LINUX Unplugged - Episode 21: Unplugging 2013 | LUP 21

Episode Date: January 1, 2014

In the final moments of 2013 our virtual LUG shares their expectations and predictions for 2014. We’ll debate some of the most anticipated changes.Plus a frank Slackware discussion, rolling Ubuntu is back again, your emails, and more!

This is Linux Unplugged, Episode weekly Linux podcast that's popping a beer cap like it's a bottle of champagne. My name is Chris. My name is Chris. My name is Matt. Hey, Matt. Here we are on the precipice of 2014, and our crystal balls have been shined once again. We are joined by our virtual lug, our mumble room. They're going to throw in some predictions.

Plus, we just did a big batch of predictions, a huge episode, almost like an hour, 50-minute episode on Sunday of the Linux Action Show, where we threw down our predictions for 2014, and then immediately, one of the reasons we actually created this show is because we get off air, and then I go, oh, crap. Oh, I should have mentioned X. I should have mentioned Y. So I got a few more predictions we got to get to. Plus, there's been a couple of things that happened this week that also kind of just

clicked and said, oh, man, this is actually going to play out big in 2014. So we'll talk about that. Plus, CES is moments away away and we have reason to believe that a couple of things that we're going to talk about today in our predictions will bear fruit in CES just a couple of weeks away. So I'm looking forward. It's going to be a good way to end the year. It's our last episode of 2013. So I think it's going to be a good one, Matt. Definitely. Alright, so before we get to all of that, before we get to all of our crazy crystal ball rubbing, I want to follow up with a couple of things that were sent into the

show. There was so much email to go through. I tried to kind of boil it down to just a few topics because we recorded two episodes last week. So it's actually been a couple of weeks or one week since we sat down. And so there was a lot to get through, but I tried to boil it down to just a few things of follow up. So to start with, I wanted to read the email that Zach sent in because in the last episode, we talked a lot about the Chromecast. And in that conversation, XBMC came up. But I think it deserves a little extra attention here, and so did Zach. So here he says, hey, guys, just wanted to respond to the Chromecast XBMC talk. I use XBMC all the time, and I would love to see XBMC rise to the same

popularity as Chromecast and Plex. The only real problem with XBMC right now is the lack of out-of-box functionality. Now, do you think Chromecast and Plex are already more popular than XBMC, Matt? Here's a simple rule to follow when in doubt with these things, and this is a rule I live by and usually cheeses people off, but it's pretty accurate for the most part. If something's easy to use, it's going to rise to the top yeah not because it's better that's interpretative but because people perceive it as easier to use and perceive it to be better plex being a great example that in chromecast personally i've been playing with the chromecast and i do have thoughts on that so really yeah uh as far as like you know

because i think uh like xdmc and Chromecast are completely different animals doing completely different things. But they definitely share different levels of difficulty and or ease of use depending on how you look at it. But yeah, XBMC I think is awesome as Debian is awesome. That doesn't mean you're going to get grandma to use it without some support there. Yeah. And I, you know, I think part of the killer problem that Plex solved was that Roku front end, because you can buy a Roku that even if at the end of the day, Plex doesn't work out for you and the family and or whoever else has to use the TV, the Roku still does a ton of other things. So you're not totally married to one solution. Whereas if you go XBMC, you got to build a PC, you got to set all that up, you got to hook that

up to your or maybe a Raspberry Pi if you're geeky but again regular consumers aren't going to do that right um whereas plex is is not quite consumer level but it's getting pretty close where you could have somebody that ships a free like you could have an ix system that ships a free nas box with plex pre-installed and says automatically streams to your roku and they could just put that on the box and essentially the consumer would only have to do is start a Plex on the Roku. Oh yeah, well and I still believe, honestly, Raspberry Pi is the right kind of storage attached to it. Slap a sticker

on it. It's, you know, Billy Bob's media box. Plug it in, you're done. Yeah, I think there's a market for that. Sell it for $60. Sure, absolutely. So he goes on to say, as things are, XBMC can do a lot of things, but such functionality requires researching how to do it and downloading the corresponding add-ons, which usually aren't listed in the default add-ons. If XBMC would provide a more complete and prettier add-on manager, they would have a way better off than they are right now.

New users won't want to connect to XBMC Hub to get legally questionable add-ons. The add-on system is a little awkward. There's a Jupyter Broadcasting in xbmc for uh geez see it's confusing to talk about there's an app for xbmc for jupiter broadcasting but you got to dig for it a little bit exactly and as far as you know people not being willing to dig for something that's legally questionable um that's not entirely accurate but i would say that it depends how hard or easy it is to get to because a good homework assignment for everybody in the audience is to go to the Cord Cutters subreddit. Yeah. And you're going to find people that barely know how to work their Blu-ray players running Plex.

Yeah. I mean these folks are brand new to this stuff. So I think that there's absolutely – and of course they have no problem how they get their media as long as they don't feel like they're going to get pinched on it. Well, and here's the other thing he points out is he says XBMC would do better off if they could have official plug-ins from like Hulu and Netflix, right? I would think that would give them a real advantage, yeah. Because, again, I go back to the Roku and Plex. With Plex, I get all of my local content, and it's such a great setup. Plus, the library is centralized, so if I have multiple Rokus, they're all sharing the same metadata, the same watch played status, the resume locations are all shared amongst all of the Rokus. Roku is great because it's tiny.

It's silent. It runs Linux. It's cheap-ish. And then I can hit the home button and I can launch the Netflix app. And that's a huge deal. The fact of the matter is, yeah, you can get an entry-level Roku for $39. You can go up to $99 or up and higher if you want to. But, I mean, out of the gate, you can walk into it very comfortably.

I think it's an LTE for $39, and that's quite reasonable. And it comes with a remote. There's something to be said for that. Yeah. Yeah, and the Roku 3 comes with a really cool remote with a headphone connection, which is great for late-night TV. night TV. And so that said, you know, I was just thinking about the new studio that we'll be building in early 2014 or rebuilding, I guess you could put it. And one of the things I'm going to have in there is TV service for clips for Unfilter. And I was thinking about how I'm going to be ingesting that media and how I'll be displaying it. And one of the things that did cross my mind

was, you know, maybe a TV with all of the clips on there with XBMC sitting in front of that. And then I could sit on a TV and process all the clips on the TV using XBMC. I'm still working through it. That's interesting. It made it, you know, there's so many. It's almost, you know, you almost put it really well when you said you can look at it like Debian because as Debian can be used for a base, XBMC can be used for a base for. That's right. You know, display systems for billboards, for billboards, for home entertainment,

all kinds of things. So XBMC totally has a place. That's right. I like it a lot. And it just depends on what use case. But as far as spouse approval factor, and really, to be totally frank, my four-year-old son and my two-year-old daughter can use the Roku, right? And they can't really use XBMC. And that really is kind of a big deal. Well, we have a hacked Apple TV that we used to run XBMC on. And the spouse wasn't exactly enthused with it. She used it. She tolerated it.

