LINUX Unplugged - Episode 11: Bankrupt Linux News | LINUX Unplugged 11

Episode Date: October 23, 2013

The recent outburst from Linus Torvalds and Mark Shuttleworth have put the poor state of Linux news coverage into sharp focus. The media’s attention to the cult of personalities damages the Linux community.We’ll discuss what pressures push this trend forward, despite the need of a balanced dialog in an open community.

This is Linux Unplugged, Jupyter Broadcasting's weekly Linux talk show that's writing checks our mouth can't cash, but we push on anyways. My name is Chris. My name is Matt. Hey there, Matt. Episode 11, buddy. Look at us. Already.

All in a row, too. Now, who knows? Because we're coming up to those wily holidays. You never know what could happen. This is true. So people have to prepare themselves now. So coming up on this week's show of Unplugged, I want to talk about something that's been bothering me for at least a year.

In fact, since November of 2012, to tell you the truth. I could tell you exactly when. But as the Linux Action Show has gone on, we have gotten a really good snapshot of what the Linux news looks like every single week for over the last seven years. And there's been a change in tone, in quality, in amount, all of it. Linux news has gone bankrupt. And I want to talk about it on today's Linux Unplugged. Because I think it's something that, because open source is done in the open, because it is such a community effort,

I believe the dialogue around open source plays an extremely critical role in future development and in perception. And then that plays into participation and all these things. So I think it has very, very large and wide-reaching ramifications. So we'll talk about that today. But you know, Matt, as is tradition, because this is a very community-involved show, I want to get into the follow-up. And a couple of things. Oh, I can imagine. Oh, yes. Let the beatings begin. I know. I know. You know, the Linux Gamecast, they call this section the hate mail.

We do have a little hate mail today, but first I want to correct. Oh, actually, first I want to do a thank you. So let's start off on a positive note. All right. Integros. In fact, the good folks over at Integros came out in full force to reach out after we talked about them in the spotlight last uh on sunday on linux action show we had a visitor in our subreddit who answered some technical questions and also corrected a mistake i made their installer is looks a lot like ubiquity from ubuntu's installer but it is actually their own custom done installer oh it is custom that's fantastic and you know to to defend myself i made that assumption because i i drilled into the gith GitHub repo for their distro, went into the installer code, and I saw references to Ubiquity.sh and a screenshots folder that had Zubuntu screenshots in it.

So I thought there's a good chance this is based on Ubiquity because it looks like Ubiquity. There's Ubiquity names in here. But the developer said, well, we were just pulling in different bits of code to try different things out. And we're in the process of cleaning things up. Oh, OK. Well, that makes more sense. And so I just wanted to make that correction. Then also a big thank you because then also I was contacted on our IRC server.

If you go to irc.geekshed.net, that's our IRC server. And then Pound Jupyter Broadcasting is the room. Alex from Integros reached out to me and uh answered a few questions i had talked about a few upcoming things they have provided me with a uh an example in fact i think i have it right here let's see if this plays because i have and that's how you're supposed to say it he generated that for us how cool is that that is cool because i'm gonna literally play that every time every time i have to say it i'm just going to hit that button yeah Integros so I wanted to say a special thank you to them for those of you who don't know Integros

is it's a distro that's essentially straight up Arch they pull from the Arch repos they have a small repo of their own where they pull certain things in like Art and other things they set up a very minimal set of defaults I mean super minimal like I don't even think it's like a video player installed

and as it installs it pulls down packages from the Arch repo minimal set of defaults. I mean, super minimal. Like, I don't even think there's like a video player installed. And as it installs, it pulls down packages from the Arch repo. And if you want to try out like Cinnamon 2.0 or GNOME 3.10 1, it's a great way to go because you can be up and running.

Now, a lot of people have had some hardware issues, but they're working on new features, so we'll keep an eye on it. It looks really promising. I know I'm going to be checking into it. Yeah, it's cool of them to reach out too like that. They definitely went the extra mile.

And then one other thing. I was talking, we did a review, just a few corrections from last. We did a review of the Synology DiskStation 4-Bay Network Attached Storage, the DS412+. Oh, yes. one two plus oh yes and i gave it a pretty glowing thumbs up all all in all if you're you know if you want to pay a premium for a small silent you know sort of pre-done appliance basically awesome in a box i really liked it man i mean in fact i bought one on on monday so i bought one yesterday oh did you yeah i did i just went ahead and i said you know i'm gonna buy it and uh so i did now however there is one thing that i totally forgot to mention, and it's probably my main con, is it uses an external power supply.

And on top of that, it's got a real funky, you know, proprietary power adapter. Oh, does it? Okay. So that could make replacing it interesting. Sure. Now, to be honest, in this rig, I would actually suspect that the number one thing to fail would either be a fan or the power supply if it was the power supply and it's integrated that kind of you know is more of a pain in the butt whereas if it's an external brick you just replace that brick i

don't like that the connector is proprietary but i bet you i could buy an extra one and have it in a drawer and if it ever popped on me i bet i could just swap it out real quick. I like the idea of having a spare. I think that's a wise idea. And I think you're right. I think the fan would be probably the next thing to go. Either or. Sure. And then it was pointed out on our subreddit that the – in fact, let me go look for it.

Because they have a – I didn't even know this because I just didn't – I was never really going down the route of looking at a Synology NAS until I was offered to review one. Their five-drive unit – hey-o, 5 drives, huh? How about that? It has a built-in power supply. So if you want to go that route, it has the plug, and then you don't have to have that external adapter. But it's like $100 more. Right, right.

Oh, that's a good-looking machine. Yeah, they also have a $200 version that's a 2-drive unit or like a $300 unit. Oh, yeah? Yeah. So it has all the same features as the one I have, but it's a few hundred dollars cheaper because this only takes two-drive. And if you just want a nice, fast network-attached storage with some mirrors that runs Linux, you know, that would be a good way to go. I have it linked in last week's Linux Action Show. Just do me a favor and click that link so that way we get credit. Yeah, right.

No kidding. And I got to ask, I wonder if it has all the same functionality and features you were showing off in the web group. I believe it has the same OS and everything, yeah. Ooh, I like it. Right, right. No kidding. And I got to ask, I wonder if it has all the same functionality and features you were showing off. I believe it has the same OS and everything. Yeah. Yeah. I like it. Right. Yeah.

All right. So now you're ready for your my bit. My hate mail is coming up. Your hate mail is first. You ready? Oh, yeah, absolutely. All right. So John writes in.

He says, greetings, Chris and Matt. One of the common things I hear from Matt is if you don't like a distro, use something else, which always makes me cringe just a little. I realize that he's addressing the functional aspect of a distro, but I think the relational aspect is also very important. As Chris said recently, Linux distros are a type of art, and they're an evolving art, kind of like a movie franchise. So Ubuntu doing something stupid is a bit like Hollywood bastardizing some franchise that you loved with an unnecessary reboot. But it being told, why don't you care? Just don't watch it. Sort of, I guess, maybe like the new Star Trek

series. Part of being in the Linux community, to me, is having some kind of attachment, as hobbies often have. For me, personally, I'm aware that if Ubuntu does something I don't like, I can hop to another distro. But hearing it as the first response to a criticism sounds like just giving Ubuntu a free pass. Just my two cents.

