LINUX Unplugged - Episode 19: Fixing Linux Support | LUP 19

Episode Date: December 18, 2013

Experienced Linux users may soon be finding a new call on their talents to help new users switching to Linux. But with services like Stackexchange, Google+ Helpouts, and more is it time to reboot the way we provide support to new Linux users?

This is Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's wiped nearly every hard drive in the house trying out SteamOS. My name is Chris. My name is Matt. Hey there, Matt, episode 18, buddy, and are you feeling holly? Are you feeling jolly? It's wiped nearly every hard drive in the house trying out SteamOS. My name is Chris. My name is Matt. Hey there, Matt. Episode 18, buddy. And are you feeling holly? Are you feeling jolly?

Are you checking your list? Checking my list, feeling unplugged, feeling verbal, you know? Yeah, this would be a good one for folks to join us live because we're recording two episodes this week to make up for the holiday week because we want you to have some new shows. We know that just because it's the holidays doesn't mean you don't need your update on the weekly Linux issues of our day. And on the pre-show, it got a little lively. You know, we were getting into it, Matt. But that's good. It opens us up a little bit.

Kind of gives us some breathing room. And I got a sandwich waiting for me in the other room, too. So that adds a little bit of edge to this whole thing. Because I know at any moment I could just be ripping into that sandwich. But no, I'm doing a Linux show right now. Nice. It's a sacrifice I make for the people.

Well, Matt, this week, we kicked off our SteamOS coverage. It's official. It's here in the Linux Action Show, Season 30, Episode 1. Then in Coder Radio, the topic came up again, and we talked about the potential slight against Canonical

in the choice to go with Debian. So if you missed that discussion, go listen to this week's Coder Radio. We have a pretty good, robust chat in there about that whole aspect of it, and some of the challenges that Val's faced. So the conversation continues there. And then today,

we're going to chat with our local internet lug. Is that even a thing? Can you have a local internet thing? Yeah, I think so. Okay. We're going to. We just did. We're going to chat with them about their experiences experimenting with SteamOS and their thoughts on it, too.

And the reason is, I don't know, actually, on reflection for some days now, I'm not sure SteamOS is going to be the biggest deal that we're all making it out to be. I think it's super important, but I don't know if it's like really baby Jesus coming down on like a unicorn from the clouds to save all of Linux. I think it's probably somewhere in between. We'll find out.

But I want to start with our follow-up. Last week, we had a great chat about the usefulness of Linux user groups, you could say. The whole Lug concept in general. And that fired off some good feedback. The first one comes in from Anonymous. He says, hey, Chris and Matt. And then he has engaged rant mode. When I go to a local hackerspace, I meet the people who I know from local Lugs, which I think have stopped meeting altogether. When I first went to the Lug and asked a question about Ubuntu, the guy literally stopped me mid first sentence and pointed me to someone else from the Ubuntu loco who was there and told me never to ask him for

help. I had to learn who would answer my questions and who wouldn't. And to be fair, there were those who were very helpful with explaining general concepts or solving specific problems. And you know, you see this too, right? Online, like there's different personality types and some people are like, oh, Ubuntu? Yeah, you need to go talk to the Ubuntu guys. Right. And there's some people who are willing to help you regardless. And there's just personality that I could imagine was even more exasperated when you meet somebody in person. Oh, I imagine so. And I never really understood that because I've seen I've seen people react to that. And actually, I've been the one that like swoops and this is wow.

That guy was a douchebag and comes in and actually tries to answer their question, even though I may or may not be into whatever they're talking about. Yeah, I try and at least not be a jerk about it. Right. Exactly. Like, so, you know, you and I might go like every now and then, like, we're testing a rig out and we're not doing the show. We'll be like, oh, geez, Ubuntu. Like when you get all those app port error reports that just pop up constantly, you know,

you go, oh, geez, Ubuntu, really? You guys still do this? But it doesn't mean you refuse somebody help. Exactly. He goes on to say, however, while the participants would humor me by having a basic noob conversation, they tended to move on to exchanging information or having debates about advanced topics, which was the reason they were there. Overall, there seemed to be attitude of RTFM. Interesting, right?

Because you could see how you have a conflict there where there's people there that want to talk about System D. They want to talk about C groups, and they want to talk about the direction of the gnome project they don't really want to talk about how to get uh office running under wine so much and uh but there are people there that do and and rtfm is a hard thing to just tell somebody but at the same time i often find myself saying well here's what you need to know go read this you know wiki entry exactly but there's two interesting challenges to the rtfm is uh one if you ever have network issues and that's your only computer good luck with that yep and uh and two they don't really unless you know what to look for a lot of times finding the correct answer that isn't flooded with half answers is uh discouraging

right right or out of date because things change really fast he says ironically the same guys who shut me down while at open source conferences extorted how employees at his company were being taught to use open source tools to answer questions. As I listened to his answer, I thought how more effectively he could address the person's questions if they learned how to teach,

i.e. how to impart information. This is when I came to understand why my lug was bad at teaching. All the gray beards were self-taught and expected everybody else to do the same. His example was getting people to break their stuff, but this is how I did it, and this is the MS Word mindset. He goes on to say, my lug is YouTube now, where the people who want to teach Linux topics in a nice, clear way are at, which is great for me because I learn way better being told something

than reading it, which is why I first started listening, or going to the lug, sorry. Lastly, my local hackerspace has a weekly class on various topics where someone will say to me come join class x teaching is part of their dna lugs can die as far as i care anonymous disengage rant mode so i i could be a bastard when i say this i get the sense that anonymous might be younger yeah Yeah, I would say so. The local lug here, at least back when I was still popping in and out occasionally, your average age was at least in mid-40s, if not maybe even a touch older. But do you see like, okay. So I think for a younger person coming into it,

you're dealing with people that are amazingly set in their ways. But also there is value in being told to RTFM because if you learn how to research your own problem and solve them, that helps you down the road. And if I just tell you, okay, to update your DNS, go edit your etsyresolve.conf file, then that gets you that immediate problem fixed. But that doesn't teach you anything about how networking actually works on Linux. Linux. True, true. But I also think it depends on what level of learning they're looking to do. If they're actually looking to perhaps pursue this as a career or even a serious hobby, absolutely yes. If they're looking to just make their computer work, you've got to be kidding me.

