LINUX Unplugged - Episode 16: Meet the Dockers | LUP 16

Episode Date: November 27, 2013

A new version of Docker was just released, we bring on the CTO and Founder of Docker to chat about the big features all Linux users can look forward to.Plus building the perfect Linux workstation, your feedback, and much more!

This is Linux Unplugged, Episode weekly Linux talk show that already has one foot out the door this holiday week. My name is Chris. My name is Matt. Hey Matt, so we've got a fun show today. A lot of things happening. that already has one foot out the door this holiday week. My name is Chris. My name is Matt. Hey, Matt. So we've got a fun show today. A lot of things happening. Even though it's a holiday week, you'd think it's Turkey Day tomorrow? Yeah, tomorrow here in the United States.

Tomorrow's Turkey Day. No, wait, no, Thursday. No, wait, Thursday. Sorry, I got my... There's turkey all week long, Chris. I've already got tryptophan all in my blood system. I'm a wreck over here, Matt, because all I can think about is that bird and then just planning my turkey strategy so that I leave enough room for pumpkin pie,

but not so much room that I eat too much pumpkin pie, right? It's all about finding the right bandwidth for your stomach. Right. And this is what you would think we'd be concerned about right now. But no, my friends, no. We have more important matters. Some big things are happening in the land of Linux infrastructure. You might be familiar with Docker. Now, that could be because I talk about it all the time. I talk about it too much. Maybe we should just call this Docker Unplugged.

But this week, something big happened on the day we record live. A new version of Docker is out, and it promises to bring Docker to all Linux distributions. And there's only one way, I thought, to get the appropriate official word on the new version of Docker, and that was to bring on Solomon from Docker. He is the co-founder and CTO of the Docker project, I guess? What is the organization behind Docker, Solomon? So it is now officially Docker Inc., Docker.com.

And that was a transition from? Yes, from.cloud. Ah, right..cloud was actually, that actually sort of signifies a big transition in how you guys are structuring your business because it wasn't before. Weren't you guys more of a software of a service platform? And now you're kind of transitioning to the Docker project. Yeah. So we're.cloud launched in 2010, a platform as a service. So, uh, you know, if you're familiar with Heroku or Google app engine, uh, a hosted service, uh, that runs other people's web applications basically. And so we've been doing that for, for several years. We still do it. Uh, it, you know, it, the product is still there. We have lots of customers. It's a growing business. Uh, the change of name is

really to indicate that Docker is just going so crazy, uh, and growing so fast that the only way we can do a good job at maintaining it is making that the number one focus of the company. So can we give just a real quick elevator pitch on when somebody says, hey, what is Docker? What do you tell them that just sort of makes it click for them? Well, it depends how technical they are. Go technical. Don't be afraid. We have a brave crew with us. So Docker is a container engine. It's a way to package and deploy your application in a sort of a unit that can be moved around very easily from server to server and then executed on any of those servers in a very repeatable way.

And it uses a sandbox execution environment that I like to compare to how, you know, iOS or Android sandboxes its application. So it's really that notion of it's one thing, you execute it, and it's running in its own little sandbox. It's not interacting in any way with other applications that may be running on the same server. And so that gives you a lot of flexibility, a lot of power in how you deploy your applications. It makes it much easier to automate that.

And Docker is sitting on top of some new-ish Linux technologies to accomplish this. Is that correct? Yep, that's right. And what are those technologies? So, I mean, there's three main low-level technologies. So the first is namespaces. And it's the ability for the Linux kernel to execute processes and have them not see each other, basically, to kind of sandbox them so that, you know, simplistically the process thinks it's alone. And so you've got a bunch of different namespaces, PID namespaces, network namespaces, et cetera. So a process can have its own network interfaces, its own process space. So when it lists all processes on the system, it sees only its own, etc. So that's the first.

The second is one called cgroups or control groups. And that is a subsystem in Linux that deals with everything resource allocation and resource accounting. So if your process can get a certain amount of something and another process can have another amount, that's cGroup. So anything from memory allocation to CPU priority to how much IO you're allowed to consume, etc., that's all cGroups. And so that's what allows you to run a bunch of applications side by side and do things like, hey, this application gets 100 megs of RAM, this one gets a gig, and they don't walk on each other's toes. That's number two. And the third feature that we we've been using aggressively is copy and write, basically. The ability to take a directory,

to take a file system, and create any number of copies, a lot of copies, potentially, of that file system almost instantly with very little performance overhead. And in starting in version, if I'm correct here, starting with the version that came out today, 0.7, is the file system area one of the areas that we're seeing some of the biggest changes for this release?

Yep, that's correct. And these changes are what? So what we've done is we've taken the underlying copy and write file system that we have been using from the very beginning, which is AUFS, and making that, moving that from a hard coded, uh, default to an optional driver and shipping multiple drivers so that you can pick and choose, uh, from one of the, you can pick one of those drivers depending on what your system supports. Oh, so we're talking multiple Linux distribution support, almost all Linux distribution support.

Yes. That was the big headline of the 0.7 release which came out today. There's a lot going on in that release. I'll just start with that. We kind of made a list of seven really important features

that shipped with 0.7. Yeah. But, you know, definitely the one at the top is the fact that this is the first version that runs on a non-modified standard Linux kernel, which means that Docker runs on basically every Linux distro, which was not the case before. That's awesome.

I mean, that's a, that's, that's, so to me, what reason, that takes Docker in a sense, not to diminish the other features, the other six features, but that takes Docker to a sense to sort of, in a way, becomes the great normalizer amongst Linux distributions, because I can, I can build up an application and its environment on a Fedora box. I can, I can get everything running and then I can pick that up and I can move it over to a Debian box or an Ubuntu box and have the same exact performance results, et cetera, et cetera, that I should have on the other operating system, correct? On the other distro. Yeah. It's like one of the big

goals of Docker is to make that mobility uh easier right that the goal is really that across all the machines that you have access to uh from your laptop to your production uh servers to your qa servers across multiple data centers multiple infrastructures in-house public uh cloud etc that the commonality between all of those is that they can run Docker. And then you have this kind of big, really flexible playing field where you can just move containers around. And that's really, we keep using the metaphor of shipping containers. And I think at this point, everyone's sick of hearing about shipping containers and Docker being the shipping container of computing. But it's really relevant beyond the, hey, let me explain to you containers for dummies.

It's a really good analogy because a container shipping system is only as valuable as the sum of places where you can ship. No one would care about a worldwide shipping infrastructure that was supported by two cities, right? No one cares about that. It's valuable because you can ship anything, anywhere. And so that's, you know, if you look at our roadmap for Docker, that's basically the goal,

that you can install Docker on any of your machines on one hand, and on the other hand, whatever it is that you're developing and packaging, that Docker can package it. So in this part of it, this packaging part of it, is sort of one of the comparisons you always see thrown out whenever I talk about Docker in our chat room is jails. People compare it to BSD jails.

One of the differentiators here, and maybe you could go into a little detail here, is I could build a Docker container that has Apache and MySQL all set up, ready to go. And then there is a way, a very Git-like way for me to take that entire instance and publish it and then go to another machine or have a coworker or a fellow developer who, whatever the scenario is, pull it down to their computer using another Git-like command, right? Yep.

Yeah. So talk about that a? Yep. Yeah, so exactly. Talk about that a little bit. Yeah, I think there's kind of this constant, you know, over time, we've been, Docker has been tested and used by a lot of people. And there's, I don't know how many conversations about Docker have been in, but it's a lot. And so there's kind of a pattern. There's kind of a pattern in the kinds of questions and reactions we get.

