LINUX Unplugged - Episode 15: Don’t Switch to Linux | LUP 15

Episode Date: November 20, 2013

Our frank advice for switches to Linux. Despite what what the advocates would have you believe, there are some important consideration a potential Linux switcher should make. Our team of silverback Linux users shares their tips after years of using Linux.

This is Linux Unplugged, Episode weekly Linux talk show that's applying all its updates before we do our online banking every single week. My name is Chris. My name is Chris. My name is Matt. Hey, Matt. Welcome to episode 15, buddy. Thanks for having me. Now, I might not be giving the whole situation enough of its due, but I felt like that line right there was all we needed to say about this whole mint canonical controversy that erupted over the last couple of days.

No kidding. You and I, here we go. We put out a nice Linux action show talking about OpenSUSE 13.1. Meanwhile, the whole interwebs blows up because somebody three weeks ago on a mailing list said something, and then some other blog picks that up, and then Slashdot picks it up,

and then it goes crazy, Matt. Well, it's almost like someone peed someone's Cheerios. I mean, really, it's like, come on, people. That actually would have been more newsworthy. It would have been, right. That would have been a more interesting topic. So, you know, this week, this week, it's like, come on, people. That actually would have been more newsworthy. It would have been, right. That would have been a more interesting topic. So, you know, this week, it's interesting. Every now and then, I'm a bit of a slow man,

and it takes me a while to realize that there's trends that happen in my inbox. We get lots of email from the Linux Action Show and now this show as well, and a lot of new users that are looking to switch over to Linux and trying to do their investigation, right? Trying to suss out the situation before they move over. They'll tune in to the Linux Action Show. Watch our how-tos, watch the news, just kind of get a feel for it,

which totally makes sense because if I was switching to Linux back in the day when podcasts, there weren't any podcasts really. I mean, I think there was some podcasts, but there wasn't really any major Linux podcasts. And I would have totally loved that. So it totally makes sense. But what I failed to really notice is we've been getting a lot of emails about people switching from Windows to Linux.

And for a lot of the reasons you might suspect. But there's a catch. The switching is not going very well. No, no. There's definitely some bumps in the road, some hurdles along the way and whatnot. Yeah. And some people are, I think sometimes they're sold a bit of a bit of bag of goods, as it were. And they're kind of told all switch one to one replacements for your application, stability, security, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And then they switch over and they end up maybe a little disappointed or something doesn't work the way they want. They end up in the end disenfranchised and they go back to their Windows and they huddle down and they stay there even longer. And they say, well, I'll just live it out. I'll just make it work over here on Windows. And so this week, we're going to pull in our mumble room. That's our online Linux users group. Matt and I are going to kick around as longtime Linux users and people who run multiple OSs

and help lots of people switch over to Linux. I want to just, you know, we're just gonna have a frank discussion about the legitimate downsides. If you are a full-fledged alternative operating system user, and you're going to move over to Linux, there's some things that might not go very smooth. And I don't feel like there's enough places out there that are talking about that stuff, frankly. That's true. Actually, you know, I think you nailed it on the head there, because I think the big piece of it with any distribution out there, especially the ones targeting newbies because they're the worst offenders and that they have this great experience waiting for people. But there's things that folks need to be aware of, and it's not always attractive from a visual standpoint or even from an experience standpoint to spend a lot of time talking about it because then you're detracting from the value of that particular distribution. And that's where it gets funky for and i can see where they're

coming from but still it is hard it is hard you know what essentially what you're saying is that sometimes it's hard to talk about this kind of stuff it is because i don't know you know uh i mean we can talk about it but at the same time i think if i'm running you know jim bob's you know uh virtual linux thing or whatever it is and they're trying to switch to my distro, I'm a little gun shy about saying, oh, hey, by the way, here's a list of things that might stop you. That's a funky spot to be. Well, and I'll be honest. I'm a Linux advocate, right?

So I like talking about all of the stuff Linux does really well, right? And all the stuff that's really cool in Linux. I don't like to so much talk. I don't even like to focus on the stuff it does really bad. So I've brought a third co-host to the show this week his name is woodenville whiskey bourbon and uh actually i knew you're talking for you i figured i picked up this uh this uh bourbon whiskey from uh uh a low you know the the alcohol store whatever you call it and it is a local brew micro micro barreled they call it mad and you ever heard micro barrel micro barrel yeah this is batch number eight and bottle 115 handwritten on the bottle, too, I might add.

I mean, I lived in a state with drive-thru liquor stores once, but I've not experienced a micro-barreled. So, wow. I mean, you know, for when you're too drunk to get out of your car. Yeah, right, yeah. This is crafted entirely by hand in a small batch as an age to maturity in a new, charred American oak barrel. The demanding process results in extremely rich and full-bodied bourbon whiskey. So I'm going to be drinking that today to help to bring out the honesty. That's my honesty gateway this week.

That works. That works. Still fighting through some of the tech issues we talked about last week on the show. I feel like I actually haven't really solved any of them, but I've learned the new way to mitigate them to just create a new normal, which is a lot more work, takes about 45 minutes more, which I've whittled down from two hours, takes about 45 minutes per show. I'm going to do some more work tonight, so there's not going to be a live side bite tonight, but she's going to do a hangout on her

Google Plus page if you search for Heather on Google Plus. So still going through a lot of troubleshooting there. Had some great suggestions from folks that have heard of different solutions to try it on Linux. All of them I've heard of so far, but I still love getting those because if I could do the bulk of this on Linux, man, even if I had to do a bunch of work, at this point I'm already doing a whole bunch of work. There may be that eventual update to where

the blurb comes out and you're like, oh hey, that wasn't there before. You know what? They just released an update today. I haven't tried it, obviously, because I didn't want to mess with the show, but I'm going to install it tonight. We'll see how it goes. I wanted to get to some emails. We like to do some follow-up emails that are sort of continuing threads

that we've had in previous shows here at the top of Unplugged. That way, every show is... We're not like star trek here on unplug and i love me some star trek but star trek did the monster of the week and that way they could syndicate we don't have we don't have those pressures here on the unplugged show we like to do a continuing thread so the unplugged show is an evolving storyline that takes place across a whole series of episodes that way we make you listen to all of them. And so going back a ways in our threads is own cloud. We talked about own cloud a lot, big own cloud fan. I don't actually have an own cloud installation in production because I'm kind of waiting for a few things to kind of work themselves out, waiting for the next version.

However, I know a lot of you out there have it. And we also have the JB cloud that people are experimenting with. So Richard wrote in, and this one was a little bit of a warning to lot of you out there have it and we also have the JB cloud that people are experimenting with so Richard wrote in and this one was a little bit of a warning to any of you running your own cloud installation on an SSD with trim enabled he said I had an existing home server running an established own cloud setup with a laptop running an own cloud client on my SSD I upgraded my home server to mint 15 reformat reformatted drives, and did a full reinstall of everything, including own cloud. No issues. On my laptop client, I tried to reestablish the own cloud sync and push my files back

up to the server. It briefly showed a screen with two options, which I seem to remember asking which way to sync. It defaulted to the one where the local files would push to the server. The other option had a warning about data loss. Since I defaulted to the right value, I clicked next. I sat back with a smile thinking that was easy until I got a notification. That's your first mistake right there is you sat back, you got all cocky, your big old smile and you thought that was easy. Pulled the staples right there. All right.