Thanks for the shows and keep up the good work. Not Brian T. I think it's a valid point in that – well, first I would actually clarify one thing that just because I say don't use it doesn't mean I think it's awesome or that I'm acknowledging that I think it's something we should just overlook or excuse. I'm simply pointing out factually and I'm going to throw out another one that's going to irritate you guys. If you ever tried to herd cats, you know, it doesn't work. Wait, did I just call up John O'Bacon? What's going on over here?

But yeah, no, seriously, if you ever try and herd cats, you know, there's certain limitations to what you can do. The same thing with distributions and the people that design them and run them. You have limited control. And so you have a choice. You can either focus on that negativity or you can say, wow, I'm not really into this. So I'm going to go participate in something that I am into. It legitimately comes down to that. on non-Brian, not Brian T. Like, because as you start to get a little, even just, you know, in your mid-30s, you start to think, God, I have a limited amount of even energy to devote to anything, right?

In my 20s, I would have been probably right there with him with a sign in my hand. I could totally see myself doing this. However, at the same time, I also acknowledge I don't like, like when I have issues with the new Star Trek movie, I would not want to be told, well, just don't watch it. I'm like, no, no, you don't understand. Star Trek, it's Star Trek.

You don't understand. That would be my response, right? So I do see where he's coming from on that. And I guess, you know, it's almost not healthy, though. It's almost not healthy to place your personal self-happiness onto an external entity like that. That's basically my message in that I'm not discounting the fact that you shouldn't be bothered or even upset by something that is bugging you. I mean I'm not saying that, but you really have – you have X amount of energy to exhaust in a day, and you really got to look at where you're putting that. If it was me and I'm really bent out of shape about what Ubuntu is doing, by God, I'm going to put some effort into another distribution that I can get excited about and make it better

than the thing that I have a problem with, if I can. And that's just me, and I guess everybody's mileage is going to vary to that. But I think he brings up a valid point because it's a valid concern that he has, and so I want to address that head-on and let him know that I don't see it changing, but it's how I come from. What you're also doing when you say that is you're reminding us that Linux is not Ubuntu or Linux is not Fedora.

Linux is not Unity. It's not GNOME. It's a lot of things. It's a market that helps decide what the direction of popularity is going to go. And that was kind of the message of last week's episode. Yeah, it really was. So I definitely wouldn't poo-poo his point because I think it's a valid point. But age definitely plays a part into it. The way I look at look at life compared to you know like in my 20s compared to

now at 40 just there's a lot of factors but I I truly am trying very hard to remove as much negativity out of my life as I can and that's part of that process yeah and uh you know it is sort of like if something and there is also sort of a zenness to if something's bothering you stop doing it you know it's like that old story. Like every time I go to the doctor and I do this, hey, doc, every time I move my leg like this, it hurts. And the doctor says, well, stop moving your leg like that. Bob Newhart on Mad TV where he was doing therapy. And the entire therapy session where he'd lean in real close and scream, stop it, to whoever was complaining about what I was ailing them.

And that's really what it is. Yeah, it is. It really is that simple. All right. Are you ready for my hate mail now? Oh, yeah, let's do it. This actually is probably more so the next one is actually more directed at me, but this one starts with a name that's kind of hard. So Adnan, A-D-N-A-N, Adnan, Adnan.

Let's go with Adnan. He says, hey, guys, in last week's episode of the Ubuntu 13.10 review, you talked a lot about rolling releases and how you missed that factor of innovation, latest features from Ubuntu, especially from the last couple of releases, and how you found your peace of mind in a rolling release such as Arch Linux. Now, I went with this one because we got a lot of emails about rolling release statements. And I think maybe I came off as like, you could only use rolling release. And if you don't... If you don't like rolling releases, go to hell or there's something wrong with you or whatever.

And what my argument was supposed to be was, if you are technically comfortable, you can be part of pushing the open source envelope forward by perhaps rolling on something a little more cutting edge, a little more rolling. But it doesn't work for everybody. However, I don't know. You know, I didn't get that point across very well.

And Adnan here points out that one thing we don't really ever mention is the elephant in the room, and that is Debian. I kind of feel like we do, but I wanted to give an honorable mention here. This is Debian testing, specifically the Jesse version and unstable SID, which neither is rolling in a full meaning of that word, but yet both branches still get rolling release model where software is continually being developed and updated. Thus, why couldn't Debian Jesse

be everyone's perfect rolling release with its actual rolling release until it becomes stable, quote unquote. If you think about it, Ubuntu became a rolling model of yeah, okay, so he goes on to say that's essentially what Ubuntu did, yeah. And he says that, you know, Jesse can be a bleeding edge distro. I mentioned the 7.2 release in the last episode

was a very nice gesture, but I'm sending this email as a plea to provide your audience with more information and awareness about Debian. As perfectly portrayed from examples I used above, Debian seems to be left out even though it provides us all with the functionality and features. Please inform me if you have any other questions or comments. Adnan.

I'm going to actually agree with him on that we don't talk about Debian enough. I will actually completely agree with that, myself especially. I'd say I'm probably the biggest guilty party on that one because we dance around Debian by talking about all the derivatives, but we don't really talk about Debian specifically and its advantages and disadvantages. You know, my wife and I talk about the dishwasher a lot more than we talk about the foundation of my house. No, that's fair. That's fair.

But as a standalone distro, you know, Debian does have a little something to offer for those that want to go that route. Now, that being said, we're not going to make an ongoing show about it. That's not possible. The Debian action show. Yeah. So I think what we did just there really, you know, nails it. I mean, it's like this is an option you guys should check out. If you want an Ubuntu-like experience experience without the ubuntu give it a whirl ubuntu uh i mean debian

um is sort of it's unbelievable in the sense that so when i really first started cutting my teeth on linux i worked at a school district and um they're there they have run systems you know it's like it was like i guess what i'm trying to say is their IT department for a little bit for me was like a time capsule because I went back 10 years later, kind of like a reunion at the time of my high school reunion. But instead, it was like I was going back to that job to contract for three months. Right. And like I opened up the time capsule and what I found was Debian systems that we had deployed that had just recently either been retired or about to be retired, but like had been updated throughout the years and continued to run. where you just got grant funding to study something for 10 years. It was like that for me. I was like, holy crap, here it is. In reality, here is the honest-to-God goodness of Debian just lasting this entire time.

It was pretty cool. So I think the long and short of it is that Debian is a great option if you want something that you can install and honestly not think about ever again. That's really it. Totally. I'm going to give you a ding for that, Matt, because I agree. Now, this next one.