It was fine. Plex, on the other hand, there's no comparison. So I think you really nailed it. Once you actually introduce non-geeks into the situation who are not on pedestals chirping the same old chirpy stuff and actually looking at it factually, Plex really is the easier choice. And it's great. Even though it's a little uglier than XBMC, like especially on the Roku. Oh, it's horribly ugly on the Roku, yeah. It's hideous. But it's really, really sexy on the Android app, or even

when you run it in your browser. It looks really great there. Yeah, the Roku app needs a dire, dire... needs to be addressed in a big way. I think it might be a limitation of the Roku SDK or something, but yeah. It might be, yeah. Alright, well, we got a correction that came in from Mike from episode 20, so

two weeks back. He said, hey, Unpluggers, at the beginning of episode 20, the topic of licensing. He said, hey, Unpluggers, at the beginning of episode 20, the topic of licensing Ubuntu packages for the Mint project came up. He said no one could think of an example of any projects that rebuilt the source, but that is wrong. The Trisco project often purges non-free packages from Ubuntu repos and then rebuilds some of those packages and de-blobs them. These are mirrored and corrected packages are hosted

on the FSF mirror for Triscall to use. Just wanted to let you know. Thanks, guys. Now, Mike, one of the things that was different, and Popey made this point when he was on the show last week, or two weeks ago, was that Mint is pointing at Ubuntu repos. So they're using Ubuntu servers, Ubuntu bandwidth, Ubuntu packages.

They're not taking the packages, rebuilding them all, Santa was or Triskel style and hosting them on their own servers. So an analogy would be, so one group of people would be like hot linking to an image where another group of people might be saving the image to their desktop and then using it on their own servers. That would be the difference. So I guess what, and what canonical saying is, Hey, you want a hot link? You need to have a license, I guess.

You're incurring cost to us. To me, it doesn't seem like a huge deal to Clem. It doesn't seem like a huge deal to me, but it's something we'll keep an eye on. Yeah. Okay, one last bit of feedback before we get into the balls here. This one came in from James, and he had some thoughts on the topic of Ubuntu as a rolling

distro, which keeps coming up, and Mark recently in an interview suggested that maybe after 1504, you might see something a little more like a rolling release from Ubuntu. So this has got people thinking and James is one of them. He says, hey guys, happy new year. I heard you talking about a number of times about the perceived issue with Ubuntu because you can't always get the latest stuff. Well, I was a 15 year Slackware veteran until I changed to Ubuntu in 2008. I tested and continue to test other distros, but I still use Ubuntu because I think it's time for Linux to just work. And I find that Ubuntu gives me that.

And also, I want to build up an experience to support others. That makes sense. Yeah, definitely. However, I do want the latest packages. So I have run the dev version since 11.10 was released. Canonical has a policy that the dev versions work every day, and it does. I get one failure each cycle when the X server is updated, and I have to upgrade my NVIDIA driver, but that's it. It works flawlessly.

It means I get the new stuff, and then when the new distro is released, I already have experience if people need help. If I upgrade as soon as the new repo is available, which means I'm on production releases for only about one to two weeks at the start of each cycle, Ubuntu works great as a rolling release. So what James is saying is my trick essentially is I run the production version for a couple of weeks. And then once it's back up and they're working on the beta version again, I just upgrade my repos and I run the beta version. I was going to ask the Mumble Room, does anybody in here ever do that with their distro where you run the stable version for maybe a couple of weeks? And then you jump to the beta version? Yeah, I am running CrunchBang and I immediately went into Jesse because the stable of Debian didn't have everything I wanted and then I launched into Sid. And I'm still

experimenting to see how it's going to go. I did this myself for a period of time with the Ubuntu's where I would run the stable version for a few weeks and then I would just switch. For a while what I would do is I would wait until after the first beta release. So it was more than a few weeks.

I'd wait until after beta 1 was out for a couple of days and then i would switch over to that and then i would ride that all the way to the finish line and i did that for three or four releases in a row like the same installation just kept doing it and it worked okay but what what really i ran into constantly is a lot of instructions assume a certain version of Ubuntu and they're already having a hard time. The instructions you find online, you have a hard time finding anything that applies to the absolute latest version. Usually it's one or two releases behind. And then you just add an extra layer of anomaly when you're running a rolling release that isn't even out yet and stuff is a different version and stuff's in a different spot. So for me, I just I kept banging my head into that did you ever try this matt not with no not not in that exact thing but i have run into that when it comes to

documentation and things like that it's always interested try and nail that down so for me it was always a little bit different yeah yeah um and you know i i've thought about trying it again actually like with with the fedora release and i've i about trying it again actually with the Fedora release. I tried it really briefly during our OpenSUSE 13.1 review. I switched over to their rolling, and it went fine, but I only did it for a few days. I kind of feel like if you're going to go rolling, you should go with a distro designed to be rolling. Well, that would be my thinking because otherwise you're essentially doing a workaround. I mean if Ubuntu really wants to make their distro the very best it can be, they need to address the PPA problem.

The existing management tools for PPAs is pretty craptacular. It's not that great. PPAs as an idea are great. Unfortunately, what happens when one goes down? There's no system in place to alert people. Hey, by the way, this is dead. Or put out an alert that something's going to be done. This is something the Mint project has addressed,

but it's not in Ubuntu proper. No, it's not. And so I think that's something that they need to really look at because I don't see them as really needing to go rolling release because it's not their target goal. But I do think that they need to address having more bleeding-edge packages when it comes to stuff like OpenShot, Firefox, various software titles. I think that would really help out.

The backend stuff, like lib this and lib that, you know, that's neither here nor there. That's obviously a PPA kind of thing. But yeah, I don't know. It's going to be interesting to see how they work it out, but it's something that they're not addressing and I think they're going to have to here eventually. Hopefully, or maybe click packages will save us all.

That would be, hey, you remember click? I do, I do, I do. I do remember clicking. That was not horrible. I also remember clicking and running, as it were. Yes. Oh, yeah. Old joke there for you all. Lindo's fans. You have to be apt

to get that. Oh, geez. Hey, you know what I got to do before we make everybody tune out is I want to say thank you to Ting.com, who is sponsoring this episode of Linux Unplugged. Ting is my mobile service provider and Matt's mobile service provider. Why? Why? It's easy.