So I think that there's got to be a balance there. I think there should be a qualifying checkbox that says, what's your long-term goal so that we can help address this in a way or even find out if this is a place you should be. Lugs are really good for people that maybe are interested in pursuing something in a career fashion or a serious hobby because that's what they are. They're serious hobbyists.

They're not there to screw around. And I think YouTube is, much like the stuff I used to do, is definitely for people that are there to screw around and that's okay. Right. And there's such a wider variety. Like you have people that are teaching the super basic stuff. Then you have people like us who are kind of doing more of the current events, how-tos, and digging into stuff. Right.

So there's a wider range of availability. But I also kind of felt like our anonymous writer here wasn't fully appreciating perhaps some of the lessons their graybeards were trying to pass on to him. And it's not so much they're trying to blow him off and get rid of him. It's that they are trying to give him, you know, it's the old saying, you can lead a horse to water. Right? That saying. Right. Or you can lead a horse to water, right? That saying. They're trying to, or you can teach a man to fish. They're trying to teach him how to fish, basically, is what I think.

Yeah, and I totally get that, but I think that goes back to why our public school system is a joke, in my opinion. It's because it's this one-way-fits-all crap, and it doesn't work that way. And so I think that we need to really establish, right there at the door, right there when they first come in, have a sheet that says let's make sure we're not wasting everyone's time. And that's a very gray-bearded approach because it's very much, you know, it's me, me, me, all about

me, and that's fine. And to defend our writer, he said he's better at visual and audio learning than he is at reading learning. So when you tell him to go read something, he just doesn't retain it as well. I'm completely on the writer's side. I think the person who wrote the letter is spot on correct. I think that the entire experience sucked for him.

I totally do. Yeah. All right. Well, Miles writes in on the same topic. He says, bring one of those graybeards you speak of and a lug member for 20 years, and I could be, he says,

I think he meant to write, I can say that lugs have lost some appeal, but also many of us still enjoy the direct people contact they can offer. Our lug is full of former punch card cowboys, but we also have many younger and father child members who bond over the talks. And that, that last sentence, that struck a chord in me. I could see that, right? Because, you know, you're teaching a bit of the culture. So I was thinking's much more tangible. And I think for perhaps getting somebody into it, that could be beneficial. He says, our topics are not just straight Linux, but other technologies as well. It also provides a great opportunity as a technical forum of Toastmasters for many to develop public speaking and presentation skills. Interesting.

Good point. Yeah, that is. You know, because, right, because you got to go there. Maybe you're going to do a talk on Docker and, you know, you have to learn how to present and you can then take that skill and apply it to your job or whatever, a podcast or whatever. He says, Lugzor is still valid and relevant resources, but like anything worth it, you get out of them what you put in. I drive two hours each way to mine every month, and I still get something from every meeting. That's cool. It sounds like this is not only a person that's well-matched to ALUG,

but they're well-matched to their Lug, too. That's fantastic. That was good perspective from Miles, so I appreciate him writing that in. We'll loop in our Mumble Room on their thoughts on the topic, but before we get to that, I want to thank our mumble room on their thoughts on the topic. But before we get to that, I want to thank our sponsor this week, and that is Ting.com.

Now, Ting is mobile that makes sense, my mobile service provider and Matt's mobile service provider. Oh, yeah, Matt, we are liking ourselves the Ting. Why? I'll tell you why. No contracts, no early termination fees, and you only pay for what you use. Picture it now, people. You go over to Linux.Ting.com, which will save you $25 off your first device or $25 off your first month if you have a Sprint compatible device and look through their devices. They have some great ones. And what's awesome is not only do you get a discount applied to them, but they also have additional

discounts on some of them and you will own this device outright. This is yours now. Just like when you buy a laptop or you buy a desktop or a tablet, you own that. It's not subsidized. And by the way, there was a great piece. I don't remember by which publication, but you can look it up. I'll try to link to it in the show notes about the massive marketing and surveillance program that some of the telcos have. And this is one of these things that gets really creepy and really shady. And you never know what is being installed on your device. And Verizon's the worst. They have a system that is optimized at, for example, if you like to go to a local sports

game, they will determine if you're somebody who drives home immediately afterwards or if you stop by the bar first and then they'll try to tailor the marketing. They'll sell that information and try to tailor that marketing to you, which is pretty creepy. And these kinds of things are possible because they own the software stack on that phone. They own the device. They're lending it to you, and they are getting money out of you every single month for that. And they also own the software stack on that. Now, I don't know about you, but I would never buy a computer that I did not have administrative root access over. And that's what happens when you buy one of these phones directly from these carriers. Well, Ting is enabling you to buy a Nexus directly from Google Play and bring it over

to the Ting network. And then you only pay for what you use. You have no contract and no early termination fees. That's a huge deal because that's exactly how it should be. And as we become more dependent on these devices, this is going to become more and more critical. But not only that, Ting is only $6 flat rate per month. And then it's just, they take your minutes, your messages, and your megabytes. They add them up at the end of the month, whatever bucket you fall into, that's what you pay. Hotspot, tethering, caller ID, voicemail, all included with the plan. If you turn onotspot, tethering, caller ID, voicemail, all included with the plan. If you turn on hotspot and tethering, you just pay for the data usage. You don't have to be in some sort of special family shared tier or something like that.

It just works. So go over to linux.ting.com to get started. And by the way, if you're in a contract right now, hit that how much would you save button. Find out how much you would save by switching to Ting. And then they're going to help you out with your early termination fee. They will pay up to $75 per line that you need to cancel. I love the Nexus 5. I've also got the HTC One. Matt has the Note 2. And Matt, how much do you love that big screen? I love the big screen. As a matter of fact, it's my go-to phone at this point because everything's so big and bright and crisp

and clear. It's great. And they're taking... So if you combine the $31 discount that they have on the Note 2 right now plus our $25 discount, you can buy the Note outright. You completely own it for $600. Now, think about this because this is something that all of the cell phone companies, I bet, if I could make a little 2014 prediction, I would bet you that the higher end phones on the cellular networks will lose their subsidized status in 2014. Both the two biggest wireless carriers in the United States have stated they want to discontinue subsidized plans. Now, our friends across the pond are rolling their eyes like, yeah, you guys are just now catching on to this. Here in the States, the subsidized thing has been going on for a while, right? But it sounds like it's coming to an end. So get ahead of the curve.