And there's definitely one particular thread of reaction, which is basically, hey, this is nothing new. Jails. Well, even in Linux, OpenVZ has been around forever. VServer before OpenVZ has been around forever. Solaris zones, et cetera, et cetera. Even LXC, which is kind of the newest newest of the bunch has been around for a couple of years. Uh, so, you know, there's that question of, well, okay, you know, big deal. What, you know, uh, I will concede me the, the, the experts is admin who has been using all these, these amazing things for years. I will concede that, okay,

this makes it easier for the beginner, but beyond being training wheels for the real deal, what the hell is Docker all about? And I hear that all the time, and I think there's a big misunderstanding, which is that, you know, Docker, we don't pretend to have invented this stuff, and we try really hard to make sure, to constantly credit the, you know,

all the people building the really hard, important stuff that Docker is built on top of. So really, we're standing on the shoulder of giants here. What's really valuable, what's really new about Docker is that it's not just a new, like a lighter VM, right? It's not just, hey, I can start a machine faster. I can sell a VPS for I can, uh, I can, um, sell a VPS for, for less because there's less overhead. Um, it's, it's about using, um, it's about creating a new unit of software delivery, right? And the keyword is delivery. It's moving things around, having that portable format

and, uh, and, um, and a portable runtime where you can specify in advance to the developer, here's what's going to happen when this application is run by Docker. And everything that I'm telling you now about what's going to happen will be true for every single installation of Docker everywhere. And that's kind of a big deal. Do you suppose looking into your crystal ball of craziness going way out in the future as hard drives and bandwidth just become more and more plentiful could actual desktop applications be delivered this way oh i think so i mean you know our focus is is definitely the server first yeah

but and if you had asked me six months ago i've said well you know maybe one day but but it will it will be a long time, we have an entire subgroup, like an entire underground community within the community that is porting Docker to Raspberry Pi. Oh, wow. That was my next question because it seems like the Raspberry Pi is – it is the perfect device for this because the overhead of virtualization is just way too much, right?

Yeah, exactly. And it's a perfect thing. And there's plentiful. You could have dozens of them. You could move Docker instances around on all of them. I mean, so is that happening? Is Pi happening? Yeah.

So there was a big blog post. I keep reading about it. I'm just like, wow, who are these people? They're crazy. But yeah, it's Docker. We don't officially support 32 bit architectures. Uh, mostly not because it can't, it doesn't work. It's basically, there's an if statement in there and if it's if 32 bit then fail and you know, they've removed it and then

kind of went through, um, fixing problems as they find them. Um, and yeah, they, there are people running a Docker on, on Raspberry pies today. Wow. And likewise, so embedded systems, I think there's a huge opportunity for that. And desktop applications, I see a lot of that going on. Not directly running the desktop application. The intermediary use case that I'm seeing is people want a desktop environment on the server. people want a desktop environment uh it on the server you know they want a remote shit they want a remote desktop uh but you know but they don't want to junk up their main server os right yeah and they don't and they also don't want to set up like this one kind of special case desktopy remote vm they're like you go you have to go and click around to to it work. They just had Docker run. There was this blog

post about putting a I forget the name an open source alternative to the Microsoft suite all ready to go so you would Docker run it and then you had an X

window remote session which would be tunneled through SSH. And then optionally on top of that, you could have a VNC viewer, which itself had an HTML5 client. Wow. Wow. So you had like a little desktop and the browser and, you know, under the hood, it was just a Docker container. So while we still have that crystal ball out, you know, looking at the future of Linux, this is such a great Linux solution. It seems to be that more and more people are getting behind, especially on the SUSE side of the fence, getting behind ButterFS.

Any future plans? How does ButterFS play in with Docker? Because I know that there's some challenges there, isn't there? Like you couldn't use ButterFS in place of, say, an AUFS system, right? So the short answer is that I'm pasting a link to you right now, and that's a pull request for ButterFS support. Oh, well, there we go. Oh, wow, there it is.

And so we're probably going to merge it this week under the experimental label. But the blocker the there there was a blocker you're right and the blocker was really in in the internals of docker and how our code was organized it just had to do with the fact that auf you know docker was had a ufs built in hard coded uh and it took a little bit of reworking to make that part optional and pluggable and find the right API and all that good stuff. Now that we've, and it took us a while. Initially, 0.7 was supposed to come out a little earlier,

but eventually we figured it out. And now that we went from one to two drivers, going from two to three and three to 10 is really not that hard. And so there's people experimenting with, you know, a possible ZFS driver. Oh, wow. A Ceph, GlusterFS. There's some crazy guy doing something. Something has to do with automatically syncing to BitTorrent. I don't know exactly what's going on there. Wow. That could be pretty cool, too, though. There's a lot of cool stuff you can do. And so that's really like if I had to summarize

what's going to happen going forward, since I saw the crystal ball, right? Yep. Before I get back to you, there's just going to be more of that of taking things that are hard coded in Docker today, and moving that to an optional plugin, defining an API and shrinking the core. And we're going to do that for storage for networking, for sandboxing, for service discovery, all of these things that there's no single true way of doing it. There is 10, 20, and everyone has a way they need to customize storage or networking or whatever. They should all be able to do it through Docker.

I'm going to be deploying some Docker instances here probably in the beginning of the year because I'm a crazy guy and I like to have a kind of a really rapidly rolling system as my main system, but I can bring up in Docker, I can bring up a Zimbra installation and keep it nice and steady and stable running on top of a supported distribution. And I just look at this and I think this solves so many enterprise problems, this solves small business problems, this solves developer problems, and it also solves end user problems. And I think Docker is one of the most exciting things happening at the lower levels of Linux. So happy to see version 7 out.

But you guys are still not technically saying, hey, this is ready for production, are you? You're still kind of saying we're still working on it. Yeah. I don't know how long we're going to get away with that. Because people are using it. Yeah. And I can tell you, I don't know how long we're going to get away with that. Because people are using it. Yeah, and I can tell you, I got an email. I mean, there are a lot of people who are very comfortable saying publicly that they use Docker in production. Yeah.

And, you know, basically we're saying, hey, we're not saying, we're not forbidding you. Just a warning. If you do it, you better know what you're doing because we're not guaranteeing that anything will work properly. There is no particular reason. So people get suspicious i mean why are you saying that what's going to happen there's no one thing that's going to it's just engineering good practice right it's it's new codes uh and we're we're an ops shop right we run people's apps in production right we've been in that situation of oh cool let's try that let's use it it'll be fine and then it blows up of course so you know but at the same time you've got yandex you know the google of russia and they're

they're freaking huge you got baidu of china and they've got docker in production on thousands of servers today we got an email from a startup um called runnable uh and they do like um like snippets of code like the google like, how do I do this and that? But then there's a run button and you click and you get like a live running version of it. And they emailed us saying, hey, we have half a million Docker containers in production. Wow, holy cow.

So yeah, then what do you say to that, right? It's like, okay, well, let me know if you have a problem. So a question from our chat room, they wanted to know, have you heard any indications that maybe this is one of the larger projects running using Go? I think it's the biggest in GitHub, at least. I don't know. We talked to the Go team, the core Go team a lot.

I think we used Go as a very pragmatic decision process. We're a Python shop originally. We're not, you know, Go fanatics. We're not really fanatics of any language. And we kind of, you know, reached the conclusion of using Go and started using it and liked it. We kind of had that kind of gut feeling that it was cool, you know, as systems engineers, that this was something we could rely on. And so far, it turned out to be completely true. It's a great language. But, you know, what happened is, you know, Docker kind of blew up. It became popular very unexpectedly, very quickly.

We were certainly not ready for it. And we're still paying the price now. I mean, there's chunks of code that, you know, you'll see, you know, fix me, this should not exist. And it's been there for like four months because we didn't have time to get around to just cleaning it up. Well, you know, I talked to some, I talked to a couple of guys from the Docker project three, four, five months ago. Can't remember now on the Coder radio show that we have on the network. And my comment then was,

are you guys ready for how big this is going to get? Because, you know, I'm, I've been as, I was a sysadmin for 14 15 years and this i mean let me tell you i was just i saw all of the problems that solve so i can see how it's blowing up do you feel pressure to get to 1.0 do you feel like it's building like you like yeah yeah oh yeah a lot of pressure i mean the there is just the pressure of hey a lot of people using it you don't want to let them down you know right to be worth it. And now there's the additional pressure as a company, as an organization, a lot of businesses are betting their technology platform on Docker. So it's kind of this double

you don't want to let down your fellow maintainers and the community and give them crappy code and kind of disappoint them. And you also want to make sure that the business is betting their technology future on this. I mean, it seems kind of – it is pretty crazy just how rapidly things happen. I think it's just a matter of good timing. So yeah, the pressure is definitely there, but it's healthy. It's good. It's also one of the sexier demonstrations of recent low-level functionality we've gotten in Linux itself. And it's kind of a neat way to see this, see several, like the three core components you touched on.