No contracts, no early termination fees. And the thing that really keeps me around is Ting is pay for what you use. They don't have to worry about things like, or I don't have to worry about things like paying into a contract where I'm not using that fully. So previously I had two phones on a smartphone plan, $120 a month. Now I have two phones, both smartphones, an HTC One and a Nexus 5 on Ting, and I'm paying around $25, $30 a month. It depends. So what Ting does is they take your minutes, your messages,

and your megabytes, and they add those up at the end of the month. Then whatever bucket you fall into, whatever actual usage you have, that's what you pay. It's brilliant. So some months, I have 50 text messages. Some months, I have 200 text messages. Why would I have to pay a thousand text message plan if I don't need it it drives me crazy and ting solves all of that plus ting has devices that are fresh and hot right now there's some carriers that don't even have like the hdc1 yet ting has is already supporting the nexus 5 you can pick it up from the google play store you buy it directly from google you bring it over the ting network now you have a phone you fully own on a network that's paid for what you use with no contracts or no or

no early termination fees hotspot tethering into your plan. You just pay for your data usage. It makes a ton of sense. So here's how you get started. You go to linux.ting.com. That's going to take $25 off your first device. Or if you've already got a Sprint compatible device and you want to bring it over to Ting, just check to make sure it's compatible with the Ting network. And then they'll take $25 off your first month of service. That's a pretty awesome deal. And they've got a savings calculator. You can plug that in and see how much you'd save. One of the things you'll notice when you're visiting the Ting site, go to linux.ting.com to get started, is they are an awesome company. They have their blog where they're posting. They're very transparent about their business, how they work, about future

advances. They talk about rolling out tri-band LTE and what devices on the Ting network, like my Nexus 5, support tri-band LTE right now and what the benefits of something like that are. They often will pick some of the best apps, some of my favorite ones on Android, like BeyondPod. They'll feature those on the blog. There's a lot of great stuff over here that you can keep visiting. And once you become a Ting customer, you appreciate this level of information from your carrier. And Ting has great customer service as well. If you call Ting at 1-855-846-4389, anytime between 8 a.m. or 8 p.m. Eastern, a real personal answer to the phone can help you out.

And you also have a fantastic dashboard that gives you the tools you need to control your own account. You'll probably be surprised at the kind of functionality you can get in there and how clear and easy a cell phone company can make your billing and information like that. Once you see this stuff, you'll never be able to go back to anybody else. It's just their stuff. Ting is so far ahead of everybody else.

You got to check them out. So go to linux.ting.com and a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. I hear from people all the time who switched over to Ting and are totally thrilled and you can be one of them. Linux.ting.com. Thank you to Ting for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. I hear from people all the time who switched over to Ting and are totally thrilled, and you can be one of them. Linux.ting.com. Thank you to Ting. Actually, I have a recent Ting story, a real short one. Here recently I had it issued where I did something dumb on my phone, and I couldn't figure it out. You know, imagine that, right?

Me do something foolish. I did something foolish. I was like, okay, well, I'm going to give these guys a call and see what's going on. Half a ring, not even a full ring. A person that, you know, actually is very well-spoken, very easy to understand. I get up on the phone, ask them a question. Within, I don't know, three seconds, they gave me numbers to start pressing into my phone. Pressed it in, boom, problem solved.

That was the end of the conversation. Asked me if I had anything else. Happy holidays, blah, blah, blah. We were done. I couldn't believe it. Someone values their time. It's the way to go. Yeah, no kidding, right? And if you just get sick of dealing with customer service reps,

and we sound like they're reading a script, this is such a- Or they're trying to upsell you. God, that's my big pet peeve. You know, Mail Hauler in the chat room says that he went from $100 a month to around $20 a month when he switched to Ting. Wow. Nice. That's a nice savings. And with the beginning of the new year, it's a better time than ever to get started. And I think you'll see why I've been so happy with my Ting service. Alright, so I'm bringing in the mumble room here. I wanted to start, you know, one thing I realized after this week's Linux

Action Show, I made a huge mistake. Get it out of here. I completely, completely forgot to make a Wayland type prediction. And I know Ron's in the chat room here has a Wayland prediction as well, but I want to lay mine out and then we'll turn it over to him. So, I think you're going to see in 2014, it's not, I don't know if competition is the right word, but if you're a distro out there, Ubuntu isn't in this camp. If you're a distro out there shipping this year, say the second round of releases in 2014, and you don't have some decent Wayland implementation that people can try out, even if it's sort of like what Fedora did this time around, that's going to be like a checkmark

in the anti-column in the reviews. Like the people reviewing it will look at that and go, oh, well, you can't even play with Wayland in this release. Like that's, it's going to become like one of the competitive features for distributions to have in their, maybe not the first release of 2014, but their second release of 2014. Now, Rons, I know you had, or Roins, I'm not sure if I'm saying that right,

I'm sure I'm not saying that right, but I know you had a Whalen prediction. What is it? I believe that in, maybe, as I said, the second term of releases in 2014, we're going to see, possibly, maybe, Gen 2 or the more bleeding-edge distros to have such good wayland support

um maybe for arch the arch build system that it is simple as rebuilding the package with wayland support and getting of course gnome and kde support wayland we'll have so you don't have to run x client soon it'll'll be pure Western Wayland. So you think maybe like mid-2014, all of the GNOME packages on my Arch installation will update with Wayland support, and then at that point, all I have to do is go over to the Arch wiki,

look at the article about switching over to Wayland, and make the switch, and I'm ready to go. Yeah. That's bold. So you're thinking I could actually run my whole desktop in 2014? You think, like, what about, like, graphics drivers? Well, if you're on Intel, the Western Wayland drivers have already sorted.

Intel supports them. I was going to say, what about the Radeon drivers on the open source drive? Well, the open source drivers are, of course, going to adopt Wayland quicker than the proprietary ones. But maybe we could see the proprietary ones supporting Mia simply because Steam, they want to support Ubuntu. But the open source drivers, they want to support a standard, which is Wayland. All right, well, let me ask you guys this,

because Corky in the chat room is saying that Wayland, and I think he means in terms of performance, will be better than X11 by December of 2014. I happen to disagree. I think in December of 2014, we'll have the Pharonix benchmarks, and they'll show

that X still has on games the lead. But it's closer. I would say it's closer, yeah. I mean, because you've got to figure out what's X in, what, 30 years? Something like that? I mean, it's got a little bit of a head start there. Right, and I think all these games are going to be using some sort of, you know, X-Wayland compatibility, and they're all

going to be, I mean, for a long time, like years. i just i think like like you'll see like uh i don't know maybe you'll see like the window managers and and the compositing like all that kind of cleans up and it's a lot faster but the stuff people actually use where they really need high performance like so window draws will be faster, right? That'll be great. Menus and blurs and textures will be faster. But games that I install from Steam will not actually see any big benefit from this in 2014. I've got one Weyland prediction for 2014,