Also, another point that was made by a few folks was that folks in development shops, rolling releases are no good because if you total, like in enterprise, when you write software and then you certify it as something

and then you go to ship it, but the libraries change or something like that, that's a total pulling the rug out from underneath the developers. So they like to have totally snapshotted in time systems. Although technologies like Docker are alleviating. There are new technologies coming out, well, not even coming out, like virtualization with snapshots and Docker and containers that sort of nullify some of the previous pains with rolling releases. And we'll just see where that goes. I wonder if history won't prove me right in the long run because of these types of things where you can isolate applications off into a safe environment. I think so. I think as things evolve with the virtualization technologies specifically, I think we'll eventually hit that point to where it becomes a mood issue but I'm not sure we're there yet I think there's still enough considerations that people need to really make an educated decision opinion about Ubuntu going to a rolling release, only I have to completely disagree with all your points.

Last year, I switched a few of my teachers to Linux Mint, and most of us Linux Mint and Ubuntu users don't know enough to fix our system if it crashed from an update in a release. Now, you remember one of the things I said is there is this fear of, like, I need my distro master to protect me. And if I don't have the grand repo keeper checking every package before it hits the repo, then disaster is around the next update. And I actually agreed on the whole point

of it. Well, I'll get to that after the... No, go ahead. You can. I was just going to basically point out, I said to be completely fair though, I actually pointed out that it is different strokes for different places. There are use case scenarios to where it does not make sense to go rolling release. Where Jesse's making the case right here. He says,

most new Linux users don't want to spend time tweaking their computer to run the way they like. Most of them just install the distro and move over their data. I hate doing this unless I'm re-Linuxing,

re-mastering. Ubuntu is aiming for a noobish user base and rolling release would just turn them off. It seems that you also forgot that corporate distros help Linux get off the ground in the 90s.

I personally don't care about pushing the envelope unless it's base packages. Also, I'm not very savvy, and most Linux users are not either. So where he says here that I hate, where Ubuntu is aiming for a noobish user base, I see people that take offense to that sometimes, but I do agree. They're trying to do a wide spectrum. They are doing a wide spectrum and also the whole corporate thing.

The corporate stuff, while I agree that it's an ancient thing, a lot of people are using the long-term releases for that. So that's a completely out of the argument already off the bat. I think too, like you couldn't – I think the best approach is sort of the Debian and OpenSUSE approaches where you have your here's stable branch and here's your rolling branch. And that's really what I would want. I mean that's really how I think they should do it. I think that absolutely – however they do a stable branch is up to them and however they make that work with the community. But have a stable branch, schools, corporations, nonprofits, whatnot, or people just don't want something to update all the time. And then, of course, if you want a rolling release, that's available as well.

And that, of course, will then help with speedier development and less of the release party and more of just getting it done. All right. All right. Now watch out, Matt, because now the flamethrowers are fully focused on me. Ben writes in, he says, Hey, Chris, I love all the shows that you put a broadcasting, but during the segment in episode 10 of Linux Unplugged, you said you believe Valve SteamOS is a sign of them not having confidence in Ubuntu as a desktop platform. One thing I noticed that no one mentioned is that SteamOS isn't necessarily meant for desktop markets.

I'm pretty sure the point of SteamOS is making an operating system that's optimized for TV and controller in addition for the desktop. controller in addition for the desktop valve probably just wants to provide users and oems and image that they can throw onto boxes that start right up into big picture mode without the overhead of a normal desktop os anyways thanks for all the great shows ben now we got a lot of emails to this that a lot of people did not agree that in fact uh here was another one uh michael roney said in the last show you voiced an opinion that valve's decision to create steam os was caused by a concern or lack of faith in ubuntu. I think we should look at it from Valve's perspective. Why should they say their new console will be running Ubuntu, even if it will?

It will not have an Ubuntu user interface. It will be a console. You will get Steam big picture interface and won't be encouraged to tweak with it. For all purposes, consoles should be a black box to you. There's no reason for telling anyone it's running Ubuntu. Saying SteamOS is also better from a black box to you. There's no reason for telling anyone it's running Ubuntu. Saying SteamOS is also better from a marketing point of view. It sounds

like something they created and tailored for their console. To sum up, I don't think Valve's move was a vote of no confidence for Ubuntu, but rather a marketing PR decision with a goal of creating a brand with a product without causing confusion about the real nature of the OS. Thanks for the great work, Michael. Well, two

considerations there. One, as far as the branding and whatnot, that's easily done with an Ubuntu base, a simple letter from the Ubuntu developers, and basically removing all the trademark material and going with what you want. That's already doable with an Ubuntu base, so I don't think that's the whole reason behind it. I think

really it comes down to a fact that by hedging their bets a little bit, taking a Linux Mint approach like there with the Linux Mint Debian Edition that by hedging their bets a little bit, taking a Linux Mint approach like they are with the Linux Mint Debian edition, by hedging their bets and spreading out things a bit, they're not centralized on Ubuntu only. That's just common sense. Granted, the branding thing is accurate. I mean, I agree, but don't put all your eggs in one basket. That's a dangerous place to be. So I think my point to that was if Canonical had been successful and had really driven the Ubuntu desktop and as a brand and all that had broken through, it would be a benefit to say we run on Ubuntu, right? It would be like a perk. It would be like a good thing, like runs on Windows, right?

Sure. And because that never happened, it was sort of almost better to just sweep the whole Ubuntu thing under the rug. I agree, though, that at most that's probably a minor factor in the decision process. Overall, it's about branding. It's about streamlining. It's about keeping, you know, it's about reducing confusion. So I do agree. I thought about that after I said it, and I thought, well, actually, there's a few arguments against it.

So I was glad to see some folks wrote in with that. So thanks to you guys. Now, our last email, which is going to kind of, in a way, kick us into our main topic today. Oh, cool. Comes from Matt, but it's a different Matt. But he does have two Ts, like a gentleman. He writes, first, hey, guys, I just want to correct Chris on something he said on last. Linux is not the only open source community.

Because obviously I think that. A lot of the BSD code is open source as well, but isn't free software by the definition of the term that was created by RMS. It's negative in the freedom dimension. But his main point was, secondly, I've recently become more involved with the BSD community, and they really don't have the types of issues that the Linux community does with egotistical people talking to blogs and writing something stupid that pisses everyone off. I actually agree with this.

I wonder if this isn't the time that the Linux community as a whole just says these quote unquote founders something like, hey, we get that you've done a lot in the past, but now that you're part of a problem, but now you're part of the problem and you're not solving anything. So please accept this pat on the back and his heartfelt thanks and go away until you can accept that this thing you created is much bigger than your ego. I just think people like RMS and Mark Shelterworth are constantly causing severe divisions in the wider community. And they've reached a point where their contributions don't outweigh the harm they're causing by creating scenarios where the community attacks itself.

