LINUX Unplugged - Episode 191: What’s a Distro? | LUP 191

Episode Date: April 5, 2017

Joe Ressington of Late Night Linux joins Wes to discuss just what makes a “Proper” distribution. Then the latest news about Libreboot and the Free Software Foundation, Containers explained in pictures & our complaints about the latest Telegram release.Plus Fedora has the perfect desktop for Hacker News & Android is now king of the internet.

This is Linux Unplugged, Episode 191, on April 4th, 2017. My name is Wes, and welcome to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's throwing a party while the boss is away. We've got an awesome show for you this week, but we're mixing things up. Chris, oh Chris, he is traveling the country, headed to Texas, as I'm sure you all know. We don't need him though. That's right. No, we don't need him.

We've got a huge show. We're going to talk a lot of stuff. We've got the latest from all your favorite open source projects, plus something from Telegram, some cool pictures that can finally explain containers in Docker, and an elegant Vim distribution that will make you say, is this Emacs? Plus the latest from LibreBoot and their relationship with the Free Software Foundation.

Some stuff, interesting stuff from Fedora. They claim, hey, Hacker News, you're picky about desktops. Wait, wait, Fedora and GNOME, we've got what you need. Then, did you know Android? Yeah, that's right. Android has overtaken Windows as the internet's most used operating system. We discuss what does that mean for Linux, for Windows, for the world at large. And then we get into, I'm sure, what will be a heated discussion. What does it mean to be a proper distro? So how are we going to do all this? Can't be with just me. No, we have a special guest this week. That's right.

It's a little bit interesting this week. We are joined by our friend, new to the network. You heard him here last week, Joe Ressington. Welcome to the show, Joe. Hey, thanks, man. Wonderful to have you. Hopefully I'm sounding a bit better this time. Absolutely sound great.

I think we're in for an excellent show today. Let's see. We're going to cover some, got some just interesting news updates, some follow-ups to projects that we've been following along in past episodes. Before we get to all of that, though, let me introduce the thing that makes this show what it is, our wonderful Mumble Room. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Greetings.

Greetings. Hello, Wes. Welcome, everybody. It's wonderful to have you here. Thank you for joining me. Hello, Wes. Welcome, everybody. It's wonderful to have you here. Thank you for joining me. Chris is away. He's venturing across the country down to Texas. I'm sure you've all been following along.

Go check out his vlog. If not, it's a lot of fun. So Joe and I are running the show today with your gracious help. So let's see. First up, you may have heard this. A lot of people on the network are using it our friends over at telegram why they've introduced voice calling and i believe it's coming to linux as well this is just a little bit of an update but it really highlighted for me some of the things like

why i have mixed feelings about telegram uh so over the past few months we've worked hard to make sure telegram calls are the best in terms of quality speed and security the wait. The wait is over. Today, we're rolling out voice calls in Western Europe. The rest of the world will get them very soon as well. So that seems pretty exciting. Does that mean I get it before you, Wes? Yes, I think it does. Ah, I'm jealous. I mean, I don't know. I don't know about you, Joe. I don't use video calls all that often. I mean, I have occasionally maybe like a more for like a work conference really than, you know, casual acquaintances or spouses or anything like that. Yeah. And the thing is, it's not like there aren't enough options already.

This is just yet another one, which I suppose is good in a way, but it just, it feels a bit redundant to me. I can't see myself really using it. Yeah. So some of the things that stood out to me, like they have a quote here from the article. They have a quote here from the article. That's why we've improved the key exchange mechanism. To make sure your call is 100% secure, you and your recipient just need to compare four emoji over the phone. No lengthy codes or complicated pictures. Now, the emoji idea is kind of interesting, but it really brings back to the questionable security, Telegram rolling their own security.

And I understand the marketing you want, especially today, especially after all the news with FTC, etc. Privacy is important. It's nice to see that they think that their base likes privacy, but just saying things like 100% secure, I'm not sure. They also talk a lot about how each time you make a voice call on Telegram,

a neural network learns from you and your device's feedback. I don't have a problem with that they highlight that you know they're not listening to your calls necessarily it's more just metadata about it just the hype i was excited to see the feature i won't use it but the hype around the article kind of rubbed me the wrong way what do you guys think well i mean i'm looking at this emoji thing and why can't they just use four numbers or four characters surely it's easier to just say b a u o or something rather than uh kind of a sun smiley face thing and kind of two what if they were saying p e b c d and it's well basically the same sound whereas you say goat broccoli something like that it's because there are lots and lots of emoji and there are only

10 numbers and there are only 26 alphabetic characters in the latin alphabet it's way easier to generate very long keys and then turn those into uh one of a number of like a small number of uh emojis than it would be to generate a long key and then get you to read that long key out. That's a better point. I still think it's easier to just say it as well. So there's like multi-factor. Yeah, that may be true.

Anyway, I'm still using Telegram. I've been playing with Wire a little bit. There are, you know, there's also Signal. I saw some progress on Signal no longer needing or acquiring the Google Play libraries. I'm not sure what the status of that is. Telegram for me just has kind of the people that are using it in my life, but I really would like to not be as hooked to the platform.

Well, the thing is you're going to end up hooked to yet another platform, aren't you? Because even if you get a few friends on that, then you still don't know if you want Telegram. Right, that's the danger of even trying it out. Yeah if i'm still using whatsapp i'm using telegram do i really need another one yeah exactly the wire one is interesting because it has the open sourcing of the server so that one is the most interesting because you can do like a private wire and that's what that's what i'm most um curious about when as they say the end of quarter one which is basically over now but it's they could still say you know somewhere in april they could release it and still be technically around quarter one right yeah okay interesting well we'll have to we'll have to stay tuned for that then yeah the telegram phone calls

i've played with it and it's it is interesting um there are bugs where if you don't have your phone on it doesn't ring but if you are on your phone it rings like a regular phone call and you just answer it from the notifications or whatever however you want okay and it is pretty cool it does work pretty well and in the uh the quality of the the sound is is a lot higher than I would have expected. And the last thing that's important is I don't think there's any video. I think it's just audio. Ah, okay. I see.

