaging.

We've got the little drone sitting down there, which we're about to launch as an Internet of Things demo, where you can go and get the video off it via Matrix, but you can also control it. We went and hooked up people's cars to Matrix, so the car kind of sends out telemetry as little blobs of JSON into

Matrix, and you can go and consume it anywhere else. So basically, Matrix is a big, open, decentralized object database with PubSub semantics so that anybody can publish any random data they want. And it could be a message or whatever. And over here on the screen, am I seeing like a persistent group chat environment? It kind of looks a bit like IRC and messaging. Yeah.

So this is one of the classic things you can do with Matrix, use it as a persistent group chat thing. This is an Angular environment, and there are a couple of hundred chats going on there. A lot of these are bridged through into Freenode. Freenode have been very cool in that it's gone and actually bridged Matrix into Freenode, or vice versa.

Here's another view of the same room, say, but a more Slack-like environment. This one's written in React. So this is kind of like a team collaboration sort of version of it sitting on top of the matrix object database?

And so I assume in this I could have text, image, video, audio, all those things in here? So any JSON you like. You can hear these are just instant messages with people trying to do weird shit with UTF-8, but if we go back to this one, if you double click on stuff like a message like test there,

you can see it's just arbitrary JSON. So it could be a M room message, or if you were doing a video call here, it could be a bit uglier. It's a M call invite, and you've got the description of the media for that call there. But it could be drone control. It could be car telemetry, whatever the hell.

And my program, my app, just needs to be able to read this and know what to do with it. Yep, precisely. So we define some standard types like m.call. Anything that begins m. is matrix and it's part of our spec. But it's like Java namespace. So if you wanted to have a com.google.whatever-the-hell-google-might-use-it-for, then just feel free, go nuts, put data in. So if I wanted to roll this out, what's my back-end structure look like?

Is it a Linux server? What's it running on? So we're providing one reference server at the moment, which is written in Python and Twisted, and it's about 30,000 lines of code. It's pretty beta, but it works well enough to have rooms with like 1,000 people in it and a couple of hundred servers participating, and it runs on any OS that can

support Python, really. Some of that is, well, it could be Debian, we've got Dockerfiles, SUSE images, Fedora images, and even some of them might run on Windows. Very cool. I like that. Do you have any questions? So, what does a customized ability look like?

If I wanted to specify, can I specify video parameters, like the codecs I want to use or the size of resolution I want to send, that kind of thing? So what we do for the actual video on one of these calls, and if I'm going to put this on the right network, I'll even go into a quick demo. That's a great question because that's something we run into all the time is we want to be able to specifically say

720p because we know we have the right band with the right environments we've built it for that but a lot of like Hangouts and Skype a lot of the consumer solutions

they just automatically decide what they're going to give you and you have no say. Right. So what we do is to slightly punt on the issue and we just use WebRTC

which is built into the browser already and we use whatever it gives us. I think there's an idea of intents where you can say, or constraints, where you can say, hey, I want it 720p, and if you're lucky then the browser and the camera and the

planets will align, and you'll get what you asked for. So the intent says if the system supports it, give me this? Yeah, precisely. So matrix is just the signaling. We are relying on whatever else is already hanging around, like WebRTC, to make that work. Now, if I go and try to quickly find Evil Matthew, who's my demo self, and say, hello there, then... We're going to go and give Evil Matthew a video call, I think. I like that.

Okay, so that's... Oh, sorry. I'm Evil Matthew. Oh, okay. I see. I see. I can go... Oh, I like that. Oh, wait. Just like an internet video message. Then you, yep. Then this is going and calling OpenWebRTC.

Yeah, and it just puts it right there in line with the chat. Oh, that's nice. We should have an inbound call. In fact, I've got it coming in. Well, in fact, that's the previous message coming in on my Apple Watch. But if we go and accept it there, then hopefully... Oh, interesting. So there's also, there must be an app running on your phone

that's also getting the messages from the call, so you're getting push notifications to your phone too? Yeah, absolutely. So there we go. That's now just a typical WebRTC call. So this is 640x480, and it's just a default that you get. But as I say, you can put constraints on it to try to get 720p. And you can see that I'm getting push notifications coming in here

also on the app from various different channels because we've got iOS and Android apps and about 10 different clients. Five of them are from the core team and the rest are from the community. So people have done command line clients using WeChat. There's a Java desktop app. There's a Chrome app.

If I'm a company that was looking at something like Slack, could this be a replacement for that? Could I use this maybe in place of Slack? Potentially. So the big advantage is that you can run your own server. All of the conversation history here gets replicated over the participating servers. So I can run my own one, you can run your own one, and if we're in the same room, then no single server or entity or vendor like Slack, for instance,

owns that conversation. It's aggressively decentralized, a bit like Git or blockchain or something like that. So that's quite a compelling thing. We've also got end-to-end encryption in it using an OTR-like thing, which is actually better than OTR. And that, again, makes it kind of interesting because with Slack, you have no choice but to just hand all your data over to them. Whereas here, if you wanted to flip the bit and turn on end-to-end encryption you can. And for the

encryption implementation how much of that is done out in the open? How much of that is open source or documented? It's all open source under the Apache license. What we did was to take the Axolotl ratchet implementation or specification that OpenWhisper systems have written and released and it's what WhatsApp uses and

TechSecure and we wrote our own clean room implementation of that spec and it's called Ohm in TechSecure. And we wrote our own clean room implementation of that spec, and it's called Ohm, O-L-M. You can get it from GitHub, Apache licensed, along with the rest of the Matrix Go base. Awesome. Thank you very much for the information. I'm definitely going to check that out, because we've been looking at something kind of like that. Appreciate it.