and that is the monkey suit. Oh, yeah. No, that's going to happen. Yeah, that's hanging up in the closet right now, actually. I'd just like to expand on what you said. If you look at the way Wayland works, basically it's a protocol. Western is its implementation. So if you want your fancy window managers like Awesome to work in Wayland,

you basically write a Western plugin for that. I imagine Gnome and KDE, their compositors are Mutter and KWin, their window managers. That's basically just a plug-in for Wayland or Western. That's all it is. Right. I think in 2014, you're going to see a lot more apps adding Wayland support. And then in 2015, it's going to be refinement time. And then by 2016, it's going to be refinement time and then by 2016 and it's going

to be refined and you're going to start seeing a lot more people actually using Wayland on distros. So you think it's not till 2016 that we're going to have the sweet sweet life of performance and optimizations and all that kind of stuff? Yeah because there's still a lot of apps and and applications that haven't added the support for Wayland yet, and I think that's going to be all during 2014, and then in 2015, it's just going to be refining those packages, and then 2016, it's going to be refined, it's going to be available, and it's going to be easier to use than ever. It's still going to have some flaws, but it'll be pretty good.

I think this one's pretty easy to make. SteamOS doesn't go anywhere near Wayland in 2014. Why would they? They have no reason to. Their goal is not to try and push Wayland. Their goal is to get you to play video games. Seems kind of obvious.

Go ahead. I'm not doubting anyone's knowledge here, but porting apps over to Wayland isn't as difficult as it sounds. If the toolkit supports Wayland, getting your programs to Wayland is not going to be too difficult. It's just a matter of doing it.

Right, it'll depend on a matter of motivation, quite honestly, at this point. It'll depend, too. So stuff that really only uses QT or GTK to get, you know, what it needs on the screen, they're going to almost have the work done for them by the upstream toolkit. But, you know, things like video games, that's not necessarily the same thing. Or certain things like, I would think, Lightworks comes to mind, or Blender. I'm not quite sure what the situation is there. Or anything that kind of has some customizations

where they've either written their own toolkit or they've made changes to it. You know, those kind of apps I'm thinking about where they just don't quite look like any other Linux desktop app. I think those kinds of things will struggle in 2014 with Wayland. Yes. Well, for games, if OpenGL and SDL support Wayland and the game's written in SDL and OpenGL,

chances are that game's going to be able to be ported over fairly simply. Yeah, I know that's what people say. And I still come back to the everybody seems to think that developers are thinking, oh goody, we get to port something over something we didn't have to a month ago. No one cares. I mean, I don't think they really give a rat's butt.

No, no, because they're just now porting everything over to Linux now, and they're getting X support now, and now they're going to have to switch to Wayland. Well, if I'm them, I'm going to take my sweet time. If they do it right and they write to the underlying subsystems like OpenGL and all that kind of stuff, then all you have to have is the change made at that level. And then everything that uses that will then use the new technology. But I don't think it's as clear cut as that with some of this stuff. And I think the motivation is really the key issue. End users are looking forward to this.

Developers are thinking, God, I just got this working. Leave me alone. Here's my big hope for Wayland. It's not really a prediction, but I really hope that if they do eventually get proprietary drivers, that a new version of Wayland

doesn't necessarily break the proprietary driver like it did in XOR. Yeah, I don't think so, because, you know, this is a, you know, because what they're going to have is protocol level support, right? So if you write to this version of the protocol, you get this, and then they just have a new version of the protocol which gives you the new features. They shouldn't have to deprecate the old version, I wouldn't think.

But, you know, I look at this, and during the last live stream on Sunday, we played this Intel video. And the whole time, in the whole video, Intel's talking about at this, and during the last live stream on Sunday, we played this Intel video. And the whole time, in the whole video, Intel's talking about Wayland. And it's a very nice sort of like infograph meets YouTube. And really what they care about is digital signs, infotainment in cars, mobile devices. In fact, the Linux desktop in this video all about Wayland is not even mentioned once, not a single desktop app, not anything about the Linux desktop at all. And so what that to me means

is the corporate backing isn't going to be on the desktop side of things. There's not going to be a lot of people spending a lot of money on moving over desktop applications to support that. So that two things that means to me is ex-Wayland is going to be around for a long time. That's pretty obvious. But the second thing that I think unfortunately means is, maybe unfortunately or not, is all our hopes are in the toolkits, the QT guys and the GTK guys and what they do. And all hopes depend on them to do it right because they're going to bring everything along with them that uses those toolkits. uses those toolkits. And I think, oh, sorry. I think the proprietary drivers,

you're probably going to see like an alpha release for proprietary drivers in 2015, I'd say, because these guys aren't really going to jump on the bandwagon so quick. I mean, these companies, they're really slow. Intel might, right? I mean, Intel might, but yeah. If they can see a clear-cut benefit, absolutely they'll jump all over it. Otherwise, they don't care. I mean, I've been burned yeah. If they can see a clear-cut benefit, absolutely, they'll jump all over it. Otherwise, they don't care.

I mean, I've been burned so many times by Wayland predictions. Like, if you go back over the years, a few years in a row, I've made Wayland predictions that just didn't pan out. But I kind of feel like this is the year that it does, and it's almost the more dangerous thing to say, famous last words. But it feels like things are more serious this time. There's more money behind it. There's more more momentum and there's more of a recognized need too i predict that we're gonna keep predicting about whaling for another three or four years

yeah i agree with that that's true yeah what do you guys think about mirror yeah we should we should probably talk about mirror a little bit huh we should yeah yeah um what do you think about that island out there in the sea well so now that we look at it i think it's pretty clear that mirror is an ubuntu specific solution because just like we mentioned how qt and gtk and others will be building in uh the the back-end support to move over to wayland unity will have the back-end hooks to talk to mirroryland. Unity will have the back end hooks to talk to Mir. And if you don't have something written to talk to Mir, you're not going to run on top of Mir

unless you do it through Xmir. True. And so it's going to be, it's almost hard to compare the two because Mir's only going to be on Ubuntu and we know we're not really going to see much of it in 2014. Yeah. I think we're going to,

I think it's probably going to keep pace with, I mean, to a degree with only Ubuntu-specific. MonkeySuit's happening either way, but I think it's, and in Ubuntu-specific sort of way, I think that it's going to be kind of like an Upstart versus SystemD situation to where they kind of run in tandem. They're, you know, running alongside of each other and everybody's kind of doing their own thing, but I don't

see explosive activity. They're almost not in, you know, now that I look at it, after we've had a few months, actually half the year to sort of think about it, it's not in competition with Weyland. Weyland is on its own track.