I think the video part is new. It's just coming. I don't think it's hit the States yet. Oh, yeah. They said that the phone call was going to go to the – was Europe, then the States, and then I guess they're going to do the video rollout the same way. Okay. That makes sense. Excellent. Well, yes, I will say the one thing about it that has always in the past – it has just – I mean it's snappy.

It works. I don't have a lot of problems with it generally. So in that case, I look forward to seeing what they continue to do. Okay. So on to our next story this week. Also, just like a quick little update. I really like seeing things explained with pictures. It's not always

easy to do, but in a world filled with manpages, which, don't get me wrong, manpages are great. I love them. I use them all the time. And personally, I prefer kind of longer form articles over necessarily like a video. Videos have their place, but for me, I generally will read like a longer tutorial. but especially for communicating something in a presentation or a talk or to people who perhaps don't have an hour to read an article i think explaining complex

ideas and pictures really can be a big win so i just want to talk there's a consuliacomic.com i had not seen it before uh it's mostly about programming and nerd stuff drawn by a back-end developer which explains why it looks so bad. But really, I think it looks pretty good. It's not amazing. It's not, you know, beautiful design work or anything like that, but I like the concept. So, just looking at their most recent issue, containers

and Docker. And so, especially on Linux, where containers aren't necessarily, you know, a first-class concept. You've got cgroups and namespaces and other things. I thought this was a nice little drawing to come check out and explain to people who maybe come from somewhere else. They haven't used this concept. They're migrating from Windows.

I thought it was a useful diagram, so maybe you guys will too. Yeah, it breaks it down nicely and just makes it kind of visual, which is, as you said, rather than trying to read through loads of stuff, there's quite a lot of writing with it as well. But even if you just scroll down and just catch the pictures, you can get an idea of how containers and Docker and all that kind of stuff works.

So, yes, worth checking out. Do you use containers, Docker, that sort of technology very much on your end, Joe? Not really. I tend to be more old school, really. I don't have the requirement for it, really. tend to be more old school, really. I don't have the requirement for it, really. Experimenting with snaps and stuff like that,

and Maru uses containers, but no, I mean, I don't get in-depth enough with the kind of servers I have to run. It's all very straightforward stuff, so not yet. Maybe this is a good opportunity. I got to talk to you last week, but other than that, we haven't done a show before, so I don't really know

that much about your background. I mean, I've listened to some of your week, but other than that, we haven't done a show before. So I don't really know that much about your background. I mean, I've listened to some of your podcasts, of course, which I enjoy very much. But what do you do as your day job or other things? Oh, that's a mystery. Oh, excellent. That's even better. I solve problems, basically, as my day job. Perfect.

No, I don't solve cases. I solve problems for people. All sorts of problems for people is what I do. Oh, excellent. Hey, Jack of all trades or Joe of all trades, whatever. Yeah, pretty much. All right. So on to our next story.

Recently, I've been doing some development work in a language called Clojure, which is a Lisp for the JVM in search of a very good development environment for that. I ended up using Emacs, but I have never been an Emacs user. I've always kind of used Vim very minimally, especially if I'm just writing Python or other dynamic languages where I don't need a heavy IDE really. Then I found SpaceMax, and SpaceMax is an Emacs distribution that's kind of targeted towards Vim users

and people who want easier setup or kind of a pre-built thing that has a lot of pluggable options. And then I saw SpaceVim, an elegant Vim distribution inspired by SpaceMax. What is SpaceVim? SpaceVim is a Vim distribution for Vim plugins, resources, and is compatible with both Vim and NeoVim. It is inspired by SpaceMax and mimics SpaceMax in a high level, especially in the whole architecture, key bindings, and GUI. So I don't know if this will be interesting or anything, but I've had some very positive experiences with SpaceMax as a newcomer to the Emacs realm where I really, you know,

maybe if I like it, I'm going to keep using it over the next years, then sure, I can, you know, dive in, learn Emacs Lisp, figure out how to actually configure it, those kinds of things. But SpaceMax made it really easy for me to kind of pick up and go and just focus on doing the development work that I was trying to do. Joe, MumbleRoom, do you guys have any strong preferences? I don't want to get into an editor war here, but do you see value in maybe an extra configuration layer, especially for things where, you know, there's different plugin systems?

This can kind of provide a way to have one, one might argue, an additional way to do it, but one kind of higher level way to get started with configuration. You're talking to an NL user, so, you know, I'm not much use on this, but I can see if you're, you know, if you're a dev and you're using

it every day, then this could be a useful way to, as you say, like a higher level config, certainly getting into it, if you're a dev and you're using it every day, then this could be a useful way to, as you say, like a higher level config, certainly getting into it. If you're making the transition from nano to a proper text editor, I really started a war there. Proper. Yes. No, I know. I know many nano users, Chris included of this program. It's a fine it's a fine editor and uh you know one thing you can say about is it lets you focus on the text that you're editing and nothing else so that's nice too yeah the unix philosophy do one thing and do it well yeah right yes exactly that there is there is no space nano so it's dead to me this whole initiative yeah no that's fair uh space nano maybe we'll have to do that so listeners if you

you like the space theme maybe you like these editors i do think you should give them a shot if you're new to vim or emacs uh though i've not tried space vim yet uh maybe someone will make a space nano well if you want to you know better configure nano to be better, you can use Emacs for Vim. Yeah, there you go. Good one. Or Sublime Text. Yes, that's true. Sublime Text, Atom, VS Code, there's kind of a plethora of options, even if you don't go into the

full IDE space. Or just use Pluma. Yeah. Or G-Edit. It's a fine, fine editor. I know I've seen a couple like more minimal ones i think i think one's actually called joe uh that are that are kind of uh trying to fill that joe joe and jed yeah jed right micro now as well which is very good yeah it's a good uh i think it's a good problem to have here okay Okay, so moving on.

That was just some updates. We've got another update. We talked about this recently, about LibreBoot in general, kind of what their mission is, some of their interactions with other projects. You guys may remember that LibreBoot and the Free Software Foundation have been kind of in a state of discord. So now there's an update from the LibreBoot project. You can argue about the interpretation, but one way that it's been stated is, LibreBoot no longer opposes the GNU project or the Free Software Foundation.

