LINUX Unplugged - Episode 144: Flavorless Mint | LUP 144

Episode Date: May 11, 2016

Is a new wave of tech savvy Linux users coming? Chris makes his case & why distributions like Linux Mint won’t be ready for it.Plus updates from some of our favorite projects, Linux on the PS4 & a quick look at the Fedora 24 beta.

Hey, welcome. I'm Linus Torvalds, and I started Linux in 1991. One of the more interesting parts about Linux is how it turns out in the most unexpected places. Wait a minute, is he doing our bit? Is he doing our Runs Linux bit? Is Linus stealing our bit? So when I started Linux, I needed an operating system for my own use. And today, you find Linux everywhere. And today, you find Linux everywhere, in small embedded devices, supercomputers. This technology allows you to expand into many different niches. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 144, for May 10th, 2016. Oh, welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's stealing the Unix mindshare

every single week. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Right, Wes? That feels about right. I think so. Yeah. That's our mission.

Now, this week on the Unplugged program, we have a heck of a show for you. We're doing a heck of a job for you this week, guys, because guess what? We have big updates from some of our favorite open source projects. I might be a little cranky. I don't know. So we'll see how that turns out on this week's episode. Always an adventure. There's some of these updates,

Wes, that I just have a strong opinion about. Some good, some bad. Later on in the show, we're going to talk a little more about Linux Mint. Also, an early look at Fedora 24, a few things you might be interested in. And one of our favorite open source projects has launched a Kickstarter. We'll talk about that as well, Wes, as a few other surprises mixed in there. Yeah. Mixed in there.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. Episode 144, for those of you who don't know, is a lucky podcast number. And so Wes was feeling fired up and brought us something from Caldera. No, not Linux. It's beer. Hopportunity Knox IPA. Brewed in Ashland, Oregon. Yeah.

From Oregon. An India Pale Ale. An Indian Pale. Okay, here we go. Ha ha. Now this bad boy is rocking in at 6.8% APV. You know, and then first on the ingredient list, mountain water. Not regular water.

This is mountain beer, folks. All right. So, I also, I don't want to bury the lead this week. We're doing something really important. This is important work. We're bringing in one of my favorite all-time computers into the sickbay. Bring it over here. We got the Apollo here.

Now, over the weekend, PCI, SSD in this thing gave up the ghost. I don't know if it's the port. So it's even more useful to you now. I don't know if it's the port. I don't know if it's the port. I don't know if it is the card itself or the what. So I thought, Wes, as the show goes on, we take the pants off the Apollo. Oh, yeah. Try a little troubleshooting.

Maybe the card's just loose. And maybe we can stick it back in there. Jam it right back in there. Yeah. So we've brought it. Hold on. Where's our sickbay noise? Wait.

So we've brought it. I say we brought it. There we go. We brought it into the sickbay. We also have a backup, like one of these PCI SSDs that came with it. So this is the one that came with the Apollo that has Ubuntu 16.04. The one in here, aftermarket, has Antargos installed, which would be my preferred OS. installed, which would be my preferred OS.

Right. Also, Wes, as we get along here, I brought in... Oh, hold on, Wes. There we go. Thank you. I need that. Yeah, you do. You do, because we're in the PC sickbay. Hey, I spent a long time finding this loop.

I've got to use it. Yes. I have your weapon, sir. Your repair kit, as it were. So we'll just check in throughout the show. Bump your microphone a few times as you're going, so that way we know you're working. Absolutely. And we can swap back and forth if we need to, too.

It's not all on you, but I'll just let you start as I get us rolling here. That sounds good. Because before we go too much further, and now that our loop has ran out one more time, it's absolutely time to bring in our mumble room, our virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings, virtual lug. Hello. Hello. Hello.

Hello. Look at that there, Wes. We got ourselves a nice turnout. Hello, everybody. It is good to see you. It's good to see you, our dear friends, on the Unplugged program joining us. Now, I don't know how many of you out there have a PlayStation 4.

I don't. I've never been out there have a PlayStation 4. I don't. I've never been particularly interested, but that might just be changing. It may be booting up a PlayStation 4 in the not-too-distant future, because it looks like it may be possible to run Linux on one of these bad mamma-jamas. Now, this is sort of like a layered hack. It starts with a jailbreak that happened back in December. Now, for those of you who are not familiar, the PlayStation 4 runs like Orbis OS. Did you know about this, Orbis OS?

Only a little. Yeah, it's based on free BSD. The BSD Now guys will make sure you know that if you watch that show. And Gadget reports that there's a bug in WebKit. Now, you're able to gain access to the kernel via this bug. Oh, now here's the catch, though, as like all of these things. It only works on Orbis 1.74, which is a much older version than the 3.11 that is out right now.

The hardest part about getting Linux on a PlayStation 4 is finding one that... Hello, hi there. Hi... Hello. Hi there. Hi. Hello. Hi. Hello. Hi. The hardest thing about finding or getting Linux on this, the hardest thing about this

hack is getting an older version of the PlayStation. So he uses this jailbreak. And now the Cobra team is working on another thing, too, that's going to make it even easier. It's like a full Linux distro ready to go. So you've got a jailbreak. Then you've got another team that's working on the Linux thing specifically. And they've been demoing software running on the PS4 using hardware. And then on top of that, you've got another team that's working on packaging it all up and making it super easy to use.

Oh, that's cool. Yeah. So there is a lot coming down the pipe for the PlayStation 4, making it possibly a really cool little powerful Linux compute machine. All thanks to a jailbreak found back in December. Just one more computer you can run Linux on and not play games.

No, that's mean. No, it's about dead on. You're right about that. Damn it, Wes. Damn it. Is Josh in the virtual log this week? I don't see him in there, son of a gun.

I was going to ask him just how much he, how does he get so much damn attention for Solace? You know, I've been thinking about this. We go through the headlines every single week. In fact, I said 30 on the pre-show. I bet you it was damn near 50 links that between you, myself, and the beard, we went through damn near 50 links, different stories. And we do like four project updates at the top of Linux Unplugged.

And we go through like 50 stories to figure out which of the four we're going to put in the show. And we're just like, you know, which ones do we even feel like talking about? That's really what's good for us to talk about, what's going to make a good discussion, what's good for the audience to know about. And one that's always in the news feeds, like almost on a damn weekly basis. the news feeds, like almost on a damn weekly basis, you would think, right, like out of all the distributions out there, Ubuntu and Linux Mint and OpenSUSE and Arch and Fedora, if I'm going to tell you one of these distributions in the news every week, you're going to say, oh, well, it's Ubuntu. Well, maybe.

But one that is surprisingly in the news every single damn week practically is Solace. And Josh was doing a post over at Solace. They have This Week in Solace, the 20th edition, actually, where he talks about the entire project getting a rebrand, in a sense, a rebrand of a consistent brand, I guess I should say, and something else. They talk about a brand-new software center. There's no getting around the fact that the software center in Solus 1.1 sucks,

Josh writes. Software discoverability and ease of use for installation of software is incredibly important to us, and we want to tackle it with urgency. So we're doing something about it now. This cycle. And it's going to be amazing. Now, is it the way they talk?

Is that why we cover not necessarily we, we cover only some of what gets reported on? Yeah, I mean, it's that combination. They have opinions and they're moving fast. Our current thing sucks and we acknowledge it instead of being like all hoity-toity about it and being like, well, there's a lot of priorities. Because they're so new. They don't have a lot of image and ego yet just because –

Well, their image almost is like, yeah, we'll just tell it like it is. Yeah. Which I like. Yeah. I mean we've talked to them and they are straightforward. It is. Yeah, we have. And tell it like it is. Yeah. Which I like. Yeah. I mean, we've talked to them and they are straightforward. It is. Yeah, we have. And Josh.

Josh is great. Yeah. And so is Ike. So, you know, or Ike. Yeah. Ike. I don't know. I just, I'm trying to wrap my head around this project, though, because for an upstart

distro built from scratch that's building its own software center from scratch. We don't talk about it like it's this crazy project that has no chance of succeeding that eventually the developers will just burn out and will go away. We talk about it like it's in the top 10 of DistroWatch or something. I don't know. I find it to be fascinating. What do you think, Rod and Corpse? We were kind of chatting about it offline a little bit. I'm curious your thoughts about it.

Yeah, I think it's because they do something that a lot of distros don't do, which is talk about it offline a little bit. I'm curious your thoughts about it. I think it's because they do something that a lot of distros don't do, which is talk about it. We talk about Solus because Solus talks about Solus. How often do people talk about OpenSUSE correlates to how OpenSUSE talks about OpenSUSE?

OpenSUSE has paid PR people. OpenSUSE pays to be part of opensource.com. They have Richard, who's on here often, and Richard, who's all over Reddit during comments. I mean, they have people out there talking. In fact, I'd say OpenSUSE has people talking a lot about OpenSUSE. Yeah, starting last – six months ago probably. Actually, not even that much really.

Last – six months ago probably. Actually, not even that much really. Like when they started talking about the new Leap and the new Tumbleweed stuff, then it started picking up and people talked about it. Before that, no one talked about open systems because they didn't. Now they're talking about it. Now Richard is more active in Reddit and here and a lot of places. Working hard over here. If you look at other distros, how often do they talk about anything like for example clem has never done an interview ever right no i i guess i see your point to an extent

make a release and that's it uh and so you think it's really just a matter of frequent hyper frequent updates well just the fact that they're open about it and they're – like Wimpy is for Ubuntu Manta. He's constantly talking about it. He's available to talk to if you want to in like forums and stuff. And with Solus, you can go to the Google Plus group or community and you can talk to them anytime you want to. And there's – they have – they're more accessible and they're more active in the discussion. You don't think that delivering to also has something to do with it? Like actually delivering on...

Well, yeah, it's definitely... The way they talk is also interesting in the way that they're consistently releasing new things and they're showing you that they are being consistent about it. But I think it's because that they're more open and transparent

about all of the stuff they're doing is gets you more interested in talking to them about it and using it and stuff like that. So, all right, here we are, and we're taking the bottom off the Apollo right now. Here's what I'm thinking. I don't think it's loose because the drive is screwed down. I mean the little PCI SSD is screwed down with a screw right there. So it's not a matter of being loose. It's possible it died.

I was hoping it was just not in the slot. Right. That would be the ideal case. I mean, maybe it's a little cattywampus. What do you think, Wes? Is it a little cattywampus in the slot? Maybe just a little bit? It could be

oh man it would save me so much time if I didn't have to reload that machine I just reloaded that machine to Arch not like but what a week or two ago after yeah well good point Rotten and I say good on them and I say good on Josh and all of them for doing a good job with it because it's still fascinating to follow

I wasn't trying to make it seem like they weren't doing something good it's fantastic I just want. I wasn't trying to make it seem like they weren't doing something good. It's fantastic. I just want more distros to do it. You know, speaking of things that distros should do, there's not a nice way to talk about this next story. Mangero, their SSL certificate expired again. Can we just set a date to remind ourselves like didn't just

didn't it just happen a year ago it's just his calendar yeah i know right also very good at this like yeah 10 days before just set a reminder yeah yeah i agree north ranger i likely did not dislodge the m.drive but you never know you never know uh so they are working on switch to let's encrypt switch to Let's Encrypt going forward. They say that. Yeah, they say. Have an easier time. They say they might switch to Let's Encrypt to have – they say they apologize for the outage.