Start saving money now. Switch to Ting, and you'll thank me later. Go over to linux.ting.com. And a huge thanks to Ting for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. Love those guys. Love it, Matt. You know what? Let's give that a ding.

Ding. A ding for Ting. Fox News alert. We're bringing in the mumble room right now. And I just wanted to kind of, let's start with this topic, mumble room. Popey, you brought up the whole topic of lugs last week. And I don't know what your thoughts are on it from now, but here we've heard two different perspectives. We've heard from possibly a younger guy who says, I got basically told RTFM.

And we've heard from an older guy who says he gets a lot out of it. Are lugs maybe just not the appropriate place anymore for basic user support? It's funny you should mention the RTFM thing. We see a bit of that on my lug and, you know, grumpy old people or the greybeards or whatever you want to call them. And one of the things when, and you also mentioned locos, when the Ubuntu loco teams were set up, when the and you also mentioned locos when the ubuntu loco teams were set up one of the kind of not a rule but a recommendation was that you don't throw an rtfm at people and you don't throw a let me google that for you link at people because it's just rude it's okay you could argue it's teaching someone to fish but actually you could say here's the answer to your actual question and

by the way you'll find that in the man i I agree. But is that because, and this is a question for Alan, is that because the Linux documentation in whole is kind of asked compared to something like the FreeBSD handbook? So example, if I ask Alan, how do I do X in FreeBSD? If he tells me, go read it on the FreeBSD handbook, I don't really consider that a disservice because the FreeBSD handbook is easily available. It's well documented. It's well laid out. It's an official source. So, Alan, when you sit there as a FreeBSD user watching us Linux users try to help each other's problems, do you see this as a major hole in the Linux ecosystem?

Partly, but one of the biggest differences I would say is I would take the time to point you to the section of the handbook. Thank you. point you to the section of the handbook. Thank you. Because it has the, we do the anchor tags, I can point you to like the chapter 24.7.3 that explains exactly the answer to your question rather than just telling you go to freebsd.org slash handbook and find it yourself.

Which is what I'm saying. That's exactly the same as what I'm saying. Point someone to exactly the piece of documentation you want to get. Okay, but here's the problem though. They could have Googled it as quickly as I did, or maybe not as quickly, because I know all the chapters of the handbook and where to look. Yeah.

What is it, though? You could probably pick on the Arch Wiki, but let's pick on the Ubuntu Wiki because I've noticed it this week as I was running this Leopard Extreme. Sometimes I go to the Ubuntu Wiki and stuff is literally written for Ubuntu 9 something. And it quickly falls out of date. And I feel like this wiki creep is a common problem for Linux, and I think it aggravates the problem of not being able to tell people to RTFM, because

the truth is RTFM might not give them the right information. And that's why a little while ago, at one of the UDS's george castro who works for canonical gave a talk a lightning talk that we're doing a disservice to our customers and our users by having old out-of-date information on the wiki and on forums and you know various web pages on blogs as well you might think you're you're doing a you know a great service to write a blog post but when you don't update that in three years' time, that's bad because people still go back to it because it's got certain keywords that they're looking for and it might not be up to date.

So his recommendation was to go through the wiki and delete pages that just are wrong. Just delete them. Get rid of them. Just expire them, essentially? Just completely delete them because when they show up in Google search results, that's worse than no answer showing up because you're leading you know you're telling someone to use you know end this

wrapper with the brawl com whatever that actually could make their experience worse than it not working yeah well you can do their machine up other wikis have it where if it's an old an old note that it will an old old post that gives you like a bad tutorial from like three years ago it was good then but now it's awful. They'll have a note that says, this is how many years old or whatever. Here's the newer version. Yeah, that's exactly how you argue. This is targeted for X release and click here for maybe the updated release or something.

The current stuff gets buried under all of the old information. It's really difficult sometimes to find up-to-date information for the current release. Well, that's just SEO. You do canonical URLs and things like that. That's a Google problem. That's Google's. I mean, canonical as in not the company.

Right, but older pages that have gotten more clicks always have, you can't always control how Google ranks this stuff. Right. You can control what those go to. Google's algorithm is based on somebody searches for something. If they click a link and then don't come back and keep searching, Google assumes they found what they're looking for

and now increases the rank of that page. Interesting. Yeah. So one of the ways we fixed it, or we think we've fixed it partially, is to switch to using askabuntu stack exchange yeah that is better because there this there's a few ways that fix it one way is it's not a wiki that's got some onerous um barrier to to edit pages um you can easily tag things and say well this works on 904 and 90 and oh hey it, hey, it works on 1204 and whatever release as well.

And rubbish gets buried and good answers get voted up, just like Reddit. The good stuff boggles to the top. There is a negative to it, though. What's that? Like, for example, I work on a project for a download manager, and if you go to Ask Ubuntu and you search for, you say, you ask any question about a download manager and if you go to ask ask ubuntu and you search for you say you ask any question about a download manager they will they will say that this this question is a duplicate

and send you to another question that has about 30 answers and 10 of those are valid but not specific to what they want duplicate duplicate duplicate duplicate yeah i'm looking at it right now expand on that too i found that i would agree that it is vastly better than the wiki system no question about it it's like reddit i love that part of it my only I would agree that it is vastly better than the wiki system. No question about it. It's like Reddit. I love that part of it. My only gripe is that a lot of the stuff that gets voted up is crap because a lot of times it's like it's technically the correct answer, but

honestly, sometimes the answers are so overkill that they turn new users off. And I have an inbox full of people screaming for help daily from Ubuntu users to kind of testify to that. So I think it's the right approach. I just want to see more vetting. You need both