Until I got a notification that it was unable to delete a file that I was editing. What the F, he said. I quickly looked at my document structure and it was gone. It synced my laptop to match the empty own cloud installation. Even if I did pick the wrong option, would a, are you sure you want to do this prompt, have been that hard? He's a little burned there. He said, I killed the power and booted up on a live disk and proceeded to try to get the data back. All my favorite go-tos for the data recovery, such as test disks, said it was unrecoverable. Then, as I dug deeper with Google's researching, undelete on extended form became clear. SSD with trim support means deleted files are unrecoverable. While this isn't a little side effect ever talked about in, why isn't this

ever talked about in SSD conversations? I've never heard of this fact stated in LAS or TechSnap discussions with SSDs either. I would have been a little more careful had I known this when I switched to SSDs. I was using own cloud with its versioning as a backup strategy for documents not safe for Dropbox, consulting documents,

uh-huh, and accepted some short-term risk to rebuild the server knowing that I had another copy on the laptop. This is exactly why the data must reside in three locations or else it doesn't exist. Two is not enough. I had an older outdated backup on a Windows Home server share, but about two months of documents that were not safe to sync to Dropbox

were lost. Please remind users that switching to SSD means you lose the option of data recovery on delete with them. And you know, Richard, I've also heard the opposite side of that where because the way an SSD can kind of randomize the way it writes to a file to a disk, in some cases when you try to do like an overwrite, sometimes it doesn't necessarily overwrite all the files. So we're still kind of learning, really, some of the challenges of SSDs because not everybody's switched over yet, so they don't have the mass adoption

that a spinning disk does. That's true. But you know, Matt, this is a hard thing because you want to have the master authority generally be the central server. That's generally how you avoid all these sync conflicts. But at the same time,

and this, of course, there's exceptions to this rule, large media files, things like that obviously are in limit. But for the most part, they were talking about backing up in three locations. One of those three locations needs to be off-site, whether that's physically in a physical drive in another location or in the cloud or whatever you're comfortable with. But for something like this to happen, that's kind of the whole thing of it. As far as something like this happening, yeah, I think that we need more SSD action taking place out there so we can kind of gauge what other little surprises are out there. Yeah, and this is stuff we'll hit. I'm pretty much all SSDs these days as I can. And so I'll experiment more with this.

His point is well taken. And this is why I've – so here's – we had an email this week. It said, Chris, you talked about your backups, but you'd never really said what you've landed on. And I really haven't landed on a good one, except for anything that's important. I store in either BitTorrent sync or directly on my Synology. Now, if I put it in BitTorrent sync, it syncs to my Synology. And then everything that's in this important data area on my Synology NAS goes to SpiderOak. And that's how I'm doing my back.

I'm not doing nightly backups on my laptop, right? I just don't have time. And to be completely honest, setting up a new installation is kind of like playing a video game for me. So if I've got to set aside an evening and stay up super late and have a few too many drinks to get my KDE configuration rocking, that's a sacrifice I'm willing to take. So then it's just a matter of moving my data back in. And to his point, you've got to have multiple copies. And I want to go back to one point in his email. Mint on a server? That's a bad time. I can't even fathom that.

I'm not sure I understand what the advantage would be. On the desktop, okay, arguably, that's fine. Maybe it's also a desktop. Yeah, that could be it. Maybe it's doing dual duty or something. Because otherwise, go Ubuntu LTS. If you like the Ubuntu underlying system, go Debian, go Cent, whatever. I like Mint, but the inherent

disadvantage that Mint's always going to have, and Lentelli changed this, is you need to reinstall to go to the next version. And eventually, if you want to get security updates, you're going to have to reinstall. And this is the problem with reloading servers. My approach to a server installation is I'm really hands-off

as much as I can be. And that kind of plays into the whole stability thing. But sorry to hear about that, Richard. I wanted to pass that along to folks out there. You know, just be careful when you're doing that kind of stuff. And I agree with him, though, on the whole being prompted. I mean, I totally am on board with that, that you should be prompted for something like that.

I feel like the own cloud desktop program is still early days a little bit. And it just doesn't have the deployment level that dropbox does so it you know things like that just don't get quite as identified as much i guess um so yeah bummer richard all right well next email comes in from tim and he's positive in the pragmatic dimension playing off of last week's title said i hear you guys i believe in support free software however there is a lot in my life I have to get done and a lot of people who depend on me and I will use whatever tools available to get it done. Now remember last week we were saying even as Linux

advocates we can understand how sometimes there's reasons not to use Linux if an application you just gotta have. Right. You gotta have it. So he says I'm beholden to Windows for work. Proprietary software, enterprise applications I have to access and use from home. Yet, I have a free NAS box, an Ubuntu server, a Roku, and a

digital ocean droplet for a VPN as well as an Android tablet. Not to mention a laptop with whatever distro I'm currently learning about. But again, I have an iPhone from work, and I use Windows for my S-Crypt miners. It's an economic decision. I could get better hash rates than plain and simple. And I've noticed this too. S-Crypt

and also, you know, mining Bitcoin, it is much easier to get up and running under Windows. I actually haven't noticed better hash rates under Windows, but it is easier to get running under Windows. He said, I may get bashed by free software proponents, but this is the world I live in and I got to get it done every day. Cheers, Tim. I think he's basically looking at this as there's effective behavior and then there's ineffective behavior. And that really removes the argument of, well, you can't do it because that's just not supporting blankety blank. At the end of the day, you have to decide what's going to provide the most effective outcome that you're seeking. And for him, that's what's working.

Yeah, I think so. I think so. We got an email about sort of switching over to Linux. And we got a lot of these. And one of them was quite long. And so I want to read his email to kind of set us up and kind of set the tone of the discussion. Because we've talked before about switching to Linux from primarily Windows. I think maybe now we should start talking about switching from Mac too. Because I think there's more and more Macs out there.

And I think a lot of times the way we've kind of just come out and say, yeah, it's going to be great. It's going to be awesome. Sure. It's awesome. Yeah. Just load it up. You'll figure it out. Yeah. Yeah. So we have an email is a great example of what somebody runs into when they take that advice. So that'll be a good spot, I think, for us to kind of frame this conversation. Plus,, you just did a great piece over on Datamation about Linux desktop's missed opportunities. So we might even want to start there. So before we dig into that, I want to thank our first sponsor this week. And that, my friends, is Ting.com. Now, Ting is mobile that makes sense. My service provider and Matt's service provider for mobile. You can get started by going to linux.ting.com. That'll take $25 off your first month of service or $25 off your first device if

you don't already have a device. Now, one of the things that really makes Ting stand out is the pay-for-what-you-use system, and I want to talk about this for a little bit. Actually, I'd say there's a few things that really make Ting stand out, but the pay-for-what-you-use system is pretty unique. I don't really know anybody else that's doing that. So they take your messages, your megabytes and your minutes and they add it all up at the end of the month, whatever bucket you fall into. That's all you got to pay. It's pretty reasonable pricing. It's not like it's going to surprise you because they've got a very active dashboard. This is where I want to change gears. This dashboard is really something. So not only do you get a snapshot of where you're at, what your usage is, what your bills have been, you