So if you're having any – There's actually a free service you can sign up for that will notify you just for this particular situation for certificates. If you're having any – you know what? It's funny. The Manjaro guy is good on them. They've built something that people like. But I got an email or a tweet. I can't remember what it was now

because it all runs together. I'm sorry. But I just got a note just before the show started saying, hey, I love Linux Unplugged and I switched over to Manjaro because of you guys. And I thought, oh, close. Close.

No cigar. Alright, well, that's fine. You cigar. Yeah, I thought, okay. All right, well, that's fine. You know what? It's great. And I hope you have fun playing with Arch, and Blandero can be whatever you want it. I think Ham, aren't you a Manjaro user? Are you still in the mumble room there, Ham?

I can't remember if he, I think he left, but I know when he was up here for editing, he was a pretty big fan of Manjaro, and he actually likes the slightly delayed updates. That's one of the things he actually prefers about it. Okay, interesting. I hadn't heard that before. Yeah, North Ranger, I don't know what show they listen to. I thought that was kind of funny, though. I did like that.

Hey, while we're at it, while we're talking about things that are funny, you know what's funny? How much I freaking love DigitalOcean. Oh, my gosh. I'm starting to wonder if it's some sort of disorder, Wes. It's getting embarrassing up in here. We have been building systems like nuts over DigitalOcean. Hey, are you still experimenting with the 16.04 over there on D.O.? Oh, yeah, with

LexD. Heck yeah. It's great. Are you using LexD on DigitalOcean? Yeah. Oh, that's pretty nice. It's very convenient. You can spin up maybe like a $10 rig and just put a bunch of containers on it. No kidding. Yeah, it's funny. When we talk about containers these days, we mostly talk about Docker. But that's out there and it's ready to go. DigitalOcean

is a simple cloud hosting provider that is dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way for you to spin up your rig up on their great systems. They're all SSDs, tier one bandwidth, data centers all over the world. And if you use the promo code D01plugged, all one word, lowercase, you get a $10 credit. And that $10

credit let you try that $5 rig. Two months, absolutely for free. They have hourly pricing if you just want to try something out for a bit. If you're watching this live right now, you're watching it through a DigitalOcean droplet. If you're in our mumble room right now, you're on a DigitalOcean droplet. If you reply to me in the chat, you're replying to me from a DigitalOcean droplet. You know, and it's really, it's just so convenient. You can get them near you in a minute or less.

Yep, yep. And whatever size you need, and if you need to upgrade later, it's a so convenient. You can get them near you in a minute or less. Yeah, and whatever size you need, and if you need to upgrade later, it's a straightforward process. Backups and snapshots couldn't be easier because their interface is cray-cray easy. It's seriously slick. They have an API to match it. And then on top of all of that, redonkly good documentation. They have senior editors that they have on staff. Their job is to vet this stuff. And when community members who are often going to be brilliant,

which probably because a lot of them are you guys, they edit it. They check it. They vet it. DigitalOcean.com. Use the promo code D-O-Unplugged. Go spin up your next machine on DigitalOcean. It is fantastic.

One of the things I love, too, about it now is I have multiple droplets, many droplets over there, and just managing all of it is so straightforward. It's nice having it all under one house. Love it. Clean UI. Even though I have them in different parts of the world. This is really cool. DigitalOcean.com.

Use the promo code DEOUNPLUGGED. Big thanks to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Okay, Wes, did it boot Ubuntu? No, it did not. Oh, no, really? So it might be the slot in the motherboard. Oh, no. That is a bummer. I mean, I'm sure Entroware would

be up for fixing it, but the idea of being out without a computer for a couple of weeks is a major bummer, especially because it's got all those cool stickers on it. Wait, let me try. Are you going into the boot menu right now? Oh, Wes, this is tight. I don't know what to do.

Mumble Room, can someone in there console me? Come on, tell me it's going to be all right because I'm starting to worry. Oh, we have Ubuntu. Oh, okay. So the slot works. Okay, all right. I haven't screwed on the bottom. Yeah, that's it. Okay, good.

So should I try the other one again? I would try shutting it down and putting the other one back in there. Maybe it just got dislodged. Right. What I was talking to Wes about before the show is how great it would be to go out and do unplugged on location and do OBS from the Apollo. Have some beers. Yeah. Oh, man.

I think that Skylake CPU in there could handle it, but we will find out. Now, let's shift gears completely and talk about Unity 8. There's been... We have to, Chris. Just a quick one. An interesting development, just we'll move on from this, but Michael Hall, a canonical employee, as most of you know, has been dogfooding Unity 8, actually

trying it out on his own computer, and he has been blogging his journey. And it sounds mostly positive. He talks about the pros and cons, and I'll leave it to you to read it, including how to get it all installed if you want to try it and all of that good stuff and using traditional apps. But here's what he wrote.

Whenever you have a new desktop environment, which, of course, Unity 8 effectively is, and the latest UI toolkit, Qt 5, you have to be concerned about performance and resource use. And given the bleeding-head nature of Unity 8 on the desktop, I was expecting to sacrifice some CPU cycles, battery life, and RAM. But if anything, the opposite was the case. I get at least as many hours on my battery as I do with Unity 7,

and I was using less than half the RAM I typically do. That sounds nice. It does, doesn't it? Moreover, things I was expecting to cause me problems surprisingly didn't. I was able to use Google Hangouts for my video conferences, which I knew had to be enabled in the browser, and I fully expected Suspend and Resume to have trouble with Mir, given the years I spent with X11 in the past,

but it worked nearly flawlessly. He has some details below. Here's a couple things that didn't work. Unity 8 is still very bleeding edge as a desktop shell, and if you want to use it, you need to be prepared for some pain. Hasn't been bad enough to stop him yet, but he's had issues like middle click paste doesn't work when you have highlighted text, which you kind of realize how much you become dependent on that once you don't have it. Yes, you do.

Oh, man. Yeah. You can't copy between mirror and X mirror windows yet, which makes it super not easy. And Unity 8 itself doesn't super support multiple windows for per application, one app per app, one window per app. OK. Yeah. But, yeah, otherwise, he's using it. Unity 8 is being used right now.

Anybody in the Mumba room trying it? Come on, somebody. Nobody? Oh, come on. Well, Wes, you know what that means. You should try it. I have to try it. Oh, man.

All right. I'm just kidding. If there's some good instructions for it, I mean, I'll do it. All right. So here, I'll take over. Here, let me take over because I want to hear your thoughts about Fedora 24 here in a moment. So I'll batten down the hatches. Here, hand me the screwdriver. And you, sir, pretty much damn near every week, although this week is an exception,

have been formatting your rig and trying out distros so you can give us impressions here on this show, stuff that we might not normally dedicate like an entire review segment to, but ones that we thought, hey, let's just check in on and see what Wes thinks. So, Wes, you've been trying out Fedora 24 beta or attempting to try out Fedora 24.

Tell me how it's been going. Well, okay, to be fair, I do format or partition this hard drive a lot. So at this point, there's probably like three or four operating systems on there. And it kind of changes all the time. I don't always have a good index of like what's on here or not. But it's kind of a good test too because I'm never like – I almost never wipe the entire drive. I have some kind of document on here I want or a system I was playing with.

So Fedora did have that stacked against them. So they get their own flash drive, boot it into it, and go to set it up like normal, click through it at first, and it looks very nice. And I always appreciate Fedora's boot up. They have a very nice, usually it's pretty polished. Consistent. GNOME is good. They know what they're doing.

Yeah, exactly. And they usually have Plymouth enabled, and the entire boot up experience is pleasant. like Plymouth enabled and the entire boot up experience is pleasant. But once I got into the installer, I just – the Anaconda like partitioning and file system selection screen, I just can't – Laravel says that they've mucked up Anaconda again over on Pharonix. Yeah. I mean I don't know what the state it was in before. It's always changing. It's never been my favorite installer, but it's just i as chris saw i was trying to just install it root you know everything into one

partition ext4 simple install grub on the main drive there's only one drive in the machine and it's telling me i need to make a boot slash efi partition but it's not efi it's not gpt it's just mbr bios it's very strange. So I would really like to play with it more. It was a pretty vanilla setup. Oh! The hard drive just fell out of the bottom of it. Oh, boy.

Well, let's see. Watch as Chris breaks the Librem here, folks. No, this is the Apollo. The Apollo, excuse me. All right. So I put the PCI SSD in that has Antergos in there, and survey says we're not booting. So that sucker. Oh, man.

And it was selected, that one in the BIOS? It should be. Yeah, I'm pretty sure. I should probably put the hard drive that fell out back in, but yeah. So is that? Oh, man, that's rough. Yeah, dude. the hard drive that fell out back in. But yeah. So is that – oh, man. That's rough. Yeah, dude.

I wonder why that would just drop dead. You know, the thing about Newegg is I have gotten burned several times now by Newegg on returns. And I don't like to do returns because who has the time? Ain't nobody got time for that, Wes. And so – but we did – we had a machine that we got that was no good. And it was one of these things where I literally bought it on Newegg because Newegg takes Bitcoin. And that was like the reason I got it. I have Bitcoin. Yes.

And I needed a machine. And so the machine came in and the CPU was dead. Bad CPU. Or the motherboard or something. And of course it's a completely built machine, so we just send it back. And they rejected our return for whatever reason. So I don't know. So with this, this was bought on Newegg as well.

Classic Newegg. Yeah, I just, I don't know. I feel super defeated. I feel like a bit of a fool for getting into buying parts anymore. I should just buy computers and have everything soldered on because apparently that's the only thing that works. No, no, no. Just buy from Amazon.

They don't care what you return to them. Yeah, sure. No, that's fine. Get Amazon to take Bitcoin. You know, Mac OS X, that's Unix, Chris. That might be a nice MacBook. You'll have no complaints. Got your back, whatever.

Jeez. So you weren't able to get too far in the Fedora 24 process, huh? No, not really. I'm sorry. I mean, I'll play with it more. And when in Fedora 24, I'm sure I'll install it. Yeah, absolutely. Like, it's nothing against.

It's more just like, I don't like how in the Ubuntu installer, it's really easy to just pick your partition, tell to format it make it root and go and this it's like it's a little unclear because it kind of lists your other linux installations but it doesn't give you maybe it's better for new users new users i'm not sure but as someone who understands disk partitioning it's frustrating to not have a real representation of what the disk looks like and be able to understand that or like have an accounting of how much free space is on the disc. Or, you know, it's like I would just want G-parted and do it and be done with it. That's probably the way to go then.

Yeah, that's what I'll probably do. Yeah. All right, so I'm thinking we should probably swap back to the – Yeah, I'll pop that back in. Which is a bummer. See, this is a 256, and that's a 120. 120. And that's why I wanted to go to this.

And this is a Samsung 850. And this is a 256, and that's a 120. And that's why I wanted to go to this. And this is a Samsung 850. And this is a Kingston. You'd think this would be the higher quality part. That's a nice drive. But it's, jeez. So anyways, that's just sort of depressing because that means I have to reload my machine for like a third time. Should we just put Fedora 24 beta on here while we're doing this? Yeah, that should be great.

See if it can handle the M2. Now we've got wallpapers available for Fedora 24 beta on here while we're doing this. Yeah, that should be great. See if it can handle the M2. Now, we've got wallpapers available for Fedora 24. Extra wallpapers, and they're actually pretty nice. Yeah, some of these are pretty nice. I normally don't mention this kind of stuff because I know you guys are like, oh, it doesn't really matter. But I actually think they're pretty cool, so we'll link to them in the show notes.

