LINUX Unplugged - Episode 122: Thunderclouds around Thunderbird | LUP 122

Episode Date: December 9, 2015

Mozilla wants to spin off Thunderbird & launch an iOS ad blocker that only works with Safari. Is there a master plan at work, or has the Mozilla foundation lost their way? Our virtual LUG debates. Then our best solutions for syncing your Podcasts from your mobile to your Linux desktop & SpiderOak ditches Google.Plus we review the new CrossOver 15 & discuss how this Linux desktop app works like no other. What nice features it offers over PlayOnLinux & standard WINE, why it's not quite like other commercial software for Linux & more!

So today's a special day. You guys may have saw the link in the subreddit, but if you look at the numbers now in the Steam store, there are 1,700 Linux games. Wowee. Yeah. That's a serious number. Is it Linux games, or does that include movies and DLC?

It includes anything that when you search by the Linux or SteamOS plus Linux tag. So whatever they classify anything. Which includes... Oh, look at this, though. Hey, hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Stop there.

Stop there. They've filtered it just based on games. They're filtering just based on games. So it is 1,700 games. Oh, that's impressive. That is pretty impressive considering it's not been that long and the steam machines are not that established. Two years ago, what was that number? That's gone up 700 just since January.

Yes. Wow. Yeah. And you know what else I recalled from our discussion about the performance of the first generation steam machines? We were discussing their frame rate and we were discussing the benchmarks and how the steam machines were a little disappointing. And we were kind of bummed about that. And then I realized they still are benchmarking

better than consoles. Because their competitors are the other consoles, the PlayStation and the Xbox One and the Nintendo. And in terms of raw performance, they can push higher resolution with higher frame rates than any of those consoles can. So as far as consoles go, it actually

is a higher performer. Which when you think about the fact they put a spinning rust drive in there and all that kind of stuff, when you realize that their real competitor is other consoles, it kind of makes more sense. Another thing to consider is

it's just been released, right? What other console or anything in history has had that many titles upon release? That's pretty amazing. Yeah, really. Yeah, wow, wow, really? 1,700? And if you figure only 800 of them are any good,

that's still a crap ratio. But not just that. The big issue that consoles have is that you can't take your console game to your PC. Right. Well, actually, I think the bigger issue with consoles is next generation, buy, buy all your money that you spent on all those games. Whereas Steam Machine, more likely than not, your games are going to be portable to your new hardware. Fair point.

I do want to point out, though, you're talking about 1,700 titles. The NES, I believe, only had about 780-something titles. The SNES actually had 385. Right, right. I mean, it is a huge amount of titles, really. What are you laughing at? Just playing over here with the little thing we'll be reviewing later in the show. Yeah, nice tease there, Wes.

Isn't that funny looking, though? That's hilarious. It really is. Yeah, you guys will see what Wes is talking about. I have your screen capture set up, too, so we can show it to the video version. Yeah, I just thought— We can all see it. You can already see it.

It's too late. They've seen everything. So, yeah, I thought that was interesting. 1,700 titles. Congratulations. Something else that came up this week, I never even really thought about it, but you guys may or may not recall that I have been using SpiderOak on one of my machines. So all of my sync thing and my BitTorrent sync and my Dropbox on one computer in my

office, I have them all installed. And on that computer, I also have SpiderOak installed, and it backups – it backs up all of those peer-to-peer or non-cloud-like storage-based sync services to SpiderOak. And so I'm – and, like, my photos go to SpiderOak. So SpiderOak's like my – One more off-site place. It's my final destination.

Yeah, sure, there might be several copies here and there, but SpiderOak's like the master backup. Well, today they ran a blog post – Yeah, we ditched Google, they say. We gave it some thought, and we realized we were hypocrites. Since inception, SpiderOak has been an advocate for online privacy. Unlike others in our market, we strive to be very clear about how our product design truly delivers zero-knowledge privacy for our users. So, for the past five years, we have been using Google Analytics for monitoring our web traffic. Innocent enough decision, right? Then we asked ourselves, are we contributing to mass surveillance of the web

by using a feature-rich yet free service that tracks web visitors? Sadly, we didn't like the answer to that question. Yes, by using Google Analytics, we are furthering the erosion of privacy on the web. Wow. Wow. You know, Google Analytics? Really? I guess it is a really great tracking system for Google, isn't it?

I mean, it lets them, you know, a little insight into every little website that uses it. Man, now I have to think about this. I got to, Wimimpy what do you use for ubuntu mate on the website are you using any kind of analytics package i am are you using google i am yeah i did i did uh i did look into using pwick but um uh the simple fact is i haven't had the time to actually you know sit down and set it up. Right. The other nice thing about it is that it's fairly quick,

and they're introducing real-time features, so it's getting more and more competitive too. So how do you also – It's great. It's more than what Google Analytics does. And recently I was reading about it. I've got the tabs open now. I was reading about it as a means of um effectively tracking um podcast

downloads i've looked into that as well yeah and it seems to be very good at that so that's that's potentially we use it it's like nifty features jb in the past i don't anymore but for a period of time and i used a really nice wordpress press plugin that just did this for me and it would append uh the tracking code information i needed to be able to track downloads through analytics. And I would use that to verify the PodTrack numbers. And what I discovered is that the PodTrack numbers are crazy conservative. PodTrack is what was sort of the industry standard that advertisers respect.

And now I understand. It's because they screw you on downloads massively. You know, like if – That's really interesting. Yeah. Like if – it is – they'll take out entire SWAT like Wi-Fi downloads. They'll take those out. Whoa.

All kinds of stuff. Yeah. So it is really – Wi-Fi users. Yeah. They're the worst. They don't care for anything. No, not all.

Not all Wi-Fi users but like public Wi-Fi and things like that. They just cut it all out. I see. Anyways, so analytics was a really nice third- party way to sort of see the gap there. But I don't know, you know, I, over the last couple of years, I've started to think more and more about the long term ramifications of Google collecting this information, not just, oh, they know where I've been this year. But what does it mean when they know after 10 years of my web browsing history or five years? And am I contributing that to my audience? Am I, you know,

am I, am I subjecting my audience to that? So I've been thinking about it more and more. So to see SpiderOak come out with this post, I don't know. I also have not found an open source solution that is compelling to me. Right. It would be interesting if theirs wasn't so niche, you know, like they say here, like, like lots of other companies with high traffic websites, we are a technology company, one with a deep team of software developer expertise. So like they, you know, they have people on payroll. They can just spin this up. It would be interesting to see that open sourced or something like that, you know, more competitive.

And for me, it's nice because I can see, okay, what topics maybe were a little more popular. What topics did people share a little bit more? The other thing I have used analytics for is when looking at 2016 and going, okay, well, where should I take the rover? And what areas are likely to have enough people to meet up? You can kind of get an insight into where your base is. Analytics gives me that. So I just wanted to put it out there to the audience. If you know of a better replacement Linux action show at reddit.com,

I would consider, you know, I very much would consider replacing Google Analytics if it was something that was fast, maybe something I could host on a droplet or somewhere that would give really good response times because I don't want it to cause my website to slow down. So P-Wik is really the only open source game in town. And you found it. It's good. It's good. But I've not set it up in anger.

I've only played with the demos. But from what I've looked at, it's the only option. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 122 for December 8th, 2015. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's already feeling a little bit of that holiday cheer, a.k.a. booze. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hey, Wes. Guess what? We got a pretty big show today. We sure do.

Episode 122 of the Linux Unplugged show is here to put it in your face. That's right. Coming up, we're going to talk about Mozilla, Thunderbird, all of that shenanigans. What's going on with Thunderbird? What does our virtual lug think about it? And then today, today, like salt in the wound, Mozilla has a big announcement. And I'm going to ask just what the hell's going on with Mozilla? And I want to see what people in our virtual lug think. I want to see what you think.

It is really something, Wes. We're going to do a big, expanded, double-segment conversation on the state of Firefox, Mozilla, and Thunderbird. It's a massive, massive project with major importance for the Linux desktop. So we're going to dedicate a lot of time to it today. Then later on in the show, new release today, Crossover version 15 just came out. Now this is the application that made it possible for me to switch to Linux years ago, years and years and years ago. And they have their 15th version today. I installed it on Wes's computer.

I'm going to give him a first hands-on boom, drop in his lap. Boy, am I excited. See what your impressions are. So we'll do that. We'll go through and also I'll do the installation live right here on my machine because I think it's actually, it's kind of like no other version of any kind of Linux desktop app. It is really a unique installation process, maybe a little more familiar to Windows users. I want to just show it to you guys to document kind of a slick thing that they've developed for getting software installed on Linux,

and then you can see what you can do with it. So coming up later in the show, we'll be talking about all of that stuff. And it is actually really cool what it can do. Play on Linux is a thing. Wine, obviously you could run wine on the command line. But there is something the crossover brings to the table. And we also have a discount so you can save some money on it coming up later in the show. So we've got a lot to talk about plus a bunch of other things.

Some feedback and follow-ups. So let's bring in that mumble room. Time-appropriate greetings, mumble room. Hello. Hello. Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome here.

Womble Room. Hello. Hello. Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome here. It is. You know, I feel like it is maybe going to be one of those shows where we get cut off in the middle because it is extremely windy and rainy here today. Yes, it is.

It has been very stormy. And the last time that happened, we literally lost power in the last few seconds of the show. Remember that? It was like a couple of weeks ago. That was a lot of fun. Just stay tuned, everyone. If we disappear, we will do everything we can to come back. Right, right.

So we have a couple of things I wanted to just follow up on before we get into the main show because there is a topic that every now and then I feel like this show is perfect to discuss because we've got you and I who are both big podcast listeners, and we've got our virtual lug, and a lot of them— They got opinions, man. And they are big podcast listeners, and we've got our virtual lug, and a lot of them... They got opinions, man. And they are big podcast listeners as well. And so there was a question that was submitted to the subreddit, and I wanted to kind of kick it around.

It's not extremely Linux-related, although I would be curious to hear people's Linux solution. But it came in from, I'm going to say Vinci. The Vinci is how you say it. He says, I'm looking for solutions to sync podcasts between Android and my Linux desktop. He says, I guess the title kind of explains it all, but I'm curious as to what other elegant or maybe not so elegant solutions to sync podcasts between their Android and Linux desktop.

My goal is to be able to listen to a podcast on my drive to work and then sit down at work and continue where I left off and vice versa. Now, Wes, do you have any solutions for this? I'll go to you first. I know somebody in the mumble room must. They must. You know, not in my own life. Do you just only listen in the car?

No, you know, I do listen kind of both places. I usually end up using something on the back end to sync, sync thing, what have you, to get the file. And then do you just jump ahead? I just jump. You know, I'm usually not listening to too many things at once. That is enough to be like, oh, 4253. All right, that's fine.