I like this more than the standard alternative to going with something proprietary like Slack, and it's a neat kind of package all put together. SkookySprite, you seem kind of impressed by it during the playback. What do you think? It sounds like totally integrated, free and open source.

I'm big about that aspect of it. That means it's accessible. You can audit it. You know that like you said, it's your own data. Yeah, and for the most part Slack is a pretty compelling product, but when it's your own data. Yeah, and for the most part, Slack is a pretty compelling product. But when it's my company and it's like – one of the things I think about with something like Slack is it seems like it could be a really good solution for 2015, 2016, maybe even 2017. Now, what happens if Jupyter Broadcasting makes it 30 years, 35 years?

And I want to look back at sort of like the formative years of the company. and I want to look back at sort of like the formative years of the company, I would really, really, really regret having that data either, A, not available because that company's not around or in some sort of proprietary format that I can't get access to. So having something like that, the collaborative details of where our company was at, owning that, to me, seems like a part of the company's history. Definitely. You know, in my office, we used to have a custom back-end chat client XMPP-based. We've been looking at, you know, we're using Slack now, but I know there are still some

shareholders in the company who are concerned about data flowing outside of our company to someone else. Yeah. Before that, we've been stuck using Pigeon and other XMPP clients. So if there is something like this that has a newer interface, has more abilities, that might be, you know, big for a lot of enterprises. It's called Matrix, and it's, of course, that's a, boy, as far abilities. That might be big for a lot of enterprises. It's called Matrix, and of course, that's a... Boy, as far as SEO

goes, that's pretty rough. I've even tried to get links for the show. I had a rough time, but... I can't believe they got the.org. That's kind of impressive. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So you can get it right now, matrix.org, and go check it out. So this next thing is... This is the last sort of, like, business-y

sysadmy thing, and then we're going to get into some really crazy great stuff. This one, though, I want to talk about because there's this category that gets kicked around, and I think a lot of people kind of associate with being a hipster, maybe the DevOps category, right?

The DevOps. And it's this one guy or gal, and they've got to do one thing. They've got to build code, integrate it with servers and they've got to be able to scale, right? And they've got to get to thousands of servers. And the thing is, it sounds like I'm making fun of people but this is an actual job

that to me sounds like it would keep me up all night long. Being responsible for thousands of servers when I really just want to create software, I don't really want to be a sysadmin. This sounds like the recipe for an ulcer. And so there is an open source project out there called Metosphere or Mesosphere.

And Mesosphere, have you heard of this at all? Mesosphere is like a cluster management orchestration suite at a high level. I was just looking at a tutorial the other day. It looks very interesting. Really? So this is one of the people working on it. Now, I got to warn you, he's not a public relations person. This was a bit of rental space, essentially,

or free space that GitHub gave out to some open source projects. And so, Wes, I'd be really curious to hear your insights after we play this. I get an idea of Mesosphere Apache cluster management with my chat in the little area where GitHub has given out space to certain

open source projects that they like. So my name is Michael Hausenblass. I'm leading DevOps relations at Mesosphere. And what we have here is Apache Mesos, a cluster resource manager, a top level Apache project. Takes a bunch of nodes in your cluster and abstracts that away, making you as a developer who wants to develop a distributed application. So if I'm a developer who's in that DevOps role and I have thousands of servers or hundreds of servers or tens of thousands of servers, that's a massive task for one person to manage

and this is trying to make it possible for one person to manage all of that? That's right. And for a person like a developer who wants to write distributed applications, it's really the kernel of a kind of distributed operating system. And that's what we do. Now, I see here you have one of the key bullet points is that it's fault-tolerant in battle testing. How does something like this not become a single point of failure

that just takes somebody down for the day if it has issues? Very good question. Number of components, like all of them, like the master and everything is fault tolerant. So you always, whatever fails, everything will fail over to something that is in standby here. So there is really no single point of failure.

And on the backend server, is it Linux-based? It is Linux-based, yes. And then what does that look like from a deployment standpoint? Is it an appliance? Is it a container? Is it a software package I install? Essentially, yeah. We have two versions.

The Community Edition, which is cloud only, so you can only deploy it in one of the public clouds. And the Enterprise Edition, which you can also deploy on-prem. Okay. And what's the on-premises one look like? Is that more of a... The Enterprise Edition, it also comes with support and a bit of secret sauce. Essentially, the guys who used to do messes at Twitter and Airbnb, taking that experience and productized that. Taking infrastructures like that. Fascinating.

Well, thanks for the information. Thank you. So what was your impressions when you were researching the product? Or I guess the project, I should say. You know, it seems like the Apache mesos on steroids. Yeah. You know, something that even further adds abstractions. Because the whole big idea here is being able to easily scale and maybe not even have to think about it. Yeah. You know, something that even further adds abstractions because the whole big idea here is being able to easily scale and maybe not even have to think about it.