I didn't love the default background of the stars, like the starry thing. I thought it was okay, actually. I mean, I don't know. All right, that's just me. Yeah, you're right. It's a little underwhelming, I guess. Because that's it right there if you're watching the video version.

It's okay. I feel like real stars would have been prettier, though. Ooh. Yeah, that's true. That's true. That's true. So I guess the lesson learned there is just wait. Although, if you're able to get it and try it out.

Yes, I'll see if I get a shot next week. There's a bunch of really kind of interesting spins releasing right now, too, on Ubuntu 16.04. I've been noticing a lot of distros like Easy Linux and a couple other ones that have come out recently that are all based on Ubuntu 16.04. So it's like now is the time when an avalanche of those is landing. And there's also been a lot of Linux Mint news, which we're going to get to more Linux Mint stuff here in a bit.

But yeah, I thought I'm looking for the name of the, oh yeah, okay, here's the other one. This was the other one. It's called like Erk Linux or something like this. It was launched. Arook? Arook, yes. Did you hear about this?

Yeah, it was based on TriSQL, right? Yeah, or Triskel, but now it's based on Ubuntu 16.04. Oh. Yeah. So, yeah. And so, yeah. There you go. Real-time follow-up from BC in the chat room talking about using Bitcoin with Amazon.

Oh, it's back. Oh, look at that. A gift had actually been disabled to purchase Amazon gift cards with Bitcoin. That is a little workaround. If you have some Bitcoin and you want to buy on Amazon, you can buy gift cards. Oh, that's nice. Yeah, except for at the beginning of May, they weren't accepting Bitcoin for Amazon. So I couldn't do that.

They had shut down for a while. It was bad timing. It was bad timing. That's why I seriously, like on the last one, I was pleading with System76 to accept Bitcoin. I mean it. I really do mean it. Just please. Please.

I love this Apollo. And it's not the Apollo's fault that the Samsung drive died. No. You know? It's not. No. But it's a bit of a setback. My condolences, Chris.

It's not like I spilled beer all over it or anything. At least you have a backup. Yeah. An M2. Yeah, that's true. That's true. And it could have been worse. It could have gotten beer spilled all over it.

Speaking of which, how are you enjoying the beer? It's good. Yeah. It's quite hoppy. Yeah, it is. It is, really. I'm about halfway done with mine. Not my favorite IPA,

but it's enjoyable. So I guess we're already done with the... Hold on, let me bring it back. We're already done with the Apollo sickbay. We've figured out that it is indeed the drive

and that problem solved and I can either just use Ubuntu again or reload that with Arch. Wipe it and reload. I expected that to take us the entire episode. Good job, Wes. We're an efficient pair.

It's because Noah's not here, I think. Hello, everybody. There you go. That's a good one. I like that. Okay, so we have to talk about Mint. Everyone else is. Right.

When I said earlier in the show that I was getting kind of grumpy and cranky, I actually think it's because of the stuff I was talking about with Mint on the Linux Action Show. And I do want to make a correction to my coverage. So really briefly, for those of you who didn't see last week's episode, because I'm sure that's plenty of you, I sort of took the position and argument that Mint is entering into an era of unprecedented technical debt for a project their size. With their continuation of Mate based on GTK2, with their forking of many standard desktop apps to X apps, with their themes, with Cinnamon and the Mate project in general, or Mate project in general. I kind of was trying to build a case that there's a technical debt that they're entering here.

Now, I did make the inaccurate statement that the X apps were based on GTK2. That is not true. They're based on GTK3. Right. That's the kind of part of the point of them. Right. Yeah. And I think that's mostly because they just don't really care about that point because that's not really my

point. That's not your problem with it. These apps are being forged. But I should be accurate when I'm talking about it. So I apologize for that mistake. So I kind of wanted to get your thoughts on it as I know you've been a... Are you running Mint right there on that laptop now? It's one of the partitions.

Yeah. And you're running Mint right there on the Bonobo. Yes. And I just want to give the virtual log a chance to talk about this issue in general, and maybe we could talk wider, too, about the... Well, one of the things that offends me about this entire Mint situation, and I think the biggest part is the X-Apps.

I feel like that was the line that was too far, and I don't know why. I just feel like that was sort of the line that felt like there was a bit of curmudgeon stick in the mud. We can do this better than other people. And then it was all sold to us in a, these will be for all distributions, rallying cry, which is so often the rallying cry of the random forker. Oh, this is for all. When in reality, it's for your own project. And so the arrogance of it sort of smacked me in the face. And so that was sort of a line that they crossed as a project with me that made me sort of reevaluate sort of the long-term realistic viability I think they have as a project.

And so I tried to sort of talk about that on Sunday's show, but it was in the context of covering the news, and it just wasn't really the best place to do it. And I wanted to see if maybe you guys think I got something wrong. Maybe I should walk it back a bit. So we're going to talk about that just for a moment in the show. Because in the show notes, I put it as, is mint too big to fail? I put it as, is Mint too big to fail? Sort of, you know, obviously tongue-in-cheek play on the banks. But when you have a distribution, I just read this stupid blog post from one of these random tech sites that gets some traffic.

Top 10 Linux distributions of 2016. Okay. Yep. One of those. Yeah. Number one distro. Linux Yeah. Number one distro. Linux Mint. Number one distro.

And they're always like this. DistroWatch, top of the list, Linux Mint. There is a position of public perception that Linux Mint enjoys that only Ubuntu rivals and likely surpasses. Ubuntu rivals and likely surpasses. And so the idea that Linux Mint could collapse, probably to a lot of us seems, oh, that's impossible. That's impossible, Chris. They're a staple in the community.

But is it more like because if they did collapse, we would look like such a bunch of clown shoes as a community that we can't even fathom it? Because it seems like that's where we're headed. So maybe I'm getting worked up here, but I want to talk about that with you guys and why I think it's a huge deal more and maybe better state my case. So I'm going to start by mentioning Ting. Let's start right here by mentioning Ting. Everybody right now, linux.ting.com.

Let's all go there like a group mind. We don't need the Borg to act as one group mind. Linux.ting.com. You go there, you get a discount, and you support this show. If you've got a phone, Ting's going to give you a credit. If you don't have a phone, and you might have a phone that works, you should check it out because they've got CDMA and GSM. But if you don't have a phone, they give you $25 to buy something nice. They've got a bunch of great unlocked phones you can get directly or you can go get really, I mean, there's all these great phones at Ting.

Everything from the budget, like you can just get the SIM card, or a feature phone for $60, or all the way up to the Cadillacs, the S7s and the internet phone 6Ss and the 6Ps and whatnot. But I really am a huge fan of the 5X, if you can afford it. I think it's a great budget phone. You can get it from Ting or Google Play, and you can just bring it over right now. It's perfect in that sense on Ting, because you have an unlocked device, getting Google updates directly on a pay-for-what-you-use mobile service provider, and the 5X supports GSM or CDMA. It's the perfect situation.

You can pop in the SIM and activate it on their website, never talk to him, even if you want, although they have great customer service. You pay for what you use on all their devices. Unlimited devices, just $6 a month for the line, and then whatever you got to pay Uncle Sam. And then you just pay for your usage. It's brilliant. You want Hotspot or Tethering? Turn it on. Before I had Ting, I had to call my mobile service provider and say, I would like to get Hotspot. I would like to be able to use The Hotspot checkbox that's built Into my operating system

Oh okay well Mr. Fisher you need to sign up for our Family share plan or well we can Give you an extra two gigs a month with It was redonkulous I hated it not with Ting Plus they have great tools to give you total control Over your account on your phone or through any Device through the web people love

Ting and Ting is great. Go check them out. From SIM cards starting at $9, the Ancetel OneTouch Fling, $63. Now you can get into an LG Vault 2 for $66. What? Linux.Ting.com. Go there and try them out. The Ancetel OneTouch Idol 3 is also a great phone for under $200.

The original OG Nexus 5. Again, a Google Experience phone. Unlocked. The original OG Nexus 5, again, a Google experience phone, unlocked, CDMA or GSM, right on the Ting network for under $200. You know what we forgot to mention about this? All these phones, they're running Linux. That is cool, huh? That is really something. Except for that internet phone right there. Right, right. They're running that thing that Alan likes, though. So you've got to give them something, I suppose. Tomato, tomato.

The Note 5 is, boy, you know, if I was in the market right now and I was, that Note 5 has such a killer camera. And then they just added the S7. You can get these phones also on your own and then bring them over to Ting as well. That's one of the best parts about Ting. Linux.Ting.com. And a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring the show and thanks to you guys who listen and go there because

you taking that couple of minutes out of your day keeps the show on the air. Linux.Ting.com go learn more about them. So let's start with the positive stuff. There is, I think, a pretty nice look coming to Linux Mint 18. This is their new flatter Mint Y theme.

So Mint X will be the default theme in Sarah. That's the next release. And Mint Y is going to be this new Ark Boca-based theme thing. And I think it looks pretty sharp. I think it looks good. I'll give credit where credit is due. I think they're doing a good job. I like the way they're rolling this out.

I like all of it. I do. I like all of it. I want to read you, though, a little verbiage in the introduction of the new theme. And maybe I'm parsing words, but, you know, words matter because I think they reflect quite a bit. So when Clem was writing about this new theme, we talked about a new theme and we noticed. This is Clem. Some of you were also scared of the changes this would introduce.

And I think using the word scared right there is particularly interesting. I think it reveals a little bit into how he perceives his user base. We don't want to change styles just because we think it might look better. We'll provide both styles to you, which I think that's a great way to go. Eventually, if the day comes where a huge majority prefer the new theme, then we'll follow that and start using it as a new default. Also, I really like the way he says that. So I'm, you know, I just, when I hear scared, though, I don't know if I, that almost sounds demeaning a little bit. And so it goes, as we continue on, Linux Mint 18 will also drop multimedia support.

No more codex installations. And it sounds like mostly because OEMs and magazines wanted the no codex CD. And because making two sets of CDs, which is multiple, there's multiple SKUs of those, was a lot of work. Instead of just not having a no codex version, they're going to have a... That's the only version. That's the only version, yeah. Which leads me to my next and final question before I toss it to you in the mumble room. What the hell is the point of Linux Mint now?

That's a good question. Because when I trolled around on the internet and I found a few people that had answers, before some of these decisions, one answer was, well, I dislike Unity, and I just want something that's not Unity by default really quick. And this is well before a lot of Ubuntu flavors were established. Another common answer, easy ability to play DVDs. Very relevant. Yeah, not super relevant anymore and not hard to fix under Ubuntu anymore.

And then this is another common one. Wanting to give Shottoworth the middle finger for cramming Unity down my throat, but that middle finger has been extended for long enough. And I actually think that last one is very telling. People were pissed about Ubuntu, people

were pissed about Unity. They were. They were pissed about... I was one of the ones that kind of fled from it. And you know what? That rage has started to fade. And so now that is no longer a reason to use Mint. And now Ubuntu Mate has taken many reasons away from using

Mint. And now last but not least, removing the codecs seems like it takes yet another set of reasons. So what's left? Is it an old implementation of Mate? Is it their one-off Cinnamon Island? Is it them not installing security updates? Is it improper web administration?