But I do wonder if something like Plex or MB – I know MB will do music for you. Oh, interesting. And that's kind of already – already has the multiple devices in mind. You know, I'll tell you. So my use case is I drive a lot now. It's ridiculous. You don't say. And so, but then, like, I really get into the show,

and I want to finish it up as I get to the studio or as I get to the rover. Yeah, as you're doing things, setting up, whatever. Yeah, and so I have, or, you know, the other thing which has been really nice is Hadiyah and I have been sharing some podcasts, like 99% Invisible, Invisibilia, and Serial, which are great shows, but, like, we only listen listen them while we're in the

vehicle together and sometimes we're in her vehicle sometimes we're in my vehicle so it's really nice to bring the sync state between us and and i love this as a podcaster because like the idea that we are like we're almost saving up podcasts and watching them like you would a netflix series or something like that sharing them together so yeah i'm like this i like this, I want to encourage this. This is great. This is really exciting as a content creator that this is happening. So I wanted to find a system that would work kind of in all of these different scenarios. And Wimpy, I'm going to go to you first, because I know you're a big podcast listener and a podcaster. What are you doing right now to kind of solve this problem? Because this must be something you face.

Well, just recently, I've been using Pocket Casts on Android for a long, long time, and just recently I've discovered that they've now got a web player that stays in sync with what you've been listening to on your mobile device. So you can stop listening on your mobile device, go to your Linux computer, log into the web service, which you have to pay another fee for,

so you pay once for the Android client and once for the web service which you have to pay another fee for so you pay once for the android client right and once for the web player but then you can switch between them seamlessly and it keeps all of your podcast playback in sync plus you're given you're given a great you're given a great podcast application uh a little bit of money uh which i i don't think there is a better podcast playing platform out there. Yeah. Especially to have something like this that's not tied with a bigger corporation or in, you know, Apple's environment.

They're going to have to get bought up eventually, I would imagine. But maybe not. They've got a decent sized team. They're making decent revenue right now. They make a really good app on Android, iOS. And I really, really appreciate this. The tablet version is really first rate. Really?

Tablets make for great podcast listeners because not only do they have great battery life, but they have usually better speakers in your phone, so you don't need to hook up any additional speaker. So just for going around the house, a tablet is a great podcast listening machine. And the Pocket Cast tablet version is great. It's great. I'd like to try that out. We've talked about it a lot. is great. It's great.

I'll have to try that out. We've talked about it a lot. We went in-depth on Coder Radio on the design of Pocket Cast because they took a lot of what's great about material and then went their own direction with it. And it is really a fantastic app. It's like five bucks or whatever. And look, they even have the Windows Store.

Good! Oh, good. We're covered, guys. That problem's solved. So it is really quite fantastic. And it'll also sync between iOS. So like if you have an iPad and an Android phone. Nice. Right. And then the web player, like Wimpy, is saying, this is my go-to solution.

Wimpy just basically covered mine. Because it does have sync. It has continuous playback. It also has server-side feed checking, which is very nice. So server-side feed checking means that essentially they check remotely for you. So your phone isn't wasting battery life going out and checking all these different RSS feeds. Then you only get the push. You get the push when they found something new. And I think that is a fantastic way to do it

because early on, podcast catchers, I'm looking at you, dog catcher, and others on Android were just battery vampires. And so this is a great way to do it. And you don't even need to have Android. You can have iOS and just a web player. Anybody else in the mom room have like a podcast sync solution? Because this is a good one, but you got to spend some money and it's closed source. And I'm looking for something free and open, something that could sync playback location maybe if possible. And, of course, there's things like Subsonic and the thing that replaced Subsonic, the project that replaced that,

but Madsonic, whatever it was. Yeah, whatever. We talked about it. Yeah, we did. A podcast addict is being mentioned. All right, so Pocket Cast. I think that's sort of the go-to as long as you're okay with spending a little bit of – in fact, maybe I can show you guys.

Do you use – you don't use a podcast catcher at all on your Android? I don't know. Do you listen to podcasts on your phone? I do. I just use VLC. You're kidding me. Do you make playlists if it's a long drive? You're kidding me.

No. Really? I'm old school, I guess. I was just about to say another option for something is like if you have something that has a streaming player, like if you have VLC on your at home and you have that web interface or a console interface, you can pause it and then just attach to your – if you have it port forwarded or on a digital ocean droplet perhaps, then you can just do that way to keep things in sync. Okay.

So it's play.pocketcast.com for the web version. So like say I go here to Tom's – you go here to Tom's daily tech show. Whoa, I've got some really crazy subscriptions. Anyways, these are not my current subscriptions, but let's say you want to listen to Sex with Emily, right? Have you ever listened to Sex with Emily? No, I haven't. Well, it's not a good show,

but let's just say you want to listen to Sex with Emily and you were several minutes into it. Now, I'm not, but it would sync up right here in the web. I'm going to hit play just to get an idea of what that looks like. Everyone, thanks for listening to Sex with Emily. You know how much I love sharing the best sex toys

and products with you? Well, on today's show, I've got not one, but two lovely ladies whose entire business is helping people pick the right toys for them and ways to enhance

a relationship. There you go. Ways to enhance your relationship, Wes. Is the relationship with the toy or is it with the human? I think it's probably with the human and the toy together, but I'm not sure.

You know what? That's probably that. I'd have to listen to that really great episode of Sex with Emily to check that out. But say you want to listen to Sex with Emily. I'm trying to show you here in the web version. You have like 10 seconds back, 30 seconds skip forward. But the other thing that's really cool, let's keep listening to Sex with Emily. Let's keep listening.

We'll go a little bit further in. Uh-oh, it's – Nation, it is today. Now watch this. I love it. I can speed up playback right here in the web browser. That is really nice.

Now I can listen to Emily in fast 2X speed. Chipmunk sex? What could be better? Hello, we're on the phone. We have a vibration sticking out the top. Come on, open your head.

But, you know, hey, you can customize it. It comes with seven vibration modes. According to Mashable, the Izzy Vibe plans to launch in June 2016, so it's basically a attachment. It's not so bad.

No, that's probably the best way to listen to launch in June 2016 so it's basically a patch it's not so bad no it's not that's probably the best way to listen to stuff right so there you go there's Pocket Cast and uh yes I was playing with that and also I the other thing I was playing with uh before the show uh cause I thought I'd be a little funny is um I fed in a custom

AR RSS so check what check this out Wes this was my little solution cause I was just playing around with different things on Pocket Cast. And I brought in – are you familiar with Pinboard? Mm-hmm. So Pinboard is a great bookmarking service that kind of replaces Delicious and others. And Pinboard allows you to bookmark things with tags. And each tag can actually have its own RSS feed.

So what I've started doing is I have started tagging things with Pocket Cast in Pinboard, and then I can pull them into a Pocket Cast RSS feed already set up in Pocket Cast, so when I jump in the car, I can listen to that. I'm just starting to mess with that because my main podcast catcher of choice is Overcast, which also has a web client. Yes, I've played with Overcast a little bit before. So one of the things that's been fun with Pocket Cast is I, so I have my own custom feed.

And the other thing that's nice about Pocket Cast is it has a really good discovery. That's how I found Sex with Emily there, which of course had to put that in the podcast. See, this sounds like a really good way if you wanted to share with someone else who maybe wasn't up to like making that custom, but if you could sort of picked podcasts

you wanted to share and they could just tune in and listen. That was actually what I was thinking is I'm – so I have a couple of different cousins that at Thanksgiving were like, all right, let's talk about podcasts. And I'm like, all right, let's talk about podcasts. Let's do it. And so now I'm just going to be able to give them a feed and I'm going to put it in a bit. I'll just say subscribe to this feed and I'll just start putting really good shows in there for you. I'm going to do like my own playlist for them using –

I mean only throwing in a few, JB, you know, now and again. Right. And of course episodes with Sex with Emily. Of course. Yes. And I'm going to throw them in there like some 99s and some other things in there that I just think are really good shows and put them in there. And they'll just have a nice curated feed. And it's a really nice way to send media to your phone in an RSS feed.

And because Pocket Cast does that remote refresh, as soon as you open up Pocket Cast, they're ready to go. I've got to say, that's pretty killer. I mean, that's making me interested. Maybe my single MP3 files aren't enough. So, Kitson, you're a podcast listener. What's your solution for listening on the go? I just use my smartphone, old school. Yeah, and what, are you doing like Wes and using VLC on there, or what?

Were you using an app? Are you an animal? What's going going on uh pretty much i just used the media player on my phone uh which uh right now is uh dead beef oh i didn't realize they had a phone version that dead beef is a thing on the phone like it is uh you have to pay for the extra codecs if you listen to anything too fancy like SNES rips and whatnot if you're into chiptunes. But I just use a feed reader to get the podcasts, and then I just upload them on my phone and put them in my playlist. It's interesting how many people do that. That is actually, huh, yeah. G. Potter is a great one for the desktop being mentioned. Yeah. All right.

Any other thoughts in the moment or before we move on from this topic? I do. Oh, okay. Hold on. Whoever had the really great voice, go first. And then... Who was that?

That was me. Is that Hey Citizen? Hey Citizen, what's going on hey um yeah i was just going to mention uh i use antenna pod which uh also works uh with g potter it doesn't sync location but at least you'll have the same podcasts oh good tip thank you that is really great so it just shares like your subscription list essentially? Yeah. Oh, that is nice.

Yeah. It uses your G Potter account. Thank you. Okay. So yeah. Yeah. So G Potter, which is great one if you're listening on the desktop. Now, who was right after Hey Citizen there?

That was me. Okay. Go ahead. So I was just going to kind of extrapolate on what Wes was saying with SingThing. As other people are saying, they have their desktop feeders that they like. So you just take your desktop feeder and you have it download whatever the podcast is, have SyncThing sync it to your phone, and then you can have automatic syncing over to your phone from your desktop and have the same files wherever you go. And then whatever media you like to open those

files with on your phone, you can use that. You know what I would really like, to be honest with you, and there are some things that I would just like to be able to have, and I think it's so close, but I just haven't connected all the dots yet, is I honestly would just love to be able to send the audio from my phone to my desktop and just keep playing everything from the phone. Yes. And just walk in and be like, okay, remote audio send to my desktop. And because I have, for editing purposes here at the studio,

I have nice studio monitor quality speakers, right? And so if I can listen to a podcast on that, I'm going to. And I would love to just be able to sit down and be like, send a Pulse audio server, and then the audio from my, kind of like Apple AirPlay, only I don't think Apple AirPlay lets you send to machines. You can send to devices, but you can't send to a desktop. I would like to be able to send, or Bluetooth audio, or something. I know you

can do the reverse. I'm thinking. There must be a way to get Pulse to do it that way. Alright, Mr. Blaster, I'll let you have the last word on this one. So, I don't know if, the first thing that comes to mind is maybe getting like a Google Chromecast emulator or something. Yeah, yeah. That you can receive on the PC. I have looked a little bit for like Chromecast-type servers, but Google has actually been killing the project.

So I've been – so it's funny you say that because I have specifically like, well, maybe I could make my machine pretend like it's a Chromecast because, well, fuck, it's Linux. So I'll just put – yeah. No, no, no. maybe I could make my machine pretend like it's a Chromecast because, well, fuck, it's Linux. So I'll just put, yeah, no, no, no. Which is a good topic, I mean. Google, I know. We talk about Google so positively. I wanted to make a whole segment out of it, and Google keeps killing these projects, and like, with

lawsuit, all kinds of threats, it's not good stuff, but if you know of a way to do this, Blaster. So, I don't know of a way to do it with Google Cast. However, there is a product called AirServer, which emulates an Apple AirPlay receiver. And that works. It is paid. It is proprietary and commercial.