Yeah. You know, the ease of writing. It's like you just drag resources around kind of a thing. Yeah. And you can kind of write as if it was all one big resource. Yeah. Oh, so it gives you tools at a development level. Right. Or you can do that. Interesting. Well, very cool. And so where do people do you have any good recommendations? People want to find out more about it? Anything you found very useful? You know, it looks like there's even a DigitalOcean tutorial right here. An introduction to Mesothere. Look at that, there is.

Well, there you go. That's actually probably the best bet, just as a starting point. Yeah, because they have technical writers that go through those. And nice diagrams, too. Yeah. Whoa, look at that. I don't think I have a shot of your machine there. That's me. No, I don't have a shot of your machine there. That's me. No, I don't have a shot of your machine.

But you know what? I will for next week. So have you heard of the company Fastmail before? Yeah, I was just looking at their services the other day. Are you joking? I think I saw an advertiser for it. It was kind of interesting. Yeah, are you kidding me right now? No, I'm not.

100%. Yeah, I actually, you know, I kick around, you know, Jupyter Broadcasting's back-end mail is powered by Google Apps. The usual hand-wavy, yeah. So there's two ways I look at this. Lazy practical Chris goes, oh, man, this is great. I get, like, all of the stuff I'd want from, like, a collaboration software without having to run a collaboration software. And it's really great.

I just click a button. I can create new accounts for people. And the web mail is pretty good, right? And the calendar is great. And so that's pretty good, right? And the calendar is great. And so that's practical, Chris, right? And then tinfoil hat Edward Snowden following Chris goes, hey man, you know, you're getting emails

from people in Iran, from China, in Russia, and they're all landing in this Google inbox that anybody could just go, we'd like to have access to Mr. And so like sometimes that's when it's like, I have these two competing voices in my head and they all, you know, they both agree on like both, they both with each other constantly, except for every now and then they go, you know, you could check out Fastmail. And I go, oh, really?

And then I started, so then Fastmail's been building up momentum. And so I was walking around OSCON, and I bumped into the Fastmail folks. And I thought, gosh, I've really been thinking about this. And I wonder how much of their infrastructure is Linux-based. What is their participation in open source? I was wondering exactly those same things when I was looking at their site. Right, exactly. And I'm thinking, if I maybe make the switch, I want to vote with my wallet again.

I mean, I want to make the right choice. And so I sat down sort of to vet FastMail for myself and vet FastMail for Jupyter Broadcasting. FastMail is email done right, or really email calendars and contacts done right these days. We do hosting for all of those for individuals or businesses, and we just do it really well. We have our own interface, which is much faster and more powerful and more elegant than our competitors, and we also do a lot with open source software,

which is why we're here at OSCON this week. Very interesting. So somebody like me who's on Google Apps might want to find something maybe a little different. Maybe I'm not as comfortable with Google Apps as I used to be. And I love that you use open source. That would definitely play into my decision, just as an open source advocate myself.

How does open source play into FastMail? So, the core IMAP server that we use to host everyone's email is Cyrus, which is one of the two big open source IMAP servers. It was started by Carnegie Mellon University about 20 years ago now, I think.

And for at least the last five years, probably ten years, FastMail have been the biggest contributor to that project. My colleague Bron is probably the main developer and leads the project these days. We also have a couple of others now working full-time on it. So we make huge contributions to that. We also have a huge number of open-source Perl libraries that we've made available that we built as part of our middleware, which is built in Perl. And

also more recently, we have open sourced a couple of JavaScript libraries that we use to power our web interface, the most popular of which being the Squire rich text editor, which is now getting quite a lot of attention, 3,000 GitHub stars or so.

So indulge me, if you will, on the back end. Are we seeing FastMail run on Linux servers? Is it on Windows boxes? What's sort of the back-end infrastructure look like? Is that open source too? So yeah, most of the back-end stuff is open source. We run on Linux. We certainly don't run on Windows.

I think there's one or two Windows machines in the office somewhere. Okay. Yeah. Any Linux desktops in the office? There are quite a few Linux desktops in the office. It's a bit of a... It's pretty much a split between Mac and Linux, or Linux run on a Mac in some cases. And I think, yeah, there's one guy using Windows because someone has to, just to make sure it still works.

You've got to blame somebody for the network spam. Well, exactly. So the backend is mainly run on Linux and I believe we publish most of the things we do, certainly anything that's interesting to our GitHub account. That includes our custom patches

on Cyrus and various things like that. Cool. So check out the GitHub page for that stuff. Great. Well check out the GitHub page for that stuff. Great. Well, thank you very much for the information. Thank you. I love that. That was a great chat.

And it was cool to find out how much of their infrastructure actually uses Linux. Were you impressed now as somebody who was looking up their services? Yeah, you know, I mean, that definitely speaks to the organization, where they're going, what they're based on. Also, you know,

there's other great services out there like Colab and other things to check out as well. So it's a good time out there. And then we have our last interview. This one was a fun one because not only is he a listener of Linux Unplugged and the Linux Action Show, which I got to say,

the Samsung booth was not going to get any attention by us this year except for this guy was here because last year they had a really nice, passionate guy from Korea who didn't speak English. And the thing is, it's pretty hard to interview somebody who doesn't speak English. And so what they did this year is they doubled down on the amount of engineers. So they brought in a lot more engineers who are all from Korea.