We have made peace. So they write, Over the past six months, the LibreBoot project has been in a state of discord. After an issue with a transgender employee at the FSF escalated, LibreBoot publicly left Gianni with little consultation from the community. Relations with so many people were strained. Friendships broken. Lines of code never written. The chaos needs to come to an end. With all this in mind, were the allegations against the Free Software Foundation true? Perhaps. perhaps not. At this point, it doesn't matter.

Indeed, it is unlikely that LibreBoot will ever rejoin the GNU, but feuding in an already fragmented community helps nobody. The world of free software is shrinking and under attack. Though the FSS may make mistakes from time to time, so do we. We do not need another divide. So, no more royal we, no more notorious surprises, no more late-night typo fixes. Transparency and collaboration are the way forward.

So that's what we get from the latest from the LibreRoot project. Joe, what did you think about this? Had you followed? You know, they only joined the FSF, it looks like. I was reading some old Pharonix articles in May of 2016. So really, not that much. It's barely been a year, not even. There's been a lot of drama in that short time. Yeah, I mean, I've been following this story for what feels like a year or more now. Well, actually, probably less than that, about six months, maybe. And yeah, the head dev of LibreBoot

just fell out with the Free Software Foundation and decided to divorce from GNU. And then it sort of went quiet for a while. And then we heard from Storm and I think he piped up and said that, well, it's not your decision to make, but we'll let you do it anyway. We'll let you go. Whereas now it turns out that I think it's Leah leah rowe was um is in charge or was in charge but now it's looking like she has admitted that it wasn't a great way to kind of go on and she wasn't in the right kind of um mental place i suppose to to make those decisions and i suppose it highlights that um if you've got one person in charge of a project, how that can cause problems. If you don't have a kind of democracy or at least, you know, a team of people there, if it's one person calling all the shots for it, then that's when these things can happen.

And at the end of the day, drama and politics, you know, it's great for shows like this for us to talk about something. But really, we want harmony, don't we? was like this for us to talk about something but really we want harmony don't we want people getting on with porting libra boot to as many different um chipsets as possible trying to get you know some some properly free software running machines top to bottom and and you know drama like this is not going to help that well also let's point out that the reason the person was – that LibreBoot was decided to leave was because the person who was fired from GNU or the FSF was a completely different person from the fallout of what happened. was claimed by the leader of LibreBoot that the person was fired because of being a transgender, which was not true.

And the person who was actually fired has never made a statement on it. So it's really an overreaction situation, but it's nice to know that they calmed down and started reacting to a normal state of we should be working on getting things done rather than freaking out over the employment of other people. Yeah, I mean, we don't really know exactly what went on is the main problem there. You know, we only got kind of, you know, hearsay, basically. So it's pointless to really speculate on the politics of it. And I think that that's why really the best

thing to do is concentrate on, look, this seems to have been resolved now. And, you know, hopefully we can get some code written and some machines running totally free software. Yeah, that sounds awesome. Yeah, we can get back to, so, I mean, I was hopeful about the tone. Hopefully people can really have some peace and feel better about things and just, yeah, get to work, get some awesome things, de-blobbed, continue the march to freedom.

Anyone else have anything they'd like to add on that story? I feel like it's a non-statement. And it's like, oh, we've settled things, but we're not going to tell you what actually happened or be transparent about you. We just started drama for some reason. We're not going to state that reason. And I understand that there may be privacy.

Maybe the person's involved in one state. There may be privacy. Maybe the person's involved in one state. I feel like it's just causing, it could just be causing drama for drama's sake, and it's really not helpful. So, WWE, would you describe that as? And the value of this is negative. Yes. I would just say, if it's personal, take it up with them.

Solve it. Don't make it public. There was a recent problem with the Drupal project that was personal about someone's personal life and did not need to be brought up at all. You don't really need this. So it really is a double negative for me. It's like, okay, why would I use i use libra then if this is how how you react so i don't know i haven't really kept up to as much as other people but it just seems like a non-newsworthy item to me when they're just creating drama the other piece that's important

and while i agree with actually everything you guys have brought up is that what ended up happening now is that Libra boot has sort of spun off and now we have Libra core which is sort of a broken up piece from Libra boot. So this is the actual community members from Libra boot. So Leah Rowe who is really the only person behind Libra boot which of course just takes core boot and doesn't ship with the blobs that come with CoreBoot. And so now there's actually an effort to have a completely freed stack that's called LibraCore, which is outside of LeoRow's domain.

And that's starting to gain traction within the core boot community. And the reason happens to be because of the, you know, kind of, I'll say ridiculous nature of bringing in personal preference to something that shouldn't have ever been brought in to begin with, right? It was a project, a community-based project with a lot of people involved, with one person that controlled the wiki and the GitHub account and could kind of go rogue. So that's one of the reasons that LibreCore is now gaining traction,

just so you guys know. Does this speak to a larger problem? Does this speak to a larger problem in the kind of community-driven software? Whereas, you know, with commercial software and a lot of proprietary software that is commercial you've got a human resources department that is probably going to stop this stuff going public you know it will be dealt with internally whereas with community projects you don't have that management structure there and things just end up leaking out onto the internet and drama happens as a result. I think that's a great point to raise. I think that LibreBoot sort of is the quintessential example of what not to do in the case of a

community-driven project. And I don't really know of many others that we can point to that sort of have that issue. So in most cases, I'd say people would be sane about something that is hearsay from a friend of theirs, and they would actually take that up through the proper channels rather than turning it into a very public flame war. So if there were a bunch of examples, then I think that it could start to become a concern. But as it is right now, I can literally only think of that one as the example.

It reminds me of all the times that Linus gets called out in press because he said something harsh about someone's code and they end up taking it personally because that's how they take it that's what this kind of reminds me about and the reporting upon it by whoever because they're focusing on the personal aspect and not the technological aspect so right i actually think i think it's a valid point uh my only counter to that is that Linus is speaking about something that is taken out of context. In this case, LibraBoot, or specifically Leah Rowe, is the one who took it all out of context on her own and then announced everything and basically making a big deal of it. So that would be to take the same analogy, right?