It's a wider industry proposition. Mirror's actual specific success is if it achieves exactly or even barely what they need for Ubuntu. And if it accomplishes that, it is technically successful because it's not a Wayland competitor. Wayland is a solution for all of Linux and for multiple types of devices. Mir is a solution for Ubuntu.

So basically Microsoft is going to get less and less attention over the year of 2014, and Canonical is going to become more like Microsoft. No, that's Google's job. Oh! No, it's going to be Google this, Google that. I mean it's going to be Chromebooks and Android devices in the tech news for 2014. It's going to dominate it. Just watch. All right.

Well, I got a couple of predictions along that line um specifically uh like the mobile stuff so is there any other thoughts on mirror whalen before we move to it well i was going to say um i'm kind of wondering if with there being uh x mirror and x whalen whether developers won't just stick with uh x support with x so their their applications can work on both. So we will have those better solutions, but not applications that actually take advantage of them. Our desktop environments

will speak directly to the display server and all the applications we run on top of them will be using an X11 compatibility thing. It's going to be a long time, guys. Yeah, none of this happens. You're going to have to hold a stick up to see any of it move. I think what you might start to see, if we're really lucky, at the end of

2014, we'll see that the X Wayland stuff and the X Mirror stuff is able to take advantage of so many efficiencies by replacing the display server underneath that maybe performance will be equal or even better. That'd be awesome,

is if we have such efficiencies in new code design, and, you know, because everybody knows Xorg is such a beast, that if by totally getting rid of all of that plumbing and having a cleaner pipeline that goes directly from the desktop to the display driver to the kernel to the hardware, etc., etc., that whole path is much more efficient. So, therefore, even though you're running something through emulation, just like we've all seen sometimes when you run a wine game under Linux,

it actually performs better than it does under Windows in certain circumstances. Maybe we'll see that same kind of thing happen with stuff running under X emulation on these new display servers. Yeah. All right. Well, before we get to our next category of predictions, I got a little prediction for all of you guys. This is going to be,

actually, I'm not even kidding. This is really going to be the year where we all continue to build out our own cloud. And that's why I'm so happy that DigitalOcean is a sponsor of Linux Unplugged because they are going to enable this for a lot of us. DigitalOcean is simple cloud hosting dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way to spin up a cloud server. And you get root access to this thing when they spin this up. Now check this out. Users can create a cloud server in 55 seconds and pricing plan started only $5 per month, which gets you 512 megs of RAM, a 20 gigabyte SSD, and a terabyte of transfer. You think about how you, all the different types of devices you can put Linux on. When you put a Linux box out there with 512 megs of RAM and a 20 gig SSD, that thing can, as a server, you will be amazed at the performance you can get out of a Linux

box in these conditions. I've got a box up there right now that's doing all kinds of backend. Frequently, I have it recording a second backup copy of our live stream in case we have an outage. I have it distributing files for the Unfilter Show, gigabytes, gigabytes and gigabytes and gigabytes of files now, like 20 gigabytes worth of files. Good grief. Yeah, it's constantly sending out and distributing to our Unfilter supporters. I have all kinds of different tasks that I can spin up on it really quick. And when you're paying $5 a month, there's so many great advantages of productivity and testing and just experimentation and training and self-learning that $5 is just an insane value. And DigitalOcean has data centers

in New York, San Francisco, and Amsterdam, so you can distribute it out as you want. I've picked New York, that way I have something on the other side of the coast. Their interface is simple. They have an intuitive control panel. Power users can even set up and replicate it on their own by using their straightforward API. And DigitalOcean also offers a vast collection of tutorials in their community section on their site. And users who submit articles can get $50 per published piece. Here's a great article. This hit our Linux Action Show subreddit this week.

How to create a Beowulf cluster using a Punto 1204 VPS instances on DigitalOcean. Oh, nice. A Beowulf cluster, a Punto 1204 VPS instances on DigitalOcean. Oh, nice. Beowulf cluster, man. Wow. Wow. They really went there. Okay, that's awesome. I know.

I mean, how cool is that? It really is, right? I mean, I'm pretty impressed by that. And, yeah, I don't know if I'd be using that, but for the training aspect of it, it's actually kind of a great opportunity. The way DigitalOcean pricing works is so for $5, you get $5 a month, you get a quantified cost, you get a machine you can always access. But if you just want to do some basic testing, they also offer hourly pricing. So if you're working on an open source project or, I mean, gosh, maybe it's closed source. It's negative in the freedom dimension.

You could upload it to DigitalOcean, use the hourly pricing, and have people all over the world bang on it for you a while, give you real-world performance reports. You don't have to worry about configuring your firewall. Look at these prices. I mean, it's unbeatable what you can do. And the great thing is the control panel is so nice. Like what I've done, I have an Arch server.

Yes, I said Arch, set up on DigitalOcean, and I image that sucker, and when I want to deploy another one, I can just redeploy that image. It's ready to go. It's super quick. You combine that with pay-as-you-go pricing. That's going to be really easy. So here's how you get started. Go over to DigitalOcean.com. Check out what we've been talking about. And if you have a bad memory, just go to any recent episode of Linux Unplugged. Go down to the show notes. We have a banner right there for DigitalOcean. And if you use our promo code Linux Unplugged. Go down to the show notes. We have a banner right there for Digital Ocean. And if you use our promo code Linux Unplugged December, now it's going to work for a little bit longer, but take advantage of why you can. Linux Unplugged December, you'll get a $10 credit. That'll let you try out the $5 server for two months, or you can get the $10 server for

one month. I've been using the $5 server for a few months now. It's awesome. It's great. I really like it. So go to digitalocean.com, Linux unplug December to get that $10 credit and I think you're going to be really impressed. This is really an awesome service and the performance

has been great. I just updated my Archbox last night and I just sit there and I watch those download speeds as it writes those transactions to the SSD

and I was like, oh gosh, yes. And here's something I could see someone using it for too. It's like, let's say you have an Arch install

and you're thinking, oh, I want to actually try... I read mixed signals in this one package, and I'm not really sure if it's going to build right. I don't really want to hose my system, but I want just kind of a test bed to test out different packages that maybe have an iffy history. It's a great place to do that kind of stuff.

You don't have to be super geeky with it. You can use it as a tool just to try things out where you don't want to do it on your main computer. And the snapshots make it easy to roll back. Pirate Ghost. Yeah. Pirate Ghost in our chat room, which is a great name. He says, I have 11 VPSs on DigitalOcean.