But they also brought in people who were familiar with the products and spoke English. And so what you got to see is people who were insanely passionate about the products. And one of the things that doesn't come across because this is an audio interview is we were, once he started talking, all of the engineers huddled around and listened to what he had to say. They all wanted to know. It was like, ooh, it was really intense.

But what was great is because we were doing the audio interview, it was just a very natural, hey, let's walk up and take a look. And it just sort of, the conversation unfolded. And this is one of my favorite kind of, it just happened because I was recording exclusively for Linux Unplugged. Now, I'm here at the Samsung booth, and I saw a Tizen sign, a big Tizen sign here on. I was like, wow, look at this thing. I've got to take a look. And while I was noticing that, Noah noticed a very slick-looking phone.

What grabbed your attention about this phone, Noah? Honestly, it looks like an iPhone, but it's made by Samsung. That's the first thing that's coming to mind. It looks like it's smaller. It's maybe an older one, right? Right an iPhone, but it's made by Samsung. That's the first thing that's going to be there. It looks like it's smaller. It's maybe an older one, right? Right, yeah, yeah. Older iPhone, maybe. But it has the traditional Samsung things you'd expect, like a home button on here and all the things.

But it doesn't run Android. No, so when I turned it on, it actually... Look at this, Chris. When you turn this phone on, it actually looks almost like the Android Unlocker. When I unlock it, it kind of resembles Android. A little at this, Chris. When you turn this phone on, it actually, it looks almost like the Android Unlocker. When I unlock it, it kind of resembles Android. A little cleaner UI, maybe. Right, and the first thing that caught me were these applications down here, and then obviously the home screen.

Oh, I like that. I like the way it displays that. So I thought to help put all this together, maybe we could talk to an expert here. So Ben's here at the Samsung booth. Hey, Ben, welcome to Linux Unplugged. Hi there. It's nice to meet you guys. Hello. So can you tell us, what the heck is Noah holding here, and what's different about this phone? So that phone is the first phone that runs Tizen,

which Tizen is our own open-source operating system that is basically just a Linux distribution that we've added a few APIs to give you access to device functionality like sensors and your cell networks and things like that. It's really great because it lets you write applications in just straight C++, just like a standard Linux application. You can also write apps using web-native languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. So it kind of gets the best of both worlds.

You've got the systems side of things that lets you get really efficient C++ apps, but then you've also got the simplicity of your web-native languages. So I've wondered, you know, I noticed Samsung, obviously, pretty well-known for their Android devices. You might have noticed this, too. And when I look at this device, not only does it feel like a pretty well-built phone, because it's a Samsung, and, you know, they've got some experience with that, but the UI, especially like in the notifications tray here, reminds me a little bit of TouchWiz on my S6.

And so where does Samsung see Tizen fitting in with something like the S6 and TouchWiz? Where is this? Because you could almost tell me this was a TouchWiz device, but then I noticed a few differences. Could I maybe see this on a U.S. phone in the future? Where does Samsung see it all fitting in? Honestly, I can't really answer questions about products like that because I'm not really privy to that information. I do know that we're trying to get Tizen on as many different types of devices as possible. So you can see, I mean, I noticed it's not just phones. We've got,

we've got, is this a DSLR here? And then, and then we've got a watch here too. Tell me about the DSLR, would you? You know, it's just a, full-featured camera that runs Tizen. So, I mean, it's... Why Tizen on a camera? Honestly, I can't... You need an OS. A camera needs an OS, right? Yeah, that's right. I mean, they're pretty sophisticated, I guess.

I'll tell you, one of the great benefits of Tizen is it's better for... Since everything runs in C++, it's better for devices that have lower memory, lower CPU power, which is why we also put it on our TVs, because if you're trying to put something like Android, it's going to bog it down with all the overhead from Java. Yeah, Tizen's going to get a lot better performance, and so that's probably also why it's on the watches, right? Yeah, that's correct.

And so tell me about the process of that. When Samsung goes out there, didn't they first try these with Android, and then they decided to switch it to Tizen? Was it performance? Can you tell me a little bit why Tizen was there? Because so many devices these days have Android Wear. As a consumer, I almost expect Android Wear. So I would kind of wonder why Tizen?

There must be some advantages. Yeah, well, if I'm not mistaken, I think we actually released Tizen watches pretty long before Android Wear even came out. But that was actually really where it started for us. And once again, it's because on a watch, you're not going to have very much CPU power. You're not going to have a whole lot of memory. So you have to have an operating system that's pretty efficient to run on it.

And as a community member, can I contribute to Tizen? Could those changes eventually show up on a Samsung device? Yeah. So Tizen 3.0 is a completely collaborative open source project. Anyone can pull it off of the, I think we have it on GitHub, but actually no, I think it's a separate Git repo. But anyone can pull it down and make contributions to it and submit it back upstream. All of these devices are actually based on Tizen 2.3, which was developed internally by Samsung and released as open source. So the changes wouldn't show up on these devices, but in the future we're hoping to get some more devices that run Tizen 3.0.

Very, very neat. And so if I wanted to take a little look at some of this stuff, maybe learn more about Tizen or learn about creating apps for it, where do I go? You can check out developer.tizen.org. And that's got all the information for, it's got an API for learning about, or API documentation for learning about all of the functionality that we've provided, and yeah, so that's good. Very good. Well, Ben, thank you very much. I've got to check out this camera resin Tizen. Are you playing with that right now? Are you playing with that right now? Yeah, I am. So one of the things I noticed is I'm not sure if this technically qualifies as a DSLR because it looks like there's just an LCD inside of here.