So you do have to pay for it. So you're saying it would be easier to use my iPhone to send audio to the Linux desktop than it is my Android? That's the thing, though. I think you can use anything. I think it supports anything. I'm going to play with this.

We used it in the office, actually. We installed it on the PC. There is a Windows version of our server. We had a Windows PC running in the conference room. And then anytime we wanted to cast something with our laptops, instead of dragging out the old HDMI cable, we just used this AirServer. But you're saying they have

a Linux version? They do have a Linux server? Because they say Mac or PC. I don't think they have a Linux version. I'd imagine it runs well in Crossover. Yeah, I will give that a shot. Right, yeah, exactly. That might be something to try. Yeah, same vein, UP a shot. Right, yeah, exactly. That might be something to try. Yeah, same vein, UPnP, DLNA, there might be something there. There's already bubblecasts

and stuff on the phone. I think that's where your best bet would be under Android is to have a playback client that supports DLNA or some other streaming protocol and then find a DLNA server or some other streaming server on Linux that it could connect to. Yeah, you just send it as a receiver and queue it up. Yeah, that's what I think maybe the best bet is, but I don't have all that put together.

Is that essentially what you were going to say, Kitson? Yes, I was actually just going to suggest putting a DNLA server on your phone and just streaming it to your computer or vice versa. VLC will play DNLA, so. I haven't looked too much into it. I just did a quick search on like like, Pulse Audio on Android, and it looks like there is Pulse Audio on Android. So you could do the audio stream so when you get home,

you connect to the audio stream and then you have it. I would like to try this. I think this is worth playing with. And I see Rikai's got a couple of links in there. He's busticating out, too. He's the best. Yeah, well, Rikai's got that Google food like you wouldn't believe. Okay. Huh. So there's a couple of different ways to skin it. So Allcast is what Rikai is.

What is this? Hey, Allcast is the new app that plays photos, music, and videos all from your phone right to your TV. Watch this. It's like magic. You know, kitties are complicated. He's holding an iPhone. He sure is. Complicated is the Allcast app.

It's so simple. I'll play you a video. Get off my lawn! You! Yeah, you with the ears. I do love kids. But you know what? How simple is that? That's as simple as pie. Hillbillies with mullets.

It's as simple as air or blinking. There's no more crowding around your phone. It's the ultimate slideshow. You just throw it up on your big, beautiful, high-definition television. It's great. All right. I'll check it out. I'll check it out. That is worth checking out.

So it's called Allcast, and you can find it in the Play Store. There's got to be something to it here. But, yeah, interesting. All right. I'll check it out. I'll check it out. That is worth checking out. So it's called Allcast, and you can find it in the Play Store. There's got to be something to it here. But yeah, interesting. All right. Anybody else have any last thoughts on syncing podcasts between your mobile device and your desktop device before we get out of this segment? And really, I would love to hear what people do that are listening, too, because I – Yes. listening to because i yes that's you know those these are the people that are listening on in their commute right now are exactly the people i'm talking to what are you doing linux action show at reddit.com go find 122 and let me know because i want to i have one okay yeah i'll give it to me so i used to listen to a lot of podcasts when i used to commute a lot uh probably about seven years ago uh when i first started listening to podcasts. And back then, I used to have it synchronizing between my phone and my desktop and everything. And it worked and it has continued to work since then.

And unfortunately, it's on iOS. They have nailed this. And we still haven't. And it's frustrating and depressing, but it has worked for a very long time and we still haven't caught up. It's very sad, isn't it? I actually, and maybe, you know, my perspective is perhaps you could suggest a bit skewed, but I feel like this is an area that is maybe more and more relevant than ever.

On-demand media is becoming the norm even for mainstream media. Right. And to not have a super great solution here is kind of embarrassing because Apple has their crappy podcast client. You've got, of course, Google Play is getting to the podcast scene. There's going to be a lot of proprietary solutions here for this, or they're already here today. I'm looking at Stitcher. I'm looking at Apple Podcasts. I'm looking at all those things that are already existing. And this is one more time on the Linux desktop where it's like, you can do it, but you have to hobble together your own solution. Hobble together. And how

many times have we heard that phrase? Oh, yeah, you can do it. You just have to hobble it together. I hate that. I hate that. It's not a good answer. It's not surprising when Apple own top to bottom the entire stack, every platform that they're on, they can do that kind of tight integration across every device, across two different operating systems for a long time and keep that integration working for a long time.

Whereas we're constantly replacing our stacks and replacing our frameworks and using disparate devices. I have to disagree. I have to disagree. I have to disagree. Apple is constantly screwing up their cloud-based solutions. Their cloud-syncing stuff barely works after all these years. In fact, for a company that's as rich as they are,

it's embarrassing how bad their cloud infrastructure is, and they still don't have it working. And they are always changing it. Sorry, one last point. Even as recently as iOS 8, they completely redid the back-end storage infrastructure for how their cloud system works. I mean, they're constantly making changes.

And that may all be true, but the only question you're asking about syncing podcasts, and that has worked reliably forever. Right? I don't care about any of that other stuff. But I'm just pointing out like, but I'm pointing out like,

but they're fairly a mess here. And yet that's, they still managed to make it work. I think that's actually my point. Right. Which is like bizarre. Now Wimpy, what were you going to say?

Well, Popey was making the point that everyone keeps changing their stacks all the time. And I was saying that there's some people that are not basking in the glamour of all the new and shiny but just you know staying with tried and true yeah i i look at this now and i think this has got to be something that we will figure out and there's projects out there like uh vocal have you seen vocal i have not vocal is it's under the umbrella of the elementary project. There's things out there that have been out there for a long time like G. Potter and Bash Potter.

But none of them really have solved this problem. G. Potter was ahead of it. If you think about it, G. Potter created the G. Potter accounts. They've been there forever, yeah. Yeah, they've been ahead of this, but they still haven't quite sealed the deal yet. Maybe it's because they don't feature JB content. Vocal is pretty, I will say. Yeah.

They have a nice kind of yeah yeah vocal is almost popcorn time-ish interface yeah they do yeah they and the problem is is are you going to bet on an elementary os project i don't know i don't know i mean i don't know yeah i mean if you're i'm not saying it won't but i just don't know about the staying power as yet imagine imagine where you're you know the use case being you want to keep in sync between, you know, your commute to work and then when you arrive at work. What if it's one device

and you're on your way to work with your phone? You get to work, you plug it in. You're not changing application. It's the same app. You just unpause it. Hold on. You mean instead of remote sending audio or syncing files between two systems using some sort of third-party proprietary service, I just have one computer that does it all?

That I already carry with me in my pocket every day everywhere? Couldn't be done. Couldn't be. Who could ever dream up something crazy like that? Well done, Popey. Half an hour before you mentioned Ubuntu Touch. Yeah, that was actually not too bad. before you mentioned Ubuntu Touch.

Yeah, that was actually not too bad. But Chris did have a point on that of why not to do that or why to do the multiple setup system in that you have nicer sound quality from your desktop than you do your phone. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Do Android support like USB audio devices? If I already had like a USB DAC setup,

can you do that from a phone? No, but you know what? I don't think of that. I don't think you – well, I don't actually – Yeah, USB on the go. Well, because then there you go. If you've got a decent one that supports modular devices. Yeah.

In fact, Noah's dad is trying to record his band using his S6 on Ting. We should probably feature that. I'd like to hear that. So I think it's an interesting point because there are – we should probably feature that. I'd like to hear that. So I think it's an interesting point because there are, we should mention, physical solutions. You could also get a headphone jack. You could hook up

your speakers with a headphone jack to your phone and listen to the podcast that way. That would also work. So there are hardware solutions, but I'm just curious what other Linux users do for this, and this is probably a good platform to ask that question. All right. Let us know your thoughts.

LinuxActionShow.reddit.com or JupyterBroadcasting.com slash contact. Speaking of mobile devices, let's talk about Ting. My secret weapon to actually giving my small business real connectivity. I couldn't actually afford, like, the Duopoly carriers' prices. No way. No. You don't have, like, $opoly carriers prices. No way. No. You don't have like $200 a month just to throw away? It's $200.

On data you don't use? I think $200. So let's – you know, I actually think for – so we have three lines we're using right now on cellular. I think $200 is generous. I think that would actually be – I think it would be probably – boy, I bet you couldn't get under $195. Then you do taxes and I bet you're over $220, something like that. Yeah.

You know, it's great because my bill through Ting, like $40, $45. Wow. Yeah. So go to linux.ting.com to support this show, but also get yourself a $25 discount just off any device or if you've got a compatible device with Ting, $25 in service credit because they've got a GSM and CDMA network. Probably going to work with a device. Or you can get one of their SIMs, which are right there on their website. Or where else?

Amazon. Amazon. Oh, I saw that. That is amazing. All of these things just go together to make it so easy to switch someone to take. You're like, well, you know, they'll help pay your ETF. Yes. You can get the SIM card in like a day or two.

You know, you have Prime already. Yeah. And your phone already works. So just switch. There's no excuse. And then there's no contract. So you have no early termination fees or anything like that. You just pay for your usage.

It's $6 for your line and then your usage on top of that. And because they have the CDMA or the GSM networks, you can kind of just plan where do I have better coverage. Or, you know, like this was a legit thing on the road trip. CDMA is stronger in some areas and GSM is stronger in other areas. So basically, and my observations kind of show this to be true, a lot of hills and trees, CDMA. A lot of flats or not a lot of big hills between you and the towers, GSM. And if you can do GSM, you're going to get like, I'm getting 21 megabits.

Just like, you know, four out of five bars, 21 megabits, rocking. And that's the thing with Ting is, you know, they don't throttle you. You pay for what you use, so they have no incentive. The other thing I like about it is they don't get in the way of the updates. They're not, you know, how so many times the carrier is the blocker for you actually getting the update. Yeah. Ting has zero incentive to ever block the update, ever.

In fact, in most cases, the devices, the Android devices you get from the Ting store are just the pure Google experience. They're not branding them. They don't have a Ting store. They don't have a Ting cast service. They don't have like a Ting home phone service. They don't have that stuff, right? They want to all integrate in one package. And the nice thing is they give you tools to really control this.

They have an incredible online dashboard. They have companion apps for iOS and Android. And these dashboards are legit. They actually work. They give you full control. It lets you set up names and manage it. It is a very nice experience. And then they back it all with fanatical support.

You can call them at 1-855-TING-FTW, and human beings actually solve your problem. They have incredible online resources. They have an active YouTube channel, Twitter account, and Reddit, subreddit. It is very nice. It's basically mobile for anybody who's a little bit technically savvy. If you have a little bit of technical cred, and you're just sick of the duopolies screwing you around, and their crappy contracts, and basically screwing you for anything they can, you could check out Ting. That's not part of the ad read. That's just my personal advice after over two years of using Ting.

If you're tired of taking it in the butt, go to Ting. Go to linux.ting.com, linux.ting.com. You'll save $25 off your first device. They really do it right. And it's not just me that's been saying that. Consumer Reports, and this is a really big deal, just put out their annual report for 2015. And you weren't kidding. This is an in-depth report. I mean, they do a crazy amount of work here. 90,000 cellular customers surveyed. 90,000.