What is the big feature left for using Mint? And you use Mint, so you tell me, Wes. You know, I think I do have Mint installed, but I don't see myself installing any new Mint. I think that it really was like them removing the codecs. It doesn't like that actual loss of value isn't that much these days, but I feel like it's very telling and like it reminds me of why I came to Mint or like why when it was first popular,

I was an Ubuntu user. I had friends using Mint and that was like a huge reason for them. It was just, it was Ubuntu, but you know, maybe they liked the interface better and it looked a little better and it wasn't so, you know, Ubuntu. And now, you know, and there's lots of times where it's like, oh, GNOME was changing and Cinnamon or before, you know, Linux Mint was a very stable place. It just worked. You had the stuff you need. You could install it anywhere. You knew you had VLC. You could just play whatever

you wanted. It was really easy. But these days, Ubuntu isn't hard, and there's so many options. There is Ubuntu Mate, and Linux Mint kind of lags behind as well. Like, there's all this excitement right now about 16.04, and, like, you can get 16.04 Mate right now and have a great experience, but where's Linux Mint 18?

We're waiting for that. Yeah, and why are we waiting? Why are we waiting for that? Because it's not like they were pumping out a bunch of intermediary releases. And I also feel like you're right that they are taking on a lot, and it's not like, clearly they do some things well, and I like Cinnamon, and there are parts about it that I will

always think, that's good. I would argue that this is why we're waiting. But this is why we're waiting, and it's also, I don't know that, like, some of the things they're doing is necessarily what they should be doing, and I worry that, one of the things I always liked about Linux Mint, and what you liked about when we reviewed 17.3 is like the attention to the detail, the nice like,

oh, the integration with the music. Those are things where like they really do, I think, understand a certain subset of Linux users and what they want. I think they know that. Yeah, those sound like elementary OS users.

Right. And if they don't focus on that, like the other parts, like I don't know if like, yeah. And at the same time, it's like, well, if they, I don't know if I want them making these universal apps when there are also other people making individual apps that maybe have more design experience or app experience or just

more experience in general yeah well put wes uh anybody in the mumble room want to jump in with their thoughts on the state of mid anybody have a counter take you're welcome to jump into i'd love to hear that argument um because to me it's seeming like it's becoming case closed. And I hate to think that way because Clem and team have worked very hard on this for a long time. I know Ladies Night 62 in there had some similar thoughts. Did you want to jump in? Mr. Night?

No. Hmm. All right. Well, Poppy, I noticed you joined in. I wonder if you wanted to – in the past, you and I have chatted about sort of Mint as an overall contributor and citizen to the open source community. Do you feel like their stance there has begun to catch up with them? Oh, sorry. There you go.

Sorry, Poppy. I had you muted like a jerk. I'm sorry. That's fine jerk uh i uh i don't know i i kind of think the the whole codec thing is overblown i think maybe eight years ago that was a thing like you know i need my div x codecs i need my codec pack like the people the people who ran Windows whatever back then would go hunting down the best codec pack.

And, oh, no, you get the green screen on your video playback or you get vertical lines or whatever. Oh, you need the latest codecs. This is 2016, people. You don't need shonky codecs. I used to pay for mine from Fluendo. Remember that? Oh, wow, right.

Yeah, exactly. It's a lunacy. It's 2016, right? Codec things are not an issue now unless you get your shonky video from like off the back of a lorry or something. But that's not an issue. So I actually don't think it's a big problem that they're stopping distributing a version of the ISO that has the codecs bundled in.

I think that's the right thing to do because I don't think- Legally, they probably- Yeah, I agree. I don't think they had the permission to do that in the codex bundled in. I think that's the right thing to do because I don't think... Legally, they probably... Yeah, I agree. I don't think they had the permission to do that in the first place. And I think this makes them a better upstanding citizen for doing that. So I think that's actually the right thing to do.

But I don't see how that's a problem. I don't think that's a rock that we need to throw at them. I think there are other things that I would worry about with Mint, but they have a very wide and diverse user base and they have a lot of people contributing monetarily to the product. I know we have a lot of fans in the audience. No, I think the reason why the CODA things come up is because it's sort of like the temperature in the boiling water just got turned up a lot.

And people are like, wait a minute, wait a minute. Where does Mint fit in now exactly? For a lot of people, it was, oh, this is how I get my codex. And as each one of these different categories gets filled in by either another distro or by their decisions, I think more and more people kind of wake up and go, well, now, wait a minute. And I guess I'd turn my question back to you. If it's not their security practices and sort of forking their own applications and things like that, what is it in your estimation that, I guess put very frankly, Popey, prevents you from installing Mint? Why don't you run Linux Mint?

Because I'm one of those perverse people who actually like Unity. Alright. I don't believe you, but no. There's a surprising number of us out there, you know, and despite what everyone might say and sticking the finger to Mark, well done, but

actually there's still a whole lot of us who quite like using this thing. And it hasn't moved a lot in years, and it's you know, you could argue it's stale and it needs a refresh here and there. And fair enough. I accept all those arguments. But I don't see why – It's not competitive sour grapes, is it? I mean it's not competitive that he was able to take that product and then branch off a whole bunch of separate users that found it to be a superior product.

Personally, no. of separate users that found it to be a superior product personally no i think i think it's fantastic that someone could take the ubuntu base and create a derivative distribution that has a huge number of users uh i'm not happy about certain things like the you know the security model that they have i've never been a big fan of holding back updates from users but but that's their choice that they've chosen for their user base. And their user base seem to be accepting of that. And many of their users, technically inclined users, will defend the position that Clem has taken with the way Linux Mint distributes their updates and makes their system defaults. And that's fine. And they have a wide and diverse user base.

They've got lots of people who give their hard-earned cash voluntarily. You know, it's not a subscription service. They voluntarily give their money to Linux Mint to say thank you to Clem for creating what he's done. So he must have done something right for all these people to be using it and for people to give him the money. Technically-minded folks. Technically- minded folks,

Popey says. So Wimpy, as a technically minded folk, are you looking at the X apps as a possibility? I don't know. People may not realize. Wimpy has a Mate-based desktop distribution that he is familiar with. And I'm just curious,

as somebody who's familiar with the Mate-based desktop, are the X apps appealing to you in any way? Most of the X apps are stripped-down versions of the Mate desktop applications with the desktop integration removed and built against GTK3. Right. So Puma's been recalled to Xed or xed uh i have gnome is now called x viewer uh x reader is a trilly totem is called x player etc etc these are the x apps yeah and yeah and some of those that you've mentioned are the marty desktop apps and so Marte has its suite of tools and applications,

and then we found other utilities to fill the gaps for media playback and stuff. So now I'm not going to be using the X apps. So what is the niche they're filling? Can you help, just in your opinion, give me an understanding of that? Why do I need XPlayer over Totem or VLC? If I'm using these X apps, I must need this over something. What is it that it's doing exactly? What's it enabling?

I think this is more a development-focused decision rather than an end-user-focused decision. is more a development-focused decision rather than an end-user-focused decision. By forking these applications, you can choose what toolkit version to target when you build them, and then you have a degree of predictability about how they're going to behave against a targeted toolkit over their two-year period.

That just sounds like you're planning for obsolescence. You're planning to use old code. You're planning to be stale. Or planning to be predictable. You know, it's Clem's decision, and I think it's a development decision to streamline the development process as much as possible so there aren't going to be any unexpected changes throughout the course of that version's life cycle you know i people have also said the same thing about the way security updates are handled right is it's it's for the

users it's for the end users is it or is it so that way there's not a whole bunch of support issues? Somewhere in between, probably. It's probably not. I've never been a fan of the update model in Linux Mint. So, yeah, I think it's more about not introducing change that might introduce support issues. And if you read back through some of the Mint release notes,

the words sort of reinforce that mindset that, you know, if it's not broken, don't update it. Yeah. I suppose, like Ike says, is Ike in the mobile room? He should be. Because like he just said, it reminds him of what Cinnamon is in general. I suppose that's a good point. So Wes Jeff 2 asked in the chat room.

He says, are the X apps just applicable to Mint Mate? Essentially, that's the only place they're going to get used. That's so functionally. They're intended to be everywhere. Yeah, they're going to the Cinnamon version and the Ubuntu version as well, I think. Maybe not the KDE version. I mean, I don't follow those particularly closely. Why would any other project use these?

I guess that's what I'm not understanding about this. It seems like these would have very minimal appeal. I could see Zubuntu using them for a release cycle. I guess that makes sense. Yeah, that's true. But I wouldn't want... Well, I mean, Zubuntu is still using XFCs, which is still GTK2, so they might have a benefit.

But in general, nothing. I guess what I... Here's where this sounds like we are introducing a very minute level of fragmentation everywhere. When we have Puma and we have Zed and we have G-Edit and we have Kate and we have K-Write and we have Nano and we have Vim and we have Emacs and we have – I mean the list goes on and on. We have – You're making me dizzy over here. You forgot the Electron stuff too. What drives me crazy right now is I could install Ubuntu Mate

and I could get one text editor and then I install Linux Mint Mate and I get an entirely different text editor even though I'm choosing the Mate desktop. And as an end user, how the hell am I supposed to keep that straight? Oh, sure, maybe we can keep it straight. I mean, maybe, maybe. Or maybe I will forget it after this episode and I won't be able to remember which distribution has what. I just find it to be, what I find it to be is typical.

I find it to be disappointing and typical of the Linux community. This is the typical crap that we do that makes it completely confusing to new users to come to Linux. And you have to be like Leo Laporte and spend three months and have 22 flash drives to try out different distributions. Or you have to be like Chase Nunes and have an entire show built around you deciding which distribution to use because there's so much damn choice. And then

we pat ourselves on the back and we say, good job everybody. Now we've got choice. Good job. Well, good job everybody. This is a good one. And job. Well, good job, everybody. This is a good one. And it's ridiculous that we have our text editors. It's our text editors that are this fragmented now. It's just like all this stuff. How many file managers do we need? I know this is an old horse that I don't need to keep kicking, so I'll move on. But it's just disappointing.

It is frustrating sometimes, yeah. I guess I saw – here's why I guess I'm kind of upset about it. I guess I sort of saw a point with ButterFS and containers and GTK3 and SystemD and everybody now being on a modern Linux 4 kernel. So much of the Linux landscape sort of began to coalesce in a way that- You could have a standard. Linux, well, not even a standard, but a platform that is reasonable and rational to target. That was beginning to emerge. A rational target for a developer.

A rational target for somebody to build a product around. Something that didn't need something like Android that was something that was, as a product manager, you're able to wrap your head around. Something that just looked nice and simple and uneasy to understand. It didn't mean something like Android that was something that was – as a product manager, you're able to wrap your head around. Something that just looked nice and simple and uneasy to understand. And here we are now, midway – not even midway into 2016, and it's a total clown show. All right. End of rant.

I'm just – go ahead and disagree, please. I don't think this is an example of the clown show. I mean, yeah, it's an excessive amount of applications that really don't need to exist. And I don't think anybody has a reason why Mint would do that. But that's just an example of a bad decision by OneDistro. So if someone builds an app image or a Snap package or whatever, it can be spread across a lot of places. App images everywhere. You can run that anywhere you want to. Even Snappy

has not even been around a month yet and you can run it on pretty much every official flavor of Ubuntu you want to. That'll probably be the best way to install applications on Mint 18 because it's going to be... The best thing about Mint 18 is it'll be based on 16.04.