can manage all of that. You can activate and deactivate devices. You can manage your voicemail settings. You can manage your call forwarding settings. You can manage what happens when you get X amount of calls. You can manage all of this from the most road, other than the amazing savings you're going to get, because each device is just $6 per month. Yeah, $6 per month for a phone. That's it, you guys. That's all you have to pay. And then you just pay for your usage fairly on top of that. When you combine that with the awesome management of their dashboard, it really, as a long-term solution, really is awesome. And if you go over to Ting.com, and you're kind of checking things out, you're not quite sure if it's going to work for you, they have a savings calculator. You can get an idea of what Ting.com and you're kind of checking things out, you're not quite sure if it's going to work for you, they have a savings calculator. You can get an idea of what kind of money savings you're going to see. And if you're worried about your contract with your current mobile provider,

they also have an early termination relief program, up to 75 bones per line. It's super easy. You get your phone from Ting. You port your number to Ting. And then you submit your early termination relief claim to Ting. Now, the other great thing about Ting is they are riding the wave of the investment the Sprint Network is making in LTE right now. They are on a mad dash right now to roll LTE out to all major nations, all major areas in the United States. So you're

going to see a lot more areas turn up. I happen to be particularly lucky, and you might be as well. You can go check out their coverage map on their website. I live in an area where I get great 3G, I get great LTE, and I also get awesome WiMAX. So I'm sort of benefiting from all the major available types of connectivity. And that for me is great because I'm a heavy Waze user. So every moment I spend in the car, I have a data connection. It's up. It's pulling down information. The state troopers on our Interstate 5 here are absolutely maniacs. Seriously, I went up to the meat store today up in Arlington, and four or five cops on just that, between three exits. Waze flags all that stuff for me. So Waze is an absolute must. And I don't want to have to sit there and worry about, am I going to reach my two gigabyte cap? Or do I need to make slightly less phone calls this month? All of that honestly feels like a scam. It all feels like a

scam to get my money when I'm just using the service the way I want to use it. And Ting just nukes all of it. They give you control, and they give you the tools to keep control and monitor all of it. Plus, they have fantastic Android apps that really work in concert with all of this stuff. If you're in a small business, or if you're in a family, that $6 per line from the pooled minutes, and you just pay for what you use, really works amazingly well. And then to top it all off, Ting has incredible support. You can call them, and somebody answers. You can go to their support forums. They got people in there discussing stuff. You know, as they're working through the Nexus 5, there's some awesome threads in there right now about getting Nexus 5 working on Ting. And to see that just not only just to see the community kind of take on that,

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So you wrote a good piece over at Datamation that said Linux desktops missed opportunities. And you said if Windows users consider migrating, or this was the subheadline, I guess, does the Linux desktop offer a clear and easy choice? And one of the areas you said, well, right now, Linux definitely has a leg up, and some people might be surprised by this,

but it hasn't a leg up on old peripherals. This is something that's a misnomer with most people. You ask even experienced Linux people. I've actually had some of them actually be misinformed on this. You know, what's the hardware support look between Windows and Linux? With peripherals dating back to even some modern ones, but especially with older ones. Like scanners and printers? Scanners and printers are the big ones.

But even other stuff, Bluetooth dongles, certain headsets, you'd be surprised. Depending on the age, in certain instances, you will find that the support is crap under Windows. Even if you try and find a driver. I remember when Windows 7 came out, it had been out for, I don't know, a year at the time, and I was setting my mom up

with her printer. Okay, I'll go get a driver for it. HP has no reason to do a driver for that. This is an old printer. I mean, now granted, I managed to hack it together I think with something later on and then eventually switched her anyway over to Linux. But at the time, it was just like, it was really appalling. Okay, same thing with Bluetooth.

Try the Bluetooth dongle. No love. Okay, maybe there's drivers for it. Nope, Bluetooth dongle's too old. You know what I found? This is kind of my enterprise background coming through, but Ethernet adapters, which is such a linchpin because if you don't have network connectivity, you can't get drivers for all the other stuff, right? And Linux, because the stuff's at the kernel level, man, you just plug it in and you turn it on and it just works. And the experience there, if you really want to personify it, is you take a mouse on a windows box it's never seen that mouse before and you plug it in and then you do that wait well and it goes out it downloads the updates it installs the driver and then the case well ironically the worst offender are the actual

microsoft mouse and keyboard where then they download an installer and a wizard you have to run through and where is this an extra software you didn't ask for yeah right and same with scanners right but on linux you plug it in and the software detects it or it doesn't. It's very one or zero, right? For most basic users. And I think this is a good point as Linux has sort of got a bad rap from the past because vendors couldn't give a crap about supporting it. But that really has started to change.

But the other point you make for switchers is the security issues, right? Windows historically and to this day remains massively targeted by hackers. It's horrible. Windows XP, obviously worst offender. And you look at the end of Windows XP, seems like it's an opportunity to make a case here. It's absolutely – and the big picture here is that – and of course Windows XP actually ties into my peripheral argument earlier because a lot of people running XP are still running those peripherals that were working with XP. So then you have the peripheral argument, and then on top of that, from the security standpoint, you had a Swiss cheese operating system that now what little basic security you had is going to be yanked out from underneath you. And people are going to run it blind. They have no idea.

They have no clue. They don't know that what they're running is essentially like riding a motorcycle down a bobsled track in ice and storm. I mean they have no idea. They have no clue. They don't know that what they're running is essentially like riding a motorcycle down a bobsled track, you know, and ice and storm. I mean, they have no idea. It's just incredibly dangerous. And they don't know the real life they're doing it because they're marketing problem. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. And I recommend people go read Matt's piece here, but you also made, and on this one, I kind of want to push on you a little bit here because you say, well, you know, vendor lock-in is totally not a problem under Linux. But I wonder if that really resonates with Windows users.

I don't know if they recognize the fact they're in vendor lock-in. It's application specific. In most instances, it's maybe some random thing they created. Maybe let's say a greeting card maker or some random, you know, po-dunky piece of software. Gosh, or yeah, like the holiday card maker, that's such a great example. That's totally what I've seen happen too. It's the consumer stuff. It's usually some podunk software consumer thing they bought at Best Buy at one point or whatever it is.

They don't really think twice about it until they go to, I don't know, maybe they're trying to upgrade to the next version of Windows and they realize, okay, it's no longer compatible. Even compatibility mode's not working for them or to go to Windows 8 or whatever it may be. And then, of course, going to Linux, though, it's not always a straight shot. I mean, there are tools that make it easier.

Scribus, for example, has worked on their publisher support, but it's not quite 100% yet. But it's one to watch, and that helps. But that's the danger of vendor lock, and even at a consumer level, it does exist. It's a problem. So do you think there is an option here that average I'm thinking the people that would make a greeting card

software that want to buy that to make a card, they put their kids on it and they send that out to the family as the family holiday card. Do you think there is a solution for that type of user under Linux, or is that type of user going to be better served by the Mac? If I was in PC repair still, first thing I'd do is I'd get up to an affiliate program for one of the cloud-based alternatives for that same program,

and there's lots of them. Then you're not only saying, oh, by the way, your app is no longer compatible with my upgrade. They're upgrading them to Windows 8 or whatever it is, but you can go this route. Same thing if you're moving into Linux. Yeah, I think that's a huge part of the conversation we're about to have is like the cloud – hey, calling it the cloud. I wish I could – should we just call it the butt solutions? I don't know what we should call it. You can call it the butt solutions. I mean I was in Best Buy here recently, and I remember some woman asking the Geek geek squad person i want to make sure i get

the computer with the cloud oh no not the cloud but just cloud i want cloud i want cloud i gotta get some cloud oh yeah this is the people you're dealing with well and look at microsoft well we've integrated sky drive into the windows operating system that way you have cloud storage built in because they get marketing yeah i mean as much as i hate to say it i i'm not fan saying that but it's true you know i i look at this and I think this conversation, even two years ago, would be more like, yeah, if you kind of want that, you kind of have to go to the Mac. But now we're looking at a new generation, really, of web apps that do a lot. Great example is that greeting card thing could probably completely be done on some greeting card maker's website. They probably have

an HTML5 or, God forbid, Flash-based wizard you run through, and then they just submit it and print it right there. So the cloud now offers a whole new set of apps because it's itself an application. Let's just call them web apps. We won't call them cloud apps. Web apps. They're web applications. They run on an Nginx or Apache server. They have a SQL backend or something, right? Sure. They run on an Nginx or Apache server. They have a SQL backend or something, right? Sure.