It's a neat way to see all three of them used in a very compelling use case. And so I think that's resonating with a lot of people. And the fact that you're sitting on top of these established technologies like namespaces and cgroups, I think people feel a little more comfortable with that. technologies like namespaces and cgroups, I think people feel a little more comfortable with that. Yeah, I think it's just a natural fit. That's where I'm comfortable personally, that kind of that junction between low-level systems and higher-level APIs and platforms. And it's a very delicate, it's really, it's all about the art of, you know, finding the right balance. If you go too, too low level, then you kind of lose the, the end developer. What's the point? I don't care about this. And, and if you go to high level,

then you kind of lose touch with the technical reality. And you, you know, you start doing, doing crazy abstractions that are pointless. It's a really hard line to follow. But I think it's a really cool challenge. The ultimate reward is when you talk to really hardcore systems guys and say, oh, I'm glad you guys exist. You kind of showcase what's possible with the hard work we're doing. Yeah, that's very true.

I think it's pretty cool. Well, I just have a last couple of questions. One comes from the chat room, Bacon Flaps, which is always a great name. He wants to know if you could share a little bit about your teams, the IDE you use, and any kind of tool chain info you could share. Huh.

So first of all, it's very different from person to person. I am the least, what's like, uh, what's the word? Like I I'm the least sophisticated person you can find in terms of working environment. Yeah. Uh, I, I, I use stock VI on my little digital ocean VM. Right. And I'm happy. Awesome. Um, and I think like seriously, people make like Mike, everyone on the team makes fun of me. He's like, what? You didn't tune this. I'm like, no, I'll have to remember how, how to do it again.

Yeah, exactly. I totally know what you mean. So, and then it's funny cause the rest of the team is kind of split between super, super intense, super, uh, jacked up Emax setup. Wow. Uh, and then, uh, super tunes, um, VI setup. And I'm like there in the middle, like, you know, with my, with my shitty setup, uh, no, no, no other IDEs really. I mean, you know, it's, it is systems work. So, um, we write and, and my, my rule of thumb is, you know, for example,

I don't even have C tags, um, configured. So when I, you know, when I So when I want to look up the definition of a function I'm calling, I got to remember which file to go to and go look it up manually. And also something that everyone else makes fun of me for, but I like it that way. That's kind of my canary.

When I can't keep it all in my head just by moving around in files, I know it's time to refactor. The code's too complicated. That's my thing. Good point, Good point. All right. Well,

is there anything you want else you want to touch on before we let you get back to your Tuesday? Let's see. Yeah, there is one. I mean, yeah, there's a whole list.

Well, we wrote a blog post about the Oh seven release. So there's, yeah. You want to go through some of that? Yeah, there's, there's,

there's a lot. So I don't want to go through all of it. So I'll, you know, I'll just encourage everyone to go look at it. And I'll have that linked in the show notes as well as your getting started guide that you guys have. It's great. And also a little info about this. We'll have a link to this, which we're about to cover in the show notes.

So go ahead. Yeah, any parts you want to go through, I'm all for it. I love it. The one thing I want to emphasize is the support for links. That's because it's a small incremental improvement, but it's the beginning of a really important part of the roadmap, which is orchestration and service discovery. And basically going from one container in isolation to lots of containers working together on lots of machines and forming a stack that you can manipulate as as a cohesive entity interesting so is this like network networking ports like i turn on networking ports and open for everyone in that stack yeah so so this first step it's it's very simple it's basically uh and and the feature is called links and what it what it allows you to do is basically

connect container a to container b okay so that one can discover and connect to discover the open the ports exposed by the other and connect to them in a standard way oh oh that's really nice that makes it much easier yeah so typically you do you know docker run database and then you'll say docker run front end dash link database and then that the database is linked into the the front end and then the front end can now connect to the database in a simple standard way um and it's you know it's it's very simple for now it's it's local to one machine only for now um it uses the simplest possible uh means of discovery and its environment variables, which is both simple and easy to start using and also limited.

It can't change dynamically as the process continues to run. If you want to attach a new dependency, you have to restart. So all of that we're going to fix in future versions. But the fundamentals are there and it's a super, super important part of Docker's roadmap

because here's the thing. The way people use containers is as a group, right? Increasingly, if you've got a single container, you can do things, but pretty quickly, like, okay, this is great. I want more of them, and I want to wire them up together. Absolutely. Here's the risk. The risk is that, you know, the risk is fragmentation. We've put a lot of effort in building this runtime that is standardized and works the same way everywhere. That way, once I have a dozen of them, I don't have a nightmare of management on my hands. Right? Because, yeah, because it could start to become, it could start to get really wily after you have four, five, six, seven, a dozen, twenty of these things. It could be really nuts.

And so, in the same way that we want any container, any image you get from the index, from anyone that produced an image using Docker Anywhere, that should run 100% of all Docker deployments the same way. And now we're reaching the point

where a lot of these containers, part of their functionality is to be connected to other containers. If I if I build the the most awesome POSGRESS container you can think of and I share it with you, you know what you want to do with that database is connect to it from from another container. So the how containers can be plugged into each other needs to be standardized. containers can be plugged into each other needs to be standardized. Otherwise, what will happen is I'll give you this, that POSGRESS container and say, Hey, here's my standard database container. Oh, by the way, you can only use it if you happen to use Zookeeper and, and, and Mezos, because that's what I use for orchestration or you need open stack heat or you need whatever. So, but to solve that problem, we need to just put in there just one,

just that the smallest possible amount of standardization so that every container uses the same mechanism for finding another container. And then machine by machine, you can customize how it's done. You can still use Mesos. You can still use OpenStack Heat. You can still use all of those different orchestration tools but the container doesn't need to know so anyway that's that's a

really important part of it awesome there's gonna be a lot more i can't wait to watch as more comes out uh and i'd love to keep a line open to you guys just to come on in the future when uh you get closer to 1.0 as you build towards that because it's such an awesome project um thank you we have gotten a lot of good response from our audience too i think there's a lot of people out there finding use cases for it too so definitely and and one call to action if i could just add one more thing is the if there's one place that i recommend anyone go if you want to learn more about docker or just interact more or ask questions or complain or anything at all it's it's the irc channel it's just it's the one place uh you know pound docker on on free node there is a lot of people it's super active

and people are very nice and i don't know about you guys but i i sometimes i kind of get a bad first experience from open source irc channels because it can be elitist and kind of it can make you feel stupid if you're a beginner. Yeah. And I'm very, it's up there in my top three, you know, things I'm most proud of in Docker is the fact that everyone is super helpful and nice on that channel. And there's like 600 people there. That's awesome. That's awesome. I would say first thing, if you have, if you're interested in any way, just go there and talk and just, or hang out and see what's, what's, what's going on. Very good.

All right. Well, thank you very much, Solomon, for coming on the show today and congrats on the new release. Thank you. And folks can find more at docker.io. We'll also have links to all of that good stuff in the show notes.

And I cannot wait to see as version.8 comes out and then.9. And I don't know. I don't think I'm going to wait till.1, Solomon. I just have to warn you. I think I'm going to be putting it in production before then. But I won't tell you. I won't stress you out. All right. You know where to find me if you have a problem.

Okay. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show, okay? Thanks a lot. Appreciate it. All right, Matt. Well, that was fun. And how great was that? I'm glad that all worked out because I know they're pretty proud of that new release and it sounds really great. Jaime was great. It was fantastic.

Yes, it was. He mentioned something in our chat with him that I think maybe now would be a good time to take a little break and mention to the good folks at home, and that is our sponsor this week, and that's DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean is simple cloud hosting that you control. I'm talking you get the root account of this bad mama jamma and it is yours. And DigitalOcean loves Docker. So if you're not familiar with DigitalOcean, let me give you the background here. DigitalOcean, simple cloud hosting provider dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy to spin up cloud servers ever. Users like, you know, you, me, I do it in 45 seconds, but maybe you'll get it done in 55 seconds to spin up a totally your own server uh pricing plans are great too they start around five dollars per month five dollars per

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on or stuff I just want to help supplement me on the West Coast, I set up a Digital Ocean VPS in I think there's like their New York number two server. And now I've got it on both ends of the continent. It's on the continent. Both ends of the United States of America. It is really great for the functionality I'm using it for.