And I think they'll probably iron out some of the rough edges that Noah was going on about again this week on last. Yeah, pretty soon we're just not going to have anything to complain about. Good. Good. I don't like... People don't like it when I get grumpy. They don't like it. And I don't like it either. You have to defend yourself. It's a whole thing.

Well, and this Mint stuff in particular has me particularly grumpy. So it's okay. It's all right. I'll be all right. There's an interesting benefit of the new 16.04 release is that, you know, the issue of the GNOME software fork not working with local devs, it actually brought to light that the new version of Apt has a built-in local dev install. So you just do sudo apt install and then put the path to the dev and it just installs it and handles the dependencies and everything.

That is nice to know. That is nice. Good tip. Good tip. Anybody else have thoughts on Mint? Anybody want to take a counter? Because I know we have a lot of Mint fans, and I say all these things, and then I install Mint, and I do kind of get it. Like, that machine right there is running Mint.

It's been running Mint since we reviewed it in LAS. True to my word, I've been running production now for months, and it's a rock-solid rig. It really, yeah. I mean. But I don't do anything with it. I just run, you know, Mumble and web browsers't do anything with it. I just run Mumble and web browsers and that's it. That's pretty much my situation as well.

So when I use Mint I do kind of grok where he's going with it, Clem. I do kind of grok where he's going with it. But then when I look at it from a broader ecosystem perspective I get real frustrated. And the reason why I particularly have a lot of momentum behind this frustration is I really feel like they're in an important position.

Like I got these – They have a lot of goodwill and presence in the Linux community, especially for newcomers. And a lot of attention. Yeah. And I – I mean I just – I feel like we got a little taste of it when that security thing went down. When that security thing went down, we got a little taste of it, Wes. Dude, they're still number one on DistroWatch? Yes, of course.

Of course. They have been for a long time, haven't they? It's kind of weird how they're number one when every version of Mint is actually included all in the same result, and at the same time, they don't even have their own user agents that they press. So how does DistroWatch actually get that information? same result and at the same time they don't even have their own user agents that they press so like how does how does distro watch actually get that information i've actually asked them and they won't tell me like that's that's um you know proprietary information well it's based on it's

the the the the charts are generated on interest on the distro watch site so the people that are visiting the distribution – Right, but they're not saying is it just the actual page or is it a user agent? It can't really be a user agent, so how are they getting it? And they said they have multiple factors they use, but they won't tell me what that was. Yeah, I don't buy that the number one page getting hit on DistroWatch.com is Mint Linux. That doesn't seem – I did just say that as a joke.

So just so you know. I know, but it is a thing, and it does get quoted all the time. Yeah, people use it all the time. Yeah, yeah. As if it's a fact that it's the best because of that. And if you go to any conference and somebody does a talk about Linux distribution share, they always, always, always cite DistroWatch. Always.

And I don't – it's like – but DistroWatch numbers are just simply reflective of traffic within DistroWatch. So a lot of people. I think I'll make a collection of here's what Mint has and here's all the official flavors of Ubuntu and see what the difference is. I would bet it's massively for the Ubuntu stuff. Yeah. Well, okay.

All right. yeah well okay all right so uh closing thoughts from the oh um um night uh ladies night did you want to jump in with your uh your mint thoughts before we wrapped up because i know you did you were muted earlier sure i i kind of just agreed with what you guys said i i don't personally use mint i don't know at this point i think in the past they were you know really popular and still are popular but i think they've um you know kind of been replaced or at least there's other distros that you know provide the same thing that they're offering and so they're not unique anymore oh man geez this is the episode everybody's gonna hate because all the mint listeners are gonna listen in and they're gonna hate us i feel really bad about it so listen next week if you want to do a little follow-up you

are totally welcome you listener out there to join us in the Mumble Room and tell us where we've gotten things wrong. Because I was really hoping somebody in the Mumble Room would step up and defend Mint because I didn't want it to be a total Mint hate session. That's not hate. It's just we're just questioning what's happening. Mint has a good user experience in the sense of like the updates that they have, the structured things, so like yes one through five thing i mean that's nice for some people i've got people on mint that you know enjoy that because it's really easy to deal with and they don't have to worry about something breaking and so i guess there's that yeah and and speed testing the mirrors totally solid really awesome and going to be completely made irrelevant by snap packages ubuntu does that as well yeah I think the

I don't know I think the updater and the PBA manager built into Mint are kind of nice but I'm not joking when I say when we switch over to snap packages you won't be using those tools to update your system anymore so that's a short term win I know

sorry I didn't dang it I was trying to end on a positive note. But on the upside, on the upside. There is one positive note. One of the releases on the news, they did say that they're going to use Mate 1.14 at least and might even do 1.16. So they're not necessarily staying back on the old versions of Mate. That would be good. I don't totally – see, for me, and maybe, Wimpy, can you clear it up for me? I don't understand where the line is with Mate.

I don't – for me, I know there's one version that's more GTK, one version is GTK3, one is GTK2. I don't – how do I, as sort of a mate observer i'm a tab observer how do i keep it straight right so all of mate can be built by the distro maintain that against the tool toolkit that they choose so there is one version of mate the current version is 1.14 you can choose to compile that against gtk2 or you can choose to compile it against GTK3. Some distributions are going to start building it against GTK3 because we now feel that it's ready, and some distributions will continue to build it against GTK2

because they feel it needs a bit longer. I see. And by some distributions, is it Zubuntu and... No, not Zubuntu, because it's Mate. So it's Linux Mint Mate that's not going to? As I understand it, Linux Mint 18 is going to build Mate against GTK2. Huh. So we're going to have sort of a split, is kind of what I'm seeing here.

And I don't understand. I don't quite understand what the impact of that is. Well, I think it will remain to be seen. I think the impact will be that in the Marte 1.14 development cycle, almost exclusively all of the development effort was focused on GTK3 support, improving GTK3 support, and some of the components in Marte build against gtk3 now subsequent development cycles will continue to be focused on gtk3 with the eventual goal to decommission gtk2 stuff that's not going to happen in

1.16 probably not in 1.18 because we'll keep it around long enough for people to transition but the other thing there's also pressure coming from distributions themselves so for example arch linux fedora debian all have bugs open about libraries they are seeking to deprecate because they're old and unmaintained and they raise bugs against the other software that uses these old deprecated libraries. I would imagine that's just the tip of the iceberg too. Yeah. So there's been pressure for some time to move Marte to GTK3 so that we can adopt the newer implementations of common libraries.

So things like the GTK source view for the editors and stuff, libvte for the terminals. I can't remember all of them, but there's a collection. So we're not being pressured or strong-armed, but there is some gentle pressure to sort of move people along

to the newer supported technologies. For example, some of the stuff, some of the libraries have security vulnerabilities and aren't maintained anymore. So you have to move to the newer versions of the libraries in order to get to the current version that is being security patched. You know what solves that? Snappy. Interesting.

I guess, yeah, that was... I got a tweet that said why would you want Matei to go to GTK3? That's the whole point of Matei is to be like Gnome 2 resurrected. And so that sort of explains that. It's mostly there's just a lot of other ecosystem pressures

and advantages. So realistically... That point I get a lot. So let's just make that absolutely clear. GTK 3 is not GNOME 3. A lot of people don't seem to be able to unpick those two things they seem to think that gtk3 means that you get some new desktop paradigm that's not what it means at all unless you're um a really observant mate user if you run mate 1.14 with the default matee theme, so not the Ubuntu Marte theme, the default theme that we developed in Marte,

on GTK 2, and you have another VM with it running the GTK 3 version, they are almost indistinguishable from one another. Right, we're just talking the toolkit here that the applications are using. Exactly, but the thing that's important about GTK 3, and the thing that's most important for me, not personally, but the thing I think is most important is GTK3 opens the gateway to high DPI. Oh, yes.

GTK2 doesn't do that. And the other benefit, and this is a longer term goal, is GTK3 opens the door to things like Wayland and Mir and GTK2 doesn't. So in order for the traditional desktop to remain relevant, we have to adopt the technologies that allow us to support the new technology. The light at the end of the tunnel is a fast-approaching train called Wayland. I mean, that is sort of the bottom line right there. And this is where I went off the rails I think for a lot of people in last. But because I can't help but come from a security angle.

And I think to myself, rationally, all of the money, energy, effort, time is being spent now on GTK3. And so if you want things that are secure and updated and maintained, you have to move to GTK3. Do you agree with that assessment, Wimpy? Yeah, I do. Yep. And that's where I think, again, I mean, so security isn't just managing your website installation correctly. It isn't just properly verifying ISOs. verifying ISOs, security is a layered thing that happens at all layers. Lots of steps.

From shipping your system with updated secure software that continues to be maintained and updated for security purposes. That is part of a responsible secure desktop. It's not just one thing. Which is something you don't do if you're shipping software to a lot of people. Yeah. Okay. So that's good insight, Wimpy.

Thank you. I was not understanding fully, and I guess the other part I don't fully understand is there are going to be some things that don't work with Mate built against GTK3, which would probably be the biggest reason Clem would have not to use it, because he wouldn't want to scare the users with features not existing all of a sudden. Yeah. So Mint and Ubuntu Mate are at different points in their release cycle at the moment. Clem is just about to embark on another LTS, effectively what we've just done with Ubuntu 16.04. So he's going to pick stable, tried and true, because that's his shtick. another LTS, effectively what we've just done with Ubuntu 16.04.

So he's going to pick stable, tried and true, because that's his shtick. So that's what he's going to go for. I've just entered into the Ubuntu 16.10 development cycle. We've got a solid LTS behind us. Now is the time to break all the toys and to try out all the new stuff. and spend the next two years building towards the next lts right and with regards to what isn't going to work there are some plugins and extensions for mate in particular for the image viewer and plume of the text editor that are written in python and use pi gtk2 that's the underlying library pi gtk2 is not simply not compatible with gtk3 can't be done so those plugins that are written

using those libraries are disabled in fact i patched them out and there's maybe i don't know six or seven of them and then there are some third partyparty panel applets so panel applets that aren't maintained by the marta desktop team that are maintained by community contributors that are currently only targeting gtk2 now i've contacted all of the authors of that software and told them that this change is coming and have given them some pointers about how they can either make the transition to GTK3 or how they can dual support both toolkits. So some of that work we're going to have to do within the Marte desktop team.

Some of that work is going to be on the shoulders of the people that develop and maintain that software. And what I'm going to try and do is use the the donations that the ubuntu mate community have made to ubuntu mate to help those uh developers complete that work over maybe the next year with the intention i would assume to have things sort of shaped up and ready to ship by uh the nextTS. Yes, that's the idea, yeah. So I think probably Ubuntu Mate 16.10

is going to be a bit of a bumpy release because we are breaking all the toys. Those are my favorites. We're almost going back to sort of square one and starting again with a new toolkit. Now, it's not quite square one because we've learned an awful lot in the last two years and developed a lot of integration pieces that we will be able to carry through because

everything that I've worked on in Ubuntu Mate in the last two years has been GTK3. So that's all good to go. So I just wanted a point of clarification. So your patrons got an update from you and where you talked a little bit about collaborating a lot more with the Fedora project. That's a hell of a tease. I mean, do you understand that you are a Linux distro and they are a Linux distro? These kinds of things just aren't done. Yeah, you're supposed to create your own applications with your own theme and your own release cycles.