The same analogy would be that Linus basically is starting to have a blow-up fit and trying to take it to the press and make sure that everybody's aware of things. But your point's not lost in that a lot of times these personal attacks or even a non-intentional personal attack can sort of explode. I think that's a very good summary of this whole incident, and we'll just kind of have to wait and see what happens next. I think now that brings us to some happier news. It's time to talk about our first sponsor of this fine Linux Unplugged and that is our friends over at linux academy what is linux academy linux academy is the best place to go learn all the latest linux devops system administration skills that the market is craving

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So this is an article over on blogs.gnome.org talking about Hacker News feedback on what they want from their desktop. Fedora and Gnome say, hey, we've got it. So it starts out, there was a thread on Hacker News based on a question from a canonical employee asking for feedback on what people want from the next version of Ubuntu. I always try to read such threads, even when they are not about Fedora or Red Hat. In fact, I often read such articles and threads about non-Linux systems too, to help understand what people are looking for and thus enable us to prioritize what we do with Fedora Workstation even better.

Over the last few years, I do feel we've managed to nail down what the major pain points are and cross them out one by one or gotten people assigned to work on them. So a lot of the items people ask for in that thread, we already have in the Fedora Workstation or have already on our roadmap. I mean, those two things are different, but whatever.

So I thought it would be nice to write them up and maybe encourage people to take a look at Fedora workstation if you haven't done so already. So just some things they highlight here on this list. They've got handling of DPI scaling and high DPI. What am I saying? He does admit that things are not perfect yet, but there's active work ongoing. I've had some pretty good experiences with GNOME on Wayland and high DPI screens, but I only have a couple. I don't have one at home. I have some at work, so I don't have the most experience. It's nice to see that they take it seriously, though.

Another one here, which I think a lot of people, we may talk about later in the show, struggle with is multi-touch gestures. And, you know, they really come from like a OSX world. They're really used to those very nice touchpads. You know, lots of algorithms go in to determine just what you want. Very nice gestures that have been developed over the years. So they say this is another item that we've put significant effort into. Over the last three years, we've made sure we went from almost no touch support in the desktop to now supporting touch throughout the stack. to now supporting touch throughout the stack.

The one big remaining item that was holding items like proper gestures back is that until kernel 4.12 is out, the Synaptics touchpad are using PS2. This causes only two gestures to be reported, which is not great when you want three-fingered gestures. Yeah, I think that's true. So just to quickly summarize some of the rest of the things, battery life is an item here on their list. I think that's definitely an important one if you're using a laptop. They kind of show some of the nice, the gnome battery bench here, which is kind of an interesting tool. Next up is UEFI issues. There are people on the Hacker News

thread talking about issues with UEFI. Once again, this is an error. We have a dedicated engineer assigned to UEFI and making sure it works great. In fact, Peter Jones, who is our UEFI point man, is on the UEFI Standards Committee doing ongoing work to ensure the standard is open source friendly and well supported by Linux. I will also add that Fedora did do a lot. Matthew Garrett helped there as well back in the day getting UEFI support. They built that shim bootloader. Some of the things that we rely on today,

if you are in a required secure boot kind of environment or if you just want to take advantage of the know the ufi that comes standard on so many laptops now uh just to round out the list they've also got you know hey we've got wayland support uh it's true i mean if you install it install the latest fedora release you'll get gnome on wayland i think that's that is pretty neat it's nice to see them pushing things forward they've also got something like redshift i know know when I saw the news of Apple releasing the Redshift in their new OS X, I was like, hey, are they copying

GNOME there? But you know what's missing from this list, Wes? Yes, what? Configurability. Now, is it just me? Is it just that I want to be able to configure my desktop? Or is it just missing? Because could it be that people want to be able to configure my desktop? Or, you know, is it just missing?

Because could it be that people want a desktop like GNOME or Unity, which is pretty much, this is how it is. You can configure it a tiny bit, but take it or leave it. Do people just want to fire up a desktop and just get on with it and not spend hours and hours configuring it?

I do think, I mean, I think a lot of times I may fall into that location. I certainly have enjoyed configuration in the past. Don't get me wrong. But for whatever reason lately, I really haven't had like a main desktop, a main computer that I'm always at or one that doesn't kind of float between distributions or get re-imaged. And so I've kind of found a lot of value in GNOME for that. I mean, I do install a couple of plugins, maybe add a theme,

but it's pretty minimal and it gets me to a consistent environment that I can kind of just drop into, get some work done, pull up a terminal, pull up Slack, pull up Chrome, and get to work.

When I read through Dustin's post on Hacker News, the whole idea of configuration and exposing more options to the the you know to rearrange the desktop didn't didn't feature it was really about um refining things to a level that meet the expectations that people people have come to expect from for example mac os 10 so it was really about improving and making bluetooth support bulletproof improving high dpi support although that one's interesting because the unity 7 high dpi support is quite decent because you've got um um fractional scaling whereas in gnome it's

integer only so you can scale one two three not 1.25 for example which and that one you know the fractional scaling is quite handy because on like a 13 inch uh laptop with a 1080p screen on unity you can scale that to 1.25 and just make everything that little bit bigger and it's quite it's quite a useful feature and likewise on laptops with you know the old 1280 by 800 resolution screens the way you can zoom out artificially create you know additional desktop real estate but it was yeah the things that i got out of that was it was about improving the essential stuff everything to do with input and output basically human human interaction so trackpad support needed to be multi-touch and

gesture bluetooth needed to be better wi-fi needed to be more reliable and that wasn't just in the wake of the recent issues it was being competitive and power competitive with power usage, power consumption competitive with Windows and battery endurance needed to be improved on Linux in general. So it was all about refinement rather than wholesale changes. Yeah, it does seem like something that people kind of want to expect these days. I mean, new things are exciting, but you really want to see those kinds of refinement that you can really get. I know the last really positive

review of Mint on this network was exactly what they had felt, right? It was like, yeah, you've hit it here. You've really dialed it in what you were doing. You've taken the time. You didn't make crazy improvements, but all those little details have been ironed out. That's a hard place to get to. May I jump in here? Please do. My wish for mainstream desktops would be the independent treatment of monitors and virtual desktops on dual or multi-screen setups. Because I have that in Enlightenment, but I haven't seen another window manager or

windows in my environment that can do that. Maybe it's possible on tiling managers too. So do you mean like a separate virtual desktop for each monitor? It's like, imagine you have a dual screen setup and you have four virtual desktops on each monitor. So on Unity, for example, if you switch the virtual desktop from one to two, you switch the two monitors. So imagine you only switch the left one and the right one stays the same. So in GNOME 3, you have on dual screen setups, you have one monitor that only stays on one virtual desktop. And the other one has multiple virtual desktops. So in Enlightenment, the two monitors are completely treated independent.