I look at it like a very hyperactive family. There's a lot of debating going on, and even arguing, and occasionally some fighting. But that doesn't mean we stop being a family because of it. I that's really what happens oh that's gosh that makes me feel so warm it's like a warm and fuzzy feeling right i almost feel like i don't want to even say what i think because mine is like we're all you know okay so here's what i think um i think if you if you really believe the bsd community doesn't have arguments and big fights, you're fooling yourself. Oh, yeah, I'm sure. What it is, is it goes back to what I said during the intro.

It is our bankrupt media coverage of Linux because it is easy to write about the cult of personality that we have because it draws clicks. People recognize the name. People click on the links and read the articles. When Mark Shuttleworth or Linus Torvalds or RMS's name is in the headline, I do it too. I'm a dumb monkey. I click it. I read it. And that's why it happens.

Now, when somebody in the BSD community does it, you'll hear about it on BSD Now, right? Because that's the media coverage for BSD. And obviously, there's also the BSD Talk and the BSD blogs, but there's not the scale. And now industry is maybe not as a strong term, but definitely there is a forming industry of Linux coverage. these people are doing a disservice to the community because they're lazy and because they're cheap and because you click it. And because of that, these types of things get extraordinary coverage compared to, for example, today. Aaron Sigo wrote up a long blog post with lots of screenshots about the future direction of a content delivery platform that's more than an app store. the future direction of a content delivery platform that's more than an app store it's like a it's like music and apps and books and open source code delivery and and commercial software delivery that they want to integrate in with like plasma active and the kde desktop and they've got this whole back-end infrastructure for it that's totally brilliant they've got a front end they've

got they've got code they've been working on for the front-end delivery for two years and like he just wrote up all about it it's like it's going to be fundamental plumbing for app distributions for like distro agnostic it's going to be brilliant and nobody wrote about it nobody wrote about it because everybody's writing about crap yeah and and here's and i can tell you why it says someone in this market is because i'm quite honestly unless it's going directly into a subscribed mailing list, no one's going to click it. No, that's not fair. Most people won't click it.

The smart people will, but most people that are just scaling through titles, it's not necessarily going to grab your attention unless it was done really, really well. I mean, we're talking Star Wars-type titles. It's got to be really good. And that's hard to do, especially with something like that, because it covers so much ground.

Right. And it doesn't have the click-through rate of a, here's the top ten reasons why you're sick of reading these articles. You know, that sort of thing. You know, Lass has a seven-plus year history of following the news. You've been a writer for years and writing in this space. So I want to talk about this today because this is something that has literally been bothering me for really more than a year, but definitely for the last year. But first, I want to tell everybody about something great.

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Samsung Galaxy S3, which has a little bit less of the Samsung bloatware than the S4. 385 bones. You own it outright. No contract, no early termination fees. What? It's crazy. I know. Absolutely. So go over to linux.ting.com, grab yourself something nice, and take advantage of that early termination relief program if you need to, and maybe you'll even get a golden ticket. Yeah, buddy. So thanks to Ting for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. I mean, how cool is that golden ticket program? That is so cool. When's the last time any other carrier has given you a gold in anything? Especially a ticket. No kidding. No kidding. And I just feel like we need more Willy Wonka out

there. That's right. Yeah right. I'm calling it the bankrupt news industry around Linux because I feel like I've watched it devolve into crap. We had three news stories last week. Unless. We had the... Or maybe it was four. It might have been four. They all kind of bled together.

But the big one was, the big story was Mark Shuttleworth branded people that disagree with him, the open source tea party. Aaron Sigo took to G+, Leonard Pottering took to G+, to respond. That was the really big story of last week, right? That was sort of like, I mean, it got coverage everywhere. It was our top story. And what, gosh, you know what really upsets me is, and how do you, do you know how do you say Bruce, is it Byfield?

Bruce Byfield? Byfield, yeah. Yeah. Bruce wrote a great piece back in November 8th of 2012, kind of inspired by a post that actually Aaron Saigo had made on his blog. But I really liked Bruce's take on it here. He says he took on the, what he's calling the cults of personality that often dominate the free software community. And of course, you know, we think of Linus, right? We think of Mark. In fact, huge news, breaking news, everybody stand by. We all need to stop what we're doing. Linus has insulted Fedora. I've been waiting for him to, no, I've not, but I've been waiting for him to insult AMD. That's what I'm. I know, right? Yeah, that's the

joke, but that's the joke now as well. Linus puts his middle finger up and people jump. But if you look at it, so yeah. So Linus Torvalds goes after the Fedora project this week and calls him stupid. I saw this transpire on G Plus in real time. I was on G Plus when Linus made the post. I think it even happened before LAS. And I read it and I went, oh, okay. Well, so linus thinks that fedora should generate new isos periodically that way when you grab an iso you don't have you know super out of date packages kind of i agree with that i agree with that i think really who the hell why why make a thing about it right you know but whatever and then the fedora project responds oh well you know once we

generate the isos we don't we don't touch them those are the snapshot of the release and then we do updates and then linus you know jumps back in and says that's ridiculous they say, well, we don't have QA for the image. Like it was this big back and forth, but I saw the thing. I thought, okay, no big deal, right? Well, no, turns out huge deal, huge deal in the Linux, in the Linux media. Softpedia has an article up. Every new site that, that, that pretends to cover Linux has an article up about Linus Torvald smashing the Fedora project, calls them stupid, right? And it plays into this whole cult of personality. It perpetuates this, well, circle jerk of the celebrities in the Linux community. Exactly.

So here's the thing. A lot of people have to realize that the cult of personality you see in a lot of the reality TV stuff bleeds through into the written word as well. And so you need something to basically scrape together to make these new stories out of, especially when you're living in a big vacuum of things that don't

present themselves well to the masses. They're important instances. There's important things that are happening, but they're not always real easy to throw into a title and guarantee a lot of click-throughs, which, of course, will then generate revenue. That's why these things tend to do really well. Note the words in that title. If you want

to bring that back up on the screen for a second, the words smash, Linus. These words are carefully chosen, put together. When you glance at this, even if you don't know who Linus is, the odds are you might actually click through just out of curiosity to see what this Linus guy is smashing. Right. He's smashing

a project. He calls that project stupid. Definitely. Plus, you get a picture of Linus in there and what every writer loves, you get a few choice quotes to pull that you put in there and then you just couch those quotes around some sort of minimal write-up and then you get you know a few thousand views or whatever

he gets for this um and of course the beauty of this is all you got to do is file follow linus on g plus or you know watch hacker news or something like that and then it just it's like a story falls in your lap it's like it's like christmas time for the writer um and bruce tackles this bruce says that uh these cults of personality are contrary to community values whereas they do It's like Christmas time for the writer. And Bruce tackles this. Bruce says that these cults of personality are contrary to community values, whereas they do untold damage imposing commercial values at the cost of community ones, or dividing the community as those at the center of such cults decide to air their personal grudges in public. Now, he wrote this in 2012.