setups though because the question and answer format works great, especially when somebody has a question. And so it works better than regular documentation for answering that question. Right, but if you just want to learn. If you have more of a tutorial style

or like a corporate style where you're going to have the entirety of how to do something uh the question and answer style doesn't work as well so that's right you kind of need both right something like the handbook which is very like old-fashioned manual these are the steps you go through to do these type of things uh and as well the question answered because people want you know when you have a simple question you don't want to know all the steps to do x you want to know what's the answer to y right and you want and that would that was popular on forums you know people would write a tutorial for you know how to get your broadcom wireless working on like 1104 and that would get loads of um

thanks or whatever hearts or diamonds or whatever people give to people on forums and then you'd find um there would be a flurry of activity lots of replies and oh you might want to tweak it for this in this use case and so the original poster would update their their post and it would it would be golden for a few. And then you find loads of replies and there'll be pages and pages and pages of replies and it would then be orphaned and nobody can edit it to fix it. And anyone, anyone who comes to that tutorial will find pages and pages and pages of, of,

you know, people arguing whether it works or not. And then on the very last, last but one page is the final nugget of information that actually tells you how to make it working on your release. And that's just terrible as well. I mean, they've all got their own disadvantages. I don't think any one of them is a magic bullet to fix. And exasperating the problem is a lot of these – and this can be sometimes a problem on Ask Ubuntu because it's more user-generated –

and this can be sometimes a problem on Ask Ubuntu because it's more user-generated, is a lot of times the answer is a copy-pasta where, you know, add this to your sources list and then do an apt-get and import this GPG key, which, by the way, by the time you're reading that, that apt repo is completely dead, right? And this bit me with Handbrake. I wanted to get the absolute latest build of Handbrake.

I eventually just downloaded the dev, but I wanted a PPA, so that way I could have a nice, currently updated Handbrake.. But of course, I ended up getting the repo that was totally dead. And so now, and it's not a big deal. I can go, you know, pull it out of my sources list, but I get errors every time I get update. Now for a casual user who's just doing a little copy pasta and, you know, and adds that repo, that PPA and applies that update. And all of a sudden they're getting errors and they don't really know what the hell's going on. And I don't know how to solve it completely other than, you know, where at least it seems like we're on the right track.

And then also it's maybe if we could do a better job at informing people at the beginning of the gate. Like, because perhaps really we solved this problem years ago with IRC. Like maybe the, you know, the Ubuntu support chatroom is a better place to ask these kind of things, but users just don't even know those things exist.

I think the Linux community actually is really to blame here. I mean, a user joined the IRC and was asking about their bootloader, and they kind of got some help, but the IRC community had a massive tangent about whether to use SysLinux or Grub, and they knew if got some help but the IRC community had a massive tangent about WebT's SysLinux or Grubb

and they knew we just left their channel with no help whatsoever. Right, yeah, it erupts into some sort of religious war over Grubb versus Lilo or never ending list of history no one cares about or you end up with the same problem you have with a Lug, right? Lug's trying to build membership and get people to come every week

or every month or whenever the meeting is but if people if there's new people asking the same question every single week or you're going to spend you know a half of your meeting every week covering the same let's this is how you install ubuntu uh it's it's hard on to keep people coming back it burns them out that just gets boring the. The whole IRC thing, though, is people just need to get better mods in the IRCs. It's that simple. Because, like, I mean, there's thousands of people who got cash, though.

It's time to try to help. You can only expect so much from them. When there's thousands of people in the Ubuntu IRC, and they're just having an endless conversation about Grubb versus Rylo, and somebody's needing help, chances are a mod sees that and just doesn't do anything. No, I mean, technically, most of the time in Ubuntu, they'll tell them to go into off-topic channel. Because the help channel for Ubuntu is just for help, and when they start talking about which is better, blah, blah, blah,

they say go to the off topic. Maybe Google Helpouts solves this problem. You know, here's what solves the problem. Sorry, go ahead. We've had a couple of community guys in the UK who've tried doing helpouts, and I know there's more people who want to do helpouts, but because they're rate limiting you know the invites to to do help outs that makes it very hard for us to evaluate whether it's a good tool or a bad tool but

the guy who's been doing it mostly in the uk a guy called matt has has um has found it quite successful and had great conversations and he does it all for free as well oh really i was gonna say is he making money yeah his his um philosophy is i learn all this from other people who gave me the information for free, so I'm just passing it on for free. All right, all right. How bad do you feel now? I feel like a jerk. Wouldn't it be kind of good to have a wiki system

where you could vote on Ask Ubuntu and newer votes? Well, you can, actually. On Ask Ubuntu, you can convert a page from a question into a wiki page. So if it is a discussion like, should I get an NVIDIA or an AMD card, that's not a technical, you know, how do I get the latest driver? That's an opinionated question. So you can convert pages from questions into wiki pages, which multiple people can edit. I feel like just like a wiki page. I think that one of the problems with newbies is that for me, that I'm not from an English speaking country. I often don't even know how something is called. And I prefer IRC and just say, you know,

that stuff when system starts up, not boots up, because I don't know that. Right. It's easier in the IRC. And I think that's so basic that someone can help me with that from the top of his head. Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point. That's good perspective, too, because I didn't even think about the challenges when you don't quite know what it's called or how to say it. There's a whole layer of maybe several thousand Linux users who was really focused on being that front line of support that people could come to?

And it would be great if there was a way to monetize it for some folks too, so maybe they could make a little money on it. Money to us. Maybe it's a Bitcoin tip system. Maybe it's like a Flatter type system. But remember LinuxQuestions.org and a lot of those kinds of sites. Wouldn't it be awesome if there was a full-fledged – like there was video and audio and forums. And by forums, I mean something like the Ask Ubuntu Stack Exchange type system. I think that would really – if that became known almost as like a brand.