And so this sort of relieves some of that pressure. Now, as we talk about this, it brings me to an email we got. And I really felt for this guy because the subject was, please, help me switch from Windows. And his name is Milan. And he says, hello, good people. I've been watching you for a bit, about less than two years, and you're the only nudgers I have helping me switch from the glory whose symbol is inspired by a carpenter's design. Yes, I am struggling to

switch to Linux simply because of the non-existing Linux community in my area. Out of laziness or comfort, one seems to want more and better, so here's my frustrations. Also, my parents have a lot of issues with Windows. Getting them on the Mint world would never happen. But I've decided to get Mint with Cinnamon 2 as it seems to be stable.

I've settled on Mint 13 for now, Cinnamon Edition, eight months ago on my old 80 gigabyte hard drive. I used Matt's guide to do it. Big thank you, Matt. And it was a breeze. The reason is I didn't use it now. So here's what happened. He ended up reinstalling Windows 7. The reason is I didn't use it now.

So here's what happened. He ended up reinstalling Windows 7. That process removed the boot choice as an option when he booted up, so he could no longer boot into Mint. Obviously, Windows overwrote the boot order. Now I have a drive. Now I have to dive inside the cable world and unplug my main hard drive to power up Mint, and that annoys me. So I'm going to have Linux on its own machine all by itself and be Windows-free.

Second problem I have, no power programs I like to use on Mint. Things like Photoshop, Premiere. There's also a lack of audio players, such as Awesome or Amp. And yes, one can run some of these things under Wine, but I do not see that as a viable option. Everyone praises Clementine. I haven't tried it, but it seems fine. It just seems a little bloated.

I noticed a couple episodes ago that you set up a service for monitoring resources. He says, I can do, I can also set those. I've noticed I went and found a parallel. I can set that up. But he says, I don't like the way it works. There's some things that lack compared to the commercial versions. He says, some of these things seem like silly stuff. But you had a little quarrel a couple episodes ago in the IRC on the same topic. And he says, I share your same point of view.

Windows is just too comfortable. Everything works for me in Windows. I spent a lot of resources to get under people's skin. It's made us weak and comfortable seeking fools, thinking that data security is an issue that is non-existent and unimportant he says i'm also a bit fed up with google mainly about mail safety but also forcing the way use of some of their products onto us so he says here's the essentials i need in order for linux to get some traction in a nutshell i need photoshop premiere a good audio player and system resource monitoring and a mail service So the long and short of this is right off the bat. The first mistake he's making is this is someone who obviously is using computers in his professional life,

and so a one-size-fits-all tool is probably a bit naive. He probably does need to consider a multi-platform experience because that sounds like he's got a lot of stuff. Music player thing, I definitely argue with that. I think there's a minimalist music player. She's got to spend a little time at SourceForge or whatnot. As far as the other part of it, you know, I today actually had to do a multi-Skype thing for work. And I plugged in my headset with Skype open. And boy, you betcha, it went ahead and just froze the entire desktop for me because that's a feature.

So I reboot with the device detected. It sees the device, but I can't get any sound to happen. So this belief that one operating system is somehow easier to use, honestly, I think it proves to me it's really what you spend the most time in. So because I spend so much time in Linux, I pull my hair out trying to do the most basic stuff in Windows. I can't. I spend all my time in the device manager going,

okay, I know what's broken. Yeah, I think you're right too like so the other thing another email we got this week was uh somebody who tried to switch to linux and uh just was not happy with any cad solutions right and so and that's fair point actually yeah i guess too part of me feels like you got to do a little research before you make the switch well you would think yeah no i there are a number of program areas is that asking too much um the research no but at the same time the expectation has been set see microsoft and even to a certain extent apple has made people complacent in right you're whatever you do don't think yeah we're gonna do our especially apple we're gonna do our thinking we're gonna do the thinking for you well i mean we're going to you know but look at windows

right windows is so popular that you're guaranteed to probably find an application that will do what you expect. Just based on market share, it's a given. The market is spoken in that space. It could be a shit app. It could be completely crap. It could be off some shareware site. Yeah. It's interesting.

I think with Linux, that's, again, going back to what I was saying as far as Joe Bob's distro. When they're promoting these distributions, they need a section that is painfully clear. Your experience is going to be completely different than anything you've had before. This is not a Windows experience. Yeah, and I think you're kind of getting – Honestly, I think when it comes to that, Ubuntu does a great job. It says right up front, this is not Windows. Do not expect it to be Windows.

I've yet to find that page. It's in the download page not expect it to be Windows. I've yet to find that page. It's in the download page. Is it? Okay. So you're thinking – I've not experienced it because everybody I've ever talked to that frustrates with it is like, well, I don't understand why it's – And I think also that you're also – even if it's a paragraph or even a whole page, you're expecting people to unlearn a lot of that too to where – again, Windows made people lazy and complacent. a lot of that too. Again, Windows made people lazy and complacent.

I think it's not that Ubuntu is trying to say, we're not Windows, they're trying to say, we're OS X. Ouch! Ouch! That was a slam. I think Ubuntu does a good job, but I mean, their documentation is a great example.

Horribly, horribly out of date. I can point to example after example. And again, it's all volunteers, and I get that. I understand that. But compared to, say, like Arch or some of these other distros, it's like obviously it's not impossible. Well, Don Thornton Jr. in the chat room says, why switch? Why does it have to be all or nothing? Right.

That's what I was saying. There's different tools for different jobs. That's why I live in a multi-platform universe. Yeah, I mean even here. I've got a couple macs i got i don't have any windows anymore but i did for a long time you know because i've got to be honest on my end my desktop my main entertainment machine runs windows but my laptop is 100 percent linux is that that netflix that's how i started out actually back in back in the day. My suggestion is just use something like Mint

that has already a good base of applications installed, and just use the IRC. Don't be afraid to ask questions in the IRC because, I mean, the problem with the Ubuntu IRC is there is a ton of people in there, and oftentimes they'll just get flooded after like two or three seconds. And then Mint IRC is a little bit more stable in that regard, too.

And plus, they'll help you most of the time in there, too. But people don't know about IRC, right? I mean, what we are going to be encountering is the Steam generation. Right. The Call of Duty players or whatever it's going to be who, you know, I don't want to, I'm trying not to be stereotypical here, but can I just, let's just go worst case scenario. Sure. Mom and dad won't pay for a new version of Windows.

I need, I need Steam OS. So I load it on a box. I have no idea what I'm getting into or I try out Ubuntu. I have no idea what I'm getting into, but I know it can play Steam games. I know it can browse the web. So I'm just going to jump whole hog into it because here's what I'm noticing, you guys. And this is not I'm not I don't mean to like shame anybody who's emailed in because, you know, because you emailed in. We have this topic. But a lot of a lot of people don't even don't even look beyond their nose. They just jump, man. They just have a certain expectation of sort of appliance-like functionality because their previous operating system provided them appliance-like functionality in a sense. And they just switch like whole hog. Like I got to open up an AutoCAD file tomorrow.