This, I don't understand. Is there any clarifications because my world is spinning? What does Ubuntu Mate working closely with the Fedora project mean? I'm lost. Well, Mate desktop in itself is made up, the team members are made up of a cross-distribution group of people. So Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Slackware, Arch, BSD. There's a whole range of people working on different distributions,

but working towards making the Marte desktop work in those distributions. It just so happens that the Ubuntu and Fedora release cycles are very closely aligned with one another. I know we joke about Fedora delaying and what have you but despite that you know within a few weeks within a few weeks they're very close to one another so wolfgang allbrick who's a mate desktop developer and is also the maintainer for mate in fedoraora. He is a highly skilled theme developer for GTK2 and GTK3.

He does all of the theme maintainership for the Marte themes that we ship as part of the Marte Upstream project. But he has helped out other distributions and other spins of fedora that are now using versions of the mate themes in fedora and other distributions because it's about the best gtk 3.20 theme implementation you can get outside of what comes from gnome and it's got that dual theming for gtk2 and gtk3 yeah so he's very experienced and highly skilled and i don't know that theming stuff particularly well so i'm going to be working with wolfgang to build on his skill and experience to bring that work into the Ubuntu Mate themes for Mate. But more importantly, I've spoken to some of the developers for Ubuntu,

and we're going to try and then, because the Mate themes, the Ubuntu Mate themes are very, very closely linked to the Ubuntu Lite light themes that you know ambience and radiance and what have you and i'm going to try and see if we can give back some merge proposals from the ubuntu mate themes back to upstream ubuntu so that they get the gtk 3.20 support in the ubuntu themes and so it's actually going to be a sort of um ubuntu ubuntu mate fedora sort of cross collaboration effort to sort of bring everything up to gtk 3.20 that's really cool yeah so uh now just a real talk wimpy just you and me nobody else is here just for a moment uh you think unity 8 is going to be a just a boon for uh ubuntu mate edition what do you think i don't know i was oh come on i was trying to be you must say yes

um no because um there mark shuttleworth made it clear some years ago that there wouldn't be a switch to unity 8 uh unless the community wanted it you know when the community was ready for that transition then that's when it would happen and until that happens there's unity 7 and as we've discussed earlier there's an awful lot of people that like and use unity 7 so they've got their safe harborbour yeah you know here's my response to that which is completely unjustified based in no reality

or fact and does not represent the present at all so that's my disclaimer before I say this because Popey's World is the reality right now where there's people out there using Unity and god darn it they love it getting their job done a lot of these are probably like people that got computers is the reality right now, where there's people out there using Unity, and, golly darn it, they love it. Getting their job done.

A lot of these are probably people that got computers put in front of them, like the millions of Dells that got deployed in all these different places. I have a dream. I have a vision that the next wave of Linux users are exhausted Mac users and exhausted Windows users. And I believe that's not going to come in a huge, huge, huge shift. I believe it's just going to be a ramp that continues to accelerate up and up

and up. More people will be exasperated by Apple. And I could, the list of why you, as somebody who has to be, who has a couple of Macs left in production and has to deal with their limitations, I promise you, while they are great machines for way more people than there are Linux users, and will be for a really long time, for a certain audience, the exact kind of audience that Linux is appealing to,

they are extremely frustrating. And there is a huge percentage that will be a massive growth for Linux coming over from them, from Windows 10 users, especially as SteamOS grows and games are more and more supported on Linux. There is going to be a new wave, I believe, of Linux users. And it's not all at once, like I said, but ramping up. And they will be making an educated choice. And I, you know what? I'll give it to them. I have given the man a hard time for a long time.

It's for people who like to mess with computers. But I actually think Leo legitimately represents the cutting wave of tech enthusiasts. People who are, and I know I'm saying this about somebody who is by most people's account now a little out of date. But I actually think he's on to something here. He today, today is experimenting with Debian on his Google Pixel. And he's talking about getting the external. That's pretty cool. Yeah, and he's talking about how the trackpad works.

I mean he is legitimately all in on this. And I think he represents somebody. I think Chase does as well. Somebody who is actually educated on this stuff and enjoys computers and is enthusiastic about hardware, is enthusiastic about software, wants to use their computer to its fullest. Windows and the Mac no longer offer this, and they will not – and that is – this is just the beginning of it. It's just going to get worse and I think these people will be coming to Linux and I don't think a desktop environment that looks like it was designed 8 years ago

by a company that's put it on life support will be appealing to a lot of these people I think some of them will choose Unity but I think for most of them Unity 7 will look like yesterday's game and I think Unity 8 won't be ready yet so for most of them they're just going to go with something easy, practical,

boom, and it works. What do you think? You think I'm crazy? No, I'm not sure how many Mac users are going to be brought over because they've paid a premium for that whole Apple experience. There is, yeah, that's true.

I think it will only be potentially developers that have got mac hardware that would be prepared to make that switch i think but that is literally that's fair no i realize that's a good yeah but i think i and certainly anecdotally i don't see that many people switching to ubuntu marta that are using mac hardware unless it's quite old Mac hardware, and they're looking to extend the life of their computer because the version of Mac OS X that they can run on their machine is... No, you know, Wimpy, I'll tell you about the Mac user that I'm picturing. I'm picturing a Mac user that buys a ThinkPad.

I'm picturing a Mac user that buys an Intraware Apollo because part of becoming a frustrated Mac user is becoming frustrated with the hardware options because literally, the worst thing Apple has going for right now is its hardware. All of the graphics cards in all Macs are an absolute and total joke. All of the storage options are a total joke in terms of cost. They have been doing nothing with the MacBook line. The Mac Mini hasn't been updated in 200 years. The trash can has a video card that's now three generations at least out of date.

I mean, the Mac hardware is in a bad state. And so I think one of the number one things, I think it's well built. I think it lasted a long time. It's still pretty. And I think there should be more attention, energy, and effort spent on making Linux work just super well on Mac hardware,

including figuring out the SMC controller so we can manage thermals. I think that would be a huge thing to get more people. But I don't think it's a number one priority because I think this type of user just gets sick and tired of it. They go out there and they look what they can buy in a ThinkPad or an Apollo for $1,000 less, and they think, well, I'm just going to switch. And then they don't drop the Mac. They keep the Mac around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And some people have, you know, yeah, you are right.

There are Mac users out there who will make a switch. I'm not sure they're the majority of Mac users I think disgruntled Windows users is it is a larger potential market and in the last I don't know three or four years Microsoft have dropped the ball a couple of times when it if Linux or a major Linux distribution was more ready to absorb those disgruntled Windows users, I think we could have seen more people coming over. So there are choices. There is Linux Mint, and there is Ubuntu Mate, and there is Ubuntu proper. So just as another anecdote, and I don't know. This is one of the things I love about our luck.

So just as another anecdote, and I don't know. This is one of the things I love about our luck. But so my lady friend, Hadiyah, has her own practice that she runs a business, and she has a couple of computers there. And so she has a Lenovo that runs Ubuntu Mate 14. I can't actually remember which one it runs. I hope she pays someone else for IT, Chris. Oh, no, no. I do remember.

It's 1510 actually. It's 1510. And Wimpy, she has been so impressed with it that the other computers in her office which run Windows 7, she's just been offended by the whole prompts to upgrade to Windows 10 the whole time and interrupting her and all of that that she just wants to replace all of them with she's looking at I think they're called HP Stream yeah yeah yeah

she's looking at HP Streams and wants to know if I'll install Ubuntu Mate on them and just replace the other terminals. How does that make you feel? I think it's amazing and it's not even prompted by me at all it's just that she's like well this has been problem free on my laptop and it's she's now using her personal laptop uh to do like data entry sometimes and she's like so i'm now i made this my work machine and now i want to put all my work machines on linux and you know the security just happens to be on the end especially if you're

someone like that where you can kind of control all of your business stuff right like then you can just go wholeheartedly to linux and it just works great it was interesting interesting. She went from like, this is my personal computer that I write on to, well, now this is my work computer and I keep it at work because I like working on Linux more. And I think what I found interesting about that is she's not doing it from an advocate's position. She's doing it from a practical decision for her business. Business owner. Yeah. And that is also a huge area for a very practical desktop like mate you'd be fine too but for her the transition over to mate is literally like no

transition at all on the screen yeah just yeah and what what you've just described is consistent with what i've learned talking to small business owners in my local community there's a a frightening amount of small businesses you know that are you know one or two or three employees so home homegrown businesses that are still running their operation on Windows XP some of the companies I've spoken to have actually bought new computers a couple of years ago, but don't have the wherewithal to make the transition from one Windows computer to the next Windows computer. Right. Don't really understand it. And they need people to come in and actually help them do those transitions.

But when you look at what they're using they're not you know using a lot of the facilities of windows a lot of them are very disgruntled with windows because they buy a new computer they expect it to be faster than their old computer and invariably it isn't because they're buying budget computers running a modern version of windows and it's actually slower than their old computer the number of people that's running Windows XP. It's just surprising and amazing to me. So a lot of small business owners I hear are really cheesed off with Windows and they really want to make the switch. And what people know about, when they start researching, they find two things.

They find either Mac OS X, which is quite often economically not viable, or they find either mac os 10 which is quite often um economically not viable yeah and those are the two things that these businesses find so when i talk to people they've found out about ubuntu and then i start the conversation about well you know if you're familiar with windows and you want to use a computer in a way that's familiar to you, you could use this. But if you want to, you know, use this version, then it works slightly differently. And this is how it looks. And I sort of explain those differences. But there's a lot of local businesses around here that are making the switch to Linux.

Do you find people are doing more research about this than they used to? Yeah. And the other thing I found is that they're actually trying to find local companies who can support them running Linux. And I'm struggling to find people that can do that in my local area. So I'm in Hampshire in the UK. So if you're listening to this and you're in Hampshire in the UK and you offer Linux support services, let me know

because I'll hand out your business details to these people when I speak to them. Fine wimpy. Tell him. Yeah, okay. We totally went off on a sidebar, but I think it's interesting that our two experiences have lined up. So there is a business group that I have attended several times. This is just local businesses. And so everybody – so the way this business group works is only one person from each profession can go there.

Oh, funny. Hadiyah is the one that introduced me to it. BNI. What's that? So it's like a – Is it called BNI? No. No.

That sounds like a dirty thing you do. Come on, Ron. Get out of here, Ron. No, that's Business Networking International. Come on, Ron. Get out of here, Ron. Business Networking International. Come on, Ron. They have the exact same model. Okay, because for a second there, I – okay, for a second. Get it out of here.

True. It does sound weird. And, yeah, they have, like, you know, a web developer in the group, and the web developer uses Linux. And, you know, he talks about it sometimes with the group. And it's very fascinating to see like different people who just get into now looking into something a little bit further than they used to in the past. It felt like people would just take the PC and whatever it came with. But something about, and I think, I'm not saying it's a big, I'm not saying like it's like this huge movement, but I think in part for some people, like the Windows 10 prompting to get you to upgrade and the way Microsoft has handled this has really pissed off a lot of business owners who the one thing they

want out of their PCs is they want predictability. That is an effing tool. I pay my staff to do their work here, not mess with the computer, and that thing needs to work the way I expect them. It's the same as a cup. You just want it to work. You bought it to work. Right.