We just saw this happen over just this weekend. He says they can cause people to discard their own judgment and choose software on the basis of who endorses what and even to compromise themselves morally by choosing sides in a flame war when they should be condemning everyone involved now well yeah and i actually when i you know came in uh you know myself and uh you know of course they've been to his community manager came in to actually address this when when a lot of the stuff was going back and forth. We were instantly attacked. It's like, oh my gosh, this sort of thing. It's unfortunate that we've come to that because we're feeding the problem and quite frankly showing the writers that write this stuff that this is where you need to go.

And here's another reason why this is not only going to continue but it's going to get worse. And a lot of people don't realize this. Because of Google's constant algorithm changes, especially with their latest one, SEO is kind of dying. I hate, I mean, in my opinion, I think. Google said they want to kill SEO. So rather than having, you know, reasons why something's awesome or something that has long-term value in SEO, that's basically going the way of the dodo. So you're, basically it's all or nothing in quick hits. You've got to publish often, got to have lots of content, and it has to have great titles. Get people in, get people in, get people in, and it's got to continue. Right, and the other thing is all of these writers are under big deadlines,

and like Bruce points out, the problem is that journalism, as it's practiced today, finds cults of personality to be extremely convenient. journalism, as it's practiced today, finds cults of personality to be extremely convenient. Being able to just mention a celebrity in the headline guarantees you get increased page views. That's right. And that, of course, means that the writer is still employed. And of course, the website remains up. And he also says it's convenient for the writer because instead of having to go out of their way to back up their facts, if they mention someone famous said that, then it validates their point. Even if the celebrity fails to make a logical argument or offer a scrap of insight, readers are more likely

to be swayed by a viewpoint by learning that a celebrity, quote unquote, supports it. And this, so one of the deciding factors, so I put plan B on hiatus, even though I'm, I think, you know, I'm still very fascinated by Bitcoin. the problem what I saw happening was sort of all of these bankrupt values being translated over to Bitcoin, where people who really had no business being quoted in a legitimate news article were quoted. And people who I knew to be sort of posers, quote unquote, were writing articles talking about how great something was. And I see this all the time. In the history of the Linux Action Show seven plus years, I have met a lot of

the people, I know a lot of the people behind these articles. And I know that some of them never use Linux more than just starting it up on a VM on their Mac. And that is their total extent with Linux. And then they go on to write reviews about new releases and all of this stuff. And it's totally ungenuine, but it is all about they know how to phrase it, they have a bit of an established audience, and they know how to get people to click on their stuff, and they know how to write vaguely enough that you can't pin them down for not actually having enough experience. And so while the write-up tends to be vapid with very little content, very little actual value, because the state of Linux media coverage

is so poor and so weak, it gets play. Exactly. And that's just it. And then you bundle that in with the fact that Linux is kind of coming into its own. We're kind of at a lull right now because the gaming thing already happened. The cloud stuff's already kind of doing its thing. It's not really something that you can put into, uh, easy to understand

terms for the masses. Um, so there's a lot of, there's a lot of play there for just fluff and it's going to continue to get worse. I really believe that. Uh, he says, uh, Bruce goes on to say that even a writer is not, uh, not above from stooping to sub, uh, however, even when the writer is not stooping to such tactics, even when the writer is not stooping to such tactics like we covered for us for example you know last tries not to get sucked into this but we covered the shuttleware story because and we had to it's news like the audience there is an expectation in the audience that you're going to talk about especially in that case because we were drawn into it the linux action show was actually drawn into the discussion so it was like

there's even more impetus to discuss it but readers want he goes on to say readers want to hear about what famous people are doing or thinking they are far less interested in ordinary people which is why stories about people behind the scenes while often well-meaning rarely keep people reading unless the writer can quickly establish an interesting angle and i think that's also really true it's like there's sort of this market pressure to play into this whole cult of personalities. But what we get is this really watered down coverage of the open source community where it looks like we're constantly bickering. It looks like we're immature. We can't come together. Even when there's great code being made, there's great strides that are being accomplished. It sort of gets lost in the noise. It sort of – it gets lost in the noise. Right. That's exactly it. I mean I remember back in the day where Bruce could do a really in-depth analysis of GNOME, for example, and really dive in deep.

Or I could do some crazy futuristic Futurama think piece, just having fun with here's the existing technology. Here's where I think it's going to go. Here's some considerations, blah, blah, blah, something that might actually be possibly entertaining, worth worth reading and now we're trapped in this space to where that's no longer possible and i don't know where that's going to lead yeah i'm i've pulled back a lot myself honestly so yeah i think it's i mean and and you've seen it from you know both angles where you know you've been you've been you know you've told me that you people come to me say okay well matt we want you to write about this you're like i'm not really interested in writing about that why would you want me to write about that and so you know well we want another top 10 uh, we want you to write about this. You're like, I'm not really interested in writing about that. Why would you want me to write about that? And so, you know, well, we want another top 10 article.

We want something for our slideshow because we get X amount of ad revenue by the slideshow. And I feel like here we are now, a year after Bruce wrote that piece that I just read, and it goes on more. I'll have both Aaron and Bruce's piece linked in the show notes. So this week, TuxMachines.org went up for sale. Yeah, I saw this coming. I actually knew about it. Phronix.com has been up for sale a couple of times.

The H online is shut down, right? And so what we have here is either A, sites that couldn't make it work, even though they had original content, or B, we have the elimination of some really good writing like from the h online yeah uh and what we get left with is blog spam right and and what what i see happening is i see companies um you know like network world and other companies out there that are really just sort of half-heartedly getting involved like

they have an open source back page where they have people writing for that, you know, just write us something adorable. We'll put it up and maybe it'll get a few upboats on Reddit and then people will come read it. You know, it's like this total half-assed, half-hearted attempt to cover the industry. Meanwhile, Linux has seen more adoption than we've ever seen in the history of the platform. We have more people using it in terms of mobile, on the cloud, and on the desktop, but yet the writing and coverage of it has never been weaker or poorer. And it is so disappointing to see this happen. It is. And the other side of it too is that you have two types of writers.

You have the writer that basically has to get approval for a topic. Usually we present two or three to the editor and then one of them is selected. And then a lot of times none of them are selected, and we do have to settle for a top ten. Or you have the person who is a syndicated writer, and these are my favorite, the Dvoraks of the world, for a better example, that will go out, and because they're so burnt out, they don't care. They're literally just cranking out crap because they're done.