This is the brand of an organization of people who help Linux users. And then if somehow that became popular enough, people knew where to go or people had heard about it or at least enough word of mouth spread happened that, oh, you switched to Linux? Oh, you should go try out XYZ. Go look at their site because they got a ton of great info. And I feel like that would do it. Almost like how the Linux Foundation is focused on the core agendas of Linux and financing the core development of Linux and representing Linux. It'd be amazing if there was another foundation that was focused on maybe new user switchers because I feel like we're entering 2014 with SteamOS, which is our next topic. And I don't know about you guys, but there are surprising, I don't know if you've seen the post,

there's a surprising amount of Windows users who are switching. Like, they're like, hey, I'm going to try out switching to SteamOS today. Like, they say they're going to switch to SteamOS. It's crazy. But we're going to have more people coming to Linux than ever before because Windows is continually being cocked up with next version. Now they're going to supposedly, with threshold, they're going to add the start menu back, which is going to be a total cluster because they're still going to have these weird

mixed desktop metaphors going on. It's totally going to flop in the enterprise. The enterprise is going to be looking for something to move over to. Gamers are looking for something to move over to. The economy is sucking super bad. Nobody has money. They're trying to get more investments out of the existing machines they already have. So they're switching over to Linux. The amount of people moving into Linux, it's like there's just not the support infrastructure required to make it all work smoothly for these

people. I'd love to see something like that set up. I think that it would be great if all the distros put when you download or install that you have, if you need help, click here and then it will go to the site with Linux help. Or maybe...

Go ahead. They are starting to do that. Mint has done it for a while. Manjaro does that. I think Integros does it too now. I go out on a pop-up and say, if you need help, go here. If you need IRC... There's Help islands, right?

There's Ask Ubuntu. There's the Arch Wiki. There's the Gentoo Wiki. There's the Fedora Forms. There's the OpenSUSE community. They all... Man, every distro really has their own islands. But I feel like that's...

First of all... Kind of like LinuxQuestions.org 2.0. Right. We need something. Let's consolidate the effort. Right. Let's consolidate the effort. One spot, one, and the reason I use the word brand

is because I don't like it, but that's what resonates with just average users. Oh, this is something I know I can trust. It's a helpful thing. And we can all go there because I honestly think it's, like, if somebody downloads Integros or Codora, right, do you really

expect them to figure out that they should be going back to this other distro's forums which are going to be more active than the sub-distro's forums because they're just a spin of the other distro? That's ridiculous. That's not going to happen. But never tell the original distro you're on a spin of that distro.

On Helpouts, if you just search for the word Linux, there's eight pages or so of people offering help. Yeah, there's quite a – given that it's like limited rollout, and that's exactly the kind of thing. You can monetize it at a per-hour or per-minute basis, or you can make it free, or you can do a mix of the both. And you can basically achieve what you're hoping for, but as an individual. I just wish Google wasn't owning this. I wish this was something that was more from the open source community itself.

Because there you go, you need a WebRTC-based version of the helpers. Exactly. You need a WebRTC-based system with Bitcoin paid in or Litecoin or whatever you want as the payment system. So that way it's directly from the user directly to the producer. And it's not going through Google. They're not taking their cut. You don't have to have a wallet account. You don't have to have it tied to your bank account. And Google can't just arbitrarily shut you down.

I have spent, I have submitted just this morning, just before 9.30 today, I submitted 30 disputes to YouTube takedowns of Jupiter Broadcasting videos, and that's not all of them. I cut it off because I had a conference call I had to jump on, and that was at 30 before 9.30 today. I don't want to give Google any of this stuff because they're just going to cock it up. They're just screwing it all up, and so I would love to see something that's community-focused. This might be a good way to like test the theory is there a demand for this type of service what do you think i don't know um wasn't that the whole point the original point of red hat though was the bright enterprise level for business yeah for businesses but matt what do you matt what do you think about

the concept of is could help outs like uh prove the concept and then the community take it from there well so here's the problem i actually have a help out set up it's awesome one little tidbit Could help outs prove the concept and then the community take it from there? Well, so here's the problem. I actually have a help out set up. It's awesome. One little tidbit though, because I was stupid enough to use Google for my merchant account at one time years ago, I can't use Google Wallets with that particular invited address. So I'm still in purgatory trying to get that set up, and here I am trying to offer that. And I think it testifies to what you're saying as far as using Google for the service.

Don't. Run away. Run far away. Don't use Google. Between their random SEO nuclear bomb set-offs and all this other stuff, I think there's just too much power play there. There's way too much power. I'm watching – a lot of things they're doing scare me. I think there's way too much power.

Yeah, I don't think so. I was boiling over with anger because what's happening is, you know what? I got an idea. Let's just get ourselves in trouble. I'm just going to play a little music right now because what happens is every time I play a Ronald Jenkes song, who not only have I gotten a license from for all of his music he's also somebody i consider a friend like i have emails from him right now saying hey i'm really sorry about this i want you to use my music you've sold a ton of cds for me it's been an amazing relationship like

you are you are helping me and i want you to use my music and And now YouTube is tagging every single Jupiter broadcasting video that has Ronald Jenke's music in it. Well, guess what? That's just about every damn show on the network. So it's whenever you hand it over to them, if they have the payment aspect, if they have the content distribution aspect, whatever, if they have, and also by the way, that relationship is being established. That account is being created and established with Google, not with you directly. So if they shut down your account, that person would have to go find you on your own website, create a new account, set up a new payment system and all of that. And you know what? They're not going to do it. They're just going to find the next guy doing the help outs on Google.