I'm going to switch to Linux today. And they just do it. And I feel like I want to put up a red flag here and say if you're listening to our content and and you think that's possible it is not it is you know you are switching you are switching to a different philosophy of computing and one that i argue is better it is worth that switch it is worth that effort but it is a transition my friends it is a good chunk of time to get rid of my windows partition but But I still have Windows programs I have to run, so I run them in a virtual machine. Yeah, there you go.

Another thought is this next couple days, I'm actually going to play with OpenSUSE 13.1 and try to get Pipelight working on that, and I might try to spend some full-time Linux experience on my desktop again for the first time in a while and see how that runs. That should be fun. Chris, I think you're talking about awareness here, really. time Linux experience on my desktop again for the first time in a while. Let's see how that runs. I think you're talking about awareness here, really. There's not

enough awareness of what Linux is all about, and that's why some people, they fire up, we always pick on Ubuntu because it's the easiest one to install or mint a variation, although Debian soon. So they fire it up and they think it's going to work out of the box.

It does, more or less, until you start installing proprietary drivers, and there's a kernel update, for example, and things like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that can be really tricky. You know, we were just talking on the pre-show on the live stream about the need to sometimes update your kernel to get some piece of hardware working correctly well not only that but with new computers as well um there's a new hurdle that you know with traditional bios really wasn't that big of a deal yeah i mean you know that new hurdle there is really uh for us it's like okay whatever you just find stuff in a different place no you nailed it people have been emailing in and they've

been talking every one of them is different and they've been talking about it. Every one of them is different. Yeah, they've been talking about it. It's a problem. If I bring something up about the codecs, on Windows and OS X, people expect those codecs to be there out of the box these days. The idea of having to install codecs

is in the last decade. It seems like a deficiency in the functionality of my desktop operating system to them. And I think that's why a lot of them are going mint. The old school mindset is when someone buys a computer, it's an appliance like a toaster.

And that is what they've been growing up in. When they actually switch the internals of the toaster, our system is dynamic. It's organic. It's like my aunt. Yeah, it's not static like they bought, when they bought the appliance. My biggest suggestion is you have to search about these things. Google is your best friend in these situations.

What if we just said Linux is computing without the training wheels and it's just not for the absolute beginner user it is right linux is for somebody who is comfortable with googling things linux is for somebody who's comfortable with you know having to maybe set a few settings that they wouldn't normally have to set under these up there is that really that bad to say i think i wouldn't even agree with that though i think yes they're not too old of a dog to learn a new trick. Well, I disagree, too. I don't agree with that just because, for example, my mom is a person who doesn't want to learn how to do anything like that. And I have a neighbor who has no intention of ever learning how to install anything. They don't even know what an EXE file is on Windows.

So what I would suggest is if there's people like that that you want to have try Linux, don't just tell them to try Linux. Give them an out-of-the-box situation where you take their computer, put everything up, set it exactly how they're going to use their computer, and then let them go at it, and they will never have a problem. Exactly. That's what I do

with my wife. My wife is running Linux on her computer. It's an Arch install that I made for her because I know what she's going to use it for. I know that she's not going to tinker around with it and muck it up at all. She's not even going to touch the command line. She's just going to do word processing

and web browsing for school. That's all she's going to do. So why Arch? Why Arch? Because I can custom make it for her. Because you're managing it. But you have to manage it. You have to manage it for her.

But there's a difference, though, too, like you know that you can just update it and never have to worry about reinstalling if you only do enough things if you're not trying to add like five different desktops doing stuff like that and that was the major motivating factor to be honest for many people their operating system is like a religion you're not going to be able to change their way of thought there's some cases which cannot be fixed. They cannot change. They're stuck. That's true because you're trying to retrain the brain.

You're trying to retrain how people think. And I go back to what I said about the Ubuntu page. I've looked back and forth both on slash download and slash download slash desktop. It says nothing. You almost think

there should be a legal disclaimer warning. Your Windows applications will not work under Ubuntu. It has a lot of great details here, but it's missing that core, hey, by the way, we have a great operating system experience for you, but understand, it's different. Yeah. Honestly, I think this

is why this whole discussion is why Canonical is partnering up with these manufacturers to push out computers in markets where people don't have that established bias. Yeah, it does seem like it's in Africa. And that's really from Firefox OS. I actually have a great wallpaper for that, too. It's a little Hitchhiker's Guide, a little robot thing. It says, don't panic, it's not Windows. Yeah, right.

Exactly. All right, well, you got to send that, put it in the room or something. I think that Microsoft has built this regime where we have all learned to ride the bike, and we all know to ride

the bike, we pedal forwards and we start moving forwards. And for somebody to say, hold on, you can start pedaling with your arms, they're like, no, that's not what Microsoft taught us to do. Do you see what I mean? Not at all. Well, no, I think it goes deeper than Microsoft. I think it goes deeper into how many people will actually truly cook a meal versus do whatever

is quick and easy. How many people truly change their own oil versus go to the quickie lube? How many people truly go and milk their own cow? Microsoft catered to an audience of people that wanted that anyway. Yeah, I mean the Windows environment is

just as much of a sandbox as the Mac is. It's just a way bigger sandbox and to me... It's becoming more closed and sandbox as the Mac is. It's just a way bigger sandbox. And to me... It's becoming more closed and closed as it keeps going. Oh, yeah. The advantages of the Windows desktop are diminishing, and the advantages of the Linux desktop are increasing, especially as we get to HTML5-based applications,

especially as Qt comes around and we get a lot more cross-platform applications. As all of these things mature, the advantages that Linux inherently advantages from cross-platform development, from web standards, from all of this stuff, and Windows inherently is disadvantaged by those things because they take away the Windows advantage, right? They take away the monopoly.

So it's almost like this problem we are struggling with today, we are heading, I truly believe, we are heading, and I couldn't put a time and date on it, we are heading to a point where just like Linux has completely dominated every area of computing, the desktop eventually, like Steve Ballmer said, almost like a cancer will be consumed by linux because as these top tier vendors begin to focus on their new areas of revenue mobile they will they will recede and they will they will they will lesser often not less they will offer less and less advantages to running on those platforms and as linux will continue to just grow as it has it will benefit from standardization.

It will benefit from all of these things that weaken these other guys and it will become the dominant desktop platform. I don't know what that's going to look like or what form factor is going to take place in, but I got to believe these problems we are talking about right now, these are solvable problems.

And I do not believe these Windows, the problems that Windows faces are solvable. I believe they are the eventual outcome of a maturing market. Windows is also killing Windows intentionally.

I think that people, when changing from Windows because they don't like it or whatever the reason, they have to know that in Linux, you don't use the same program as in Windows because you don't have them and you use alternatives like LibreOffice.

You don't use Winamp. You use Rhythmbox or Clementine. You use different programs and you need to know that before you switch. I guess I feel like we've always hung our hat on games are the barrier to desktop Linux. And man, if we just had games, dude, if we just had games

people would be switching to Linux. And now I feel like we're starting to get games and I'm realizing actually it's more than that. And another thing I kind of want to mention is the whole thing about the word Linux sometimes being dirty in people's mind. You ever wonder, like back in 2010 when Canonical changed their branding of Ubuntu, they started removing a lot of references to the word Linux. Yeah, I mean, I think that's kind of understandable.