Think about the work to do a survey of 90,000 people. I'd actually like three people. I don't know. I'm done in three, dude. I don't even like people that much. I'm done. No, this is really great. So it was the choice of CDMA and GSM that pushed them over and their incredible customer service and the great dashboard and the no hassling you.

When I was on the road trip, I had to call in one time for my MiFi device and I just – I kept expecting her to bail on me. Like I kept it because like it was a very complicated problem. It was very complex. And I just thought – like it got to a certain point. I was like it is OK if she doesn't want to help me anymore. I understand she has done everything she can. And she stuck with me. And we – I mean it really – really was a 45-minute call.

It was longer than I was expecting. But I was so impressed that she really stuck with it. So you combine that with the fact that they have all the tools to manage your account. They have devices that are – you own them outright. They're not locked down. You get them off contract. And then with the rest of the Ting service, it really is obvious why they would rank so well. But it is really cool to actually see them get the recognition they deserve by Consumer Reports annual cell phone service report.

So go to Linux.Ting.com. Linux.Ting.com. And a big thanks to Ting for sponsoring Linux on Plug Show. You guys rock. All right. So I think this is something that we started to cover. We started the conversation on Linux Action Show. And I want to continue the conversation here on Linux Unplugged. And that is the conversation around Thunderbird and what the Mozilla Foundation wants to do with Thunderbird, some of the ideas that are being kicked around. And I don't know if you saw this idea, Wes, but there has been an idea suggested that perhaps the LibreOffice project would take over stewardship of Thunderbird. And they list some really nice benefits over on the LibreOfficeDocumentFoundation.org wiki. What are your thoughts on that? You know, it seems like there are at least some people

inside that strongly are against this idea or you know at least think it's not the right time but it is a little interesting just given how much microsoft has tied in outlook and their kind of email identity solutions into their platform yeah yeah from the outlook angle it does make a lot of sense right and and i would say that mozilla as we're going to talk about has been floundering i don't know if that's the right word. I'm a big Mozilla fan myself, but they've made some interesting moves. We see a lot of their standard user base kind of has moved to Chrome or is questioning staying with Firefox. They don't seem as strong as they did,

and I think LibreOffice is an example of a huge success in the open source. On the wiki, they document several advantages. You could possibly even use LibreOffice as the writer for Thunderbird, like you can do in Outlook, which a lot of my clients actually liked. You can enable contact notes to support complex formatting and pictures. You can provide a theme for Thunderbird to make it look more familiar to LibreOffice. All of that. Email does have a – I mean there's a web element, but that's kind of the worst part of email. Whereas kind of like the document, the management, the like it is note- taking, it is record, that sort seems a little more LibreOffice.

Now, as many of you probably listening right now already know, at this point, the LibreOffice project has said they don't want it. No. Hard to blame them, but don't want it. One of the reasons behind the success of LibreOffice, they say, is our sharp focus on a single application, which, side note, was going to be my exact criticism if this wasn't news by the time we went on air. I was going to say that is ridiculous and LibreOffice needs to focus. This is exactly what they're saying. They need to focus on a single application. Just going to say I was going to get on a big old noisy rant about it, but they totally preempted that rant, which is not going to change anytime soon.

Preach it. They say we are already working on the Android and cloud versions of LibreOffice, and that is more than enough. Oh, my God. Preach it. In terms of global effort for a community-based project, we are tapped out, they're saying. Thank you. Oh, my God.

This is great. They go on to say, so please avoid any speculation based on rumors as they might be intentionally created by our competitors that's quite a statement it really is maybe a competitor put that rumor out there like microsoft but it is really nice to see them at least saying like no you know like we we have enough on our plate we do i think you do already see a lot of open source projects that are stretched thinly or have a lot of ambitious goals, which is great, but limited development time. And I don't want LibreOffice to suffer. So I want to ask the Mumble Room, and we're going to get into the state of the Mozilla Foundation and what they're focusing on later. I want to save that for the conversation.

I want to break this up. But I do want to start with you, Popey, because I know you have been commenting about this online. So save your thoughts on their current focus and what they're choosing to work on now instead of Thunderbird. Let's talk about that later. And I would like your opinion on who would be a good shepherd to take in this Thunderbird project. And perhaps would that person or project need to be willing to completely scrap some of the base and start over? Or maybe they would be, would they be somebody who just keeps it going? I'd like to hear your thoughts on that.

I'll start with Popey and then I'll open up the rest of the Mumble room. I don't know. I have mixed feelings because I use Thunderbird and I feel that it's a great product and it does exactly what, you know, it needs to do. It's great for you know personal comms and mailing lists and having large volumes of emails and you know it does the job right and okay it might not be ready for the next generation of devices it's not mobile ready for example but you know as a desktop mail client it does the, and many people have used it for many years, and it seems okay. So does this really need a huge amount of work that necessitates being owned by and run by a foundation or a company or some corporation? Or could this be a community project that, you know, throw the code on GitHub, put a CI system in place to gate all the mergers

to make sure reliability is high and there's QA, and do regular releases. Why do you have to have LibreOffice or Apache Foundation or Collabra or any other company look after it? Here's the thing. It almost sounds like you're talking down to Thunderbird. It sounds like you're kind of essentially saying, well, if you don't have any aspirations to move forward into the future, why don't we just stick your code up on GitHub and let the Luddites that want to continue to use their old desktop paradigm poke at you and keep you good enough while the rest of us go forward and create our new convergent desktop.

It almost sounds like that's what you're saying. To some degree, yeah. Because other people are making male clients you know there are the geary guys you know we've got deco in ubuntu and there are there are other email clients around that are being worked on yeah that maybe are because they're starting later they can not have all the cruft that the thunderbird has that people like i'm not saying it's bad cruft. I'm saying it's good cruft. Right.

Right. Maybe you don't need that. And maybe I'm wrong, Wes, but to me it seems like to do – email is something we have had now for a very long time. And to get the basic fundamentals of a good email client right, it isn't the world's largest software project anymore. Well, just given the number of webmail apps that people actually do use on a daily basis, right? I think that's a big part of this conversation too is what exact audience does Thunderbird target? Yeah. Yeah.

I still feel like Thunderbird has relevancy. I mean I think Noah is a great example of that. Yeah. Or myself. I like Thunderbird too. I do too. I wonder, okay, Kitson, I'll go to you. And then if anybody else in the member room wants to comment on this,

tag me. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on it. And also at some point, I want to get to Wimpy on somebody who's thinking about the desktop experience and what fits that. But Kitson, I'll start with you. Go ahead. What are your thoughts? Yeah, I think the big problem with all these newer applications such as Geary, they're lovely, lovely applications if you have basic email needs, but you can't use this in an enterprise. Someone that has like a journalist or an activist wouldn't be able to use it because it doesn't have features like encryption. It's a security nightmare. Well, the real problem with Geary is that Yobra has shut down and there's nobody developing Geary anymore. That's the real problem with Geary. So close

and then nothing. Geary's dead, unfortunately. At least it's a zombie right now. And so, part of this is I have been burned by Evolution and its instability. I've literally used Evolution since it was something

that was developed for the Linux desktop. I mean, I cannot – I mean, there has not – there is not – I cannot sit here and tell you in any confidence that Evolution is something you can use at scale because I have seriously used it its entire lifespan. It has never held up to my inbox ever. And I'm not trying to brag. I'm just saying I have a lot of email and this thing can't handle it. Okay. So evolution, if you have minimal email needs, it's actually really great. It has a good UI and I love, love, love that it ties in with the GNOME calendar. That is a great feature. And so I actually set up evolution today still just to get that functionality. And there are other projects out there like they're considering

taking Geary and making it use the evolution backend for elementary OS. That might be nice. Right. So there is something there. I've tried KMail. I've tried Clause. I have tried so many different – Mutt. I've tried so many different mail clients.

And Thunderbird is fundamentally what I keep coming back to. Lightning is a great plugin. Enigmail is a great plugin. And Thunderbird has the ability to be connected to both my personal inbox and my JB inbox and not dump its pants. And it can do search, all of these things. Like nothing after all of these years has been able to compete with Thunderbird at just some core functionality that I need. And I think Thunderbird has so much in that there are kind of like disparate groups of email users, right? There's like the person who uses webmail and it's fine for their personal correspondence and looking at the new shopping ads or whatever.

And then you have people that need Outlook compatibility for work. And Thunderbird can work there in a lot of situations, you know, or are kind of a power user. And then you have the very power users who are using Mutt in a terminal. And without Thunderbird there, there's not a lot in the middle. Yeah. In fact, that's sort of – I want to ask Wimpy about the elephant in the room, and that is with Gmail and Yahoo Mail and Hotmail and all these really nice web mail solutions out there. And even like MailPile. We're working on that too. Right.

Yeah, yeah. But there are so many that are closed source. There are so many that are locked down that users don't have access to the source code. Doesn't that almost make Thunderbird even more important, Wimpy? And doesn't that make other open source mail clients even that more relevant? I think so. I think that having open, free desktop email clients is as important as having open web browsers.

In particular, when you look at something, you know, as only, what, two months ago, a month ago, we were talking about Nihilas, which is a very pretty looking desktop email client. But the way that it works is to abstract the email handling to yet another backend server. So now your email lives in two, you know, siloed data centers rather than on your computer. And I just think, you know, with all that's going on in the world, we really need to focus on an email, you know, despite its flaws and despite how things are sort of overtaking it, it is still the main way that commerce, you know, commercial communication is conducted. Yeah. Can I pause you right there just for a second? way that commercial communication is conducted. Yeah. Can I pause you right there just for a second?

Just because I want to just take a moment to zoom out and appreciate the fact that what email is, is sort of like a federated network of social networks. So you have a Jupyter Broadcasting server and say there's 35 people on that server that all communicate, but then we can send out to another server that is completely different but it has a whole other network of users. We have agreed upon protocols in which we exchange messages back and forth and they can even be, get ready for this, encrypted, which is really remarkable. And we have systems that automatically scan and detect any spam communications between these federated networks.

And what we have, if you were to look at it from the Web 2.0 social networking system, is like this incredible distributed social network that isn't controlled by any single company, and it is literally like nothing that would enter the market today. I think it's what we would hope would, right? Like we would love more federated services like that. Email, it's a lot of work, but you can stand up your own email server and interrupt completely. And here's where Wimpy's point to me really strikes a nerve is there are companies like Google who have introduced the Gmail API. The Gmail API is the appropriate way for mail clients to interact with your Google inbox, not through IMAP, not through POP3, but now

through the Gmail API. And they've taken the functionality of Gmail and they've exposed it as an API. And you know what? Guess what? It's better than IMAP because it's newer, it's more modern, and it's more secure, obviously. So there's a lot of advantages to using this new Gmail API. But if you think about what that really is, is that is taking something that is this free open network and locking it down to an API. But if you think about what that really is, is that is taking something that is this free,

open network and locking it down to an API. And so I think your point, Wimpy, is well taken that these open mail clients are just as important as an open web browser is for an open web. And so I'm curious, as somebody who's looking at putting together a desktop, how does that influence your decision on maybe would you include a mail client? What would you want from that? And does the state of thunderbird really make an impact there i think it's too early to say what decisions i might take regarding email clients certainly in the short term i i won't be moving away from thunderbird and I should just have to be a spectator and watch how things develop. There are, as you've said, there are other open source email clients. Few can hold a light to Thunderbird.