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Lucky number. Actually, that's just the episode they joined us, Linux 13. DigitalOcean also offers a vast collection of tutorials in their community section, and you can submit to that community section and get paid $50 per published piece. So if they decide they want to publish what you've written, you can get a $50 bone. I think they probably give you, and I don't know if they give you bones or if they give you credit, but you get $50 from DigitalOcean. We'll have a link to that in the show notes. But I wanted to back up. So we were just talking about Docker with Solomon from Docker.

And one of the things that's really nice, in fact, I'm going to go log in and show you this right now. It'll just take me a second. But so one of the challenges I've had is I'll get something all set up here at the house and then it works well enough that I don't actually ever go put it public because the time it would take to go reset it up again is just – I'm not interested. I've already spent my time setting it up. It works. Like I started experimenting.

The experiment was a success and then it ends up in production, right? And it's always like, well, this is just going to be temporary and then it never ends up being temporary. And life gets you. Right? So this is why I think Docker is going to be really brilliant, is I could take Docker, I could set up the instance

that I want to create. So maybe in my case, it's a BitTorrent sync, maybe it's a Zimbra server. And here, I'll show you if you're watching the video version. I go in, I name my host name on DigitalOcean, and I'll just call this Helper. Helper, okay. And I'm going to choose the $5 a month, 512 megs of RAM, one CPU, 20 gig SSD, one terabyte

of transfer for five bucks a month. Oh, they also have hourly rates. They have hourly rates if you just want to try something for a little bit. I'm going to choose New York, too. Now, so on the select your image, I can choose Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, Arch, Linux, or Fedora. Yeah, Arch. That's not any crazier than Fedora on a server, right, Matt? I mean, come on. Not at all. Not at all.

Nothing wrong with that. No. But they also have application images. And look at this. Which is very, very cool. Big time saver. Saves you time, right? Yeah.

WordPress on Ubuntu 12.10. Docker 0.7. The version that came out today. That's crazy, Tom. Right there. I can deploy it on Ubuntu 13.10, or I'm sorry, 13.04, 64-bit. And if I create Droplet, I now have a Docker system ready to go, and I would just use that Docker check-in and check-out process.

I would check in my Docker instance, log in over SSH, and just check it in on this machine and i'm done i start it and it's running it's like i'm all done all that work i did set it up on my local machine i just upload it i started it's brilliant and this shows you how sophisticated digital ocean is to have version 0.7 today and what's beautiful is inside that docker container even though this is a buntu 1304 image that'd be running in the host operating system, I could have a CentOS base in there, right? I could have an Arch base in there. I could have anything inside that container. It's just so awesome because it totally normalizes the underlying operating system and DigitalOcean is down with it.

And you load that on top of their super fast SSD drives and the crazy great bandwidth and the terabyte transfer you're getting for $5 per month. That's cheaper than a lunch at Jack in the Box. And you have an awesome VPS server that can just load anything you need. It's totally ready to go and it's totally a quantified cost. I think that's awesome. So use our code Linux13 when you're checking out over DigitalOcean and you'll get two months of credit. And a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. Oh, definitely.

And you've got to love the fact that you are able to not only find yourself among the most bleeding edge stuff possible, but it actually happens today. I mean, the fact that it's being released today and it's there, it's like, what? We thought we had the big scoop because we got the CTO on the day it comes out. Meanwhile, DigitalOcean's like, yeah, what else? We already have in production. Let's go. Hey, Matt.

This is CNN breaking news. A little breaking news here in the unplugged headquarters. Turns out Jack in the Box does not exist in the southeast. Seriously? Really? I did not know that. My apologies. I made a reference to a crappy burger joint that I still sometimes eat at.

That's not even in the southeast. Well, I'll take it up a notch. Did you know that the Waffle House doesn't exist up here? Yeah, I don't know, though, because I would tell you what. To my knowledge, anyway, no. Well, here's why I say it's so funny you bring that up. That's kind of weird, actually. So there's this site I just heard about called CoinMap.org. And CoinMap.org is a Google Maps overlay. I think it's Google Maps that shows you all the places around you that accept Bitcoin.

And since Bitcoin is the only form of currency I now have to my name, I thought I maybe should get familiar with the places that accept it. And I kid you not. And I don't know. It's ironic that you brought this up because I was seriously looking at this like two hours before the show. We hadn't talked before the show. But two hours ago, I was looking on CoinMap.org, and oh, this is Waffle Stop. All that buildup, and it's not Waffle House. It's Waffle Stop. But there's a Waffle Stop in Bellingham that takes Bitcoins for waffles.

Oh, is there really? Yeah. Well, that figures Bellingham. Bellingham is pretty – they is pretty good at adopting new technology. I'm not terribly surprised. I'm surprised there's not a few medical cannabis stores on this map. That seems like a match made in heaven. No, that's on the way to Anacortes.

I mean, not that I know anything about that. You know, they've got a drive-thru going, right? Okay, yeah. If you guys want to check out coinmap.org, it also uses, if your browser supports location APIs, it'll be creepy and figure out where you're at. So, okay, Matt, here's what I did. I brought in the Mumble Room, our online Linux users group, and I figured they could help us answer some of our emails. Since we're doing the show a little out of order, I wanted to get our guest on and talk about that because I'm a bit of a Docker slut, so I felt like I needed to chat with him. Aren't we all?

Right. Well, it is pretty cool. bit of a docker slut so i i felt like i needed to chat with him uh aren't we all right why well it is pretty cool uh so eric the great wrote in and uh sometimes i am i i make jokes here on the show and what i'm about to tell you is not a joke at all i'm 100 serious uh eric the great wrote in a very long email and he wanted to talk about how the problem with Linux on the desktop is that it's lacking apps. Ironically, Eric sent the email as an attachment in a.docx format. Now, I've got to believe he's screwing with me a little bit here, right?

Oh, maybe, maybe. But he may have a point to a degree. Let's hear what he has to say. Alright, so it's so so so long that I can't read all of it, but he says industry-specific apps are either not available for Linux desktops or not as mature as they are on their Windows counterparts. Number two, there's not

enough software that's configured to work by de facto standards. Don't know what he means by that. There's no good desktop groupware clients for Linux that replace Outlook. Okay, arguably true, except for Zimber desktop's pretty good. Number four, the other thing that's a good desktop groupware clients for Linux that replace Outlook. Okay, arguably true. Except for Zimber Desktop is pretty good. Number four, the other thing that's a good Linux desktop needs is properly integrated features. Many times there's a piece of software that works well.

InkFS is one of these and CryptoNFS. Unlike TrueCrypt, it provides – okay, anyways. And the thing to remember is the desktop should be usable offline. Oh, is Popey in here? Oh, is Popey in here? Oh, the desktop should be usable offline. Oh, is Popey in here? Oh, is Popey in here? Oh, the desktop should be usable offline for a small business when the server or internet connection goes down.

You know, I feel like his main complaint was the applications he wants to buy aren't available for Linux. Well, here's the meat and potatoes of it that everybody fails to get is, and Linux users do it, Windows users do it, OS X users do it. If it doesn't meet my requirements, then it affects the entire

world around me. And it just drives me nuts. It drives me nuts. For myself, honestly, 99.99999% of what I do is in Linux. I mean, like, I literally, the only time I actually run Windows is when I need to run, for business purposes, multiple video conferences in Skype because it doesn't happen to be supported in the likes.