So I can have five virtual desktops on the left screen and four virtual desktops on the right screen, and I can switch them independently. That's really cool. Yeah, that's a toolkit feature, which some of the toolkits lack, unfortunately. Yeah, it's something you can do somewhat work around with Plasma, but I've tested it and most tiling window managers have the ability to do that.

Yeah, I guess tiling managers are easier to handle that, I guess. Yeah, i3 for easier to handle that, I guess. Yeah, i3 for sure, Xmonad for sure. I think Awesome does too. Enlightenment can do that too. So I run Enlightenment 21 now, but it was possible with Enlightenment 17 too. Nice. Well, I think that's a natural segue to our next article today.

Report. Android overtakes Windows as the internet's most used operating system so kind of in the opposite vein of a tiling window manager we have android which only recently got even multi-window support joe are you an android person do you have much android in your life what do you what is what do you think this means for Linux users, mobile users, and everyone else? Is this the trend that we should expect to continue to see? Definitely. You say to me, do I have a lot of Android in my life? Well, often people will ask me what is the primary operating system or desktop or whatever that I use on my main machine. And I say to them, Lineage OS. I used to say C to say cyanogen mod because my phone i've got a

one plus one that's still trucking away nice and uh and the fact is that with a 5.5 inch screen and i'm traveling around quite a lot i mean yes i have my laptops i have a desktop as well i have tablets but i generally find myself using the phone and everyone i know and everyone i meet it seems to me that they are um using phones and tablets these days that everyone has gone mobile and you know it used to be i'm the the techie person that friends know and friends of friends know and i would always have to reinstall windows for people try and convince them to uh you know go to linux but i'm not quite as good as noah it seems when it comes to that he He has an uncanny ability, that's for sure. Yeah, that's true.

But these days, over the last few years, I've just had less and less of that to the point where I can't even remember the last time I dealt with that. Now it's, can you deal with this phone? Can you change my cracked screen? And I say, no, no, I can't do that kind of stuff. Well, I can, but I don't want to do it for them. So the reality of the situation is that in our little linux bubble where there's a lot of devs and you know hardcore gamers and stuff

like that the linux on the desktop and the desktop computing generally and laptops are still very prevalent but the reality is out there in the big bad world unless you are at work most people are not using laptops anymore and so that's why it's not a surprise to me at all to hear that windows has now shrunk below android in terms of web users i mean it's it's you can never be truly sure whether these stats are you know accurate right but i think it's it's it seems to reflect what anecdotally I have seen out there in the real world and what I keep hearing. Yeah, no, I would say the same thing. So having expressed like the sentiment for configurability and maybe even control, that sort of thing, how do you feel about Android as a platform?

I mean, clearly you have gone a little bit less than mainstream exploring other operating systems. Does Android or some of the, you know, the forks or open source versions or or roms do they meet your need for you know what you like about a linux desktop on your phone or are your needs sufficiently different that it doesn't really make sense well my needs are definitely different but i would for me it's it's more about the freedom that you free software, open source aspect of it, and how realistically I can't use a Google-free Android phone. That's just as simple as that. I think there's a lot of people in that boat, unfortunately, or fortunately, whatever you

may feel. Yeah. I mean, thanks to OpenJApps Pico, I flashed the Play Store and that's it. And then I don't have any of the cruft. Even a Nexus phone has a lot of bloatware as far as I'm concerned. That might sound controversial, but all of the Google Play magazines and all that kind of stuff, I'm not interested in it. So, I mean, in terms of configurability, yes, it is suiting my needs.

And I can install my custom launcher. I use ADW1 launcher and i have a very minimal desktop well yeah i suppose you'd call it a desktop experience on it um but in terms of the freedom more and more of android is creeping to being proprietary google are replacing more and more of it with proprietary blobs and meaning that even if you run just F-Droid and Lineage with no Google Apps, you're going to struggle with some of the apps because they require the Google Play services. I mean, I suppose not as much with F-Droid applications, but it's not as useful to me anyway. It's nowhere near as useful. I need certain proprietary applications is the bottom line,

a lot of the Google stuff, and certainly WhatsApp. I need that for work all the time. So, yeah, I mean, in terms of functionality, it's there, but in terms of freedom, it's not. And that's why I stick to the Linux desktop and why if we could get something like Ubuntu Phone to the standard of Android, which, you know, it's a long way off, and especially now that Ubuntu phone is somewhat on hiatus.

I don't know if probably people will correct me on that, but, you know, it feels a long way off. But if we could get it to the point where it was as good and as usable, then I'd be much happier about it, having a truly free software operating system running on my phone. Do you mind if I chime in? Please do, please do, Todd. Because we're actually, this is Purism, and we're actually going to be coming out with a phone campaign in September.

We've been working with a bunch of the OpenMoco developers, and we've pinned our hardware on Intel Z CPU that we can actually separate the baseband. And so we'll be able to run PureOS, which of course is a Debian fork, on the phone. The development cycle is probably going to be Q2 of next year, 2018, by the time our hardware will be shipping to users. And the reason, of course, is because so many people are wanting to have an actual Linux kernel on a phone that they can control. So we've actually tested GNOME 3. We're working with the GNOME Foundation to develop the couple of remaining applications that are needed.

Primarily, actually, if you can believe it, a simple phone dialer app that's missing. So that is something that you'll see from us coming out in the next handful of months. Interesting. That's very interesting. That's very interesting. But the big question I would have is,

how much of that hardware is going to work with truly free software? I mean, are you going to get to a situation where the wi-fi isn't working properly and you know how how well is it actually going to work with completely free software is the question it's going to be 100 wow that's uh presumably the cellular modem is not going to work because you that just you can't do that right so you can um What it's going to be is it's going to be a separate USB device that will allow us to have a baseband via USB. So it will have its own, of course, firmware within the baseband, but it's going to be a separate isolated baseband, which is not an issue.