Yeah, I agree. And I think Thunderbird is one of those projects that's important enough that there's always going to be a solution for Thunderbird users. It's too important and too many users for too long have used it. It's been here forever. And businesses use it. It's going to be one of those technologies

that you're lucky it's open source. I wonder what Red Hat uses. They're such big users of the LibreOffice. They use Zimbra. What was it? They use what? They use Zimbra. OhOffice. They use Zimbra. What was it? They use what? They use Zimbra. Oh, right. Yes, Zimbra.

Of course. I see. Yeah, yeah. There is Zimbra. There is Zimbra. All right. Well, now I want to sort of shift the conversation into let's talk about Mozilla and let's talk about why they can't manage a project like Thunderbird, even though it has massive relevance and it is extremely important to the open internet. Let's talk about what they are choosing

to focus on. Their brand new app that just hit the iOS app store today that only works with Safari. So let's talk about that. And let's talk about some of the other options and where we might see things end up. But first, I want to talk about Linux Academy. Go over to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Go check out Linux Academy. This is a platform to train you about the systems that use Linux or the technology that rides on Linux or the basics of Linux. It is really nice, and they understand that you are probably fairly busy.

So they have a lot of different features that work around your schedule. Availability planners, nuggets, hands-on answers by actual instructors, things like that that make it possible for even those of us who are very busy, even in the holiday season, to take advantage of Linux Academy. I think this would be a great gift to yourself. Linux Academy is something that when I first started working in IT, the kind of courses I wanted to learn from Linux Academy were some of the basics. I was self-taught in Linux and I felt pretty confident. But I began to realize as I worked with other administrators, system administrators, that maybe there was a few shortcuts I could learn. Maybe I could learn to use things a little bit better. So I enrolled in

a local community college and I went to local community college to learn these things. And I was very, very, very happy to pick up a few small things here and there, but the time investment just didn't really add up. If I had something like Linux Academy, where you have scenario-based labs, where you'll receive access to these labs over SSH that put you in the middle of tasks

common to everyday environments. You work in these advanced lab environments, complete these scenarios from beginning to end on live servers through your favorite SSH client. And remember, instructor help is available to communities full of Jupyter Broadcasting members, and Linux Academy is constantly adding not only new courseware, but features to the entire platform itself, like the new HTML5 player, and the new CDN,

and the update to the Red Hat certified courseware, and the stuff in the AWS category that is really, really nice. If you end up wanting to play around with S3, check out Linux Academy. One of the other things I think is kind of nice about Linux Academy is because they're so passionate about this community, is they understand some of the things you might face when you are trying to get out into the workplace or maybe when you are trying to just upgrade your lifestyle a bit. It's hard to get that next job. They actually have courseware on that. And one of the things that's really inspiring is when you log into your dashboard, you can see announcements from people

who have had success. And it is very motivational. I have to say, one of the things that I found about that is two things. I love seeing the people that are trying to do some of the same things that I am have success doing it because you realize it is actually attainable to you. That is very encouraging. But the other thing that I found

that works really well for me is the way it breaks it down in hours. Things that were massive concepts like learning OpenStack or Python development. We were talking about Ruby and Python on the pre-show. These are things that are broken down into hours on Linux

Academy, and I know that they really care about this stuff. This is what they focus on. It's not just a checkbox of a feature. It's what they focus on. That's such a huge deal. I mean, even just listening to ads on the radio, you hear like three different services that do online learning kind of, and they have all kinds of different services,

but this is focused on Linux. Yeah, and I know because I have spoken to the people that run Linux Academy now for a while. We've established a relationship because they've been advertisers for a while now. And I know what they tell me about stuff they're working on. And I know the backend tech they're using to develop that. And it's all Linux.

It's all open source. It's like they start there, and then they work with their educators and their developers to build it out of the platform. It is seriously inspiring from one content creator to watch them work on it because for them it's not just the content that they're creating. It's not just the courses. They are also building the backend infrastructure to manage it and deploy it all at the same time, not just like spin up a server and you have their seven plus distros you get to choose from. You choose that distribution. The VM automatically adjusts to that distro and all the courseware adjusts to that distro.

That's a neat feature to roll out as an end user thing. But think about the infrastructure they had to create and develop to make that possible. they had to create and develop to make that possible. And when you're doing AWS stuff, they manage local virtual servers versus AWS instances, all behind the scenes automatically for you. They really figured this stuff out because this is what they live and breathe. That's the human angle that really gets me.

I feel like many people in our audience, you can imagine like, oh, I love Linux. I'd love to teach people how to use Linux for a job. Spread the word. These guys have done it. Yeah. And it's awesome. And you should check it out.

That is why I picked them as an advertiser. So you go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. You get our great discount. And it is a good value. And it also looks good on a review or a resume. It is really a good service, too, by great people. So go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged and a big thank you to Linux Academy

for sponsoring the Unplugged program. You guys really had a great 2015. You guys are rocking it. Really good stuff. Okay, so today, a couple of big things were announced. Number one, it was announced that Mozilla will stop developing

Firefox OS smartphones. They're done. They're getting out of that market. You mean we don't have to talk about it anymore, Chris? Well, I don't know about that. Farewell Firefox OS smartphones. Mozilla today announced an end to the smartphone OS experiment and said it will stop developing and selling Firefox OS smartphones.

It will continue the experiment on how it might work on other connected devices and the Internet of Things networks. Like TVs, little things, et cetera. Maybe. I hope so, actually. The announcement was made earlier today at Mozilla's developer event in Orlando. And a lot of people have been tweeting about it. You've got to say Moslando.

Moslando. It's right there. Moslando. What is that? See, the reason why I didn't is because people think I mispronounce stuff so often now that I avoid stuff like this. But there's no other way. I have Moe's Lando. Thank you.

Thank you. So that is a huge bombshell. And also, Popey noticed via Twitter and also on Google+, I like how Popey actually summarized this. He said, goodbye, popular desktop email client Thunderbird, and hello, iOS ad blocker that only works with Safari. So today they announced they're dropping the smartphone initiative. They also launched an ad blocker for the iPhone that only works with Safari, and they're spinning off Thunderbird. Popey, you have the tweet, so I'm going to go to you first, but I opened this up to the

whole number room, but I'll go to you first, Popey. Has Mozilla freaking lost it i think they're they're having a bit of pain and trying to rationalize the work that they're doing and i think they were spread a bit too thin across a bunch of projects and i i think it's sad that they're one of the very few free software phone platforms is not going to be available in retail stores. But the way I understand it is they're going to carry on developing it or it will still be available on GitHub and people can still contribute to it.

Of course, yeah. And you can still flash your own device. Right. I did this evening. I updated my Firefox Flame tonight. So, you know, I don't think it's, it's – it sounds like a bad Monty Python sketch. It's not dead. It's resting.

It's not completely dead. I think it's just a bit of a shame that it's had to end retail-wise in this way because that really doesn't mean it has much in the way of longevity. If there's no – That really doesn't mean it has much in the way of longevity. And are you also worried about the narrative that it now adds to for these up-and-coming smartphone OS operating systems or these free operating systems? Do you think it adds to a negative narrative now? So it depends who you read. If you read some of the comments on Reddit, they are, well, you know what with YOLA having financial problems over the last couple of months. We don't know how that's going to pan out. And now this vague dropping of Firefox OS, that puts all the pressure on Canonical for Ubuntu OS.

Or the flip side is, well, look at those two going down the pan. Canonical's next. It depends who you are. Yeah, exactly. You can find plenty of arguments either way, really. And it does sort of add a little more scrutiny now to Canonical's efforts because there's two less big contenders in the game now. And so people are probably going to be watching what Canonical does even closer now, don't you think? Well, I wouldn't write selfish off yet.

I realize they're under some financial pressure. I'm not saying there's no other ones, but there's been two big contenders removed from the field. No, but it would be very arrogant. I'm not so sure. It would be very arrogant of us to say, hey, we're still here and look at those guys. They've gone. I don't think that's the narrative that I would read it i think you know both of those projects are having troubles you know we haven't exactly got you know handsets in every market you know you can't buy a handset in the us

right so you know we're not exactly trailblazing ahead of everyone here so you know we wouldn't be arrogant enough to do that so no no i think it's troubling i didn't mean to imply that i just meant to i meant to suggest that perhaps every move now will even be more watched because there's less contenders now to to comment just that there are perhaps perhaps within within a certain set of interested you know geeks and phone aficionados and free software people yeah Yeah, sure. I wonder if there's plenty of people who've never heard of any of them. I wonder if that means pragmatic open source evangelists will now start throwing more support behind Ubuntu mobile. But I want to give Wizard Jet a chance to jump in here. We can hope.

Yeah, we can. He says that Mozilla has been floundering for a while and he thinks this is part of it. Wizard, jump in and kind of expand on that. What do you mean? and he thinks this is part of it. Wizard, jump in and kind of expand on that. What do you mean? Yeah, so for a while Mozilla's been kind of flopping all over the place,

I guess is the right thing. I've had a Firefox OS Flame since kind of day one, ever since it shipped, and I've been using it as my daily driver for quite a while. I stopped using it a couple weeks ago because I broke the screen. It's one of those things when you start sitting in the community and you really watch it, you see all kinds of people that kind of

are saying, you know, everything, all the resources that they have are spread so thin. They're trying to attack a mobile operating system and a browser and an email client and they had instant bird which was another project which is you know a chat client and then they were also integrating the chat client into you know into mail now so thunderbird does that too now so like

they have so much resources that are spread over such a huge area that they're trying to attack and then you just have all the chaos that's been going on. You know, like, for example, the whole thing with Ike leaving Mozilla. You know, I'm not going to get into, you know, the whole controversy behind that. But, you know, like, this all came down and it's just been hit after hit after hit. And I don't think they've ever gotten the chance to kind of stand up and say, okay, got to find my footing now. Where do I step next?

And I think this is them trying, but, you know, they've managed the whole thing so poorly. Here's what I take issue with. If that is the case, if they're refocusing, you know, what's the brand? Let's figure this out. Let's double down. And I don't quite understand then where this ios ad blocker thing is coming from it's a little weird they're they're trying they're trying right

now because and they say it again and again like if you if you go to their their subreddit or firefox they always everyone the whole narrative now is we're attacking general users we care about the general users we don't care about power users. They'll figure their own thing out. All we want is the regular people. And regular people have iOS devices. And regular people have Android devices. You know what else though?

Regular people use Safari and Chrome. I don't know how much regular people have to choose their web browser. I don't think it was regular people that spread Firefox to begin with. Not at first anyway, not when it counted. I agree with you. No, they watch all the ads.

That's true. I mean, we should be thankful for that. That's what let us get away with blocking all the ads. That's true. Well, on iOS, I think there's a lot of publicity around the integrated ad blocking on iOS now because people have noticed that there's a lot of um uh publicity around the integrated ad blocking on ios now because people have noticed that there's a significant performance gain to be had by blocking

all of this stuff on a on a on a mobile device yeah you know people don't notice it so much on a desktop because your desktop isn't like so constrained resource wise but on a mobile device there's a lot of advantage to blocking not you're not downloading stuff over your 4g or 3g or gprs connection and not using those precious cpu cycles to render an animated video or an animated battery life or something you know this is a compelling product there's a there's a there's a market there the guy who created one of the first ones you know wentusters, and people were all over it and paying him, throwing money at the screen to get an ad block for iOS. So there certainly is a market for it. And I think they've been quite canny in creating a product, a positive product, when all the other Mozilla news today has been negative.