That's literally for myself the only reason I would. And there's other people that have other needs. Maybe they have an AutoCAD need or maybe they have other specific things. But I think it's more task-oriented. To claim that the platform is flawed or not usable based on the fact that he's not finding it meeting his needs is ridiculous i i agree although you can apply that same argument to the mac um but here's yeah here's here's my take on it it's like if i'm if i'm eric the great i'm i'm good for probably the next 10 years right i'm sure i got windows 7's got support till um

until i don't know when like for a a while, right? And then even then... Yeah, oh wow, geez, wow, that's amazing. And then even then, if I really, really still loved Windows in 2020, I could probably jump on the 8.1 bandwagon, install some crappy extra software to give me a start menu, and make it even for a few more years, right? But there is a path. But even then eric's got to be sitting here going man i'm really about to get screwed this is this is not going in the right direction i mean he's got to be sitting here thinking what am i going to do maybe i mean not immediately right no but he hasn't experienced he hasn't

experienced the pain point yet for him his pain points that he's experiencing is that he's missing specific applications that do certain things that he's used to the way he's doing it or that even its availability and that may be the case and i think history will look back and go boy look at all of the things microsoft did to enable their own downfall because i actually think extending windows 7 support to 2020 what you're doing is you're giving time for alternative ways of doing things to develop. And people are going to come up with replacements. And I talk about this more and more now where I think like video editing on Linux is a good example of something that will never match the proprietary commercial offerings. I mean you can now buy like – I don't actually know what the actual price is, but I think Final Cut X is like $99 and Motion is like $99. And you could make TV grade productions from that from

those products that's not going to happen on linux and if it does happen on linux it's going to be too far too late because things like google hangouts are going to get better and web rtc where it's not really taking off yet you there is such industry support for that that there's going to be products built around WebRTC. And today when we say video editing in the cloud, that sounds effing crazy. Well, by 2020, it's not going to sound that effing crazy because it's going to be so doable that there will be software packages that clowns like me that broadcast from a garage can buy that use WebRTC. And I do all of it through my web browser. And then I just download the final file to my Linux box and apply any final touches to it. And what my point here is, is this is going to completely

change the way video editing is done. So it's not that the existing method of video editing is going to come to Linux. We're just going to do video production in new ways and Linux will be there when those new ways are developed. And I believe it is the same for CADs and all this kind of stuff. It's just going to take a really long time. And it will all run on Docker, obviously. I mean I think that's – well, I mean I'm just saying it could totally happen. Yeah, I mean I've already seen early attempts at like online video editing, very young, very much not ready for prime time, and it's very Windows Movie Maker level. But the stuff does exist.

It's already beginning to happen whether people want it to or not. Yeah. Visit the Google Chrome extension store sometime. I don't think you'd be surprised. There's a lot of stuff there. Not you, but a broadcast, you know? No, no, not there. All right. So Craig writes in.

Go ahead. That's the thing. Today, like, connectivity is extremely simple. We've got LTE. We've got 3G. So it's not hard to be wireless and connected now. The whole Microsoft ad as well, it's just stupid. It's like, oh yeah, if you're not connected to the internet, you can't use it.

That's not entirely true. But when are you not connected to the internet? I mean, I'm always connected to the internet now. Like anywhere I go, even if I go into like the woods where like it's all Blair Witchy. Well, and I guess maybe the better question is what are you doing in the woods? Whoa. Yeah, whoa. With your laptop too.

I would challenge him to run a Linux distro for a month and find those alternatives because it doesn't sound to me like he's done his research. No, I'm'm gonna wager that this is someone who has uh it's what i call a drive-by review well basically they they stuck their toes and come on i mean i don't know like if i if i if i did if i went to if i went to work every day and needed after effects i mean that's just it comes down to that's fair but i think he was happy where he was at someone Someone probably recommended he check it out. He half-assed it. He tried it, and it was kind of like, eh, not really for me.

I'm happy where I'm at. He gave his honest opinion. We got a lot of emails from people who say that converting to Linux is like – you've got to understand it's not just an alternative software selection. It is an alternative way to use your computer. Oh, yeah. God, me using OS X is like newbies trying to use Linux. I understand the frustration of stuff. Believe me, I scream at Mac all the time. I can't deal with it.

So I understand that switching platforms frustration. I totally get that. But then again, when I'm yelling at the Mac it's because I'm half-assing it. Let's be honest. I'm not trying. I'm like, this is hard. I give up and I go back to Linux. It's fine. The thing about the Mac, and this is sort of the truth about the Mac, there's two ways to do things.

There's Apple's way that they let you do it, and then there's no way to do it. And if you're okay with the Apple way, then the Mac will work for you. And if you ever kind of want to go outside that box, that's where it starts to become a frustrating experience. But I'm a special kind of idiot. And when it comes to using OS X, can I do it? Yeah, I can do it. Do I find it to be the most ass-backwards way of doing pretty much everything? Yeah, I do. I just – I can't deal with it. The way they lay things out, it's always frustrated me.

I've always gotten grief on it. Well, an idiot can use a Mac. Well, then I'm a special kind of idiot. I don't know. That's okay. You know what happened with – You can use it more than two different things. Well, Mac is also genius because when you make – you move files and drag and drop files, it doesn't make a copy for you.

It makes a shortcut, which everybody wants. They lost me when I started ejecting stuff by dragging it to a trash can. I'm done at that point. It's like, you know what? Hey, there's no way I can do that. He used Ubuntu and then he thought of Amazon Ads. He's like, what? Oh, hell yeah.

Yeah, I mean, there's that controversy. So, Craig writes and he says, Hey, Chris and Matt, I love Linux Unplugged and I haven't missed an episode yet. Converting to Linux even for a veteran admin is something no one really wants to do. There are just too many distros to choose from. Going through the late 90s, like you said,

on episode 15 is hardly heard of. I'm losing him here about this. Let me read ahead a little bit. Upon switching, I had no issue at all as I became more and more interested in computers and learning what the command line was. However, my situation was as almost perfect situation as it could ever be for a Linux convert. My girlfriend can log into Ubuntu 13.04 and open up a new tab to research something for college. My mother calls me with her wireless mouse battery is dead and proceeds to tell me she needs a new computer,

and that's essentially all I have to worry about. But he brings up the point that it's just a big hassle to switch over, and it's not even a matter of being better. It's a matter of being of a familiarity, right? It's a matter of comfort. Yeah, that I agree with yeah and and i go back to i go back to i look at this and i think uh uh he thinks that uh you know as you as you make the switch over it's just kind of all going to be based on what your motivations are um he

says yeah i he said if he's if he's this is one part i thought was interesting he said if each distro came together and focused on the major issues like video drivers, audio drivers, audio, video editing, software, gaming, then Linux would be a thousand-fold better than Windows or Mac, hands down. See, there's another one of those statements. It's like, okay, the video drivers and audio drivers, again, based on someone's personal experience, were they running a machine, which clearly is giving them some grief with it. I have no problems, but I run computers that fortunately are compatible with what I'm using. So, you know, is it truly a widespread problem?

Honestly, you really want to get the brass tacks. I'd say Windows has more retroactive compatibility issues with driver support than Linux ever will. So, you know, yeah, it's kind of like, it's all perspective, I suppose. So, I mean, absolutely. There are people out there that will find that, you know, they it's kind of like it's all perspective i suppose so i mean absolutely there are people out there that will find that you know they get a black screen when they boot

from a live wait a minute did you install the drivers first or did you connect the usb device first because if you connect to the usb device before you install the drivers it's not going to work sorry and it's really important when you have a palm pilot to not install the drivers and plug that in first because that always works really well i remember those days well god it used to frustrate the hell out of me my wife has a macbook pro and sometimes it'll sit on her on her lap and she'll shut the lid right go to put it underneath the sofa and i'll see the light still on i'll say hang on a minute that's that's not right and my my game os uh desktop windows 7 doesn't suspend it flat out won't suspend i've tried suspending it and it just it just doesn't and i've gone through all the knowledge base

articles and i cannot make it work and no matter how many drivers or firmware or bios updates i put on it it just doesn't work so anybody tells me that that windows and uh os 10 outclass linux on the driver department is talking out of their ass yeah i've got absolutely i've got one windows machine left in the house i booted into it uh two weeks ago for coda radio and after i was done with that episode of coda radio i went to shut it down and it would only go back to the login screen if i restart or shut down it would only go back so the only thing i could do is log out and then just hold the power button down. It didn't matter what I clicked.

It's just like, what? Really? This is ridiculous. One last one. My wife's Mac, her Mac specifically, it never fails. We go ahead and we put it in suspend. As soon as we're ready to go to bed, it comes to life. All by itself. Hey, are you sleeping?

It's always Facebook that kicks it on. It's like, what the hell? It misses you, Matt. It misses you. Oh, clearly. Yeah, it's beckoning me. Have you checked the iTunes store? Come log into iTunes.

I got a very special crowbar with its name on it. I'll tell you, man. All right, so Bob wrote in. This is just a quick one. He says, great show. My experience with mom and dad users is that they not only need to use a web browser, but also an office suite. I know many of these users who struggle with Windows 8. So I moved a few of these people to Ubuntu 12.04, where they're all able to get by without any tinkering with the default install.