But look at that. Yeah, exactly. If I can figure out how to get to the plate, the picture is super sharp. So I turn the aperture down. Look how fast that is. Look at how much blur we have. Oh, it's touchscreen. So you get all this blur in the background.

And look at this right here. You get a little pull-down menu right there. How slick is that? Well, the thing I can see that would be advantageous about this is, Chris, is we can take these pictures, and then we can go and just upload them straight to Twitter, so you get all the benefits that you would expect from a professional camera

with the advantage of a smartphone. Wow, check that out. Boy, welcome to the future. That might be my next camera. A Linux running camera? I got to have that. It was pretty neat. And you know what?

It was really responsive. Like you would have thought it was a custom built operating system just for that camera. It was super snappy. So to have all this kind of nice slick UI and features on a little camera like that was pretty cool. Has anyone else really embraced Tizen? features on a little camera like that was pretty cool. Has anyone else really embraced Tizen? Because that seems like where it might be really interesting is to have a non-Android platform that other

people could take and stick on their cameras. It made sense on the watches, too. It was interesting. We'll see where it goes. I asked them, and of course they couldn't give me an answer on when we're going to get that stuff in the U.S. That would be the key thing. That would really be the key thing. So that's scratching the surface. Of course, we have another two hours of OSCON coverage in this week's episode of the Linux Action Show.

Well, not really two hours, about 45 minutes, 50 minutes in episode 375 of the Linux Action Show, OSCON 2015. And you can go check that out if you want even more. Also in the show notes, because I'm a good guy, I also posted a playlist of just the OSCON interviews from the Linux Action Show. If you don't want to watch the whole episode you can watch. Tired of Chris? You just want the OSCON business. You got it. There you go. Yeah, because it's more it's all Noah in the interviews. Alright, so we got to talk about this Skunkworks project

in development deep inside the community from Las Vegas but first I want to talk about Linux Academy, the third sponsor and final sponsor right here on the Linux Unplugged program. I've been a Linux Academy customer for about a month before they became a sponsor.

And when I decided to become a... When I decided to work with them and have them become sponsors, we said... My conversation started literally like this. I almost don't want you to be sponsors because this was my idea. I wanted to do this. I almost don't want you to be sponsors because this was my idea. I wanted to do this.

Like, if I knew everything I knew now, like almost 10 years into Linux Action Show, looking back, this is so brilliant. Because you have to have the passion for Linux and open source to build a platform like this. And that I've got. But I don't have the connections to the education community and the development community. And that's what Linux Academy had.

But it's so genius because it's exactly what we need as a community. It's like all of those big-name online education sites you heard, but specifically around Linux and open source. So instead of just Linux and open source being a checkbox and they're multi-category of things they cover from everything from Adobe After Effects to replacing the oil in your truck. For them, it's a feature, right? But for Linux Academy, it's their life. It's their passion. So they came together as Linux enthusiasts and educators and developers, and they built the Linux Academy platform. And that was the missing piece, is what we really, really needed

is somebody who's truly enthusiastic and creating incredible content. I remember when I was starting in Linux, there was the Linux Documentation Project, and there was the Gen 2 wiki and all of these things were really good resources, but they were not legitimate resources that I could tell my employer about that they could go towards my employment, educational reimbursement. It could show up on my review. There was team account support. Like it didn't meet any of those criterias. The best I had were books. It was a horrible. Linuxacademy.com. Go there I had were books. It was horrible.

LinuxAcademy.com. Go there and check them out. Go to Linux Academy right now. In fact, if you go to LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged, you can get our 33% discount to really try them out for a little while. Go to LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. You have step-by-step video courses, downloadable comprehensive study guides. They have

a great system where you can choose from 7 plus Linux distributions. They'll automatically adjust the courseware and the virtual machines they spin up for you on demand. You want to know about AWS, you want to know about Red Hat certification, Docker, virtualization, just doing backups on a Linux rig, building out an entire LAMP stack, or maybe

Android development on the Linux desktop. Linux Academy has courseware on that. You want to learn Ruby, Python, things like that. Anything that's an ecosystem around Linux and open source, Linux Academy has courseware on that. You want to learn Ruby, Python, things like that. Anything that's an ecosystem around Linux and open source, Linux Academy has courseware on it because they love it. And they also have just introduced a new feature called Nuggets. Between two and 60-minute courses, we just deep dive on a topic. Nice things, too, like IP tables or rsync backup

or virtualization in VirtualBox. Headless virtualization under VirtualBox. And if you're ready to go get those Red Hat certified engineer certifications, the ones that are basically... I remember when I was doing interviews, I would look at somebody's I would look at somebody's resume, and there's a few that would really stand out. The ones that I really respected, and definitely I would account I would count the Red Hat certifications among them, because you really have to actually earn that certification. It's no joke, it's a hands on kind of of testing where you really have to work

with the technology and prove you can do it over and over again. And as an interviewer, you know that, right? It's a big deal that Linux Academy has some of the best courseware on the web on this, and you can go get it right now at a 33% discount when you go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. linuxacademy.com

slash unplugged, and a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Oh, man. I love the Red Hat certified stuff. They are really working overtime on that. So now I am excited to talk to Mr. Skooky Sprite. It's been a while since he's been on the show. And I guess it is downtime.