So you think them having a – let's just give them the benefit of the doubt. And let's say that Mozilla or whatever brand they're putting on that sort of helps it move to the top. You think that maybe will give them – that's sort of like a way to introduce them to new users as like a – yeah, it feels weird that they'd be making an iOS ad blocker, but it's really more sub subversive the long-term goal is to introduce them to the mozilla name and then maybe they'll switch perhaps yeah and the fact that it's called focus you know the whole it seems like their whole all hands meeting is about focus is about getting rid of the the products that they're they don't need to focus on and focusing on things that are going to potentially keep the company going and keep revenue coming in and keep their mission statement alive, the open web and keeping things right for the users.

How are Mozilla going to make money off an ad blocker when so much of their revenue is advert generated? Yeah, and Wimpy too, aren't they like damaging potential future revenue sources that could keep them alive? Well, you'd have thought so. It's a difficult conversation to have with your ad networks, isn't it? Yeah. Maybe it's, hey, we'll block your competitors. Well, yeah. Not annoying ad networks.

I don't know. Well, this is also a trend at the moment, isn't it? To have an ad blocker that doesn't. Right. Yep. So you would like to have some views. Yeah. This is also a trend at the moment, isn't it? To have an ad blocker that doesn't. Right, yep. So you would like to have some views. Yeah, and they come down like, boy, if that's the case, that feels dirty, though.

That doesn't feel very good. It also could very well be that they're just going to try and live off of their whole, you know, we're going to set your search provider to Yahoo and then we're going to get money from Yahoo or whatever they choose. Which, by the way, is horrible. That's the biggest thing running Linux Mint this week? Yes.

That is the biggest thing. I was trying to use Firefox, but just the fact that they defaulted to Yahoo, they were unusable for technical searches. It's for people who like to mess with computers. That was the biggest thing that I noticed and I completely failed to mention it in my review on last because it

didn't seem like, in in comparison everything else worth mentioning. But the search results on Mint suck so bad because you just – you come to expect as somebody – if you've been on the internet before and ever searched on Google, you expect things to look a certain way and work a certain way. And so you got two options on the Mint desktop. Your first option is to use the built-in search in Firefox, which uses that horrible Yahoo search. Oh, it's so bad. It really is bad. I mean, I tried it. Like I kept trying to use it, but I was trying to set up Linux containers, other technical things. I think for regular Google, you know, regular searches. No, I think it's terrible. Okay, probably. It's terrible. But especially for the technical Linux specific questions. But then, so then your second option is when you launch Firefox on the Mint there, desktop right there, it brings a Mint start page up.

And what Clam or some of the folks at the Mint project have done is gone ahead and embedded one of those sponsored Google searches right there. And so you start searching in that. But the thing is that that also looks like a clown show. And there are links all over the place. It's a real bad theme. Yeah, it is. So what I'm trying to tell you is the out-of-the-box experience on Linux Mint is your web searches feel and look horrible and result. It is the worst out-of-the-box web searching experience ever.

And it's a weird thing to say, but it's true, isn't it, Wes? And I think even just going with like DuckDuckGo even would be like way better. 50% better at least. Yeah. No. Because there's BangG and you're – It would actually look right. So something I think you have to understand is it doesn't – it looks like scam search results.

It does. They all look like ads or they all – Phony. Yeah, right? It looks like phony crap. And so it all, I don't, I don't trust, I don't want to, my, my, my, my instincts are, I don't want to click any of that. I don't want to click that. I don't know what that is. I don't know if that's a legit research result or if that's a sponsored search result. And, and, uh, I find myself actually having to

go to google.com and then, so here, so I'm going to pull it up there. So Wes has got it there on his machine and there you can see there's the Firefox page. So Wes, go back to the homepage there and do a search for like Linux or something in there. I don't know. Just search for something. Just because I want to show people like – you see how they all look like ad results? They all look like ads, don't they? They really do.

It is no good. It is no – now, OK. So go back and now search for Linux in the Firefox search box. Go up to the search box there and search for Linux. And, yeah, you see. Oh, you switched it to Google. You already switched it to Google. Yeah.

Here, here you go. This is what you see. Yeah, there you go. And that's actually not so bad, but it's still not that good. There's too much going on there. And I got to say, just the, I don't know, it really speaks to the quality of Google. And I hate to say it, but the search results that you get are a lot more meaningful and it's a lot easier to decipher what's meaningful and what's not. It is really like you, so, you know, you sat down and within 20 seconds you had it changed.

You already fixed it. I don't think I, I think you changed it. Oh, maybe Rikai changed it. Rikai. Thanks, Rikai. He's got everything here. It works in the studio. Rikai did it. Rikai knows what drives me crazy. So, yeah, he probably fixed it. But it is not a hard fix, but defaults do reign supreme. And it was a really bad out-of-the-box

experience that I just neglected to mention because it made me feel unsafe. And I think it's one of those things where Mint has so many other defaults out of the box that are better than other competitors. It sucks that this one is worse. Also, it's using Firefox. Anyways. Just kidding.

I love Firefox. I found this whole Mozilla conversation to be rather fruitless though. I don't really know. I guess I like Popey's take on it that maybe this is their way to try to introduce Mozilla to the masses. It seems like honestly perhaps giving up on Firefox OS and focusing a little more is actually a very reasonable thing to do. I had some hopes pinned on the project. So that's why I'm a little disappointed. I am as well. But to be honest with you,

if I'm looking at it objectively, it makes a lot of sense. If you have limited resources, limited funds, and limited time. And compared to like Canonical, they have a lot less experience packaging and operating system, which is different than a web browser. That's true. That's a good point. I just would love now to see where this new

philosophy takes Firefox itself. And I think – yeah, exactly. Because Mozilla has been a good bastion for the open web like they say. It's a little clichéd but it's true and I think we do – I hope that they succeed because I would like there to continue to be an organization that represents that. That's exactly it. That's exactly it. Kitson, I'll let you take it out because I know you've been wanting to touch a point on the identity thing. So go ahead.

Expand on that. Yeah. I think that Mozilla is basically – they're a company with a history. They've been around for almost 15 years now. They have an identity crisis right now because they're trying to figure out where the market is going to go next. Then they're just unable to do it. So they're just sticking their finger in the wind seeing which way it goes that's why they uh you know want to abandon uh thunderbird and that's why they've abandoned uh nightingale which is their music

player they've also abandoned uh their standalone chat client i don't think anybody's doing much development on Chatzilla either. And the other thing is, is Firefox is such a huge product. There's all this technical debt that goes along with it, like Zool and all of that kind of stuff that they need to maintain. Yeah, it's a difficult position and Thunderbird has inherited a lot of that technical debt. Yep.

And so there is a very honest discussion going on right now of maybe it's time to rebase, and that would be basically a reset. QT Thunderbird, anyone? Yeah, I'd be down for that. I actually think that'd be – Yes. I think that'd be really good. That sounds wonderful. Yeah.

I'd like to see a known native Firefox. Yeah, me too. Sure, sure. Oh, man, of course. This is how it's going to go. There'll like to see a Node-native Firefox. Yeah, me too. Sure. Oh man, of course, this is how it's going to go. There'll be a Thunderbird core, right? And then there'll be a Thunderbird QT and a Thunderbird GTK and a Thunderbird etc. There'll be a Thunderbird web, of course. And then we'll still complain about the dependencies

it pulls in when you try to install it. And the Thunderbird backend is going to run on top of Node.js. Of course it is. It's going to happen. We've Node.js. Of course it is. You just wait. It's going to happen. Oh, man. We've called it here.

We need our own Redbook. Yeah, we do. We do. That's a good end of 2015 prediction right there. I think that could happen, actually. Hey, you know what else could happen? You could have your own cloud server in less than 55 seconds. Go to DigitalOcean.com and use our promo code DEOunplugged.

One of these days, we should demo that. We should just spin it up on the air because it is 100% true. How come I haven't thought of that? 55 seconds. How come I haven't thought of that? I don't know. And we could like, you know, each time we could do like a different kind of server. That's a great idea, Wes, because it is a really easy way to get going with your own Linux rig up in the cloud that is super fast. Their entire infrastructure is Linux-based, SSDs for their hard drives,

40 gigabit e-connections to each hypervisor. You can get started in less than 55 seconds and pricing plans start at only $5 a month. Use our promo code DEO, unplugged, one word, lowercase. You get a $10 credit. Try that $5 rig out for two months for free. You get 512 megabytes of RAM, 20 gigabyte

SSD, because like I said, they're all SSDs, one CPU, and a terabyte. A terabyte of transfer. And they've got data center locations in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, London, Germany, and Toronto. That's the FUNSA data center. I'm just putting that out there. They don't say that, but I mean, come on. And also, it's that interface.

That interface is so simple, yet you get everything done. You can create your machines. You have an HTML5 console to watch your machine from the BIOS post all the way up to when the operating system starts. Love it. I do, too. Very nice. Very nice. No Flash needed.

Nothing like no Java. Of course not. You don't need that Java runtime. That won't even work in today's modern browsers. Don't get me started about mustaches and Java. I have rants for both. The number of load balancers that have never updated, it just

drives me wild. Also, one of the things that's really great about DigitalOceans is they've, DigitalOceans? DigitalOceans has got lots of Linuxes in their ocean. Obviously, they're going to have your Ubuntus. Why not? You got your latest Ubuntus, you got your LTSs, they also have CentOS. Ah!

Oh, now that's starting to make sense. For you Red Hat kids. Yeah, or Debian, you know. Or Debian. You want to go old school, just good old tried and true Debian, they have that available as well. But one of the things they did that was really cool is they worked upstream with CoreOS and FreeBSD to make sure that they're just, boom, right in with the channels from those projects to get updates directly. They got the latest Fedora up there because, yeah, Fedora's making progress, and especially with DNF upgrade. I've got a Fedora 23

DigitalOcean droplet that I'm going to continue to upgrade from release, release and just see how it goes. Yep. Just see how that goes. But one of the things that's really nice

about their interface is their one-click deployment of applications. I tell you what, you can get something deployed that's super fancy in no time. You go to DigitalOcean.com, you use the promo code

DOunplugged and I tell you what, you'll love it in two months. Now, Popey, you just created a droplet right now? Yep, during the show. While you were talking about Ting, I noticed there was an advert or an article about a daily show with John Stewart had been on it. And I clicked the link, and it didn't work because I'm in the UK. And it says, no, you can't use that. And I clicked the link and it didn't work because I'm in the UK.

And he said, no, you can't use that. So I thought, ah, screw you. So I spun up a DigitalOcean droplet, grabbed YouTube DL on my droplet, grabbed the video, and then pulled it down to my local machine. And I'll watch it later. I tell you what, it's handy. Shut the droplet down, done. It's rather handy that they have data centers in London. And they have data centers in San Francisco and New York.