They mentally checked out a long time ago. They figured out what buttons to push to generate enough links to meet what that site needs to keep them around. And like Big C points out, you see this definitely happen on Slashdot and all the sites. But it's interesting, in all of this, and I think it's of some note, to keep in perspective, LWN.net, LinuxWeekly.net, a reader-supported news site, dedicating to really producing deep coverage, which I've never found to be exceptionally compelling myself, but totally respect the type of coverage that it is. They're still around. I don't know how they're doing,

but I'm pleased they're still around. And I feel like you touched on it. Like what I want as a Linux user and a follower of this industry, and I would want this even if I was 10 times less involved with the Linux community. If I was just following Linux news because I had sent OS servers deployed on my servers at work, I would still want thought-provoking articles that are deep discussions about things that are going on right now, that are well-done analysis, that go much further beyond just the surface coverage, this top-level coverage we get now.

And LWN.net does exactly that. They just don't happen to do it about things that I'm particularly passionate about. Well, and the other side of that too, because this is a great example. They're still around because, of course, their expectations are probably not monetary in any way other than server cost. I'm sure it's volunteer authors and so on and so forth. And I think even – was it opensource.com, I believe now, the Red Hat group, actually they do a lot of volunteer stuff. I think a lot of the volunteer sites tend to do pretty well because the expectation,

people are doing it for the fun of it because they're passionate about it, maybe even just to get their name out there. But- Yeah, there are a few efforts. And opensource.com is lucky because they have a benefactor that, you know, Red Hat that- Right. But it's all volunteer writers. Yeah, there are a few. out pretty quick because after a while you find that you have X number of hours in the day and you want to spend it elsewhere. I think Jerem is misinterpreting, so I want to correct because I'm sure some of the listeners. I don't mean that LWN isn't compelling. I guess what I mean is like I'm never like compelled.

The topics aren't maybe hitting it for you. Like they're good, like optimizing CPU hot plug logging, locking is interesting, a new direction for PowerWare, scheduling, rationalizing Python packaging. Pretty hyper-specific. Yeah, and just not particular topics. But I probably find myself on the site about once a week reading something, but I would really like some deeper stuff. And I feel like there are, like you just pointed out, two good examples. And I feel like there are, you know, there are, like you pointed out two good examples, you know, open source., we say, what are we going to cover? And we watch it all week. And then at the end of

the week, we kind of, we literally take it all in and then say, okay, well, this meets the cut. And every single week that for a while now, like that list is getting shorter and shorter. And in the last week, in the last couple of weeks, it's been shockingly small, like so much so. And unfortunately, the noise ratio hasn't gone down. There's still horrible things being written and posted on the blogs and all these other places. So it's so disappointing to watch it happen. Well, and I also think it fills in the gap a little bit for the lack of actual news. I mean we need more – Dell dumps Windows forever and goes nothing but Linux or some crazy stories like that to where it's like really big, compelling stuff like what we saw with Valve and gaming.

We need more of that to drown out the noise. You know, here's a, here'll be a great example because ZooX is asking for kind of maybe like an example is while, while this whole shuttleworth kerfuffle is blowing up around Mir and Upstart and SystemD and all these things, wouldn't it be awesome to have like this like new york times style article with like here is like the whole backstory here's all of the stuff here's when this stuff happened here's the people behind it here's their goals like this whole like if there was just one spot you could go to and be completely up to date on this whole kerfuffle and like get the timelines right and get the motivations and you know and and

and have it be impartial third-party documentation of it because really and i don't mean to toot our own horn right now but one of the best ways to get that is just to watch the entire back catalog of linux action show and then you just organically watch it come together but that's not how it should be and because quite honestly to get a writer to actually go that deep into something and to do it right for that article alone, honestly, I can't see anyone doing it for less than a grand. I know. Maybe two. This is the problem. This is the problem.

Yeah. The internet makes things cheap and people don't – unless you've been involved in the industry, people don't know the actual like – And two is probably not enough honestly because it's going to be quite a job. Yeah. Yeah. So just – I don't know. It's just – I don't know. Maybe the Mumble Room has any thoughts on this. actual like and two's probably not enough honestly because it's going to be quite a job so yeah yeah so you know just I don't know it's just I don't know maybe the mumble room has any thoughts on this if you guys have maybe you've noticed an improvement in Linux

news you've noticed a decline in Linux news if this concerns you guys or doesn't concern you if anybody has any thoughts and want to chime in before we move on you are the floor is open to you to do so well to paraphrase the great philosopher of our time, Jessie J, from her infinitely deep poem, Price Tag.

Again, I'm paraphrasing here. Okay. All about the cha-ching, cha-ching. All about the bub-bling, bub-bling. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, hey, Linus Torvald, bubling bubling yep yeah yeah i mean hey linus tolwall uh the term linus tolwall's hate for

dollar gets people a lot more money than alan saigo introduces some new piece of technology or something like that right you you know this better than anybody both of you because you know you're actively into this. Exactly. So – and it's all about the bottom line. See, if they don't do this, they get sold and they shut down and they don't have any money. If they do do this, they're rolling in dough and everything. There's so many incentives. It keeps them in a holding pattern. I mean, because, I mean, really, the writing industry is just hurting as it is.

But it does. It keeps them in a holding pattern. If they do get bought out, when they look at which writers to keep and which writers to fire, they will look at, they look at viewer counts. What are your thoughts, Matt, on, like, you know, having to be, have a certain level of qualification before you're allowed to write? before you're allowed to write? I mean, like not allowed, but like before, like do you think there's a responsibility for some of these publication companies to like hire qualified writers? Or is it if they...

I would say just more the knowledge of the topics themselves. The problem is they spend all their time and there's a lot of some of the sites you pointed out earlier are great examples of what happens when you hire the guy with the English degree. That's great.

He's a fantastic writer. He had no clue what he's talking about, but he writes really well. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I write,

I don't know, maybe in an eighth or ninth grade level or whatever, put the point, but I know what I'm talking about. If you know the material, it's more important. If I know the material, I'm going to at least speak intelligently about it.

So, you know, yeah, that's true. That is true. Cause that's a whole nother problem. Yeah. Yeah.

That's why I have an editor who has the English degree that can then take my mumbo-jumbo and make it into something legible. That's what I do. Can I get one of those for real life? Yeah, I got two. My wife does initial editing and I have my final editor. But yeah, my wife just takes my stuff and she's just like, I don't even, she just cringes. She's like, oh God, here we go. That's good.

She just takes one for the team. Oh, big time i see it's kind of evolving into tv media how all negative presses all the hoopla but no actually good miracle stories get coverage right it's more american idol and less firefly i mean really yeah and you look at that email we got where the guys like gosh it looks like like the Linux community is a bunch of clown shoes. Yeah, see, it's not a Linux thing. It's a human thing. It's a people thing. You see this in the gaming media.

You see this in the technology media overall. You see this in regular media. And, yeah, this is a human thing. This is a phenomenon that is inherent to, i think media itself not just linux media we are at the end of the day people and so we want exciting stuff we want short sweet exciting news stories right on yep uh small content that can be easily consumed just and then we move on and the thing is is these sites recognize that and they manipulate us based on that. And so then they end up just producing shovelware. Exactly.