He's been working on, I believe it's called the Radio Controller Project or something along those lines. Skooky Sprite, what is it and what's the name? Radio Control Room Project. Control Room. Yeah, rcrproject.com. Yeah, okay, so what is it? It enables users to create from their own local files autonomously self-generating programmatic streaming radio.

So like if I want to be a dj like if i had a whole library of music and i wanted to be dj for a weekend and can i use this yeah but what's what's even cooler okay so like i got the idea because i have 56 000 mp3 files all of them legitimately ripped from my own cd collection which i donated to the va uh, and a bunch of vinyl. And so I'm thinking 56,000 MP3 files, how am I ever going to listen to them? How am I ever going to even create playlists for what I want to hear at any given time, right? Are you following me? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, okay.

So I thought, well, what if I had a way for – I like radio a lot. And what makes radio good? The thing that makes radio good is there are programs. You just turn it on. You turn it on and you don't have to think about it. It's just the music you love is playing. Exactly. Or at certain times, there are programs that are playing certain different types of music.

Sure, yeah. So what if I could make a program that would just make all of these programs, like radio programs, and stream them all as like one streaming radio thing but it sounds like real radio? And this could be like running on my own server in my house that I could hook up to internet. So like it does like an ice cast stream in my phone? Yeah, yeah. Okay. So where the rubber meets the road is ice cast and liquid soap but what rcr adds to it is like basically the controller that sits on top of it um i've

run it off of uh right now it runs off of my uh one of my laptops um which i use you know as my daily driver pretty much uh and it's been it spits it out to a digital ocean droplet, and anyone can listen to it. And the really exciting thing is TuneIn Radio now. You can sign up with TuneIn Radio for free. That's the other thing. I don't like Pandora and stuff, where it's like, oh, well, fine. We want to access your preferences and your data. You want to use your own library, not Pandora's library. Absolutely.

And the other cool thing is you can set up every aspect of the shows. You can decide when a show starts, the type of bumpers it has, the intros, outros. It has back announcements. Man, you're going to put me out of work. Wait, you're just automating my job now?

Pretty much. That's what I kind of wanted to do, yeah. Okay, okay, cool. You can find the retire case. I was cutting straight for you, Chris. So I'm gathering this is a closed source project released under a Microsoft license? Absolutely no. No, it's totally built on a free and open source stack.

Like I said, like you said, liquid soap and IceCast. And then this is built on top of it, and we're adding an HTML interface for it. Right now you configure your shows via actual text files and stuff, which is not that bad because there's a lot of stuff to configure. So could a person say – somebody in our chat room, for example, could they string together a few chapters of an old-time radio series or an audio book and kind of have like a weekly serial that broadcasts? Yes, absolutely. That's cool. That's in the latest Unstable Bill because, like, basically,

the coolest thing about RCR is that it makes sure it has several checks in terms of, like, what gets added. So when you – okay, here. So, like, when you okay here so like when you create a show you select from all of these different directories or all of these individual files that you want to have played and it actually has checks that you can turn on or off like global freshness factor for instance like so so only every six hours before any any song repeats across any show,

et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it's designed to randomize so that you hear stuff that you wouldn't normally hear if you were. Cool. Oh, that's neat. That's pretty cool. And so the link to the project, which you can also just find at rcrproject.com, we'll have a link in the show notes. And eventually, I'll just have this doing Linux Unplugged in the future.

You won't even know. It'll just be powered by this thing. Scooby Sprite will be the have this doing Linux Unplugged in the future. You won't even know. It'll just be powered by this thing. Scooby Sprite will be the puppet master of Linux Unplugged from a distance from Las Vegas with his blue hair. The coolest thing is you get to be the puppet master. You get to create. The hardest thing about creating your own streaming radio station that doesn't suck is actually

being there to create your own program. To DJ it. Hell, who has the time to DJ 24 you know, 24 hours of programming a day? Well, now you can without having to be there. Boom, boom. There you go. Now we're going to need a jobs programs for all those DJs that are getting put out of work by Scoogie Sprite.

But it's cool. Done. In the name of open source, it's cool. So check out, we'll have a link in the show notes if you guys want to check it out. All right, and that'll bring us towards the end of this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. Wes, I'm glad you could make it out even after the big move. Congrats to the new place. Well, thank you, sir. Pleasure to be here.

The new digs in Seattle. And big thanks to the folks at OSCON who interviewed us. And thanks to Noah, of course, for making it out there with me. And, you know, I've got to say, I really, really enjoyed taking this. You know, all of the interviews we did for Linux Unplugged were just on this little portable recorder. And I think I got some really great chats because it's more disarming than having a big video camera in your face. And I loved, it was a good fun opportunity for me to just focus on doing interviews for an audio-only show. And I think it made for a much more enjoyable OSCON for me.