Yep, exactly. So anyways, that's my rant. Chris, if I can just jump back to your one brand idea. I don't think that works because what works on Ubuntu doesn't work on Arch. Well, no, you'd have to have different, yeah, you'd have to accommodate for that, for sure. You'd have to have people

that could be- Totally different audiences, too. You'd have to be like, you'd have to have channels to send people down the right channel. And then you'd have people that, you know, you'd have representatives from the Arch community,

representatives from the Ubuntu community. And maybe even eventually, like that person would push that person onto a thread on Ask Ubuntu. Like it doesn't necessarily negate the need for distro specific help resources but it might help people get people in the right direction right but it sounds like you're just advocating also stronger branding for the distro in question so you might instead of saying you're using linux say you're using ubuntu

that'll make it so much easier for your average user to find help instead of putting you know how do i set this up and adding linux so they can get rid of all the Windows crap. You know what? Great point. You put Ubuntu and you get exactly distro-specific help. Yeah, you know, because when I had my wife try out Mint, she was searching for Linux application things. She wasn't searching for how do I install X on Mint Linux or how do I install X on Ubuntu Linux. How do I install X on Mint Linux, or how do I install X on Ubuntu Linux, how do I install it on Linux? And she didn't know that she's going to get

a dramatically different answer by searching for how do I install Shotwell on Ubuntu than how do I install Shotwell on Linux? That concept, she never even realized she needed to make that clarification. But with that, you fragment the Linux help. If you put one page, the page can read which

edition you can use, or you can just choose it, and you just get help for that edition specific. Yeah, and when you're searching for like, when you're searching for software or whatever, then you have to teach them to say, well, when you're looking for software then you search for Linux, and when you

need help, you search for Linux Mint or whatever. Now picture this in a commercial. You too can try this great Linux distro. Just learn to use Google. Learn to use this other tool. Then stand on one foot, twirl around in a circle, stand on your head. It's too much. That's why we fall off.

That's totally why we fall off. I remember this old article, I think it was ZDNet had it, and it was care i mean it's like that's that's why we fall off that's totally why we fall off yeah so and i remember this old article i think was zd net had it and it was uh this guy complaining about linux i remember he tried to install the rpm like he tried to install yum on debian you're gonna have a bad time yeah it's not to work so well. And he was trying to mix all three package managers at once and wondering why. Because he searched for how to do this on Linux. And he got the answer for CentOS

and then tried to do it on his Ubuntu machine. Man, yeah, that happens too. I mean, that's the problem. I mean, you could do the way that if you wanted to do something cross distro, you could do it in the way that help outs do it and just tag people. You know, people say, you know, my expert area is servers. And, you know, I deal with hard disk related problems and Ubuntu. A reputation system?

Like a reputation system. Like, you know, user Matt is good at Ubuntu support, and he has 25 upvotes in the Ubuntu support category. That kind of thing? Yeah, that would work, yeah. Like, the exchange software has a bunch of things like that, right? Yeah. Someone to vet these. Could you use

the Firefox user agent to tag which undo should you have? That's not possible. Most people, if their Linux computer is broken, they're switching from a second computer. And also, whether they do know it or not,

for example, Linux Mint still shows up as Ubuntu. Right, right. Yeah, screw those guys. Also, a lot of questions, too, have to do with like desktop specific questions like questions about unity itself or like xfce or kde because they're like i mean kde is going to be completely different on how to do something in xfce would at the same time yeah very true right

yeah because right and you can just tag yourself with whatever desktops you're familiar with and when someone searches you know what do you want to help with? Filter it with this. I think so. This is also why I like the idea of like a video type based hangout because the user might not know what quite the right things are. But if they can generally get into the direction of talking to another human being, that person would go, oh, oh, you're on KDE. Oh, OK. I thought you were on GNOME. No. What you need to do is go to system settings and then you need to go to appearance. Right. So I think that's why that that interactive aspect of it is is almost worth that money,

because they can they can kind of fill that gap where the user doesn't quite even know what to ask for. Totally. Yeah. The more the more I hear like what we're talking about here the more i i kind of see it it has to be a company that's doing this because it's almost sounds like you have to have like a almost like a conveyor belt system where you have someone that just diagnoses the problem like oh you're using kde we're sending you to our kde guy you know it's not a. There's got to be an incentive. Otherwise, no one cares. Here's the simplest fix I can think of for just like even existing systems is first of all, for the love of Pete, incentivize this somehow. Swag, hats, t-shirts, a handshake, meet someone famous. I don't care.

Whatever it is, incentivize it somewhere. More importantly, every time an update for that particular user rolls out, there should be a list of people that are alerted via email saying, hey, this has been updated. You have an opportunity to earn more swag. Would you like to update this wiki? That would solve so many problems. I tie that into the help out system. Wouldn't it be interesting if, by the way, Ubuntu 14.04 is shipped. Go to this URL to find out all the people on Google Helpouts that are helping people transition from 13.10 to 14.04 or whatever, right?

Like when some big announcement – you could tie it to anything. When some big release of something comes out, here's the people on Google Helpouts that are already totally up to date on this topic and ready to help you make the switch. And I think that could be a really big opportunity too. I mean now I'm kind of coming back on the side of Google Helpouts again just because I don't feel like there's a better option yet. The Stack Exchange system has a lot of this already kind of built in and they

incentivize it with just badges, but you could augment that by if Canonical donates a thousand t-shirts, then the first thousand people to get a thousand rep points can get a free t-shirt. And titles. Assign titles. Meaningless titles.

People love titles. I got the achievement teacher because when I answer a question, I don't just answer the question. I also explain why it is that way. Right. Yeah, that would be awesome. I like the badge idea for sure. Or you get analytical because of the way that I write things. That would work. Yeah, that would be awesome. I like the badge ideas for sure. Or you get like, you know, analytical because of the way that I

make things. That would work for me. It's kind of a gamification of support a little bit. It helps, right? The Stack Exchange software has all of that. Yeah, Mark could just throw a few space bucks into that, right? I hear that's how that works. Well, you know, you become like the super granular spaceman wizard

guy or whatever, like the best of the best, the ninja, whatever. Then you get to meet Mark in person or something. You know, whatever it may be. Something cool. You know what I meant? Most of my points are in answering NGINX questions on server fault. When I met Mark in person, it was at an Ubuntu conference, and he was working with – he was talking to a guy from Intel and they had this tiny micro PC.

This was before the iPad. This was a long time ago. And Mark was playing with this little Intel-based PC running Ubuntu that was, I've never seen a computer this small. It was a full-fledged micro computer with a bigger core to keyboard, I think, if I recall. Popey, do you know what I'm talking about? Was it an Intel Classmate? Maybe.