Like, you know, cars aren't manufactured as gasoline anymore. This is a gasoline engine. Like everybody just kind of assumes it's a gasoline engine. Y'all, people get into it. Linus has said this before. People do not install OSs. They just don't. Right.

Yeah, that's right. So, like, your average Joe is not going to download, like, an ISO of a Bluetooth and put it on a flash drive and install it. That's just not going to happen. It's got to be somebody like us to show them that.

Or it's mobile. I think that most people don't even know what is Linux. When my mom came to my room and said, what's it Ubuntu thing? What's that? Yeah, I think the Linux branding right now. So here's what it is. It's a deficient brand. There isn't enough there to bank on it.

Brands are like a commodity that could literally be traded on the stock market. And they are so much amazing amount of value. You guys don't even realize how manipulated you are by brands. But brands are everything. And Linux right now doesn't have a super strong brand. Windows actually has the opposite problem. It had a great brand. It had a very strong brand.

Shit, you bought something because it supported Windows or because Windows ran on that. And that's why you bought it. But now it is a debt. It is a problem. Things in the marketplace do not succeed when they are branded with Windows. So they have crossed that lexicon, right? They have moved into territory where Windows now is a problem. Linux is – the branding of Linux is not yet like, oh, shit, that's Linux?

Oh, I'm going to buy that. But it could get there. I think it suffers from a lot of old stereotypes where it was the, quote, hacker's OS where you required more knowledge to use it. But you could have made that same argument. If you take it – so one of the things that I think you can draw parallels to, to watch what happens in a compressed timeframe. you can draw parallels to, to watch what happens in a compressed time frame. The commercial industry, in my opinion, operates in a much more compressed time frame than the open source, organic, evolved market, which is the Linux market. If you look at the Apple branding, right?

Apple was a joke in the late 90s. I don't know how old you guys are, but in the late 90s, they were terrible. Oh, yeah, they were terrible. Right? Yeah. In the late 90s, they were terrible. Oh, yeah, they were terrible. Right, yeah. Now they're almost like at a – their brand is like the number one brand in the world or some crap.

They're competing with Coke. It's ridiculous, right? And so you can see how you – as long as – I feel like the brand can cross from – I feel like you can have a brand that people understand isn't there yet. And then down the road, they'll acknowledge, okay, it's reached that point where it's refined enough that now it's good. It's a good thing, and I know about this, and it's good. Whereas a brand like Windows can also be – can travel that whole lifespan and then enter that period that it's in now. I don't feel like Linux has crossed that. What's that? I wonder how close we're going to achieve that when distributions like Ubuntu would rather focus on the Ubuntu brand rather than saying, oh, hey, we're Linux.

But aren't you glad? Linux will never be that brand. It will never be that brand because it's impossible for the – because the people who own the brand of Linux and own the trademark won't do that themselves. And a company won't want to put money behind it to advertise someone else it doesn't make sense it is more empowering to the user and in this case the user could be the manufacturer that they don't have to live on that brand that they can build their own the fact that a bruntu can build a respected brand by using linux makes linux more important like i go back to my gasoline comparison like gm doesn't say say, this is the gasoline-powered Chevy Volt,

or whatever, Volt's probably a bad example, Chevy truck, or whatever, right? They don't advertise the fact that it's powered by gasoline. I mean, everybody just knows it. Yeah, and I guess an electric car would have different advertising and branding. I mean, the same thing goes for, like,

Chrome OS or Android. It's more about the Android focus or the Chrome OS focus and not so much on the Linux, which I definitely understand. Well, I kind of like what they're doing, like the Chevy Lithium. Chevy Lithium is one. A big piece of what we've got to remember is what makes or breaks a brand is the experience that they are selling and or otherwise offering. If they're selling an experience that you want to participate in or emulate in some fashion, whether it be Apple or whatever it may be,

it's like, wow, I like what they're doing. I want to do that or I want to try that or I want to experience that. That's what will make a brand successful, even if it's past, even if you're watching something. When it comes to the business side of things or the quicken or the, you know, it's always the business apps.

And I think that's why Ubuntu focused on changing. I'm sorry. I think that's why Ubuntu focused on changing their branding three, four years ago. Because rather than being Linux for human beings, they were just Ubuntu. Yeah, that is a good point. And so I guess the way to kind of bring this back to the switching conversation is people definitely, I mean, based on my inbox, so here's the trend I've noticed. When I started doing the Linux Action Show, it was Fedora that people were finding

because they were finding the link from Red Hat and then they would follow that down to Fedora and then they would try out Fedora and then they'd be burned. And you'd see that reflected in my reviews. Like, I'd be like, why the F are they doing this? Don't they understand they're making, I mean, literally, you go back to my early Fedora reviews, I'd be like, don't they understand they're making the Linux community look

bad by shipping a volume app that doesn't actually change the volume? But now, I would say the vast majority, the vast majority of emails are people that are trying Mint or Ubuntu. Mint or Ubuntu. And what's interesting, it seems to be older versions of Mint, too. Where's that coming from? Magazines? I don't know what that's about. I found Ubuntu back in 2006. That was my first experience with Linux. And now when I use Linux, I go right for OpenSUSE just because of the tools it offers. I think this is part of the problem, is to understand what makes a successful,

long-term viable desktop. And it's based on like, well, what do you need? For me, I want community and I want modern software. So that's Arch, right? But for a lot of folks, it's, I want to know this is going to be around forever. I want to know it's enticing to commercial software creators. And in that definition, Fedora, Ubuntu, and OpenSUSE fit that definition a lot better. But how is a Windows user supposed to know that?

Exactly. And if you go back to early days of Linz, Spire, Xandros, and some of the other guys, we've seen people try and take this concept without any disclaimer, disclosure, or what people are getting into, put it into storefronts, or in some cases, online shopping. People will buy these machines not realizing what they're actually getting. So they get it home. They say, great, I'm going to go ahead and install my, let's say, the greeting card maker software. They put the CD in the tray.

They close the tray. They go to install it. Nothing happens. Okay, what's going on? Well, okay, I've got to get Microsoft Office on here. I've got Microsoft this. Okay, that's fine. I've got my product key.

I had to dig it out from under the drawer. Got it. Good to go. Entered it in. Nothing. And so it's like, okay, well, especially with Exandrus,ros which actually believe it or not for a while required a product key which was weird but which really sent the mixed message but these guys you know this was the early days and what was worse is if you look back at the time they were i won't use the brand names but they were using

very low-end hardware so you had a double-pronged sword of misinformation really really bad experience, a misunderstanding on OS and then bad hardware. To make it more confusing, at least under Zandro's business edition, business edition came bundled with Crossover, which I like. Crossover was fine, but they didn't really explain what it was. No, and you'd put the – if you put the Office CD in your CD drive, like it would auto mount it and it would actually start the office installation process like right there. It's very confusing because like some applications. So what you got was some applications automatically installed when I put in the disc and some don't do anything.

I don't understand what's going on. Right. And then you had Lenspire, which on the consumer side of it automatically worked with DVDs encrypted or otherwise. It actually even went so far as to allow you to purchase weird stuff like hang on to your hats, kids, parental controls. We don't have that now, but we had that back then. And they did a really good job with it, actually. And then, of course, you had a variety of other tools.