The main issue from a baseband standpoint is by using Qualcomm that the baseband is connected to the CPU. standpoint is by using Qualcomm that the baseband is connected to the CPU. So what we're looking at then is having a separate baseband option. But the wireless, of course, will be free. And you can actually also have it be a hardware kill switch for the baseband to be able to then use it via a wireless only device. Interesting. So the separation of the baseband from the CPU is the biggest hardware hurdle to accomplish. And that's where, again, we spent an awful lot of time doing the research to figure out how we can separate that baseband so we can actually isolate it as a simple chip that communicates to the baseband provider. So the goal for us is to have it be a completely unlocked phone

that you can walk into any carrier, get a SIM card, slide it in the baseband slot, and then have carriage if you want, or have it be a Wi-Fi-only device where all of the services would be VoIP services. This sounds expensive to me. Well, so they're, you know, it, they're, they're not going to be cheap, uh, but they will be within the range of buying a phone off the shelf. So we're looking at somewhere in the ballpark of five 99 or six 99 type of, uh, uh,

and a customer price. So at that price, what kind of, um, what kind of hardware fit and finish should people expect to see? It's going to be a metal case around a 5-inch size, and you're running an Intel Z CPU and, of course, Intel GPU. Right. Okay. So where can people go, if they're curious about this, Todd, to find out more about this new project? Well, right now, a lot of it, we ran a survey on our website. So that's, of course, purism, P-R-I dot S-M. And people can follow along there. We're sort of doing a lot of the research behind the scenes at the moment until we can pin down the hardware. The process overall is now that we have our, we'll call it the shopping list, as we've narrowed down all the hardware through past projects like OpenMoco, and we've narrowed down the shopping list.

So the next step for us is to take that to a number of fabrication houses who already have fabricated five-inch screens and five-inch phones, and there's actually a fair number of them. Then we see, have you also done Intel CPUs? And then we can leverage a reference design for that process. And so we're at that stage now. Once we have picked a fabricator and then we can actually know our cost, at that point, we're going to run a crowdfunding campaign to say, hey, how many people are interested in basically having a Linux-driven phone that you can control? It will come for us. Of course, we're dovetailing that into a pure OS distribution.

But since you guys are bringing up the phone and especially the Ubuntu Edge that had such a great run at the crowdfunding campaign, but they just pinned an astronomical price. For us to fabricate, we're looking at around maybe a million dollars, which we feel as though we'd be able to easily meet, especially looking at how many people were interested in the U-bootage at the time. Excellent. Well, thank you for updating on this, letting us know. I know I certainly look forward to hearing about it more in the future, and best of luck to you. As a side benefit, it sounds like GNOME Maps might actually have a purpose now.

Hey, there we go. Have you prototyped running the GNOME desktop on a small screen like that? We've run it on a 10-inch screen so far, that? We've run it on a 10-inch screen so far, but for the 5-inch screen, it's a pretty kludged environment. So 10-inch screen works fine in our tests. It actually works great with everything with the exception of a dialer. But the area of software development to get to that 5-inch screen, we know is an undertaking that we will have to invest in and that's actually why we're looking at giving such a long lead time between running the campaign in let's say september time frame but actually delivering product in june

of 2018 because of those uh really the software usability on a five-inch screen with GNOME is we still need to address the fat fingers on such a small screen. Well, if Wes gets hold of one of these, I know what SIM card he's going to put straight in it. Yes, I do. That's a perfect segue. Thank you very much, Joe. Let's take this time and hear from

our next sponsor, which is our friends over at Ting. Ah, Ting. They're on a mission to make mobile make sense, and I think they're accomplishing it. So if you are going to get one of those fancy new Purism phones, or you've got a OnePlus, another niche product that you really love, you're really excited about, but you're like, well, what carrier am I going to do? Don't go to one of those big carriers. Do something cool. Go check out Ting. Go to linux.ting.com. There you'll find pay-for-what-you-use service. It's that simple. It's so easy. It starts at $6 a month.

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a nice little table right here. You can figure out ahead of time, oh yeah, I'm going to go over, what's the next bucket pricing? Okay. It's very clear. It's very easy to use. So if you do go check out linux.ting.com, you're going to get a $25 service credit. Or, or if you don't already have a phone that you want to bring, go check out their store. They've got a lot of awesome unlocked devices, very reasonable prices, and they've got those SIM cards from $9. Yeah, that's right. $9. Super reasonable. And sometimes, sometimes, check their blog. They have a lot of good stuff there. You'll see SIM card sales for only $1.

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Go over to linux.ting.com and go find yourself in a far better phone provider situation. Ah, yeah, I think I definitely would use Ting with my fancy purism phone. So we're running a little bit short today, mostly because we got a text up program. I got here a bit late, so sorry, everyone. I know we love unplugged. So I just want to mention something really quick.

Then we're going to do the last sponsor. And then we're going to turn to some discussion as we wrap the show up. So let me just say, I saw kind of an interesting thread over on the Linux subreddit. And I just thought after the ad read, maybe we can talk about it and then kind of transition. I just thought it was kind of interesting that someone who does work for a company that has Linux desktops in the office, you know, we're pretty we talk a lot about Linux desktop, we talk about the usability

of it. We were just talking about how Android is supplanting Windows. One of the places that Windows still has a huge footprint obviously is enterprises in the office. So this was just a thread talking about how often is Linux really used in Linux-related jobs.

And so Bonemaster69 here is asking, you know, he's been frustrated that his management wants him to use Windows, claiming that, you know, hey, everyone, all these real developers, they use Windows, and you just use a VM, or you pull up a terminal, you talk to your Linux machine that you do development on. And it's turned into a pretty good

discussion, at least for Reddit. And there's also some good stats just about like hearing kind of from a diverse range of people about what do they use at work? What are they allowed to use? How many, you know, do you get to pick your own distribution? Do you have to say both on the server end or for your desktop? Do you even get a Linux desktop? Is it all Windows and Mac? So I thought that was useful.

Maybe the Mumbler Room will have some stuff to chime in. Before we do that, let's just go hear from our last sponsor, which is DigitalOcean.com. Maybe you don't get the chance to use Linux at work. You know, you're just not that lucky to use it. You know, you don't have it on your desktop, but you still need to deliver things to clients, right? You still want to use Linux. You still know that like, hey, I need a web server.