These users were unable to learn Windows 8 at all. So I disagree with some of the statements on Linux Unplugged that new users need to tinker more with Linux. I think the intermediate users probably do, but certainly not new users. Ubuntu and Mac are only two OSs that I found new users can just pick up with no help. Yeah, I think it depends on how you define new user. My favorite new user is someone that has zero experience with a computer because they have no perceived misconceptions. Fewer and fewer of those people now, though. Yeah, they are.

They're still out there. Well, they should live out where I live, in the back right yeah you go out in the country or you know you go up into the older demographics and you can find them still but we still have people chasing cows around with usb cords it's scary but yeah well windows 8 really is i mean uh i'm sure i probably overshared this story but I'll just share it again because I haven't told it on this show. When Windows 8 came out, actually when it was, like, I guess it was done with RC or whatever where you could download a trial for a limited time. You didn't have to buy it. And so I had a client that had five computers. So they had this room where they had QA people because they ran a website where they posted things that had to be QA'd all the time because they came from outside sources. So they had a team of about a dozen QA people and they had about five computers that were not being used

because they would only kick them into gear during the heavy season. And then during the slow time, it was temp staff and those computers wouldn't be in use. So I took those five computers and per the client's request, loaded the 8.1 demo or trial on it, which you could re-extend a couple of times. And I did have to extend it one time. So we put these five users of various proficiency. One that I would say is he's definitely not a technical user, but he knows Windows 7 so well that he showed me a couple of things. And I know Windows pretty well. I've supported it for years. And so he's definitely sophisticated. I mean, he'd never know anything about Event Viewer

or any of that kind of stuff, but he probably knows about Device Manager and he can definitely install printers and all that kind of stuff. Then I had a user who is pretty much still struggling with the fact that the mouse has two buttons and one of them does something different than the other button. So good range, right? Right, yeah, definitely. And none of them, none of them could figure out how to shut down the Windows 8 computer. Oh, it's confusing.

None of them could, because the thing is, is they won't just go poking in the corners. They won't just go down there if there's no visual indications for them. And none of them even paid attention to the tutorial, even though I played the tutorial for all of them that comes with windows a they didn't they didn't help at all and the other thing that was constantly confusing for them was the the thing they were qa'ing they had to qa a version of it in ie and a version of it in firefox and a version of it in chrome well because the ie one uses active x only the problem was the metro version of ie doesn't use activeX. And they kept getting confused

between, wait, am I in IE on the desktop? Am I in IE in Metro? And why is the address bar on the bottom in this UI, and why is the address bar on the top in this UI? And totally disconnected from it, and these same people, these same users for a short period of time

were on an XFCE desktop and had none of these problems. Because, first of all, who the hell uses Hot Corners? I mean, that's the problem. Chrisley, my friend was looking to update his laptop, so we went online, we found the model. We ended up with a HP Smudge, I believe, and it came with Windows 8.

He's not overly familiar with Windows because when he was first getting into computers i actually convinced him to actually use ubuntu so he's always been an ubuntu user he used it for a week and he said there was so many weird things like because there was a touch screen he said we type stuff and then metro would just pop up for no reason at all and he said it was just i'm like yeah and he's just like he got so frustrated and like a stupid things like when he's trying to do like the hdmi out um he didn't quite understand you've got to slide the bar over and then you've got like the mirror it but like it's not just mirror you've got like options for like screen resolutions but the screen resolution was wrong for the tv and it killed like the screen on the monitor tv like he had so many hassles he said look he said i don't care anymore he said just for the TV and it killed like the screen on the monitor as well as the TV.

He had so many hassles. He said, look, he said, I don't care anymore. He said, just come over, put that operating system on that I've been used to because I absolutely hate Windows 8. I explained to him that like, you know, I'm not going to be able to draw boot properly because it's got UFIE problems. I said, I can do the thing where you do like escape. He said, no, I do not want Windows 8 at all. He said, I absolutely hate it. He said, I don't want it don't want it so you know people and he's not very computer literate he's

pretty useless yeah it's on the computer but he can work his way around it perfectly fine i think it's what you get used to using i realized something when chris said earlier that people didn't know how to do the shutdown and i have messed with windows 8 and 8.1 and i've helped people like walk them through things and when you said that i realized that i have never shut it down on windows 8 so i have no idea how to do it yeah it's uh i i've worked with eight and it's definitely uh but first you got to do the hokey pokey and then you shake it all about yeah twirl around in a couple circles and then finally it will appear it's the weirdest thing but yeah it's about it's about three different options it's be dug into like yeah

yeah the funny thing about windows 8.1 is that they brought back the start button but not the menu so when people who have a start menu like a third party installed that it they're the buttons are in the same place on top of each other so there's like a 50 50 chance which one you click what a train wreck what a train wreck Windows is becoming. It's so, wow. It amuses me. I'm fine with it. I mean, let's be honest. I mean, I used to do PC repair and Windows is what drove me to Linux.

I mean, like actually repairing other people's stupidity is just, that's literally what drove me to it, you know. I've got two more emails and then the grand question I want to ask you and the mumble room. But first, we should thank our second sponsor this week. So everybody knows about Ting now, right?

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better time than ever to sign up for Ting. First of all, if you have the internet phone with the iOS four or four S iPhone four or four S and now compatible with the Ting network, you go over to the BYOD page, which you can find over at linux.ting.com and they'll give you all the info you need. If you've got a Sprint compatible iPhone. If you've got the Nexus 5, this is what is so awesome about Ting is they've been very transparent about the entire process because, first of all, they're a CDMA network, which is a huge boon here in the U.S. because that gets the signal through areas that GSM just doesn't generally penetrate as well. And so one of the things that a CDMA carrier has had to deal with for sort of the

first time is a phone that requires a SIM card, because that's generally something that's only on the GSM networks. And it's been really awesome and encouraging to watch the Ting folks very publicly in their forums and in their blogs, work with their community, work with the experts. It's so awesome to see a cell phone company recognize that people in their audience know a lot about these Android devices and are very savvy and very capable of helping them have a better service. That's huge for me as a Ting user. And to see them work to get the Nexus 5 with their community has been awesome. And it's what gave me the final push to make my Nexus 5 purchase. I cannot wait to combine the power of purchasing directly from Google on Google Play, an unlocked Google experience Nexus 5 phone, and then bring it over

to Ting, which is no contracts, no early termination fees, and you only pay for what you use. That is such an awesome combination. And I want you to go over to linux.ting.com to get started. And by the way, if you're in a contract now and you've been thinking about switching, Ting is going to give you some early termination relief. You can get more information at ting.com slash ETF. They're going to give you about up to $75, I believe it is, per line that you have to get canceled.

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and just talk to them about the Nexus 5. They'll just talk to you about the Nexus 5. You got questions on how that's going to work? How's picture messaging? All that kind of stuff. Just talk to them. They'll give you. They'll help you out.

They've also got help.ting.com, which gives you lots of resources. You can find out more information, do discovery and exploring on your own. So go over to linux.ting.com to get started. You're going to love Ting. It makes sense. It's no BS, no hidden fees, only pay for what you use. $6 per line, and you can share pooled minutes. It's really awesome. So I want you to go try it. linux.ting.com and go get started now because the sooner you switch, the more money you'll save in the long term. Gotta love those guys. They keep my bills stupid cheap. It's great. I know. It really is awesome. I kind of feel like I'm cheating a little bit. Like, I don't know. Well, that could be interpreted depending on what you have in mind for the UPS guy. I don't know

what you're mentioning there. It's like, wait, what? All right. So Carl wrote in and he said, dear Linux, please keep on breaking. What? He says, my typical day is I fire up Windows when I'm at work because there's no efficient way to get around the fact that they have like a dozen proprietary Windows-only apps they require me to run. And since I already have Windows set up for work, I also get caught in playing Steam games on Windows because, well, F. If I got the Windows installation, why not, he says. However, as soon as the clock strikes five and the workday is over, I hit the switch on my desktop and boot into Linux.