Nice. How about that? They also are pretty cool about, he says, helping him with working on open source projects. That's cool. Yeah. So big thanks to DigitalOcean for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. Okay. So this is kind of a spinoff

of the prediction I made on Sunday, but I want to revisit this in light of a story that came out, and I didn't cover it in last because it didn't really seem, at the time when I thought about it at first, it didn't seem Linux specific enough to me to talk about it on the Linux Action Show. But now that I think about the larger ramifications of this story, I actually think it's very much going to become a Linux story. And what I'm talking about is these recent published reports from Der Spiegel that the NSA is intercepting laptops and other hardware like routers and firewalls purchased online. And they can intercept the package when it leaves the company you buy it from, say Dell. when it leaves the company you buy it from, say Dell, and they will install malware, in some cases hardware,

in some cases software, to do whatever the hell they want. The report indicates also, by the way, some of the companies included in this, let me see, I'll find it right here. Oh, here we go. Dell's in there. Shocker. Yeah, I know, right?

Western Digital, Seagate, Juniper Networks, Mac Store, Samsung, Hawaii, and Microsoft are included in this report that says they worked with. The report even indicates the NSA can even exploit air reports from Microsoft Windows operating systems by intercepting the air reports and determining what is wrong with the target's computer, and then the NSA can attack it with Trojans or other malware. That's just so sleazy.

To gain physical access, the NSA reportedly worked with the CIA and the FBI on sensitive missions that sometimes included flying NSA agents on FBI jets to plant wiretaps. This gets them to their destination at the right time so they can help disappear again undetected after even as little of a half hour's work, the report notes. So what you have here is machines. And here's an example of what they call a hardware implant. One of the products the NSA appears to use compromises Target's computer. It's codenamed Cottonmouth, and it's been available since 2009. It's a USB hardware implant that secretly provides the NSA with remote access to the compromised machine.

Some of these, like you format the machine, you know, you wipe the master boot record, you delete the partition table. Some of these actually will reinstall themselves after you wipe. Now, everything appears to be sort of targeting Windows. And, you know, you look at a lot of this stuff, and it's, once again, it's requiring either cooperation with the manufacturer or the fact they can take advantage of zero-day exploits or whatever it is. And I read this and I think, you know, these NSA leaks, in 2014, what we'll see is security becoming a sexy feature that companies are going to compete on. And Linux and open source will inherently be better suited to meet an increased demand there. And I think specifically, you're

going to see a lot of new secure chat programs, file transfers will explode, you know, secure file transfer is going to explode in 2014. We're going to have a pick of our litter and some of them will be closed source, but a lot of them, because what's going to happen is first you'll have a first round of stuff that's closed source. And you've already seen a few of these new chat programs that have come out that have been closed source. And the first thing everybody now says is, well, it's not open source. How can I trust it? Right? Everybody's saying that now. So the next competitive step people are going to have to make in order to check that box off and be competitive is they're going to have to go open source.

So as a result of trying to chase these sexy features that can sell to consumers, they'll open source the software. So that way they can say, well, here's the software. It's open source. Pay us for the service. So, I mean, here's the bigger thing that I see exploding with that because all these things are great. And we're, you know, unless you know how to audit code, and I sure as hell don't. You know, open source, closed source, that's awesome. But even if it starts out open source, you get it on your system that's perhaps already infected with something that you don't know. So you've taken benign software on an infected system that's got some weird hardware thing going on.

Here's what I see being successful. Someone opens up a consultant firm that will actually audit your hardware. That's what I want to see. I want to see someone that actually – people can vet, that can actually see what they're doing and actually have a success record to look at. what they're doing and actually have a success record to look at. I think that's probably the only real defense against this because you can... Otherwise, it's just peanuts and

beer at that point. Peanuts make you thirsty. You're going to have more beer. The security industry with the firewall programs and various security programs you see in Windows. You do have the advantage. I'm not buying it. You have the advantage. I see what you're saying there. You and I would not really be able to check it.

You have the example of the TrueCrypt project where enough in the community could get together and say, you know what? We're going to audit this as a community. Oh, yeah. So it's great coming down to your computer. But what if – and again, look how – I mean I hate to be paranoid, but look what's already happening. What if you have a setup on your computer you're not aware of that takes a benign program that's completely safe and makes it unsafe on your computer. It becomes a moot issue. This is more of a threat, I think, with Windows. What you have to do is you have to make best efforts,

your best rational effort that you can make. The first thing is if you're really paranoid about security, you seriously have to consider, well, if I really care about this, I should probably stop using Windows. You do. You seriously kind of have to consider, well, if I really care about this, I should probably stop using Windows. It doesn't guarantee that some Linux box won't have something on there that is monitoring you. But Windows is low-hanging fruit, certainly. Wouldn't it? You know, what would really be scary is if some distro, by default, shipped it so that everything you typed into the launcher was sent over the network that somebody could capture. That would almost be insecure right out of the box and be really freaky.

And if that ever got popular, it would be a heyday for the NSA. But as long as nothing like that happens. Yeah, I think at this point, Linux is definitely low hanging for, or Windows is low hanging for it. And I think Linux is probably generally pretty safe at this point.

That's not to say that embedded programs and things might not be an issue later on. Mumble, go ahead, Ryan. Create a hardware test. Call it the Snowden test. There you go. You plug it in and it runs a Snowden audit. Exactly.

A little humming sound. I think we just all need to learn how to build our own computers and make processors. Oh, jeez. Absolutely. I've got my clean room ready and I've got my suit, so I'll get right on that. Maybe open source hardware will become a more

popular thing because you can audit the hardware. What about something that sits on your network and is watching your machine? Like at the firewall level. This firewall includes packet inspection where we'll alert you if it looks like something's leaking from your computer.

That would make the most sense to me because... ATNSA? Yeah. I mean, it could be a marketing opportunity for PFSense. I mean, at the end of the day, as Heaven's Revenge points out in the chat room, it's completely spot on. If someone wants to do something badly enough, they're going to do it. I mean, that's just

what it is. All you can do is minimize that damage by using Linux. That's right. Yeah, exactly. That's where I go back to. mean, that's just what it is. All you can do is minimize that damage by using Linux. That's right. Yeah, exactly. That's where I go back to. You just have to make the rational compromise. So you can't go tinfoil hat. You can't install a Faraday cage in your house.

But what you can do is you could. But again, there's like a diminishing returns, right? But what you could do is use Linux. Use an open source email program. Use open hardware if you can. And I think that just that base fact will drive human behavior towards open source and Linux. Not like, I don't know if it's going to be some sort of mask hysteria, but when you have decision makers, people who are designing systems for businesses that need to be secure, CEOs who are paranoid

about corporate espionage, and things like this. Because all these things the NSA is doing, some private company could do as well. And in fact, in some cases, we have now documented evidence that the NSA has weakened industry standards to make their job easier, and other attackers could just take advantage of those weaknesses too. Hello, RSA. Right? So it's one of these things where where because the vulnerability exists, it's not

just the NSA that can take advantage of it. So there's all of these reasons that just stack up, and the rational person that really is concerned about this would have to... I mean, I think the decision you come to is some sort of open source system. Maybe it's not Linux, maybe it's BSD. Exactly. I wonder if the NSA uses Git for their

software that exploits people. It's probably all CVS. Yeah, right. Mark Softball. Yeah. Anybody else have any NSA-related predictions in the chat room? I just want to say that you don't want to put tinfoil on your head because it'll increase the signal. You want to put a wet towel.