What am I going to use? IIS? No, no, you're going to use Linux, right? So going over to digitalocean.com, use our promo code, D-O unplugged, and get yourself a $10 credit. Yeah, that's right. That's right. And wait till you hear this.

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60 seconds, you can have one all for yourself. With that $10 promo code, it makes it really easy to get started. I know, you know, I had found one of those. I was like, oh, yeah, okay, promo code. I guess I could start trying this service out. And I did. And since then, I've pretty much always had at least one droplet running, probably more like three or four. oh yeah okay promo code i guess i could i could start trying this service out and i did and since then i've pretty much always had at least one droplet running probably more like three or four

if you don't need something that runs all the time but you probably do right like you know go go put quasal up there or you know another irc bouncer if you're not cool enough to use quasal um but there's a ton of there's a ton of applications you can run your own vpn you can host your own email server if you really want to. There's so many options that you can do. Run NextCloud up there. But if you don't need any of that, you should still consider it for their hourly pricing. That's another thing that makes DigitalOcean really nice.

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Alrighty. So, we have the topic of Linux at work. Joe, we were also going to talk a little bit today about what makes a proper distribution. So I'll turn that to you. You can answer either one of those questions or whatever else you'd like. And the next 10, 15 minutes, let's just let's discuss. So what makes a proper distribution? So on one end of the spectrum, if you look at DistroWatch, you see these respins of Ubuntu with a new wallpaper and XFCE, and they call it a new distribution. And everybody knows that that isn't a real distribution, right? It's not a proper distribution.

But then you get things that kind of blur the lines, right? So, I mean, I'm specifically thinking about Linux Mint and Elementary OS. Okay. Now, the two of those have some of their own code and binaries that they build, some of their own packages that they build, but at the same time they're pointing their repos at canonical servers, right, at the Ubuntu mirrors. Now, obviously, everyone reuses code.

I mean, that's the whole point of Linux and distributions, open source and all that. Reusing code is just a no-brainer. That's how these things work. But the question that I have is if you're reusing binaries from another distribution, which arguably, well, you are basically allowed to do under the terms of most open source licenses. So there's no problem with that.

But am I going to take you less seriously as a distribution if you do that? Then yes, I am. Now, let me put some caveats in here. I mean, there are certain distros that don't sort of claim to be totally independent, like the Ubuntu flavors or the KDE, sorry, like the KDE spin of Fedora, for example, or XFCE spin, you know, they are using the infrastructure of a bigger project that might be backed by a company. And, you know,

I think that's fine because they're not pretending to be their own independent distribution. Whereas if you look at things like elementary and mint, and there are others as well, but they're just the obvious examples to me. I find it very difficult to take them seriously because they're not properly building all of their own packages. You know, something like Solus, for example,

which is a totally independent distribution built from scratch. IK there, he takes the code and builds his own packages and puts them on his own server, and, you know, it completely controls it. So do you worry then, you know, that if they don't have that level of insight, right, like they may not have even needed to ever have done the build

if they can get binary packages, et cetera, that, you know, you could potentially run into problems that they just don't have, you know, a good system to be able to fix if, you know, without having to start building their own build infrastructure, which it doesn't seem like they really want to do. Well, I mean, they do build some of their own packages. So I assume that they have got the infrastructure there, you know, that they could probably scale up to do that if necessary.

to do that if necessary. But it's, for me, it's, it's more of a, just them having the, the chutzpah to say we're at proper distribution. I see. Right.

I mean, like the, yeah, they don't, it's not like they, they hide it, but obviously they have totally different marketing. They're not saying,

you know, derivative of this or spin or anything like that. It's, it's, they don't do it in like the, in every marketing, because that would be terrible marketing but they do have it when you go to the about sections especially elementary they do explain that it is based uh on ubuntu and they have like they have good news slash linux and the

and the the core like the information about the distro and stuff like that so it they are acknowledging but my i have a question about like where do you draw the line? Like, if you're getting your packages from a different distro, is it because they're hosting the packages or because they're making the packages? Because Ubuntu kind of does that, too, with Debian. Well, I mean, that is a very good question. I think that for me to take you seriously, you've definitely got to host your own packages. The building of them, I mean, it depends. Sometimes it makes sense to rebuild them sometimes it's just a waste of electricity at the end of the day waste of resources so i think that

certainly hosting and building i don't know that that is up for debate i think okay so i'm gonna throw you a curveball what do you think of intergos well that and manjaro as well to some extent right no because manjaro would technically fit your proper thing about hosting their own packages true yeah well with well anskos is just making arch easy right i mean but they are there are technically consider its own distro and they have their own packages and their own infrastructure for their own build servers. But all the other things, right? But that's just for their extra features.

But they also point to arch repos and stuff, yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's why I'm bringing this up. I'm not saying it's black and white. I'm not saying it is a definite thing. And that's why I wanted to bring it up, because it is an interesting question to me, because it's not a's it's not a

black and white argument here there's a lot of nuance so the i'll chime in with the free software foundation does have a sort of a i'll say black and white since most things from free software foundations tend to be that way yeah um which is exactly as you're describing. If your apt-get-resources list says that it's pointing to your own for all the packages plus the source, that means that you're hosting it yourself, then they consider that a distribution. If you're pointing to anybody else for any package that you're installing, then you're not a distribution. So they are aligned with what it is that you're describing. And now, granted, there's other all sorts of ways around that, but that is their litmus test for determining if it's a distribution or not. Where do you stand on this then, Wes?