Obviously. It's not about the technical proficiency of the writer or the understanding that the actual journalist has about the topic. It's simply about what people want to hear. That's true. But the people that want to hear that generally tend to attract that class of writer, though. They attract the one that can write or spin a really great tale but doesn't have a clue he's talking about. And, of course, then the market, of course, rewards that, and that's the problem too. Well, you know, Matt mentioned John C. Dvorak earlier, and that guy can get away with writing just about anything strictly because of his name.

He's a well-known writer. Everybody knows who he is. Well, there's also science behind what he does, too. He's very, very smart. He knows exactly what he's doing. I think anyone that survives in that industry knows...

I feel like if I wanted to manipulate our audience all the time, I could. Because I think I really know what they all like, and I think I know how to... We could title things, we could cover certain things just strictly to manipulate. And it's like, it is, you know what, actually I'll even say this. There's sometimes I have to fight the urge and every now and then you do see it, you do see it leak out in our titles where we'll go for a little bit of an outrageous title just to get you to watch. Even though we hope that the actual show

normalizes it, I've learned that it doesn't. People, that title sets the expectation when they go in. They then watch it through the filter that that title set, and they perceive everything we say through that. And so now I've kind of backed off from doing that. But, you know, it can literally, for some of these sites, it could be the difference in thousands of clicks. So it's a hard thing to fight. so it's a hard thing to fight also another thing is somebody's mainstream writers they still think of Linux as just a toy

like something you just play around with like they're talking down to it almost a lot of them are and a lot of times you also have to follow where their sponsors are coming from if it's an AdSense sponsor or some network sponsorship situation where it's just rotating ads you know usually they're just

truly honestly believing that it's a toy But if it's actually a purchased in place ad, a lot of times on a lot of these sites, that's by design. There are a lot of them are mouthpieces for Microsoft and other places. And I can think of a few of them right off the top of my head, actually. Easy World. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Oh, snaps. Well, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I thought, you know, we could name and shame, but there's just, you know, let's just say that if they're pretty popular, it's probably safe to say. Yeah. Yeah.

Now we're naming shame. I'm watching the chairman. They're naming shame. That's cool. That's cool. All right, guys. Well, any final thoughts? Riley, I thought I saw you.

You piped up with something, but I was going to move on. Oh, great. No, I was just talking about the... Never mind. Okay. Keep going. All right. Well, I'm going to read a couple of emails before we run, and then I think, Matt, I'll

wrap us up with the RMS wrap, which debuted on Coder Radio this week. So this email comes in from Roy. He says, hi, Chris and Matt. My name is Roy. Say it like Roy. I'm from Israel, and I'm a product manager in a software company, a long time fan of the show, and even longer fan of Ubuntu. I switched to Linux

where Ubuntu during 7.04 was the first thing I tried out. I'm a long time fan of Ubuntu as they were the ones that made me realize a user has the options other than Windows and it was a wonderful experience. At first, when you moved away to Arch, I preached others to do so. I don't know if I really preached that.

Shared excitement preached. Thank you. Shared excitement. It just shared in my experience. It's kind of like when we start the Coke Action Show and I share my knock. Oh, my goodness. Hello. It's the internet, baby.

He said, I could not turn on Shuttleworth as we were talking about it. But I guess maybe it was the Amazon collaboration that got me. I like Amazon, but I don't like to get results from Amazon and everything that I search in the dash. Anyway, I switched to Arch, and the first thing I have to say is, oh my god, SystemD. As a power user, Arch is easy to learn, and the Arch wiki is wonderful. Then I installed a desktop environment. You talk so much about KDE, so I gave it a try, but I felt it was too broken for my

needs. Certain features were missing or perhaps just weren't quite done. But it goes on to say that I switched to GNOME, which has been great. I guess you can say it's more complete than KDE. It's okay, but whatever you do, never write about GNOME. Best advice

I can ever give you he says it does work and it even works smoothly the only thing missing for me in arch is a respectable gui for pac-man as i want to explore the repo in a comfortable way and there are some ways to integrate with and and some way to integrate with the aur easily i've installed your but i would rather have something embedded with pac-man keep up the great work now matt on manjaro they use a gui package manager correct yeah they call it pac-mac or slap mat or something i don't know yeah pac-mac i think like a mac no it's pac-man xg right isn't that what it is no no no they further up for the integrated thing

it's like it's pac mac okay now there is a gui one called like pac-man xg too which yeah i actually run that for all my AUR stuff. And there is even an Arch Wiki entry about it. And also, for installing packages from the AUR, I'm sure I'll get some. Whenever you say what you use, by the way, on Arch, just so you know, just brace yourselves for this, Roy. Whenever you tell people what you use, you will get 30 people telling you not to ever use that. It will destroy Arch. So with that disclaimer made, I use Packer.

Packer I like quite a bit. And then you can also, there's a web search for the Arch user repository. And what I really love about that is the comments and the votes. You can use that to kind of suss out if it's workable. That's right. Myself, I'm a huge fan of PackAUR. Okay. It's a really good one. It acts

just like Pac-Man, but also works with the AUR. Yep. And then you can just say, like, PacAUR dash S, capital S, and then the name of the package, and if it's in the actual Arch repo or in the AUR, it don't care. It just go gets it. Exactly. It doesn't bump to you a million times.

Right. Yep. The GUI is definitely Pac-Man XG4. Okay, oh, L4. The one is Octopi. Okay, okay. Octopi. Yeah, but the ones that I use are two awesome command line AUR interfaces that I've found. Which are?

PacAUR and Packer. Yeah. Like a P-A-C-K-E-R. Yeah, I like Packer. Those two ones are awesome. Yeah. I've always just used Yowart. Yep, yep. And I want to call it Yogurt. Yeah, I like Packer. Those two ones are awesome. Yeah. I've always just used Yowert. Yep, yep.

And I want to call it Yogurt. Yeah, I know, right? Or Yoplait or something. It used to be French. It used to be from the French arch units, arch community, and it was only French. Holy smokes.

We should rename it. It used to be used back in the day. We should rename it Activia. I find that Yowert prompts me more than Packer does. Not by a lot, but just by a little bit. And I don't know, I just kind of like Packer output a little better, but Yowert's

awesome too. In fact, usually that's how I install Packer is by installing Yort. I have a request for the Linux community. If the Linux community could just start naming things, the stuff I can pronounce, that would be so awesome. People were giving Noam a hard time for calling the music app music and the photos app photos and the file manager

files, but now looking back at that, I'm thinking that makes some sense. Well, even KDE, they slap a K in front of everything. I mean, I'm good with that. Yeah, that works. And what they don't is like Dolphin, and that's easy enough. Alright, last email comes in from James on the Mirror debate. He says, hey guys, I just had

one point to make, which has been overlooked in the discussion over Mirror versus Weyland. You were discussing in a different context what, quote unquote, needed to happen. But I think Mirror needed to happen. In 2010, Canonical was first to say they wanted to go with Weyland. But Weyland moved very slowly and was apparently not responsive to Canonical's needs. From Canonical's perspective,ere needed to happen, perhaps. But surely it's obvious also that Mere gave Weyland a giant kick in the butt. I don't think Weyland would have made anything like the progress it is now

without competition from Mere. See, now the Weyland guys really hate it when you say that, especially if you say it on a podcast. They really hate it. That's where the whole monkey suit thing came about is at that time, and I realize this has changed. But to my knowledge – and I'm going to disclose this. To my knowledge at that time, I saw no evidence of Wayland doing it.