That's all I got to say. Good to know. Good to know. Good to know. All right. Well, any other predictions, Jerem? I got to say. Good to know. Good to know. Good to know. All right. Well, any other predictions, Jerem? I'm opening up the floor now. Yeah.

Go ahead. I've got a prediction about Canonical. Oh, okay. Let's do it. Yeah, and that is that I think by the end of next year, Canonical might announce that they're going to make their own kernel. So not a fork? That is optimized for mirror.

It could be a fork, but I think that they're going to feel like they can't control Linux and they want something that is custom tailored to their needs. So they'll have the Ubuntu kernel that's like a snapshot of the semi-latest kernel that was out at the time they make this decision?

Can I interject? If Popey was here, he would add the Ubuntu canonical. Well, I'm sure he's going to add that Ubuntu has no intentions or never will modify. Hold on. What if we took our kernel and we connected it to our display server and then connected it to our upstart init system and then we just called it all one thing. The Ubuntu base.

Can I interject? So, I think first of all, you need to clarify what BitPuffin was suggesting, because what I heard BitPuffin say and what Chris said were two different things. Yeah, no, I was just joking. Yeah, I heard, and it sounds like he's

trying to say that Canonicals didn't turn Ubuntu into their own system completely. I can't see it. Well, I think they would still try to maintain some kind of Linux compatibility compared to what they do with XMirror. But BitPuff, and don't they have the best of both worlds right now? They get one of the best kernels

out there, developed by a different team, and then they can pick the version they want to run, and they can run that version for as long as they want to run it, and do whatever patches they need to do to keep it secure run, and they can run that version for as long as they want to run it and do whatever patches they need to do to keep it secure. And so they can kind of do that now without having... That's exactly what we do.

Yeah. We already take a kernel and then we apply patches to it, and that's our kernel. Seems like path least resistance, yeah. So I guess, BitPuffin, for your prediction to work, you'd have to have some sort of decision the kernel team was making that was inherently incompatible with Ubuntu's goals.

Yeah, something like that, but also that they realized that Linux is a huge train that they really don't have any control over. And if they want to add their own stuff, they're going to have to fork and stuff. But then they can realize that Linux is like, it covers so many stuff that they don't really need, and bending Linux to be the way that they would maybe need it to be would require it to

a lot of more work. So maybe they would feel better to start from scratch and implement things in ways that benefit them. I don't think that they can make a kernel that anywhere anywhere compares to linux maybe they get licensed the microsoft kernel 2014 canonical signs license agreement with microsoft i think you're kind of yeah it's kind of going like a

react os uh type of thing so we're gonna see what a boot to nt edition i would say if anyone is going to fork uh linux it's going to be the Mint guys because they just like forking stuff. That's going to be Google. This just strikes me, and I hear this a lot. Anyone who's said this on IRC, who says this on podcasts, shock for you, you're not the first person to suggest this.

I hear this a lot, and it seems to be the natural exaggeration of, well, Canonical will fork X next, or whatever X might be. And it's just the natural, most exaggerated, most ridiculous thing you can possibly suggest. You know, it's the end point. I think Canonical is going to fork Atari, sure.

Now I want it to happen, now that we've recorded all of this and then BitPuffin to emerge totally victorious. I think it just comes down to practicality too. Yeah, it's just more beneficial not to. Adapt as need be. Everything else has already been

done. There's already a fork of Firefox in Debian. There's already a fork of Firefox in Debian. There's already, you know, a fork of OpenOffice as LibreOffice. You know, everything's already been done. So the one thing left to do that the only company that's so ridiculously outrageous that would do it must be Canonical. Well, okay. I agree with you there, probably. They provide an experience which is like, you know, when they write the display server, they kind of write it so that Unity works well with Mirror and Mirror works well with Unity.

I would think that they would want to do something similar with like the core system kernel stuff. So the other direction would be, is you could take this, so the Apple rationale was, well, so you could look at it from the Mac OS X standpoint. They built their own display server, they built their own kernel, and then they have a BSD user LAN tools. And so that's the extension of what you're saying, is you'd have canonical builds, the Ubuntu desktop, they build the display server, and then they have a Linux user LAN tool base,

but it's an Ubuntu kernel. Yeah, I just don't see that. Not in 2014. No. Oh, right. Maybe the year after. Maybe a couple of years. Maybe 2020. Now I see Mark Shuttleworth in a Buck Rogers thing twirling through space, right. Maybe the year after. Maybe a couple of years. Maybe 2020.

Now I see Mark Shuttleworth in a Buck Rogers thing twirling through space. I mean it's going to be something like that. No, it just practically doesn't make any sense. The reason that I think that they would never do that is because – I mean they're not extremely rich. They're not billionaires. I mean you have to take – if you're going to make your own kernel, you have to really make sure everything works exactly like the Linux kernel was working before on Ubuntu, and they just – I don't think they have the resources. Plus, man, I would imagine them forking the GNU user land before they forked the kernel.

I mean, look at Android. And why fork that down deep, you know? Did I just give Popey an idea? If anybody's going to fork – no, but seriously, if anybody's going to fork the Linux kernel, it would be Google for Android, right? Yeah. And they could probably pull it off. But even they aren't doing it necessarily.

I mean, they are using certain things from it without going that deep into it. They only fork what they have to. Well, they don't want to make Linus swear at them, I think. Yeah, exactly. Well, they don't have to. Yeah. Monaco loves the Linux kernel. Last call for 2014 predictions. Anybody have any?

Sure. If I may restate Ant's predictions for Ubuntu, no companies will use Ubuntu in one and a half years. Ubuntu in general will be dead in two years. What? Whoa. Based on... This is not his predictions.

Oh, oh, oh. Their answer. I think it would probably be more accurate to say that these were the drunken ramblings of Ack, which they could well be the drunken ramblings of anyone. Yeah, there you go. These podcasts are probably the drunken ramblings of us. I'm not going to say anything negative regarding Ubuntu, I'm not going to say anything negative regarding Ubuntu, but I am going to say that in the year 2014, OpenSUSE is probably going to get even more popular than it did in 2013.