The best way I can describe that moment is coming home from a hard day's work and throwing off a stiff suit before putting on your sweatpants and cracking up a cold one. Heading out to the garage to restore that car or something like that, Linux will always fight me, which is to be expected since I have a multi-headed setup with three monitors of different

sizes and resolutions. And I'm also sending my sound over HDMI to the one of the monitors connected to my NVIDIA card. In other words, I'm begging for trouble with broken X, but that's fine. That's part of why I love it because when stuff breaks and has to be fixed, that's when you learn how it works, why it broke, and how you can configure it better than before. Hell, half the time I'm almost hope for something to behave unexpectedly. So I'll have a reason to sit down and have a puzzle to solve. He says, walking out knowing a lot more than I did before. And I think it's one of the hidden charms that keeps a lot of people away from the platform. Oh, okay. He says, and that allowed me to move quite quickly from

hand-holding Ubuntu installation to running two servers, a laptop, and a desktop under Arch. I had everything just working. I might have gotten bored and jumped back full-time to Windows. But now with the challenge, I press on. He says, most people can live with Linux. Tinkerers can hardly imagine living without it. Also, all this time spent on Linux has taught me a few still valid tricks on how punching my Mac in the face through the terminal when it's ill-behaved. Nice. Which is also a reward to itself, he says. Keep up the good work.

Once again, thanks for the great show, Carl. Good time. I'm going to be honest. I think one of the things that keeps me on Linux is the tinkering factor. Yeah, I mean, for me, well, see, for me, I think it's different. It's the consistent behavior. And, you know, like I said, what drove me to it initially was the fact that I was watching, I don't want to say de-evolution of humanity, but it felt like it some days,

to where people were not only being dumbed down using these other operating systems, but quite honestly, it was more operating system than they needed, that Linux could in fact fill these needs. And a lot of people, when I actually retired from it, I switched them over to Linux and then occasionally provided some remote support, and it works out really well. I don't have the problems I used to have with it. So, you know, different strokes, different folks. In fact, to put it all in perspective, Terrence

wrote in, and the headline was... Oh, go ahead. Yeah, Matt, I completely agree with that. If you're going to install Linux onto someone's laptop or computer, definitely install TeamViewer. So when you do that, it takes two seconds, TeamViewer

in, click, click, click, done, and you sort their PC out. Or Splashtop. Remote access, regardless of what So you could just, it takes two seconds, TeamViewer in, click, click, click, done, and you sort their PC out. Yep. Or Splashtop. Yeah, Splashtop. Remote access, regardless of what system they're running. Yeah, totally. That was a real game changer for a lot of folks, for sure.

You know, all of that's going to get real crappy, by the way, I believe. I believe Weyland and Mir both proposed to make those remote viewers much more challenging. Well, that's important. We have something we can really be proud of, but let's break it. Good news, everybody! It's like, okay, Dr. Nick, good to know. Then we'll have to go back into the virtual machine remoting.

I help people out on Boehm and stuff on TeamViewer. TeamViewer is like a must if you're trying to wean someone off Windows or Mac. You've got to have that hand-holding experience. I have not used TeamViewer. TeamViewer is like a must if you're trying to wean someone off Windows or Mac. You've got to have that hand-holding experience. I have not used TeamViewer as much because I don't like the... Isn't the client on Linux a wine app?

It is a wine. It's a self-contained bottle. And see, with Splashtop, they actually have a native Linux app. I use that to get into my mom's machine and it's click-click. It's so fast. I like that. So in terms of – you mentioned MIR and remote desktopping. That won't be a problem for a while because the next LTS release of Ubuntu is going to still have X.

So for the next five years after 2014, it's not a problem. Right. Yeah, true. Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, I guess that's the silver lining good enough for me good uh whaling however uh proposes to introduce that problem they are working on yeah those guys oh come on whaling at whaling today actually i think the whaling guys are working with somebody from the one of the vnc groups to to figure something out but uh it is it is good

times um but i think all of this, I think we all need a little perspective right now. So Terrence writes in, he says, back in my day, insert old man's voice, back in my day, when I installed Linux, there was a distro called Slackware, and it was an unholy beast in its infancy during the late 90s.

One of my beloved 386XSs, it took 10 hours to compile the Linux kernel, and one misstep would ruin your install. Consider yourselves lucky whiny Nancy boys that you even have a window manager or a graphical settings manager. There's no Google back then. All I had was a 500-page Slackware book that came with way too many floppy disks for the installation. Installing Linux? Yeah.

Go ahead. I didn't want a Nancy boy. That won me over. Installing Linux back in those days was a blast because it was an adventure with numerous pitfalls. You used Linux with pride because it was your baby made with your sweat and tears. Linux is far

from perfect, but I feel sorry for people who are locked up in Apple and Microsoft's jails. They are narrowing their dimensions of yourselves every day and eventually all that will be left with their services that they'll sell at a premium. Linux is the wild, wild west of operating systems

and may God bless Linus. Wait, Linus is our God. Terrence. Wow. Tell us how you really feel. PraiseLinus.com. Yeah, I really like your whole dramatic reading. That was pretty good. Thank you. I felt like Terrence, I felt like I was

connecting with him there. So I have one, we're getting a little tight on time, but one of the things that we've been looking forward to on the Linux Action Show is getting our hands on that new Leopard Extreme from System76. So we just got word from System76.

It's better than that. Oh, yeah. We're also going to get the new Kudu, right? That's what it's called, the Kudu. And we're going to get their Ultrabook with a brand new keyboard arrangement that they've just set up for it based on their purchaser feedback. So I thought I'd ask you guys, like as we get ready to review these, and I'm going to

start with Matt to give the mumble room time to think. Matt, what for you, what are like, like, if you're going to, if you were going to buy a computer, what are some of the key things you need in like a Linux workstation? Well, and I think we already know that obviously compatibility is already set with Ubuntu, so that's a no brainer. That's done. But I think a keyboard's a really big thing for me. Keyboard and the actual touchpad placement itself, how that feels. Do those keys feel responsive? Are they working for me? So if you were in the market right now, would you buy a desktop or a laptop?

Ooh, based on current needs, laptop in a stone's cold second. Okay, okay. But based on like if I needed like both, I would probably say desktop first. Because I'm kind of weird like that. Based on current needs, totally laptop. I'm really, really specifically weird when it comes to keyboards and laptops. System76 has been really good overall. If I only had one keyboard I wasn't real in love with,

but most of them are really awesome. Just a couple of things for me. I would love, because you don't really see it on a laptop keyboard. I love a keyboard with backlight. I could see the keys and stuff. Yeah, yeah, right. I understand that.

You guys are all really focused on laptops. Yeah. I want the Bonomo. Screen resolution on laptops suck. They still suck. Many of them, not even 1080p. Yeah, yeah. High resolution on a laptop is important.

Sure. I mean, I got a tablet and a phone with higher screen resolution and most tablets, not to host laptops on the market, it's ridiculous how low screen resolution laptops are. So what about on the desktop though? What do you look into for a desktop, like for the ultimate desktop? Quiet.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking too. Quiet. Quiet and power. And also not having to wonder, okay, what am I maxing out now? Or do I have enough resources to do this? So expandability? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Powerful.

Yeah, power and expandability and quiet. Those are pretty good. Case quality. While I want the quietest computer, I want the loudest clacky keyboard to show that I'm actually working. Old IBM style clack. Yeah, they're going to get the cherry switches. There's a few people in Mumble with very loud keyboards, is working. Old IBM style. There's a few people who mumble with very loud keyboards.

On TechSnap, I often joke that Alan's keyboard is the third host because he's got one of those Razor with the clackies. This is what I'm thinking for a desktop. Quiet, expandability, case quality. It sounds like on a laptop, we've got keyboard, backlight it's

funny because so far nobody said battery life or uh wireless oh that's a good point yeah the battery life yeah that would be that would be helpful in any case i always want an ssd no matter what yeah top or lap yeah no no way i'll ever go to a hard drive now. SSD is kind of getting just the only way to go now. The only feature on a laptop that is a go, no-go for me is if the keyboard doesn't have a touch point on it, I don't want it. Like the little nipple? Yep. If it hasn't got one, I don't want it.

Really? Yeah, I've spoken to the System76 guys about it, and I was like, dude, last time I bought a laptop, I bought a ThinkPad. And if you had a nipple on your laptop, I would totally have bought it. I feel like that. Multi-touch touchpad as well. It's scrolling. Multi-touch touchpad.

It's scrolling. Okay, yeah. I'm the opposite. I hate those nipple things. I think it hurts my finger. Yeah. Well, with all due respect, you're wrong. For me, I feel like I should be buying it

dinner first or something. It just feels weird. It just feels incredibly intimate and awkward. I don't know. Yeah, Popey's all about his nipples. It's how you caress it, whether it's good or not. I'm Scaramanga. I have three. Or Chandler.