So depending on your preference. And that API, right? So what Popey just did, that could be one shell script. It's up. Ansible installs everything. It's done. Right? I mean, it's beautiful.

It really is pretty slick. And the great thing is because, honestly, I would never write that code. The code's already up on GitHub. There's a lot of good code. You pull it down. You run it. You're done. You're done.

Bob is indeed your uncle. And you can say hi and Merry Christmas to Bob. So go over to DigitalOcean.com and use the promo code DEOUNPLUG. There's so many things you can use it for, just like we have. And I think that DEOUNPLUG code will give you a little opportunity to try it and see what you can do. You'll be pretty impressed. After your first

package upgrade or update, you'll be sold. Oh, it's so fast. Plus what? You spent $5? Oh my. After your first package upgrade or update, you'll be sold. Oh, it's so fast. It's awesome. Plus what? You spent $5? Oh, my. So I want to try something kind of never done before here on the Unplugged show. Are you ready there, Wes?

Probably not, but let's do it anyway. I want to talk about Crossover 15. Crossover 15 came out today, and it is their release that includes Wine 1.8, the latest Wine 8, which, you know, brings, like, tons and tons and tons and tons of improvements. They have experimental early support for, like, DirectX 11 in this. 11? Whoa. 11.

That's impressive. Yeah, and also Crossover now uses Pulse Audio as the back-end sound system, and they've completely redone the user interface. Completely redone the user interface for Linux. So Crossover Office, if you're not familiar with it, is a Linux desktop application that takes Wine and really repackages it. And if you're watching the video version here, I'm installing it right now on my computer.

And I wanted to go through this installation with you because it's kind of familiar, but not for the Linux desktop. And this is really where Crossover begins is if you have come from the Windows world to the Linux world, this immediately feels familiar. It's a setup wizard. So, Chris, how did you start this? Oh, you know the story. But the long version is, or the short version of the long story is, I had to have Exchange compatibility in order to use the Linux desktop at work. And Evolution wasn't doing the job.

I had to be able to use Outlook. And I was kind of new to Linux desktop. And what Crossover gives you is a really sort of out-of-the-box, simple, and back then everything was installed from CD. So it managed all of that. So it would tell you when to insert new CDs, and out of the box with a wizard, I could install Office, have full Outlook, and be ready to go. License it like

normal. Oh yeah. So anyways, I'm going through the installation right now. So it installs an Opt CX Office, which is where all the base stuff goes. I like that it puts itself aside in the file system. That actually is really kind of handy because you can have crossover wine and you can have regular upstream wine installed. Like separate bottles and the whole play on Linux.

And so that's very nice. So now it's installed here on the desktop, and I can hit finish. And when I go to my menu, there will be a crossover entry that is created, and I will launch crossover here. And you'll immediately notice the... If it launches... Oh, so this is actually kind of nice. It doesn't do this on all distributions, but on Ubuntu-based distributions, or Debian-based distros,

it does do this. And it says there are several dependencies that I need in order to make wine applications work correctly. So it immediately launches the terminal, asks me for my pseudo password. That's the big part right there. Gets it in there and then installs the dependent packages that are necessary to make sure that your out-of-the-box experience actually is pretty nice. And so this is something that you wouldn't, starting right here, when you're trying to run

your own application under Wine, you would need to go Google, well, why isn't my Wine application running? Yes. And maybe this is your first time on Linux. You're trying it out, seeing if you can make it work. Yeah. Or really, even if you've been using it for a while, like, do you, okay, so instead of having to do this, I try to launch the application, it fails. And then, okay, I go get this dependency. Now I need this dependency.

And each one is a Google search. Before you even try to do anything, this says, hey, this environment's never going to work. You need to install a few packages. And then it goes out and gets those packages for you automatically. So you never get into that game of trying to figure out what dependencies need to be installed to run this properly. It just manages that for you. So I actually think that is worth some value right there. But then once it does that, it brings you up to their brand new interface. This doesn't look anything like Crossover has looked under Linux for a decade now. And you click Install Software.

One of the first things that happens is it says, hey, for better results, I could go out and get a new update of all of the available applications that will work under Crossover. Would you like me to do that? And I always say yes. So I say always update. And it has a UI for telling you it's sort of like going out and getting a new list of packages. And then after it's done, I will have a category of – I will have broken down by categories different applications I can install. So I can just search for something like Quicken. I hit search.

And it will – Quicken – basically every version of Quicken is on here. Although I don't know why the search isn't working. Oh, there it goes. Quicken. And so you can see even up to Quicken 2016 is on here. Although I don't know why the search isn't working. Oh, there it goes. Quicken. And so you can see even up to Quicken 2016 is on here. That's more Quicken than I would ever want to run. I know, right? But if you want to use –

But if you need to. If you need to use Quicken under Linux, and this is something the Crossover development team specifically focuses on to make sure this application works. It's even got a star rating. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and there's other things in there that don't necessarily have such a good star rating. You can also just browse the available applications. So you can go to games and you can go to online games. And a good thing here is like this installer doesn't look horribly un-native, right?

No. Like it fits right into your desktop experience. Yeah, and so say I wanted to play Star Trek online because – Well, you do. Well, it's Star Trek and I do actually want to play it. You click it here. It gives you desktop experience. Yeah, and so say I wanted to play Star Trek Online because – Well, you do. Well, it's Star Trek, and I do actually want to play it. You click it here. It gives you the rating. And when I say continue, one of the nice things is there's several installation options for the installer source.

It can get the Star Trek Online installer for Steam. We also did this with Batman Arkham City earlier before we started the show. It can download the installer directly from their website. Or if I have the installer locally, I can just point it at that. I don't. So I'll just say I can choose download the installer. Now, when I continue, it will create the English version. It will go and get the English version of Star Trek Online.

It will download the file. It will create a Windows XP bottle named Star Trek Online. And then it will begin to install the additional dependencies that it needs, like DirectX, Internet Explorer, because the launcher uses Internet Explorer to render. Right. So it installs Internet Explorer. It gets the minimum versions of those that it requires to function, and then it locks it all down into a static bottle that is isolated from all of the other wine applications I use. So their changes will never affect my ability to play Star Trek Online. It's not going to break on you randomly.

Right. It'll just work. So that changes will never affect my ability to play Star Trek online. It's not going to break on you randomly. It'll just work. So that is the... Go ahead. I've used Play on Linux quite a bit. Now, I've resorted to saying I will only accept

native Linux content because I always seem to hit one issue, is we use CDNs now. We use Steam to get our games and our games that may be Windows-based but use Steam, whenever that updates, you hit wine regression. Does Crossover have a particular way of dealing with this to where your games and your save files don't just break? Because that's my main issue with PlayOnlineX.

I can't really answer that because that is always a possibility but so the way crossover so we before the show did batman arkham city and arkham asylum and uh what what crossover does is it creates a bottle for each game so that's like an isolated container to use today's parlance and it actually installs direct x in that bottle it installs steam windows version in that bottle you log into steam it then downloads batman arkham asylum into that bottle and here i'm going to pull your screen up wes and it installs steam then steam goes out and gets the game and it uses the steam game to actually use it. So the answer is it installs Windows Steam. It installs it.

It uses that client. So that's kind of the usage paradigm, and then Crossover seems to be built for that. So there you go. Wes just launched that. That's Windows Steam here. Yeah, Windows Steam, which is kind of weird because it looks a lot like Linux Steam. It really does, which, I mean, testament of out there. So, Wes, why don't you – okay, so minimize Steam there, and why don't you launch like, this is an example, the Excel viewer there.

Just you can double click on that as an application. And it will look like the regular old version of Excel viewer. And I want to, then what we'll do is, and you have to do the trial. You have to acknowledge the trial because I didn't register it on there. There you go. So look, it's got the nice new, what do they call that? Isn't that a beautiful What do they call that? I forget. The ribbon? The ribbon. It's got the ribbon.

That is the Excel viewer. Now, Wes, go ahead and close that. Get it out of here. Get it out of here, Wes. And click on install Windows software there. And let's just walk through that. It's the bottom of the UI there. And why don't you search for Word Viewer in the search box there? Because this is free. It'll just automatically download it off the web.

It could install full-fledged Office as well, but you would actually have to have the installation media. I see. Which we do not have here at JB1 Studios. No, of course not. Okay. So search for Word or you can probably just put Word in there or something like that, and it will come up. And it has – Here we go.

Would you like 2003 or 2007? So this is the nice thing, too, is sometimes you want older versions of Windows software for compatibility testing. Those are the files you're getting from your client, et cetera. And so this bottle environment makes it possible to have different versions of Windows software on your Linux box.

So which one did you choose, 2007? I chose 2007. Yeah, because that'll do the docx. So then you say continue. And what's it say there? It's going to go out and get those files. English version. We'll download the installer.

We'll install into a new Windows XP bottle named Microsoft Word Viewer 2007. So even if you're just looking at the bottle, you know what's in there. And what's nice, so you see how they did Windows XP is what they do for Windows software is the lowest common denominator. That way it's not going to try to do something super fancy. It's not going to work under Linux. It's not doing all the updates, all the patches. Right. And the software goes, oh, I'm on XP. I'll just give you this.

And it's just honestly functional, right? It's just basic. OK, so hit next there, whatever it is, install it, whatever your option is. And now it goes out, and it's going to go out and pull out each individual dependency and say trial there, because we're just doing the trial version. Now, this is going to walk you through all of the software you would need to install before you could run the viewer. Chris, I have to ask, do you accept the license agreement?

Hold on, Wes. I'm not so sure. Yes, I'll accept that. All right, let's do it. Live, on air. You can just hit next. You don't have to put anything in there. And just, yep, next, next, next.

All right, so you're going through. It's bringing you through each type of dependency package, like the redistributed files, the libraries. It's the real experience installing Microsoft software. Yeah, it's the real MSI installation. You're going to choose your – so there you go. Now hit OK, and now hit OK there. And you'll see in the background, Crossover will finish things up. It'll get any of the last things that need to be done.

It's downloading these off of Microsoft's site right now for you. You don't have to go get these files yourself. And now it's done. And now it's been added as an icon there. And also, Wes, it adds those. Blammo. Yeah. And it also, go into your menu there.

You can close this. Go ahead and close this. And then go into your menu there. And if you look around, like I think if you go into Crossover anyways, or maybe an Office category, yeah, an Office, I think go to your Office, or did it add them to your Office category? You know, I don't, I only see LibreOffice right now. Okay, yeah. I'm not, yeah, I'm not sure if it does

with the viewers. It will, it can integrate them. Oh, here we go, Windows application. There's a whole separate category. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, it can integrate them in with the desktop menuing system as well. That's really nice. It is really nice. And so this – Especially for you're trying to migrate your friend to Linux, right? You install this.

You set it up. And they're right in their start menu, I say with quotation marks. Quote, unquote. It looks a lot like Starman. Right. Like they can just load Word if that's what they need for work or whatever. Yeah. So it is – it's a pretty nice UI.

And if you go here, Wes, to – let's see. I think it's view. I'm not sure what the menu option is there. There's a way to view bottles or something like that. Show bottles. Show bottles. Here we go. Yeah, so there on the left there, it has broken out each container environment in a –

So you can have different service packs,.NET installs, et cetera. If you right-click on, like, one of them, you have different options. You can shut down all of the running processes in that bottle. If you've got a Windows app that's being weird... You can run a command, install software into a bottle. That's awesome. Yeah, and you can also launch control panel applets. You can manage your different control panel settings.