But even with all that stuff, because of the legacy concerns and questions and things that people would have and no real support system, they didn't really understand what they were getting into. But I would say, I guess our tips to new switchers to kind of put a bow on this whole thing yeah is just spend some weekends spend some some late nights doing your research find find all of the programs you think you would use for the stuff you need before you switch so you know going in what programs you're going to try, right? I would also suggest dual booting. Oh, yeah, or virtualization. Live USB.

Yeah, I would say USB is one. Dual booting at one time I was a big proponent of at one time. I used to think it was great. These days I'm absolutely shaking my head, jumping up and down, no. Yeah, with the UEFI it seems to be kind of hit and miss. One of the things I've been noticing in the emails is UEFI, sometimes people booting up their machines and they're just getting different results even. And who's to say a Microsoft update won't break something, you know, NBR-wise? You don't know.

I mean, you're putting a lot of trust in that. It's when I dual boot, you know, I find one week I'll spend 90% of my time on one OS and then boot the other and feel alien. So I go spend a week on that and then vice versa. It's absolutely a depressing conversation because a lot of times, either you're willing to learn and try something new, Linux is a good option. If you're not willing to learn and try something new, you have to stay with Windows.

It's unfortunate and sad. Windows 7, which is the last good version of Windows, hear ye, this is the last version of Windows that will ever be acceptable, as far as I'm concerned. It really wasn't terrible. To me, Windows is actually going to die. Yeah.

Microsoft themselves are going to kill Windows. So you have time, though. I mean, they're not going to pull the plug on it next year. It's got years of support left. So it's not like somebody can't find the time to try this stuff out eventually. Buy a new machine, set up your new machine, so then see how it works. And if it doesn't work with Linux, then put Windows

on it. You know, there's a lot of different ways to approach it. Virtualization, dual boot, whatever works for you. Yeah, usually whatever they buy, they're going to use. They don't care to change it. It comes as it is. I feel like if you're going to take this on yourself, wait till you're going to buy a new computer.

And when you buy that new computer, put Linux on it and just try it like that for a little bit because then you have your old computer if something should go wrong. Here's what I don't like about the dual boot. The dual boot, the problem with that is you immediately will reboot your computer after 30 seconds of not being able to do whatever it is you know you could do within 10 seconds on the other operating system. So the problem is that temptation to hit that restart button, and now you've got an SSD, so it's going to reboot into Windows super fast. So it's not like you've got to wait that long. You're going to reboot back into Windows, and you're just going to get the job done under Windows. And the problem is, lesson will never be learned. You'll never have learned how to do that. If you have it on its own machine, it's just that much more of a barrier where you're going to stick with it and try it for a little bit.

And you know you've got plan B. You can go over to the other computer if you can't get it working on that new computer. And I'm envisioning like you got a desktop for years and you buy a new laptop. Maybe you try that new laptop with Linux and you keep Windows on that desktop for a month or two until you've decided you can switch over. Right? I mean, and other things like Dropbox and BitTorrent Sync, by the way, make this a lot easier. Set up a synchronization between your two machines, open the same files on both machines,

and if you're working on a GIMP file and you just can't get it to work the way you want, after you've tried it enough, go open up on Photoshop, right, and do it there. But you can avoid the dual boot. There's solutions where you can avoid the dual boot now. With UEFI, I think it might be time to start considering, at least for a little while, not doing the dual boot now. With UEFI, I think it might be time to start considering at least for a little while, not doing the

dual boot solution. And that, Chris, is kind of why I have a different machine for different purposes and run a different OS on different machines. Yeah, totally. I think you really nailed it there because I think at the end of the day, I generally recommend to people that if you have an older computer and you're wanting to try Linux and you're going to buy a new computer anyway,

whatever your new computer is, I generally recommend using the operating system it comes with. If you're not sure, get it with whatever you're going to do, wherever you're at. But with older computers, you have a little more flexibility in that you know the compatibility is going to be more likely, especially with people that tend to buy a brand new Windows

machine, and then they go, oh, I'm going to go put a Ubuntu on it, and then five minutes later they're in the forums whining about how Ubuntu sucks because it doesn't work with this thing that has a Microsoft sticker on it, I might add. So that's my biggest gripe. That's good. Well said. And also maybe a little bit is be willing to be your own teacher, like Bullet Freak is saying in the chat room is like,

we are living in a time where information is so abundantly available to us, it's kind of ridiculous. To not take advantage of that is almost negligence on our part. So be willing to be your own teacher, do the investigation that you need to do. So yeah, I think that's- Remember trying to learn stuff pre-internet? I was having this conversation with my nephew earlier. You know what we used to do? It's kind of fun. In the enterprise, what we would do is about once every quarter, a couple of guys would jump in the car and we would take a super long lunch and we'd go down to the most closest Barnes and Noble and we would just buy a

crap ton of books. We would just buy a bunch of books, right? Cause we didn't have Google, right? We didn't have Google, man. I mean,

come on. I mean, maybe we had all the Vista back then, maybe, but that sucked. Well, that was a joke. Yeah.

So we bought books now. Now you just, I mean, everybody knows hot, but one but that sucked. Well, that was a joke. Yeah. So we bought books. Now, now you just go to books. I mean, everybody knows HotBot won, right? I mean, you know. Yeah, good times. I kind of miss some of that a little bit. I miss HotBot. I don't know why. Maybe it's the logo.

I don't know what it was, but yeah. All right. Well, I want to shift gears and kind of bring us into the end of this week's show. But first, I had an email I wanted to get to, and that was from No Need to Pronounce My Name Correctly. Hey, that's one I think I can get. I and that was from No Need to Pronounce My Name Correctly. Hey, that's one I think I can get. I think I can manage that one. They just won the internet.

What do you think? You think I can? I think you nailed it. But before we do, I want to talk about our sponsor this week. Now, Matt, did you know that DigitalOcean is sponsoring this week's episode of Linux Unplugged? Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, DigitalOcean is cloud hosting made simple. Now, cloud hosting, like Ray, me, and our audience pointed out, cloud hosting might not be the best way to put it.

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of transfer. Now, you might think, oh, SSD, that's interesting. You know what? It is interesting. And when you combine it with their super fast network speeds, oh boy, does that sucker sing, let me tell you. So here's what I want you to do. Go over to digitalocean.com and use the promo code Linux13. That's going to get you a $10 credit. Now, if you buy their lower end machine for five bucks, their beginning machine, that's the machine I've been using it now. $5 a month when you combine SSD storage with their crazy awesome network performance and the fact that Linux has amazing memory management so 512 megs of RAM is plenty for what I'm using it for. I have been so happy and I got the first two months

for free because I used the code Linux13 they'll give you a $10 credit $5 machine means you get it for two months they've also got servers by the hour if you want to toss up a machine now here's what's great is they have droplets and these can be the pre-configured droplets like I was talking about, LAMP, Docker or you can make your own image like I've done of my Arch installation.

And then if I want to test something and I don't want to spend a couple hours setting up Arch, I just deploy that image. I do an update and then I've got a fully current Arch machine with all the installations I need and I can pay by the hour if I like. I think it's really nice too because you can also resize on demand. So if I want to really throw something need, and I can pay by the hour if I like. I think it's really nice too because you can also resize on demand. So if I want to really throw something at it, I can add more memory, more CPU. I can get web console access if I don't want to fire up SSH.