Maybe it was when the Classmate was brand new. That might have been when it was. It was really cool. It had a round mouse touchpad. Yeah. I can't remember if it had a touchpad or not. But, I mean, it's funny now, looking at the whole

Ubuntu touch effort, and now how captivated Mark was by this device back then. You can kind of see the history connect. Alright, well, so I do want to actually touch on the topic of SteamOS a little bit, because we've got a great resource in the Mumble room today, and he's the

creator of Simple Screen Recorder, and he's been working on how he's actually the guy I found out that the GNOME desktop session is running in a separate X session than the actual Steam big picture interfaces by his commentary in our Linux Action Show subreddit. So I want to talk to him a little bit about his efforts on setting up and configuring and building Simple Screen Recorder to record a Steam OS. But before we get to that, I want to thank DigitalOcean. Simple Cloud Hosting. DigitalOcean is dedicated to offering the most intuitive way to spin up a cloud server. I got to tell you, I set up a cloud, a droplet, as they call it, called Europa, because Europa is a moon of Jupiter. Yeah, I know, I'm funny like

that. And you know what? They say users can create a cloud server in 55 seconds. I don't want to brag. I created mine in 45 seconds. Pricing plans start only $5 per month for 512 megabytes of RAM, a 20 gigabyte SSD. Yes, an SSD. And yes, it makes a difference. One CPU and a terabyte of transfer right there for $5. A terabyte of transfer right there in the plan. DigitalOcean has data center locations in New York, San Francisco, and Amsterdam. Actually, they got two in New York, son. I got my droplet in New York number two, which has been fantastic because then I get something. I have facilities here on the West Coast on my own fiber connection, and I have facilities on the East Coast, which is awesome for the kind of distribution I'm doing. By the way, the interface on DigitalOcean is super simple, intuitive. The control panel is powerful, and they also have a very straightforward

API if you just want to write something that talks to it. DigitalOcean also offers a vast collection of tutorials in their community section, and users can submit an article. And if DigitalOcean decides to publish it, you'll get $50. We'll have a link to that in our show notes right underneath the DigitalOcean banner. But guess what? We got a great deal for you. If you want to get started at DigitalOcean, we'll get you a $10 credit by using the promo code LinuxUnpluggedDecember. LinuxUnpluggedDecember. All one word will get you a $10 credit. Now, if you get the $5 box like I've got, that'll get you two months. And I guarantee you a Linux box connected to a super fast internet connection in a data center,

basically on any major geographical location you want with SSD backs. And by the way, runs on top of KVM. You can choose Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, goes on, goes on, goes on. And it's awesome for $5 a month. And we'll get you a $10 credit so you can try it for two months. You're going to find something to do with that. So go over to DigitalOcean.com. And a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. I love my

DigitalOcean droplet, Matt. Loves it. Good stuff. Love it. I want to bring in Martin here. So, Martin, you've been working

on Simple Screen Recorder and you've been playing around with SteamOS a little bit. Tell me a little bit about what you've found so far. Okay. SteamOS is actually just a Debian distribution,

but Valve made some changes. So they don't use the Debian repositories. Valve has their own repositories, which is actually just a really stripped down version of Debian. So they don't have any packages that they don't need. I think if you look at the packages that are actually installed, it's like all of them. So that's a bit of a problem if you want to, yeah, load other open source applications. Well, were you able to add just the regular Debian repos

to the sources.list file? Yeah, you can, but there are some conflicts, I think. I did it. It just, well, it will pull in some applications, not applications, but things like Grub that were updated.

It didn't break for me, but I'm not sure, so I don't really recommend that. Okay, so what kind of success did you see with running Simple Screen Recorder on SteamOS? Yeah, so right now it doesn't really work yet because

Valve has split the desktop and Steam itself. So they're actually two separate accounts. And when you switch between them, it's like switching to a different user account on a normal Linux desktop. So if you try to run an application on the desktop, like Simple Screen Recorder, and you try to record it, and then you switch back, well, you won't see anything. And it also breaks things like keyboard shortcuts. Oh, yeah, right. So, yeah, a lot of things I still have to work around.

And so you can't share the same home folder, so if you record something on one desktop. Now, have you been able to record the Steam OS session? Well, I can record the desktop, but I haven't really tried yet. Well, one other problem is I'm doing all this in a virtual machine right now. Oh, okay. And I didn't get hardware acceleration to work.

So it's really, really slow. Yeah. So it's a bit hard to test it now. I guess it kind of makes sense that they'd break that off into its own user account and all of that. Well, I mean, I'm sure you'll work on it over time. I think it's something that people will want to do quite a bit. Because, you know,

Simple Screen Recorder is an awesome utility. Yes, it is. Keep us posted in the Linux Action Show subreddit, would you? Okay. Alright, guys. Well, so we have one bit of email I want to get to before we wrap up for the day today.

And it's actually on the topic of lugs as well. It wasn't exactly an explicit follow-up to our episode last week, but I'll read it. Matt, maybe you and I will kick some thoughts around, then I'll bring in the mumble room to get their final thoughts on it. But it comes in from Archie, and he wants to talk about starting a lug.

Now, I know we had somebody in the mumble room last week who was interested in that. I don't know if we still do, but we'll jump in there in a second. He says, hey, Chris and Matt, I've been a longtime viewer of Lass. However, this is my first time submitting a question to any of the shows. During the last episode of Linux Unplugged, you touched on the topic of lugs. I'm living in Estonia, and as far as I know, there's no existing lug in our country. Moreover, I could not find any active lugs in either

Lativa or Lithuania. Oh, geez. Oh, man. Lithuania. I used to know how to pronounce it, but I can't. Lithuania. I'm going to go with Lithuania, which is our closest neighbor. Oh, my. Yeah, that's right. So I was thinking about starting one in my country. However, I'm struggling to find a direction in which to go.

I mean, I could personally give a couple of short talks, but that's basically it. I have some friends who are very passionate about Linux, but I really believe organizing an install fest is kind of dull. As you mentioned in the show, lugs are all about meeting people in real life. But what could be the reason that would

convince people to physically come to one place and discuss stuff? From what I understand, there are some people in the audience who have some experience with participating in a lug, so maybe they could give some suggestions. Keep up the great work, Archie. So he talked on it. So I thought, first of all, Archie has a good insight.