It just sits there and does the thing you want it to do. And I can tell you as somebody who used to fix business machines for his living as a contractor, I bore the brunt of the anger from the business owner when that effing computer wasn't working. And he wanted to understand why it wasn't working as a damn tool because he spent $600 or something like that on it. So the idea now that some people – and I don't want to make a big deal out of this but do you find there do you find it to be people that are maybe in their 30s and 40s that are now business owners that are just sort of more of an internet savvy generation because that was my experience is that these people are just now getting a generation of people that are going

to be business owners that know how to use Google. And have also been using Windows for 15 years or more in some cases and are really sick to the back teeth with it, really ready for change. I hear those words quite frequently that they're ready for a change. Yeah. And it's really because they're at their wits' end. They feel that any change can't be worse. Yeah, exactly. Wow, okay.

Well, so that was a bit of a sidebar, but I want to keep going on. I want to give a special mention to one of our favorite open source projects who's doing a Kickstarter right now. But first, I'm going to give a real special mention to Linux Academy. Go to linuxacademy.com to support the show and get yourself a discount. $9 for the first 30 days over at Linux Academy. That is such a deal. Holy smokes, man.

You've got to check them out. They have so many great self-paced courses, 2,389 as of this here recording. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. They've got downloadable comprehensive study guides. They've got a whole bunch of distros you can choose from that automatically adjust the courseware and the virtual machines that they'll spin up on demand and give you SSH access. I think what I like about Linux Academy, though, the most isn't their killer, killer, killer, killer dashboard that really helped me quantify how long it takes to do certain things into just hours.

I mean, that was great. But what I really like about it is the people that run Linux Academy. I started communicating with Linux Academy way before they were ever a sponsor. Really? I've never told this story. Linux Unplugged Special, folks. Yeah. I should tell this story because it tells you really more about Linux Academy as a company.

We started talking to Linux Academy before we announced HowToLinux, however long ago that was, to the public. As a way to try to figure out how to amp up our show segments. Like here's something you could do to spin up a server, but if you want to know more, go do this. And then we were going to replicate essentially the exact steps you could follow that we did on the show in their virtual environment. And then they would take it up from there and take you to do more things.

And this is when they were just experimenting with the technology because they really came from an angle of how can we show more people in the community at large how to use Linux properly? Right. And even people who are self-taught or people who want to get into it to help support it for small businesses or for their company or for whatever, or people that just, you know, want to make a buck off it and build off the technology around Linux and maybe properly use those things. And that's everything from Amazon Web Services to Android to OpenStack and Ruby on Rails and PHP, like all the technology around it, like how to use that properly, right?

And that properly, it's like a big, you can learn a lot of, like from a lot of places how to like do a basic configuration, get it working on one machine. But like if you have to suddenly support like 50 or 500 machines, then Linux Academy is really what you need. Man, the thing that's great about Linux Academy too is like when you got to go into a whole new world that is like – it feels like a different language and a different way of thinking about things. The fact that they can break down like getting through that barrier into an amount of time for me and the fact that they have an availability planner where I'll go say, OK, I've got this much time this week, which is often not much. And they still manage to make it worth my time. And you learn something.

LinuxAcademy.com slash unplug. They got detailed notes. They got practice exams. They got instructor mentoring when you need it. And they got a community stacked full of Jupyter Broadcasting members. A big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program now. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged.

Go there, support the show, and find out more. So Corita is an application we talk about a lot. Mr. Wester, you are in the mumble room. So I don't make a jerk face out of myself. How do I properly describe what type of application Corita is?

It's a drawing app, but that seems like calling it – that sounds like paint. I mean it's way more than a drawing app. What is Corita and how do you use it? Westraco. I don't hear it. Did he leave? That was such a good buildup. Did you like my buildup?

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I felt like that was – I felt like I could tweet that buildup. I could tweet that. That was so good. I almost wish I could play it back immediately and hear my own buildup. I enjoyed that so much. I enjoyed it so much.

I would just play the creative video that would tell you. Yeah, let's do it. But you know what? All they have is music. You know, you remember a couple of weeks ago when I said you need to have music, and I said here's an example of like a little tune you could play to jazz up your – Jazz it up. Yeah, just give it a little oomph. You could talk about anything when you got this playing.

Oh, yeah, slats. I'll buy whatever you're selling. Well, the creative project took that – Let me tell you about Windows 10, Chris. They took that too far. So everybody, if you're watching the show, close your eyes for a second. I want you to experience the show like our vast audio audience does. Because if you think about it from that perspective, this has got to be one of the worst Kickstarter project videos ever.

So imagine you're listening to the show if you're watching right now. Almost an opposite of what we often do. So if you are watching the show, you're at a disadvantage. Close your eyes and listen. This video is going to tell you all about this creative Kickstarter. Thank you. I think you get the idea. That's why I'm saying not a great Kickstarter video to describe what the product is. I'm just – here's why. I'm not – I sound like I'm being a jerk.

But what I'm doing is I'm giving away consulting services. Instead of charging you $100 an hour, I'm just giving this away for free right here. So if you create a project, if you're listening, voiceovers. You know who's got a great voice? That Popey guy's got a great voice. I secretly use Arch Linux. I mean, I know he's busy, but I would just, like, you know,

maybe tweet him. He's probably ready to secretly use Cretra as well. Yeah, yeah. He might be ready to secretly use Cretra, so Yeah, yeah. He might be ready to secretly use Krita. So just poke him and say, hey, Popey, would you – in fact, if all the Kickstarter projects out there would just tweet Popey and ask him, he would do the voiceover. Stop it, Wes. You're making it hard for me to say it.

I just think that would be a really good idea. So anyways, back on track. The Carita Project, Carita 2016, Let's Make Text and Vector Art Awesome. It's got 317 backers. A noble goal. I mean, it's already a great program. They've got a goal of $34,215.

They've only raised $11,907 at the moment, but they have 28 days to go. So you can go over there and find out more about it. I think it would be pretty cool. They'll support SVGs now. Yeah, I'm really excited. Interrupted a thingscape. I agree, yeah.

And look, Wes, they are distributing an app image, which is fascinating. Oh, cool. Yeah, they have one here for CentOS 6 and Ubuntu 12.04. Ubuntu 12.04. What is that about? And then they just have a general app image hey everyone all the cool kids are still on Ubuntu 12.04 Chris

yeah that is true upstart so create a project trying to raise a little bit of funds Wes your thoughts this is really kind of what I want to talk about what do you think about the idea of booster funding so you got a project they're kind of what I want to talk about. What do you think about the idea of booster funding? So you got a project – They're doing it like they're kind of doing it in their own way.

Yeah, about once a year. It seems to be working though. Once a year, you raise about $30,000, $40,000, let's say. The idea that an open source project could once a year come out and say, hey, would you mind funding us? This is what we'd like to accomplish this year. It kind of seems like – that seems like kind of a solid idea. It does seem like a good idea. I mean, I agree the video could be better, but if you lay out like this, like a good set of achievable goals and once you get a good track record of like meeting those goals, right, which they have.

I mean, they've improved their program a lot. I could see myself as someone who uses Create. I want some of these vector capabilities in a program I know. I would pay for that. Even as somebody who's now been burned by a couple of different fundraisers, I feel like there's a couple of Kickstarters that are going to deliver. When Pebble comes to Kickstarter and they say, you fund us and we'll ship a round watch, I actually, even if I'm not interested in that product, I believe they're going to do it. I know they're going to deliver on that.

Corita, this isn't their first time doing this. And if they come and say, you fund us and we're going to fund 2016, I buy that. And I could see other ways. I mean, we've talked a lot about Patreon, but I could see this as a solid way. So I don't know. I'm curious what you guys think in the Mumble room. Does anybody have a counter about using Kickstarter to fund open source? Like a project that goes to the well about once a year and asks for funding.

It says, hello, everybody. We would like funding. Anybody? What do you think about that? It seems to work for NPR. Yeah? Yeah. That's true.

Like a pledge drive. Huh. That is a good point, Wes. That is a good point. If anything, less annoying. Yeah, they are super annoying, aren't they? That's why it seems – and also it seems – now that I think about this, it actually seems like a really horrible idea. Yeah, because I could see what it creates is –

Oh, Python scripting plugin. That sounds cool. Maybe I'll just – I don't even use it but maybe I'll give them some money. It sounds great. I actually think this is a horrible idea. I think it creates sort of a false deadline to have to hit and certain things you have to do that maybe you commit to that you get to down the

at the end of the year and you're like, this is not what we should have been spending our time on or this is not what we can spend our time on. Then all of a sudden you're not delivering on your Kickstarter. So perhaps as Zeke the Penguin is saying, Patreon's a better way? That seems like a more sustainable method because then you're not trying to do a big splash. Don't have those deadlines, yeah.

And it reminds me of like the Apple keynotes where they have to have a product announcement every WWDC. Even if it isn't a real product. Yeah. Even if it's just another Apple TV that's a little thicker or something. Yeah.

So I actually don't know if I actually bounty. And Alex Vada asked about Bounty Source. And boy, the elementary OS guys will sure tell you Bounty Source. Bounty Source, $15,000 Bounty Source. I don't know, man. I'm not seeing it. I decided to put my money where my mouth was. And I gave, I think, like $100 or something like that that to the elementary OS bounty source. I don't know what happened

to that. And I tell you what else, I think if bounty source was going to be a success, it would have happened by now. It's been around for ages, and it just doesn't seem to be going anywhere. I see developers go on and off it. The elementary OS, though, seems to use it to some success, but it

doesn't seem to be a big thing. Just like Flatter hasn't become a big thing, and BitTipping hasn't become a big thing, and YouTube tips haven't become a big thing. There's just a certain resistance to it. Oh, yeah, Flatter. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

So I don't know. Rod, you had a discussion with someone at Karina about Patreon. How did that go? They were saying that they couldn't think of any rewards. That's why they haven't tried it. So I gave them examples of what they could do, and they said after the Kickstarter, they're going to look into starting a Patreon. Yeah, I'll tell you, the rewards are the real son of a bitch. And we've missed them on all of ours, and we're reworking ours right now.

That's funny, too, because as a person who uses Patreon for other things, I don't care about the rewards. I just want to give the people money. That's the thing. But as creators, we get like super mental about these rewards and like they're like this big psychological thing and the reality is then you want to make – you want to make them worth something. So you aim big but the reality is you're so

damn busy just working on the everyday product. If you had time to go off and do these big side projects You'd have a second business already. And that is something I struggle with. Like with Unfilter right now, I'm struggling with that. We have something we're ready to roll out for our Unfilter supporters

and it's just, I'm so the Unfilter news cycle is so crazy right now. I'm so busy doing the show. I don't have time to do anything else. Just like with the way – Patreon.com slash today, by the way. Go fund our network because holy smokes. We are so slammed right now. It's starting to feel like we're barely treading water.

There's so many things I am turning down right now. It's just – it's rough out there. And I honestly think this is a more sustainable method than the Kickstarter sort of boop, boop, boop every year. And the milestone thing is a really difficult thing. So, Rotten, tell them just be easy on themselves. Well, I did find a good example. I showed them examples of projects that are currently running Patreon that don't have that very good rewards or even any at all. And then I showed them an example of a good project that has pretty well thought out rewards even though it's a software product.

And it's also – even some of the rewards are funny and that's Ubuntu Mate. Well, here's what I'll tell you from my experience too. So let's see how many people. We have 578 people. Okay. So there's 500. That's awesome. Wow.