You know, it is kind of a gray area. And I can see, I guess it kind of makes me think a little bit, and I don't know where I fall, on, you know, is there room enough for the value add? You know, I really do respect a lot of the independent institutions. Solus is a great example. They have, you know, kind of whole cloth built some amazing things. I really do respect a lot of the independent institutions. Solus is a great example. They have kind of whole cloth built some amazing things. I wonder for some of the distributions that are maybe more

resource constrained, does that open up a path where by piggybacking on those things, they can innovate in smaller areas or areas where other people have overlooked because they don't have to duplicate all this other effort. Yeah, but if you look at something like Ubuntu Mate, I mean, Martin could have, Wimpy, as you lot know him, could have taken the Ubuntu base and Mate and pointed at the repos and called it something completely different. But instead, he was honest about it

and called it a Buntu Mate remix, I think, at first, and then when it became an official flavor. But that hasn't stopped him innovating with things like the software boutique and stuff like that. No, that's a good point. I could see from the creators' perspective, you know, that that may, I suppose it depends on what you're, you know, what you're branching off of, what their policies may be about spins and branding and that sort of thing. And I can see how people might also want a control issue, you know. We've seen some projects and distributions that have switched from, you know, hey, we

were based on this before and now we're this, but hey, it's still kind of the same project. We have the same goals, but we're no longer pointing at those people's packages. We're pointing at these people's packages. And so from that perspective, I can see why they might want to have their own unique identity. But I do take your point that on some of these, you might not – you go to their front page and without digging, you might not even know that it relies on these things. And it does make me wonder about – it seems like it could certainly cause problems between those distributions and make working together, if one party doesn't feel like they're being

respected or their contributions or that these people are taking their work and not appreciating all that goes into it, that would not be good. I mean, what do you think of them too? I think we should just bypass the problem completely and just use the term distribution to describe anything that is a kind of a distribution and then use other things like a fork or a re-spin or a derivative of... Or maybe create a completely different word

that describes, like, a proper distro. But we can't all agree on what a proper distro is though can we you could you could put an arbitrary limit and then it wouldn't matter because if you make a new word and you say this is the to be a proper distro or be it to be blah you would have to be hosting your own packages and be not be 100% reliant on anything else like if you are pointing to someone else's repos, you are reliant on those repos to not go down. So

you're not technically a proper distro or whatever we decide to call it. What about operating system? Yeah, that's a big one. That's kind of a generic term. Just distro as a two.

They're both broad. They're both too broad. I was thinking that maybe we should understand distro or distribution as I thought it was meant like a redistribution of the Linux kernel and then you have other things

upon that, that maybe there needs to be further definition of what makes a distribution a distribution and not a fork or a re-spin and further talking with other members of the community. Well, you can also go into the concept, like this is more of a nuanced argument of like, you know, fork is still a distribution.

You can, like Ubuntu is a fork of Debian and it's also kind of a derivative of Debian too, but it's also still its own entity thing. So like it doesn't necessarily need Debian, but it uses it anyway as a foundation. I always thought that a fork and a derivative were one and the same in the Linux world. No, because you could be a derivative and not fork everything. Forking is where, like for Ubuntu's sake,

everything that they use from Debian is taken from Debian and put into their own infrastructure, whereas a derivative would use something that's not. They would maybe point to other repos and stuff like that. Hmm. Okay. Well said, I think. I think that's a natural point to wrap up this episode. I think it's been a ton of fun. Let's see here.

We can get some outro music. That's the end of this week's episode of Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show. This has been episode 191. And as usual, it was you, Mumble Room, that made it all possible. If you want to see more of this fine program, head on over to jupiterbroadcasting.com. There you can find our archives, other shows' archives, plus go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash schedule. There you will meet a wonderful robot who will tell you what time this show is live in your time zone. Then you can be a part of our fabulous mumble room or just hang out in our IRC room.

They help out a ton, too. Thank you for being here. We'll see you next week. All righty, that was the show. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Joe, especially. I thought that was a lot of fun. I certainly enjoyed chatting with you, and thank you for helping host today.

Yeah, no problem, man. It was good to be on. And I didn't even plug Late Night Linux once. Oh, man, I meant to do that. I have it sitting here on my notes. Oh, you should have done that. Oh, well. Post show.

Yeah, that's true. That's true. I've really been enjoying Late Night Linux. You guys get up to some fun conversations yeah we had a bit of a controversial one that we released this week

we interviewed Yoss from Nextcloud the scanning thing and interviewed is one way of looking at it locking him in the kitchen and beating him up with some bats verbally is another way to look at it. I mean, as long as you provided food in the kitchen as well. Yeah, but Ike and I were very harsh on him.

Probably a bit too harsh, to be honest. Feel a bit bad. About all the, like, them scanning for old versions and that sort of thing? Yeah, exactly. That stuff, yeah. Right. What did you, what was your main criticism?? Yeah, exactly, that stuff, yeah. Right. What was your main criticism? I mean, maybe I shouldn't spoil it.

Well, the main criticism is that it's free software. If I want to run an outdated version on my server, it's none of your business even if you made it. But then the other argument is the greater good, the commons, it's the spam that gets sent from these things and the fact that the internet at large suffers as a result. So there's definitely two sides to the argument, but I'm pretty firmly on one side. Yeah, I'm firmly on the other side. That's what makes this all so fun.

that's what makes this all so fun yeah i have the issue where i've i've had projects where people would send me reports about uh the other is this bug that is in your software yeah we fixed it three years ago stop using a three-year-old software like that happens all the time and it's in some cases it's not necessarily the fault of the user sometimes it's not sometimes follow the distribution that's providing those packages. But that's also an issue that Nextcloud has a problem with as well. So if you go to most distros, the version of Nextcloud is super old.

Or an own cloud, for example, they even had a press release saying, please don't use the default packages from whatever distro you're using for that particular reason. Because if you keep sending like essentially it's spam, if there's a, there's a problem you have and there's a bug report already,

and then that bug report is fixed. And then two years pass by and you continue to use something and continue to complain about a bug report that is already fixed. It's at point it's it's absolutely user stubbornness surely there's a solution though sudo snap install um next cloud yep snap solve that yep or uh some people would probably use docker they also solve the perpetual update problem because when I installed Nextcloud, I had 10 points something, and when 11 came out, it just upgraded automatically in the background.

Nice. Yeah, see, that's a big win right there. Yeah, I mean, are there just... Yeah, I think, I mean, maybe it does highlight some of the pain points of the distribution model that we have relied on and kind of makes it point right at snaps as something that we do need

so that we can have these independent channels but still keep all the other benefits we get. But to be fair, a PHP application like that can update itself if you've configured it correctly. Sure, yeah, that's true. Like WordPress. My WordPress installations update themselves all the time. So that's what the solution is to me, really.