Oh, man. I'm totally with you, Matt. I just didn't see it. I had the clown show where like we did like two or three years of our yearly Linux predictions where like, OK, Wayland is going to ship this year. Right, yeah. Totally. And it never happened, right? Now, what I think did happen is it focused the supporters of Wayland into doubling down on what was actually already there. And like Intel got more involved and started a dialogue with Red Hat, right? And they started working closer together to push Wayland forward. You know, driver manufacturers started thinking about it a little more.

So I think even if the core amount of contributors maybe to Wayland hasn't gone up, or if it has, I don't know, but I definitely think it's moved things forward. And we just had a great, thanks to Heaven's Revenge in the Mumble Room, a great pre-show technical chat about the differences between Wayland and Mere. pre-show technical chat about the differences between Wayland and MIR. And it actually, you know, I should get him to try to post it somewhere. But the summary was, you know, there's also some long-term architectural differences they're making. So we could see this conversation. I think a lot of us are kind of just expecting it to ship and then we're going to stop talking about it.

But I actually think once it ships, that's when the conversation is actually going to begin. We're going to look back at this pre-launch time stuff as, like, adorable. In a couple years, we're going to be living it, right? Or a year? I don't know. He backs it up there. He says, five years of Wayland development showed that

open-source software development needs competition. Mir provided that. And Wayland has a lot more progress as a result. I'd say bring on X.12 too. Why not? James. X.12, right. Yeah, man.

Who needs X.11 when you can have X.12? There is a thing. There is a thing. All right, Matt. Well, I think I'm going to wrap us here. What do you think? Anything else you want to cover before we wrap up? I think that's it.

The one thing I would leave on, well, as far as Weyland's concerned, I'd want to leave everybody with this statement, is that when I made that statement initially, I was instantly given 101 reasons why, well, no, Wayland's developing just fine and it doesn't need to speed up. And it's like it's interesting that that happened. And of course now, of course, with the whole mirror thing happening, Wayland is in fact going really quickly and it's doing amazing things and it's coming along very nicely. Well, and I think what I kind of want the meta message of this episode to be is the dialogue in the open source community actually does matter because that's what encourages people to join open source projects. That's what motivates people. It gives people passion.

That's why the news coverage and the media around Linux is actually more important than it is around these commercial companies that have dictators and commands from above, right? There's actually a larger impact Linux media can have. And in that same regard, there's a larger impact that competition has because it galvanizes each camp. It gets people focused. It gets people working. It gets people behind their effort.

And it pushes things forward. And just like commercial competition helps commercial products, open source competition helps open source products. And yes, I think both Matt and I acknowledge there is plenty of opportunity for display server fragmentation, right? Oh, totally. We could be going down an uncharted path and forfeiting one of the cornerstones of Linux stability thanks to X11 that we've had for years. But in the end, we might also see ourselves evolving into something that's pretty awesome.

And with two folks going at it like this, now we've got our Coke and Pepsi of display servers. They're going to be pushing each other forward, I hope, at least for a while, at least for quite a while. All right, Matt. Well, so I want to give people a little heads up if they've stayed tuned this long. This week on the Linux Action Show, Matt and I will be reviewing Cinnamon 2.0. Actually, I guess it's technically next week.

But Cinnamon 2.0 has been out for a little while, and I've got it installed in a VM, and I've also got it installed on my Benobes, and I think we'll give you our full take on it. I know there's a lot of folks out there who aren't quite happy with any particular desktop, and some of them are looking towards Cinnamon. I know we have some Mint 14 users in our Mumble room right now now they're looking towards the next release of mint with cinnamon 2.0 and hoping that it's going in the right direction so uh we'll give you our thoughts on uh the new version of cinnamon in the next episode of the linux action show good stuff all right well uh i'm going to end us with the rms wrap so uh this was cut from this week's coda radio it was put to the end of coda

radio uh because uh during the show about midway through the show, we had a Skype hiccup. And something happened and Mike dropped off. And you hear me trying to reconnect to him throughout the song. And so I decided to kill time by taking a song I like from Ronald Jenkes called Sidetracked and pairing it with Richard Stallman, which is two great things that go well together. It's like peanut butter and chocolate, man. So here you go. This is a clip from the end of this week's Coder Radio, and we'll end with this.

Thanks for joining us, everybody. We'll see you right back here next week. Don't forget, you can email us. Just go to jupiterbroadcasting.com, click that contact link, and choose Linux Unplugged from the dropdown. Also participate in our subreddit, linuxactionshow.reddit.com,

and in our Mumble Room, which just go to jblive.tv on Tuesday at 2 p.m. Pacific, and you can get details on how to join our Mumble Room and be part of the dialogue. We are your internet lug. So just come and hang out with us and enjoy the RMS rap. See you next Sunday, Matt. See you then. There's nobody else here, Chris. You don't Sunday, Matt. See you then. Is nobody else here, Chris? You don't hear me?

What are you talking about? Christopher. Aw, I hear you. You don't hear my wonderful beam, or what about... He's a jackass. Do you hear that, or do you hear... I think it's wasted effort. Or do you hear... I think that we should all make those businesses fail. It's the Stallman rap.

Here it comes. Here it comes. And the value of this is negative. And the value of this is negative. It's negative in the freedom dimension. I think it's wasted effort. Get it out of here. And the value of this is negative. I think that we should all make those businesses fail. Get it out of here. It's negative in the freedom dimension.

It's negative in the freedom dimension. Get it out of here. Get it out of here. And the value of this is negative. It's negative in the freedom dimension. And the value of this is negative. Get it out of here. I think it's wasted effort. I think that we should all make those businesses fail. Get it out of here. Get it out of here. I think it's wasted effort. And the value of this is negative. And the value of this is negative. Get it out of here. I think it's wasted effort. And the value of this is negative. And the value of this is negative. Get it out of here. He's a jackass. He's a jackass. He's a jackass. Hello, everybody. Get it out of here. Get it out of here. I think that we should all make those businesses fail.

And the value of this is negative. And the value of this is negative. Negative in the freedom dimension. And the value of this is negative. I think it's wasted effort. And the value of this is negative. I think it's wasted effort. I think that we should all make those businesses fail.

It's negative in the freedom dimension. It's negative in the freedom dimension. I think it's wasted effort. Hello, everybody. Hello, everybody.