Thank you. 578 people over at Patreon.com slash today. Heck yeah. Man, that feels really good, and that is really super cool. So let me look through here to find the last time I did an exclusive okay, perfect example. For episode 143

of Unplugged, so last week's episode, I published a complete live stream version of the show. From the moment we went on the air to the moment we ended. Like stuff that didn't go in the final edit. That's right. Naughty Chris. Right.

So I said there's 578 patrons. 80 people watched that. So I guess what I would say to those open source projects out there that are looking at Patreon as a funding model, don't kill yourself over the rewards because I work my butt off sometimes and then out of 578 people, 80 people watch the thing. And that is just the reality of it because what they really want is the thing you're already doing.

That's why they're supporting you. Right. Which if you think about it is super rewarding. That's like the coolest part. That is exactly the coolest part. So don't kill yourself on the rewards, but try to deliver on what you commit to, which is what I struggle with. Do your best. Do your damn best, which we were revealing our milestones, by the way, on the Patreon.

We have exceeded some of them. I wonder if anybody has noticed, but there are some things we've done recently that exceed some. We're kicking ass. But anyways, to the creative project and others, I would just, as my experience would go, and this reflects not just the Patreon for today.

This also reflects my experience with the Unfilter. Right. The same thing. Double dipping. I stopped producing a separate show for the patrons because that was good content

that the rest of the audience could benefit from and 30 or 40, 60 people were downloading it from the supporters out of – we have way more than that that support the show. So like over – well over 400 people that support the show and 30 or 40 of them would download the extra show that I was staying until midnight to edit and produce and upload. So it just didn't make sense. So I scaled it back. But now I'm trying to come up to another area that still gives them value. And that's still a really tight line to walk. And so you've got to find it and do it. But I would say to the creative project, it could be something as simple as every now and then doing a Google Hangout with your community and chatting with them and just answering questions.

It doesn't have to be a big to-do. That's a great idea. Now, we get to go a little fancy because over the years we've established like swag partners and stuff like that. So for us, we can do swag levels and things like that. But you don't have to do that stuff. You don't have to go that far. You can just connect with your community or spend an afternoon in the IRC room.

Like don't even have to do a Hangout. Like it doesn't have to be super complicated stuff. You can just connect with your community or spend an afternoon in the IRC room. Like don't even have to do a hangout. Like it doesn't have to be super complicated stuff. And I think the reason why I want to mention Patreon is it is fundamentally rewarding to be working for your audience and not for somebody who's sponsoring you or giving you money. Now, we still make more money from our sponsors than we do from our Patreon. But if I had one goal in 2016, it would be to flop that now. Right. That would be hard. But having now created shows, and this has, I think, got to be the same thing when creating

software, having created shows from the perspective of what's the best way to sponsor this, like how do we format this so a sponsor fits in here versus how do I format this so my patrons like it? That's totally different. And the questions I answer and the ideas I come up with are really different when I'm starting from those two different premises. And I think it's got to be the same for people who create software. And so I think it not only does it benefit the creator, but I think it ultimately greatly benefits the end user for having that model.

There you go. That's my thoughts on it. Well said. Yeah, a lot of, see, I told you 144, lucky 144. A lot of different paths. But in the meantime, Greta Project is still seeking funding on their Kickstarter.

Check them out. It would be really nice to see them. I mean, if this is how they're choosing to do it, it would be really nice to see them be successful because we have more and more these days, sort of these iconic open source applications that are absolutely competitive with closed source solutions or as competitive as they need to be.

And they do. This is one of them. And if you have the money to spare – hey, look. They just gained another one. If you have the money to spare, check them out. We'll have a link in the show notes. Or just go search for Corita 2016 on the Kickstarter. I was going to have Mr. Westra talk about it because he does commissioned artwork and stuff.

And I'm pretty sure he uses Corita. That's awesome. All right. Mumble Room, this is your last chance before we go. I secretly use Arch Linux. Oh, okay, great. Well, there was the input from Popey. No one asked. He just likes to mention it, though.

That does sound like an Arch user. All right, well, that brings us to the end of this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. If you want to join us live, go to jblive.tv. That's so true. jubilabroadcasting.com slash calendar for when we do this S live. My son said, Dad, why do you say S? I say S now in real life. You're so polite.

It's these damn shows. jubilabroadcasting.com slash contacts. Also, linuxactionshow.reddit.com for feedback, topic ideas, things like that. We'd love to have you live and join us in our virtual log next week. Won't you join us, neighbor? See you right back here next Tuesday. All right, hit it, everybody. Thank you. man did you notice how no totally blew the starting the titles? That's super embarrassing.

Why doesn't he do those things? I don't know. I don't know. I guess he's probably doing stuff. Anyways, thank you, Mumble Room. Great discussion today. Yeah, absolutely. Oh, hey, look.

She updated the Patreon. Oh, boy. I'll check that out. Oh, what's going on over there? Anyways, Mumble Room, I love you. Thank you for being here. There we go. Look at that.

That is fancy looking. Somebody say something because we haven't heard you for like five minutes. There we go. Thank you. But it was a good show. Thank you for being here. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Now I'm off of it. I feel like actually it was actually very good. I got it out there. I got my concerns on the record. And there's really nothing else to say. We can move on. I really feel like that is the case.

I've said what I need to say. There was just a lot in the air that needed to be. Well, actually what I realized was going on is I have been doing more and more self-censoring lately. Because I got it in my head from this show that people don't like it when I complain. And so I have stopped complaining. And I got it – I just – I have been observing things about different projects and different things, and I just haven't been voicing my concerns because people don't like it when Chris complains. So I stopped complaining. And we had a whole bunch of happy shows and everybody's great and everything. But then, you

know what? Turns out, no, I feel a little righteous because I think I'm right about this and I do want to talk about it. And so I think I just crossed that line. And now the problem is the floodgates opened. And now I want to complain about... Let's see how far we go. I want to complain about Anaconda being crap and getting

screwed up every single damn release. I want to complain about Unity looking like it's last year's game. I want to complain about Anaconda being crap and getting screwed up every single damn release. I want to complain about Unity looking like it's last year's game. I want to complain about every single thing. Yeah. That's all show content, baby. That's what happens. I love your rants. That's what happens when I hold it in.

I hold it in because nobody wants grumpy Chris. Well, guess what? Now guess what? Are you saying everybody hates Chris? No, you know what I think it is? I think what it is is a conspiracy by the lawn maintenance community. I'm having the worst luck during the weekdays. I really am.

It's actually making me think about like, well, there's two options. Either I get that window taken out and that wall re-insulated, which seems crazy, or we move. taken out and that wall re-insulated which seems crazy or we move. And the window's nice in the summer when it's, you know. I just don't know, I mean, I, like, how many weeks in a row am I going to sit here and bitch about

the lawnmower? And like, here's what's really sort of alarming about it, and this is really what gets me, is I wouldn't, I could make this mistake again because if I came here and looked at the amount of yard here, I would go, oh, they'll do this once a month and they'll be here for two, three hours and they'll be done. And the whole thing, the whole place will be done.

I would never have thought it would be three days a week every week because there's just, literally, there's no yard here. No, there's really not. There's like nothing. Yeah. Well, I did kind of, I did kind of shout during tech snap last week and I think the guy heard me. Oh, snap.

Mm hmm. Tech snap that is. And you can hear it. You can hear it just a little bit, but you also, you have to be listening because you only hear it while my face is making noise. As soon as my face stops making noise, our system cuts it out. It's a nice system. So that's why you're not hearing it.

But so here is the problem is I hear it all the time. I constantly hear it, and so it distracts me. And then Rekai will edit the show, and then he'll play it for Chris, and Chris will hear it again. Yes, I do. He'll criticize Rekai unfairly. I do listen to the shows on playback he'll play it for Chris, and Chris will hear it again. Yes, I do. He'll criticize Rikai on barely. I do listen to the shows on playback. I'm like, fuck, you can't hear it. Chowroom says you can't hear it.

I can sure as shit hear it. That actually happens. You need more sound proofing. Oh, it's so frustrating. If you guys look in here, if you look, you can barely see up in the corner of that shot. The ceiling is even insulated. I just have up there there is sound insulate we are surrounded in sound insulation the all of the walls have that on it all of it and still yet it

is the weaponized lawn equipment is what it is and it it is the bane i mean boy i can really hear that no regard for anyone else in the sound space i think yeah go ahead yeah it might be cheaper to just buy your neighbor the uh electric lawnmower yeah i'm never convinced so it's oh here's what it is too right is it's uh it's it's a it's a couple of things it's uh it's the yard the grounds i should say the grounds and when i say grounds i mean there are patches of greenish, mostly brown grass between cement. And then there are people's yards. And when I say yard, I mean something that's about seven by seven, maybe seven by six. I mean, they're very small yards, like, you know, not even large enough to have like a

gazebo in it. They're small yards. They're very small yards. And so what you have is a collection of tiny, small public shared spaces which are maintained by aggressive contractors who milk this little housing community for everything. And then

you have these very strictly enforced yard rules so that way everybody's tiny brown yards are up to standard or else you get fined $60. And because nobody's on the same schedule, there's just enough people here taking care of all of their tiny little brown patches of ugly ground at different times that it seems to impact all of my shows.

Even on Sundays, or I'm here on off hours. I shouldn't get this upset about this, but it's like- $60, yikes. You move into a place. And here's the thing, too. Okay. So just – and then I'm done. And this is why it upsets me.

And then I'm done. Two things. I would make this mistake again because I would evaluate the yard here. You've learned nothing. And I look and I go, obviously, this doesn't require maintenance. This is a great way to go. One of the reasons we are here legitimately is because there's such low yard maintenance. Right.

Like, I'm here to podcast. It's just a studio. Exactly. Okay. So I could make the same mistake again. Number two, though, and I cannot see how I could have foreseen this. I used to live here. I lived in this house.

This was his house? For like years. And this was never a thing. Then I moved out for like five or six years. And they got new housing authority and all of that. Like the entire community got replaced. And now this is how it's been. But I didn't know that before I came back.

But this very house, I lived in it. And then I rented it out. Sounds like some Twilight Zone shit, Chris. For like five or six years. The whole community replaced. No, just the management. Now they're very noisy. But I'm just telling you, at the time, not only did I know what the sound was like here,

I podcasted here before. So I have recorded shows in this building before, and this was not a problem in the past. So I did not ever consider it would be a problem. You come in, you invest money in a place, you get all the stuff done, you get the studio set up, and then this. Oh, man. You've been betrayed. I'm going to check my blood. I've got the watch on

right here. I'm going to check my heart rate right now, just see what my heart rate is before, and then we're going to start the show. Either Chris is going to the hospital or we're starting the show. We don't know which. It's difficult for me. It's difficult. I can't... What I would like to be able to do, Wes, is I'd like to be able to go back in time and go, this is where I made the mistake. And if Dummy Chris hadn't just done this dumb thing, he wouldn't be in this problem.

He wouldn't be in this situation now. Oh, Dummy Chris causes you all kinds of problems. I know. Past Chris is usually a D-bag. And I can figure out, oh, that's where he screwed up. But this time, like, well, it says I'm only 69 beats per minute. I don't know. How could that possibly be? I'm going to tighten this thing up one more notch says I'm only 69 beats per minute. I don't know if that, how could that possibly be?

I'm going to tighten this thing up one more notch. I'll tell you what, Wes. I'll tell you what. All right, well, that's clearly not high enough. Someone say something Chris hates. ButterFS is the best that was really good that was funny