So there's a lesson in that for all of us. But I want to invite you to join us next week. Go over to jupyterbroadcasting.com slash calendar to get this show in your local time zone. But if you're hip to the Pacific, it's at 2 p.m. over at jblive.tv. Of course, you can go to jupyterbroadcasting.com slash calendar to send us an email,

but even better, go to linuxactionshow.reddit.com, please. linuxactionshow.reddit.com. The feedback thread for this show never gets enough attention so give it some attention give it some love attention at linux action show dot reddit.com episode 103 also any stories or feedback great over there wes is there you'd like to point people throughout the week anywhere twitter account anything like that i don't think so no okay follow me at chris las and follow the network at at Jupiter Signal. And we'll see you back here next Tuesday. Thanks, everybody. jebbytotals.com

and then we're going to get out of here it's a big show today big show jebbytotals.com And then we're going to get out of here. It's a big show today. Big show. JebbyTitles.com Go pick. Now, it probably should be something with the Oscon in there, since that was the bulk of our show. But a lot of good stuff.

Thank you specifically to Wimpy for that great update, and Skooky Sprite, and Popey. Great updates. And, of course, everybody else in the Mumble Room, like Mr. Corpse. JebbyTitles.com JebbyTitles.com Oh, heck, i did a search now you see what i'm talking about yeah there you go yeah wimpy you got a lot of coverage didn't you

oh boy i didn't realize honestly i thought like 20 comments on my g plus stream were the size of it i had no idea yeah i was surprised when i saw the amount of coverage I got. I was like, wow, this is an issue that resonates with people. OSCON secret sauce is good. What's interesting is that there's more people saying don't remove it than there are people agreeing

with removing it. That's because crazy people outnumber us. Yeah, you know, Wimpy, my only experience with that is at a certain point, you've got to go with your gut. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, I'm getting feedback right now that would literally be suicide for the show if I followed it. And I get it over and over again, and I've got a fresh batch of it today.

There's an active thread in our subreddit. batch of it today. There's an active thread in our subreddit. It really shows you how sometimes the reason why you're the person making the content is because you are willing to take these risks. And so, you know, you can't, you've got to move forward.

I think it's a beautiful thing to do because worst case is, you can always put it back in the next release. It's already there, yeah. If you could buy the magic wand and fix software center what would you do like you know if other than removing it what's the magic wand fix for someone's brain to the ground so i had a lot to say are you asking me or is that a general question it's a general question yeah Yeah. Okay, so one, the developers having access to the paid section of the Ubuntu Software Center

and not having access to do anything at all on the open source thing, that sucks. I don't understand what you're saying. If I put an app in the Ubuntu Software Center that is completely free, but it's on the paid section, I can control the source of the app app and I can actually update it myself. And I can do whatever I want. I can change descriptions. I can change the photos and all that good stuff. If I have my app in the open source side of it and I have absolutely zero control and

I have to just beg and beg and beg for them to do anything. Rodan, wasn't that the thing? They wouldn't update. You went through several updates of your own project? They wouldn't update? You went through several updates of your own project and they wouldn't update it? Yeah. It took me a year to get my stuff updated. That's less of an Ubuntu software...

I accept that's an issue. That's less of an Ubuntu software center issue. Having that split is irritating. The fact that I can't control that is incredibly irritating. That's not the question I'm asking there. But also, as an end user, the recommendation system is pretty much useless because it's based on your account that you don't have yet. So then you'd have to create the account, which is the Ubuntu 1 thing, which then they announced that Ubuntu 1 was going away, but they really weren't taking it away.

It was just a music thing, so that created confusion. No, Ubuntu 1 didn't go away. I know. I just explained what I meant. Anyway, it created confusion. It created confusion. Because Ubuntu 1 music is called Ubuntu 1, and no one called it Ubuntu 1 music.

It confused people. So then now there's actually people who do say that, who say that it's gone, and I've had to explain to them, no, it's not. It's still there. It's just confusing. We just said it was gone, no, it's not. It's still there. It's just confusing. We just wish that it was gone.

No, I actually explained. Anyway, it doesn't matter. The point is though, there is a situation with the listings of what you have installed is only available when you're logged into your account, so you can't look to see what you actually have installed on your computer in the software center unless you have it logged in. That's people that have actually used it. Your complaints, Rod, are all from complaints of people that have ever used it. I think the first impression...

It's also incredibly slow. Yeah. So that's what I'm aiming at. The search is incredibly awful. The search is absolutely terrible. The search is bad. But hold on, hold on. So the question I'm asking, I'm asking at is the search is incredibly awful. The search is absolutely terrible. The search is bad. But hold on, hold on. So the question I'm asking, I'm asking this from the perspective of someone who's installing Ubuntu Mate, right?

So someone who's installing Ubuntu Mate, they're going to be affected by the fact that this is missing. So those are people who are doing a clean install. Those are new users. These are not people who've already got, like, hundreds of pounds spent in the Ubuntu store. of pounds spent in the Ubuntu store. So I'm saying from the perspective of someone who's experiencing Ubuntu Software Center in something like Marte or any other desktop, for that matter,

other than it being slow, I appreciate it is slow, and I hear that quite a lot, what else is wrong with the Software Center itself? I'll tell you what... The search actually removes itself based on different parts of where you are in the Software Center. So if you actually do a search, you go to any of the items for the results, you no longer have your search box.