You can also SSH into it later. You get backups, you get snapshots, you get one-click application installs. It is really awesome. Plus they have a 99.99% uptime SLA. So go over to digitalocean.com and use the promo code Linux13. Oh, by the way, DigitalOcean offers a vast use the promo code Linux13. Oh, by the way,

DigitalOcean offers a vast collection of tutorials for their community. Yeah, they're big on community. You know I'm a fan of that too. Here's the great part though. If you want to contribute to the articles that community has,

you know, reference stuff, if they've decided something they want to publish to the community, you can get $50 per published piece. That is awesome. That's awesome. We'll have a link to that

in the show notes too as well as a link to get this deal use the promo code Linux13 when you're checking out over at DigitalOcean you're going to love it I've been using it

for all kinds of things it's a fixed cost so I know what it's going to be every single month not like some of the other stuff where it varies depending on CPU and bandwidth and you get a surprise

it's got a great amazing awesome interface I get root access to my box and the performance is incredible. And on the back end, I love the technology they're using. They're using Linux.

They're using KVM. They're using industry standard security technologies, and I love it. So go over to DigitalOcean.com and use the promo code Linux13 to get a $10 credit on your account. And thanks to DigitalOcean for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. You know what's awesome about that? You know, you got the promo. You walk in, right? You get started essentially for free, really.

And then by the time you're done and you want to continue with it, it's like a Starbucks coffee. I mean, that's crazy. Yeah, it's no bigs, right? Right? Yeah, it's great. I love it. All right, no need to pronounce my name, sis.

First off, thanks for lasting all the shows on Jupyter Broadcasting. I've been an avid listener ever since installing Ubuntu 9.10 and experienced Linux for the first time back then. Oh, man. Oh, man, did I freaking fall in love. Now, after all these long years, I have been mainly staying in Ubuntu. In particular, 1204 LTS has been treating me well. I'm not much worried about having the bleeding edge like an Arch,

but with all these news and all these recent privacy issues in Ubuntu, I have thought about switching to a different distro. I know, Chris, you use Linux Mint. Actually, I use Arch these days, but I like it. And I do like Cinnamon quite a bit. It caught his eye as well. He said, I've used Unity starting in 1204, and I'm looking

at the next LTS release, and I really feel like maybe after looking at what their plans are for the next LTS, maybe I should try Linux Mint. But at the same time, I kind of want to know how Manjaro works. It's rolling release instead of LTS, so I kind of want to test it out. I know Matt likes Manjaro. I do. So here's the long

and short of it. I would say, is it as easy as Ubuntu? Not exactly. It's close. But there's a couple of little snags that you might run into along the way. The good news is that their forums probably have already covered it. So if you're willing to check that out, you're probably fine. Like setting just little things.

On the bonus side of it, yeah, most of the stuff you expect to be set up like in Ubuntu will be set up for you automatically and you won't have to fool with it. That is nice. If you're wanting to actually step out a little further and try something a little more hands-on, you can actually go full-on Arch with what we're using now, Integros. Integros. Yeah, Integros has kind of been a hit in the JB community. It has. Totally based on straight-up Arch.

So one of the big things I'm not totally sold on with Manjaro is their approach to stability is having a repo that they just kind of held back for a little bit. But I do not believe, and I could be wrong, and maybe time will fix this, but I do not believe their testing base, it's not big enough to really suss out problems. So what you really just get is delayed packages. Now, I'm sure ManjaroCamp hates hearing that criticism,

but the reality is that's how I see it. They're not Debian, right? They don't have a Debian deployed base where they literally have thousands and thousands of people running the testing branch. That is true. They probably have hundreds of people using the testing branch, maybe 500, who knows, right? Whereas with Integros, you stayed more married to the mainline Arch. So when Arch pushes out that security fix, you get it right away. But I would also point out that, and I definitely would agree with that, but I would also say the difference between setup is,

And that's true. And, you know, I definitely would agree with that. But I would also say the difference between setup is, oh, there's no question Manjaro is easier. I mean, it's not. Oh, yeah. It's not hard for Integros just because, I mean, I've done Arch. So for me doing Arch, it was no big deal. I mean, Integros has a very Ubuntu-like installation.

It's real. The install is fine. But as far as, like, getting some of the niceties set up, first of all, if you don't know what Pac-Man is from Space Invaders and you're coming into this, okay, then what are you doing? The tool they provide is a little... You might want to actually... You'll either want to study up ahead of time and learn what the hell it is, or if you go with Vengero, they provide an app where you don't really care. Do you think maybe

he should go Mint? Because he's kind of coming from an Ubuntu, Debian kind of space, and he's kind of doing the whole apt scene. Or elementary OS? Yeah, I'd say probably elementary OS over Mint. Mint is making me kind of nervous lately, so elementary OS is probably a good choice. Manjaro is cool if you want to try something cool or new.

And Tegos is awesome as well. But if you want something you can just slide in directly, probably elementary. Mint, I don't know. I just – lately they're just – not because of all the other stuff that's been going on as far as the back and forth, but more just from stability. I'm not really feeling it. I've always had nothing but problems getting it to work right. Oh, snap. You're talking about cinnamon? Yeah.

Or no, not just cinnamon, but just later versions of mint. It's like there's always some little thing that pops up that, yeah, I can work with it, but it's just kind of like, look, if I want to work with it, I'll use a more advanced operating system. He also asked, how would you compare rolling releases to LTS? And I would say apples and oranges, right? So the LTS is you get all of your updates in one big go. And I mean one really big go, like you moved to a whole new OS. Whereas rolling is a lot of little changes frequently. Absolutely.

Whereas rolling is a lot of little changes frequently. Absolutely. And no matter what distro you choose to go with, first and foremost, say it with me, dedicated home. You'll thank me later because you will forget to back something up and kick yourself. But by having dedicated home, your life is going to suck a whole lot less. Hey, hey, hey. Hey, maybe we should be recommending OpenSUSE 13.1. It's got – it's never been released, three years of support. It automatically recommends a home partition for software availability.

You've got software.opensuse.org. I mean, seriously, maybe this is an opportunity for no need to pronounce my name correctly. Go check out opensuse13.1. I actually think this is your perfect solution. I think I'm going to agree with that because it's kind of a balance of the best of both worlds. You can actually try something new and cool, but at the same time, it's really, really easy to use. Yeah. And Yast is a pleasure if you're not super comfortable with Linux.

You're going to discover things you didn't even know you could do. Just go check out the one-click installs for the software you need, and I think you'll be pretty happy. And because they got three years support, I think that's just right. For somebody who doesn't want something that changes that often but you don't want to get too stale, I think that's the sweet spot. And you got your package access, which you've got to love that. And you got your sugar daddy who's keeping the project alive long term. That's right. So there's advantages there, too.

Very good. All right, Matt. Well, I think that'll bring us to the end of this week's Linux Unplugged. Now, you know, sir, of course, we love to get people's feedback. So they can go over to jupiterbroadcasting.com. They can pop that contact link and then choose Linux Unplugged or Linux Action Show. We'll take them both. Send that in to us and

we'll read it on the next week's show. And of course, we want you to join us live. You can go to jblive.tv on a Tuesday afternoon. You can also join our mumble room if you go over there. We put all the details in our live chat room over at jblive.tv or jblive.info. Timing for that can be found over at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar.

So you can go over there and get it updated in your neck of the woods. Well, Matt, I'll see you on Sunday for the big show, okay? See you Sunday. All right, everyone. Well, thank you so much for tuning this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. We'll see you right back here next week. you