Back to the touchpad, I would say the clickable buttons. I cannot stand touchpads without clickable buttons. Right, actual clicks. That's how my Asus is. You need that tactile, yeah. Yeah, the trackpad. I feel like right now, which is funny because it doesn't match what you're saying, even though I completely agree with you.

I feel like the only people who have the one-button trackpad really great is Apple. Because even on my Bonobo, I totally can use it. In fact, I appreciate that it has two-finger touch scrolling, because that is a very natural kind of way to scroll a web page and stuff. But generally, if I'm going to sit down like when I'm doing LAS, and it's partially how I sit too, but I still prefer to go to a physical mouse. And so that's why I'm – like is the trackpad or the nipple, is it really that big of a deal? Is it a make or break?

It's kind of like the touchpad that you can do like a zoom in for like a Google Earth and, you know, where you can do the multi-touch on the touchpad. The nice thing about the – Go ahead, Paul. Go ahead, Paul. touchpad the nice thing about the go ahead sorry go ahead the nice thing about the nipple is with a middle with the middle mouse button you can hold your like if you imagine holding your index finger on the nipple and your thumb on there don't steady and your thumb on the middle the middle mouse button you can use that for scrolling so i you know basically when i'm laying on the sofa and i've got my laptop i i'm making such

minimal movement i look like i'm dead so your thumb is on a trackpad still so your thumb is scrolling on the trackpad no the middle mouse button it's got three mouse buttons below the spacebar oh right right right right okay so for you it's about effective behavior it's about an effective experience yeah okay okay i have only the only thing i will I want on a laptop is the, uh, the button to turn off the trackpad. Right. Oh yeah. Yeah. I just install an app for it.

I forget what the hell it is, but yeah. Yeah. I have a, it's funny. I have a button on my Bonobo. Uh, if I hold down function F1, it turns off the trackpad. And if I hold down function one, function one turns all the fans on at full blast, which is funny because the Bonob is is quite well ventilated it has two big fans in the bottom of it and then it has these big uh vent outtakes in the back so it i've never actually heard it kick up to

full fan speed until the day i accidentally pressed function one and i was like whoa this thing's really it's like it's gonna take like air wolf in your life or something but now now that i know it's like every now and then I'm like, yeah, I'm about to do something that's a lot of work. Maybe I'll just kick the fans up for a second, and then I just smack it. That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. Rev the engine, Matt. There's also those apps you can install that will actually keep it,

when you're typing on your keyboard and your touchpad is being bumped into, you need to be able to disable that, too. So sorry to interrupt. Going back to the laptop, make sure it has enough ports, too, because a lot of times you only have one or two USB ports. Oh, yeah, okay. Let sorry to interrupt you. Going back to the laptop, make sure it has enough ports too because a lot of times you only get one or two USB ports.

Oh yeah, okay. Let's talk about it for both workstations and laptops. So let's first do laptops. I'm writing all this

down for our review. So okay, on laptops, connectivity, so we're talking USB is a must. Now USB, now remember we're getting less and

less ports these days so we've got to keep it realistic. HDMI out? Is that a must? Yeah. I'll exchange it for USB any day of the week.

I want USB ports just like I want it to look like a UFO. So maybe we'll just put the difference and say we have to have good video out. So video out. Because it's really handy if you've got like HDTV, you've got Netflix or, well, because it works on Linux now, you can just shut up your laptop, put it underneath your TV, connect a wireless keyboard or mouse, and then you can just sort of like surf on your laptop and use it. It's sort of like a home theater PC.

Yeah, dovetail on that. Yeah. Dovetail on that. You know, if it's got Bluetooth built in, that's amazing. That would be nice. Because I can just flip on a bluetooth mouse yeah and go fire warrior 100 uh the bacon flaps is mentioning none of us nobody said anything about price yet i guess that's that's a scaling kind of that's a scaling thing it depends what you value

but honestly i want i want this thing to look like a hub i want usb ports all the way around it i mean i want i want danglers dangling. I'll give up HDMI any day. What would you use the USBs for? I never know. I never need them until I'm missing them. It's weird. See, I have the same correlation because my laptop only has

two USB ports. And one of them I have filled with a Bluetooth. I've just bought a 7-port USB 3 hub from Amazon that's arriving tomorrow because my laptop only has one USB 3 port, and I want more. More. Yeah. Well, I have like an old 2008-era System76 laptop here,

and it's got four, which is good. But I would be perfectly happy with like 12, 8. Yeah, that'd be good. What's people's views on a DVD drive? I'm not really that big of an animal. perfectly happy with like 12, 8. Yeah, that'd be good. What's people's views on a DVD drive? I'm not really that big of an animal. Optical is dead. Legacy media.

Optical is dead, alright. I don't keep it around. That's just because I burn DVDs for people. Well, that's why you need that USB port. And I have external whatnot for that. That's what I do now too. That's true. So, and I have external whatnot for that. That's what I do now, too. That's true. Although, so,

you know, when I specced the Bonobo, I went the direction of getting a drive, a disk drive. And now looking back on it, I do wish I had gone with, like, a third disk in that spot. Oh, totally. Because, like, with the Kudu machine they're setting us, you can actually do an S, they have two slots for drives, and then they have, you can swap out the optical bay for a drive if you want to so you can do three

ssds in a laptop awesome which if you think about it like you could you could dedicate an entirely separate os to one of those drives if you wanted to you could do anything so yeah i agree optical is probably dead and i'm gonna all right so that's a good list right there you guys thank you so that'll be just kind of wanted to get some updated requirements from folks. I was going to say passive 3D, but that's a little bit different for laptops. There is one. There's your microphone

and headphone port. They're merged together nowadays on the more recent models. Yeah, they are. You're right. Audio jacks. So they have to determine whether or not they want the two separate jacks or one which is combined together. The one that's combined together you can get an adapter for pretty cheaply on Amazon, so that's really not too much of a factor. Well, some people have these very specific mics, just how they don't ever want to change programs.

Sometimes they have this special microphone that they want to plug in, which is not like what they're used to. Very true. True, true, true. All right. Anything else for me? Yeah, make sure, like, also, like, no weird proprietary connectors,

like Ethernet adapters. Oh, yeah. Right, right. Oh, yeah. Gotta have Ethernet. I'm gonna write that down. You gotta have Ethernet. I think...

Serial port? I don't know. I really like that. Absolutely. I've been trying to pack a satellite system for a few years. This is totally serious. I would love to have multiple ESATA

USB combos. That's a nice to have for sure. I'd love to have an ESATA on the Bonobo. Just curious, you know the old laptops used to have these PCIe slots? Do anyone use them anymore? PCMCIA.

Just for the wireless. I'm staring at an old Orinoco wireless card. SSD drives on there. I've seen some hacks where people set up Nvidia graphics cards using the PCIe socket on a laptop.

Oh, that'd be kind of wild. Q5Sys in the chatroom votes for parallel port. Now, I don't think we're going to have these in time for next last I think they're arriving Monday or so so we'll probably have them in the following last but I'm looking forward to it so I think what we're probably going to do is we'll

go after the laptops in one episode and then we'll abuse the heck out of the leopard in the following episode after we've thrown a week of just battery of battery of batteries of tests at it so i think that'll be good all about punishing it yeah yeah absolutely all right well uh thank you to our uh mumble room for joining us today and thank you to solomon from

the docker project for calling in the beginning of the show that was great to get an update from them and don't forget guys you can watch the show live on tuesdays we begin at 2 p.m pacific over at jblive.tv show about a half hour early to get the pre-show. And you can contact us. Go over to jupiterbroadcasting.com, pop that contact link, and just use Linux Action Show. I don't even know if we have a separate entry for Unplugged in there. And then fill out the contact

info and send it in. We'll read it on a future show. We'd love to get your follow-up. That way we have a thread through each episode. Alright, Matt, we'll have a great week. I'll see you on Sunday, okay? Sounds good. See you then. All right, everyone, well, thank you so much for tuning in this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. Don't forget to download us, subscribe to us, and even raid in some of those other places,

including Stitcher now. All right, everyone, thank you so much for tuning in this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. See you next week. Thank you.