It'll open the C drive right there. You can modify it yourself if you need to. Which is something you need to do if you're going to use... If you're going to play Star Wars The Old Republic through Crossover. You need to be able to right-click on it and go edit one of the launcher.settings files. And it just makes it really easy to do all of that. So, anyways, it's Crossover Office version 15. Now, here's the thing, Wes.

And us Linux users, we're not used to paying very much for software. No, we're not. It's $60. It's $60. It's $60. But they do have a promo code going right now. I got info in the show notes. And you can get it if you use the promo code.

What is it here? CX15. You get 25% off for their new release. And I will say, if you are a user of Wine, these people contribute. Yeah, all this goes back upstream. That's the other thing to mention. And so you are helping future development of the Wine project.

And it's a lot of work. Can you imagine being a Wine developer? Like, that's a lot of thankless just like, oh, how do I make the Microsoft crap work on the Linux desktop? Right? That's a lot of work. So it's kind of cool that there's a commercial effort to help support that effort. Yeah. And the $60 is for this version, but they usually do many updates.

And like when the new versions of Ubuntu or Fedora or OpenSUSE, so when major versions come out, they generally issue a new update, and your purchase covers those updates for this version. So I always buy every major version, and then I just get all of the updates for like a year or whatever it is. And I end up installing it on any serious workstation where I want to be able to run any Windows application

because I almost prefer to use things with regular straight out wine because I just drop to the command line, wine the executable name, good to go. But if it's ever more advanced than that, there's dependencies or I want to be able to revert or take snapshots. Or something that's going to be installed like appliance life, long or like my game like Star Trek online. I

just want it to work. And that's where I use crossover. And I don't know exactly how long I've been using it. But I think I've I think I think since 2003, but I'm not I'm not quite sure. It's been a long, long time. And I've bought every single version. They've never ever paid me to promote it. They've never paid me to talk about it. Don't even know you exist? No, they don't exist. We actually might talk to them on Friday for the Linux Action Show.

They were going to join us today, but the scheduling just didn't work out because their CEO is on vacation. But he may come back on Friday, and if he is back, we'll talk to him. And maybe we'll get that in the Linux Action Show. So, anyways, yeah, go check it out. We'll have links in the show notes. It's just a really great piece of commercial software that's managed to be around for a long time.

And I like that about it. And it's available. It's been available for the Linux desktop. And it's made switching possible. And if Quicken or something like that is one of those few applications you need to get. And that's a big deal for a lot of small businesses. Huge. Huge.

Huge. Actually. It's a huge deal. I've had to use it myself in the past. I think it's up there with AutoCAD and Photoshop. Definitely. I think it's a big deal. They make it work.

Oh, also Photoshop. I think starting with CS, which isn't the latest, but CS and earlier work beautifully under Crossover just give you all of the stuff you need to get it going you just point it at the installation file and it sets everything up for you integrates Photoshop with your desktop you can even associate file extensions with Photoshop

it's like having Adobe Photoshop on your Linux desktop full fledged and if you're okay with things like version 7 of Photoshop which really is fine, really, it is flawless under Crossover. There is like nothing that doesn't work. It's amazing.

And I mean, it is good enough under Crossover that I think you could use it full-time as your daily driver. And it's just, that's a big deal. So they make Quicken and Adobe Photoshop very easy for not experienced users to get going under Linux. And I just don't think the project and the company gets enough attention. And the other thing that burns me is they make way more money on their Mac product, which is total shit.

Wow. Because they've been around for Linux way longer. And if Linux users would just step up a little bit and buy something from time to time, then we wouldn't. Yeah, we don't pay any license fees. So, I mean – Yeah, and then they release something – Got cash in your pocket.

And then they release something for the Mac, and that's what sustains the business after all these – it drives me crazy. So we go out there and buy something. And yes, that is true. It is a proprietary, which is – It's negative in the freedom dimension. But it is a commercial product that contributes upstream, right? Which is an interesting twist. I think we see similar things with

Valve, with Netflix, right? These are all kind of areas that are open source-ish in some ways. They're not quite at the end user perspective, but they might help our cause in the long run. Yeah. Alright. So I wanted to mention something. Now we're talking about stuff you can pay for.

Let's talk about stuff you get for free. We are doing swag for the holidays. We just gave away a really, really cool Linux Action Show glass coaster, which was neat. It was a thick piece of glass with the Linux Action Show logo in there. We're giving away all kinds of swag. If you have successful Patreon payments in November or December for the patreon.com slash today or patreon.com slash unfilter patrons pages, patreon pages. I'm confused.

Patron pages. Then you just have to watch for swag links in the show notes of any show sometime in December, like Coda Radio or other shows, TechSnap, shows like that. There's swag link. Just click it. There's just a link in there. Just swag links in there. And then you get entered to draw.

If you think about this, the pool is not that big. So you have to be a successful patron. So you can just go to – Which means you love JB a whole lot. And you're helping us. You keep us going. Patreon.com slash today. You have to be a successful –

So you know the total number of people that is because that number is right on the Patreon page. And then there is only a subset of those people who are going to click the link and enter to get the swag. So I'm just saying the chances of actually winning something are extremely high. And Wes, you saw it when you got here. It's beautiful. This is badass is what this is. Full Christmas fever up in here.

And legitimately so, each one of those boxes has wrapped swag for each show. Whoa! Each show has its own individual swag that is unique to that show, that is a callback to the show that when you enter the swag drawing, we'll be giving out through December and maybe January, depending on how many people sign up.

They're all extremely cool. That lamp. You can see the lamp there. The lamp is so cool! It's great! Angela is amazing. Each ornament And they're all extremely cool. That lamp. You can see the lamp there. Did you see that lamp? The lamp is so cool. It's great. Angela is amazing. Yeah, it is. And each ornament has a special show saying on the back of it.

So you can see the front of the ornaments there. But each ornament on the back of it has something unique to the show. I will be looking at that after the show. Yeah, and each box there has a unique swag item related to each individual JB show. So here's how you get in. Go to patreon.com slash today or unfiltered, depending on where you want to invest. And then you will be entered for the drawing once. One more thing.

You find the link in the show notes for the shows. You got to pay attention here. And once you go in there, you have those two things. Bada boom, bada bing, bada boom, bada boom. Bob's your uncle. Say hi to Richard. You're entered. And that's all you got to do.

It's really quite easy. That's just a false belief. Get Richard. You're entered. And that's all you got to do. It's really quite easy. That's just a false belief. Get him out of here. Get him out of here. Alright. So there you go. I just wanted to mention that. Patreon.com slash today also helps all of the shows. Wes, was there anything else we wanted to cover before we get out of here? I don't think so.

No. Alright. Mumbaroom, is there any final thoughts you wanted to have before we get out of here? Anything that doesn't go into the post show? Going once. Going twice. All right. They have spoken, Wes. That brings us to the end of 122. Now, I would invite you to join us live next week because it is the last live show before the holidays.

We'll be back the week after Christmas, but the Christmas week, there's going to be no Unplugged Live. That's crazy. We do have something very special that will be going out. So please watch. Please tune in. But it won't be live. So why don't you join us next week for 1.23. Hang out with us for the live show, jblive.tv.

Everyone's welcome. And also submit content, LinuxActionShow, to Reddit.com. We also have feedback. Go over there. Give us your thoughts. All right, everybody. Well, thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged, and we'll see you right back here next Tuesday. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

You said commercial software. All right, JBTitles.com. Now we have to name this beast. I'd just like to say that Crossover has Age of Empires 3 Patch 114 up in here. Now, does it have a web installer? Because that's the real sweet spot, when it just goes and gets the setup off of the web for you. It does? AOM.zone.com. I have no idea.

Do it. Hit install. Oh, my God. That's amazing. I've been wanting to play that game. So that's what I love is sometimes these scripts, like sometimes you have to supply your own executable. But sometimes they just go get the executable. If there's an EXE on the web somewhere, will stick it in the true windows style i love it so

now we're gonna be playing some age of empires here in a little bit we won't even have time for future shows no no screw that so um my new machine has got has got some fancy brand new technology in it this is the first time it's my first computer that I've bought that's new, as in a new computer that's new to me. Yeah. That is not behind the times. It's like bang up to specification right now. So I've got one month before I can enjoy it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a dual Pentium 3. Ooh. 128 megabytes of nano. Yeah. It's the tippity-top i7 Intel NUC. Really? Which generation?

Congratulations, sir. The Broadwell. Cool. Very nice. Whatever the one with Iris 6100 graphics. Oh, yeah. Okay. We've got those at work.

Those are nice that's legit that's and and uh i did some research and i found out you can actually buy the memory for the haswell um boxes and this will work in this particular generation so i've got the faster clock ram but um and i'm also going to have to eat some humble pie and take everything bad i said about black friday because this wouldn't have happened had it not been for the Black Friday deals in the UK this year. I got about a 60% discount on all of the items I bought. Oh, that's nice.

One of which is one of these new fancy NVMe SSDs, which is amazing. Oh, yeah. which is amazing oh yeah oh yeah read read performance is 2000 megabytes a second and right performance oh my gosh 500 megabytes per second so if you've ever booted a nuc and you've seen that intel nuc logo you know the big nuc appears in the center of the screen and that disappears i've got a slightly old monitor which i'm also going to sort out maybe in the new year but in the refresh cycle for the monitor to fade that out the system has booted and i'm at the login screen that is amazing it's like are you running what i assume you're running of course yes of course it's the fastest booting operating

system on the planet now that's right that's right um so yeah that's made um that's made a huge difference it's quite amazing actually those those new uh quad channel nvmes are um are amazing yeah man wow it makes me want to build a new rig yep do you have uh a is system d on this rig so you can run system D analyze and tell us your boot speed on this? That would be very nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Give me a minute. How do you... Oh, link to post.

That's what you do. Link to post. But you can't open that link to post. The boot time was 1.15 seconds. Wow. That seconds. Wow. That is... Whoa. Probably faster than a resume from suspend would be.

Yeah, really. Yeah, who needs power management anymore? This is what I'm saying. By the time the screen has realized it needs to go from black to something else, it's up and running. What were the specs again? I'll tell you what, I'll find the exact model and I will paste the details. You know what, I've realized that if I build a really nice computer, I think it gets me

two, three years. Like if I build a really nice one. And if I go cheap, it's a year. It actually, I think, saves me money long term to buy nicer computers it probably does invest in the nice stuff now and look at this this is officially three years old here right and so that's yeah no you disagree well yeah my my the computer that it's replacing um is was purchased in 2008 and that was was some dual quad-core Xeon with 32 gigs of RAM and Nvidia stuff and all the rest of it, and it's got SAS RAID and what have you,

and that machine is still very, very usable today, and more so because of Black Friday, I've got four 250 gig SSDs, striped RAID 0 in it now. That sounds lovely. Lovely. No kidding. Woo-wee, the wimpy.

You upgraded. Yeah. He's not kidding about us being in the dark ages. Yeah, yeah. Well, Black Friday really came through for me this year. It was really terrific.