You have to revert back to two previous pages before you find your search box again. Yeah, that is awful. Here's what it is. And I think why I care is because it's at a big picture what the Linux desktop screws up all the time. It's like if we can't do it right, let's not do it at all because then it's just compared to what Mac and Windows is doing. And so if we have a software store, it has to be comparable to what – I understand it existed before the Mac App Store did and before the Windows 10 software store did. But now it also exists in a world where those things do exist

and where a lot of people are coming from. Right, and unfortunately it's not been touched in the last two years. So it hasn't been updated. It sort of personifies that poor knockoff sort of reputation that the commenters on Engadget give Ubuntu all the time. Chris, let me put you this way.

I tried to get my now ex-girlfriend, and no, it was not because of the Ubuntu software store, but it was close. I tried to get her to jump onto Ubuntu, and I'm like, oh, well, just look on whatever they have, because I'm used to all these other distributions. And she's like, no, but this doesn't work. She was looking for something that could manage her photos better.

And there's no alternatives to it's so much better. That's where I think, yeah, you do exist in this world where the software, other competing things exist. And, yeah, it should have been fixed two years ago. I think the web version is better. What are you going to say? They actually have their own They actually have a better version. That's their website. Appstabuntu.com is much better.

I know, but that's not what ships with the OS. Well, it doesn't matter. You go to it, and regardless, they can put a link in the launcher that just opens that website. That's what I'm saying! Right, in a frame kind of thing. How about in a scope? Yeah, put it right up there in the dash.

That works. I made a video about 10 months ago explaining why the USC versus the apps on that website, the apps.abuntu.com. That is such a better solution. It was myself and Popey and you, Rotten, that were having a discussion a lot like this 10 months ago that prompted you to make that video

because I'd not heard of apps.and2.com when we were. Oh, yeah, that's true. Yeah. I like appstopand2.com. The problem is that that's not maintained either because you'll find that it's not perfect. No, yeah, yeah. I haven't got entries for the current version.

Right. It's not perfect, but the search results work. But if it was faster, had better search results and didn't bother doing recommendations based on stuff it doesn't know about you.

No, no, no. I'm okay with the recommendations. It's just, I would rather it be able to scan what I already have rather than require me to create an account, log into that account, give them a permission to see my installed app. Oh, I see. So if it just looks at your existing

packages on your machine without going off to the cloud or anything like that. Right. It just streamlined it and made it simpler. And some people might go, oh, well, I don't want them to see what I have installed. It's like, well, it's local anyway. It doesn't matter. It's only telling you what it sees. It doesn't need to submit that.

No, here's a couple of things. Right. Here's the really depressing thing is this is the same commentary that Matt and I have made on Linux Action Show for the last couple of years. You guys had this conversation as recent as 10 months ago. And I think the reason why Wimpy's story got so much traction is because it's now just gotten into the general Ubuntu community's mind that the Software Center is a total train wreck, and that's why that story picked up momentum, is because it's just a general shared consensus now.

And, Popey, I love you, but, like, I gotta say, like, Chris is totally right. I remember when this show was started, that was when I started listening to it. We were still talking about it. In my opinion, Wimpy... Just so you know, whether you love me or hate me doesn't take away doesn't take away from the fact that software center sucks i can handle wimpy you are getting you are getting uh a such a tiny percentage of the people that are following this story commenting saying you shouldn't get rid of it because the amount of momentum and distribution the story has got is so proportionally outweighing the amount of comments you're getting about why it should be

removed it's just really hard to see that until you've been through this cycle a few dozen times it's obvious just by the by the sheer amount of momentum the story got that it is a shared consensus by a lot of people it doesn't mean by everybody but i i'd say it's a majority so hope you ask the question how how would we i fix the ubuntu software center my answer to that is primarily i look to my immediate family and the close friends of mine that run ubuntu mate that are not super technical computer users they use it because it's familiar and they know how to get stuff done using it they can use the ubuntu software center just fine they've they've been using some of them have been using Ubuntu for six years or more some have been using it for a year 18 months

they see that as a perfectly usable tool so for them I don't need to change it but what you said Chris is absolutely right the undercurrent of feeling about the ubuntu software center is that it's not very good anymore and you hear that enough times and i'm in a position where i can make a change hopefully for the better so this change i'm ushering in by removing ubuntu software center as the default installed app store is because people that are familiar with the Ubuntu community and have been a part of it for a long time generally seem to have this collective feeling that the Ubuntu software is not that great

and it should be replaced with something better. And what I'm providing is the choice for those people to make that decision. So they can choose to stay with the Ubuntu Software Center or they can use AppGrid and potentially a third way as well. And we'll see if that pans out in the future. Yeah, hopefully we'll stimulate that. It's giving the users the choice.

And for those of you that aren't familiar with Ubuntu Mate Welcome, it pops up on first login. You've probably seen these welcome screens from other distributions. So the ability to click the software button and see this option to install an app store is right there in front of every new install, every new user on the system. So it's not tucked away or hidden. It's front and center. I think that's a good compromise. I like it.

And it is a compromise. But we'll see whether it was a good decision or not. And maybe for beta 1 or beta 2, we have a change of policy. But, you know, Ubuntu Software Center's future is uncertain. Maybe you should just keep alternating it, like, for each release, just like rip it out, put it back, rip it out, put it back. Hey, what could go wrong? What could go wrong? I know that Ubuntu Mate is sort of

a throwback to how Ubuntu used to be but I'm not going to swap out major applications every cycle remember

you know rhythm box in f-spot out you remember how it was I'm not doing that yep oh lord burn