So I think one of the things he was talking about here was holding talks to bring people to the meetup. And, you know, I think that's a really good idea. If there's a topic on Linux, or if there's several topics on Linux that, Archie, you're comfortable with, and you could volunteer to hold talks to bring people in, people will come.

And then if they have, you will find that the people that come to watch your talk likely have topics and subjects they are qualified to have talks on and you can work with them. Yes, that would be my experience. I was wondering, like, so, you know, Matt, getting things started, I like the idea of, I mean, I can't believe I'm about to say this, but using a resource like Facebook and finding people in your local area who share a common interest with you and maybe establishing like a group on Google Plus or a group on Facebook or whatever it is where you guys virtually kind of collaborate initially. And then once you kind of have a core group, maybe move to doing something local. I would actually do that, but I would also integrate the talks idea, as you pointed out.

Also pointing out that in Estonia and a lot of other countries, there are social networks that are perhaps more popular there than they are here. And I forget, I can't think of their names off top of my head, but Facebook-like networks for sure. But I think the talks idea is good. I think that also offering for people that have never even heard of Linux, if you want to get fresh, fresh blood into it, actually saying, hey, do you have an old XP machine that you just discovered is going to become a paperweight here very quickly? Right. Let's have a look at that. Maybe not necessarily an install fest, but let's actually look at your options.

Look at the headlines. Take advantage of that. Hey, did you hear XP is support sending? Well, come to our group and we'll show you how to get more value out of that old PC. And then you wink and a little glitter in the tooth. All right. Well, let's – or I'll bring the mumble guys back in. So anybody in the room have experience with starting the lug or have ideas for Archie

on how he can get started with creating a local lug, maybe the first lug in his country? Sorry, I was just going to say, you were saying about incorporating things like Facebook, Google Plus, et etc., social networks. You might actually run into some problems there, because at least I've found that a lot of the people that are really into Linux and would love to go to Lugs are the people that

don't really use them that much. Oh, different audiences. I'm not so sure. I think there's certainly a crossover of Refuseniks who hate social media and scoff at that kind of stuff and the privacy issues. I mean, the people who know better, right? Right. The Venn diagram has a massive overlap between them and people who go to Linux user groups. But we, my local Linux user group, on the subject of talks,

they do exactly that. They put a mail out on the mailing list and say, because we have a mailing list and an IRC channel, we have a Google Plus page, a Twitter account, and I don't think we have a Facebook page. But that's just because it hasn't been done yet. But we put a mail out and say, look, we're having a meeting at this time on this day. If anyone wants to give a talk, let me know.

And then they build up on the web page and on the day we set some times uh when the talks are going to be given and the rest of the time is just general chit chat and support and that kind of stuff and that works out really well i've i've listened to some really diverse topics like three completely different things that you you wouldn't put in a track on a conference together. Right. You know, completely wildly different things, but all interesting and all, you know, or not necessarily all interesting. Sometimes some of them are just, you know, not interesting to me, but interesting to half the rest of the audience.

But then the rest of the time you can sit there and, you know, fix someone's PC or something. I think a mailing list is a really key point because you could have people subscribe to the mailing list. You could say, hey, are you interested in Linux? Do you live in this area? Subscribe to our mailing list is a really key point because you could have people subscribe to the mailing list. You could say, hey, are you interested in Linux? Do you live in this area? Subscribe to our mailing list. You wait until that mailing list is built up to a substantial subscriber base, and then that's when you start to pull the trigger on the local stuff. Maybe you don't start with local. Maybe you start with a mailing list.

Good. Hi. I'm from Estonia, and we have a webpage called pingvin.org, and that kind of has all the information about Estonian Linux users and all those things. What was it again? It was in the chat room earlier. Pingvin.org.

Oh, okay, yeah, I'll put a link to it in the show notes bingvin.org yep very good and we have once a year we have it in September we have free software day that all the

free software activists come together and have a meeting or do cool things and stuff. Very good. Well, thank you. I'll link to that. So maybe our writer will catch that in the show notes. Yeah, definitely. Good stuff. Thank you. All right, guys. Well, so just a couple of extra things in the show notes. I want to point people over to Thermonex wrote in and he built a Steam box on Arch and he has some scripts for that. We have a link to that in the show notes. says i recently set up arch linux on my home

theater pc and i set it to boot into xbox media center the standalone edition from xbmc now i have a shortcut to launch steam of course i could easily boot directly into steam os but it's his script so he has an entry now in his xbmc menu matt how awesome is this right i'm gonna you know i actually like that better than SteamOS, just because it's less clicks, less hassle, less waiting. It's more functional, right? You can watch your videos. And so then he's in XBMC, and he clicks it, and then it starts Steam in big picture mode. And he's got,

I'll have a link to that. And also, of course, Michael Larbell over at Pharonix just got in some benchmarks of SteamOS versus Windows 8.1 on the NVIDIA chip. And guess what? The performance is pretty much, as long as you have everything set along the same lines, it seems like it's pretty much neck and neck. There's nothing really too outrageously different there. But we'll have

a link to that if you guys want to read that in the show notes as well. All right. Well, look, we're going to wrap up right here. But we want to hear from you. So you can join us live on a Tuesday. Matt and I sit down. We open up the Mumba Room and we begin our conference with our internet lug. And we do that over at jblive.tv on a Tuesday.

And you can find out when that's at by going over to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. Send us in your feedback on any topic we covered or topics you'd like to hear us cover. I don't know. Maybe you've got something we haven't thought of. Go over to jupiterbroadcasting.com and pop that contact link and we'd love to hear from you. Alright, Matt, well guess what? We're going to do a review of Fedora 20

on the big show on Sunday. Oh, yeah. So I'll see you then, okay? Cool. See you then. Alright, everyone. Well, thank you so much for tuning in this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. We'll see you then, okay? Cool. See you then. All right, everyone. Well, thank you so much for tuning in this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. We'll see you right back here next week.