Okay. All right. Yeah, I know it is. Ubuntu is going to be more popular in 2014 than it was in this previous year. They're all going to be more popular. At the end of the day, when I load Linux on someone's computer that doesn't know Linux yet, I load Ubuntu on there no matter how I feel about it because it's going to be easier for them. Woo-hoo!

Got a woo-hoo of approval there. I predict that Amazon is going to get tired of everybody using their affiliate system, so they're going to make their own distro, make their own browsers, and their own search engine. Brilliant. Haven't they got their own distro

on their Amazon Kindle Fire and their own affiliate revenue system there? Technically, yeah. Actually, I think you're right. I didn't think of it that way. Now, here's a good question. What was different between your affiliate system and the way it's integrated into the Dash?

Product placement, because they're actually advertising products, yeah. And not just shop here. So, okay, last call for predictions before... I got one real quick. All right. In education, Linux has always been really big, but I think it's going to become even bigger with things like the Pi and the Chromebook becoming so cheap that schools realize that the contracts they have with Microsoft are ridiculous and move from proprietary to open source software. Yeah, I think schools have a lot.

They're also just reinvesting in existing hardware. As XP goes away, that's going to be big for schools. Oh, yeah. And especially businesses, too. When XP goes away, where are they going to go with their custom software? Why not have somebody develop custom software for them on Linux rather than upgrading that to Windows 7 or 8? I would bet they're going to stay on XP until they have a massive just fallout from all kinds of horrible things that they're going to be attacked. of horrible things that they're going to be attacked because there's a lot of things that if you notice

there's been some studies that said the hackers or the virus riders are waiting for the drop support so they can attack massively. So probably about next year is when they'll realize. If I put my contracting hat on, I can already picture

a client that's asking me to mitigate the risk and not migrate the OS. So they'll say, do what you can, firewall it, clock it down, protect it, let's monitor it, put antivirus on there and we'll run the risk because it's in our land and we're just going to keep it until it dies. And I can see that happening.

So it's not going to be, 2014 won't be like this, boom, everybody switch from XP. It's going to be a slow thing that picks up momentum in 2014. But I do think we're going to get lots of blaster worm-like alerts in the paper and things like that. I'm sure you guys remember that blaster worm thing that happened in the hospital. That's actually what my name is based on. Really?

That's funny. The patch was released the whole time. That's what blew my mind. It was out there the whole time, and no one applied it. It's just like, really? Yeah. Don't banks and stuff have custom software that they use on Windows XP that they're probably afraid to migrate to Windows 7 because it's got to be changed? But before it was on XP, it was on SCO boxes.

So they've had to move it before. This has happened to them before. It'll happen again. And in some ways, you could make the argument, hey, if you move to Linux, this is just an organic piece that will just continue to exist. It doesn't come to an end like some of these other products do. It makes me kind of afraid that some of these banks might stay on XP. They will. Oh, yeah.

There's banks on 2000K. I mean, seriously. At least that I've seen, at least as soon as a year ago. A few years ago, I would walk into a Bank of America, they would have Mac pluses. They're from the eighties, um, with text terminals, you know, is so they,

yeah, they'll, that was just the ATM. Yeah, that was, there's only a few, it wasn't, it wasn't recent,

but it was a few years ago. Um, I just like to add a little bit. We said about education, um, getting Linux from my experience, getting, um,

Linux in the door for education is quite difficult simply because there's not enough people who know about Linux to supply classes and stuff like that. Canada actually would prove that wrong. I mean, it's based on the Canadians that I've known and the Canadians I've worked with, and also

just reading news articles on it. It seems like various provinces in Canada have actually had a lot of success. I think it depends on a local company who can work with the school district. It depends where. If you have a school district who has some big fatty IT contract with some company who sucks off Microsoft's tit, they're going to come in there and they're going to sell more Microsoft software. But you get some local guy who maybe can help do some IT development with the school district if they don't have a strong in-house IT. And they like Linux.

It could happen. They could start an edgy log. I went to a school who the admins were very into Linux. And they run Linux and all the servers, anything that wasn't a desktop. And the only reason they wouldn't run it on the desktop is because teachers want their software. They don't want to use LibreOffice or GIMP. And for the purposes of teaching photo editing or word processing,

LibreOffice and GIMP are perfectly fine solutions. You don't need Photoshop. Microsoft's going to solve that problem for us, though. With Windows 8, you don't have your own... I mean, you do, technically, but the UI is going to continue to change so much and you know these Metro applications are not

not up to snuff they're not what people want they're not Photoshop they're not you know they're not full replacements yet so that's going to help with that a little bit when you're faced with that stark of a change anyways then it's still a lot of change to switch to Linux but you're already dealing with so much change that it's

not a huge leap. I think another what we're going to see coming up is, we saw some of this in 2013, but I think GNOME 3 is going to even further just find its place as a desktop environment in 2014. I can see that. I can see it being a good year for GNOME.

I think schools will continue to do stuff. You have iTalk for classroom work. Moodle, which if you apply a theme to it, it's actually not too terrible. By out-of-the-box, Moodle is just painful to look at. I get that. It's painful to use too. I've actually run it a few times. But yeah, I think the tools are out there for schools.

It just takes time and it takes financial motivation sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of things at play. So before we jump out of the Mble room, is it 2014 for anybody in here yet? I know it is for Aviator Continuity in our chat room right now. It's been there for seven hours. He's been in 2014.

We are in 2014 but how Oh, well congratulations. Welcome and hello from the past. Our poppy only has an hour left. Yeah, yeah. I thought BitPuffin was going to cross over during the show, but I can't remember. Yeah, he did.

He did. Five minutes ago. Ah, yay. Well, happy 2014, Bit. Okay, guys. Well, before we go, I got to read a little email, so I'm going to get to that right now. It came from Tim, and he's calling us out, Matt. Now, we get these from time to time.

Last time, it was about Debbie, and this time it's about Slackware. He says, I rarely hear you guys mention Slackware. I've been a Slackware user for many years and would love to see you guys do a Slackware challenge. I have a lot of people turned off by the fact that Slackware package manager does not even handle dependencies. But I would like to think that you guys, as Arch users, would realize that there's a benefit to knowing exactly what is on your system because you installed it. These days, building and finding Slackware packages is as easy as ever with slackbuilds.org and sbopkg.org. He says, most of Slackware's team keeps an up-to-date repository of commonly used pre-built packages. And he gives a wiki link to that.

As a Linux user, Slackware user supporter, and a huge fan of your shows, I'd just like to see you guys give it some loveskies. Now, we did give it the love spotlight on last during our OpenSUSE review. Yes. Here's the thing about Slackware, Matt, is when we make these switches,

these challenges, I have to straight up use these for a while. Well, and here's the thing. He mentioned a couple of tools. I know I've never really cared. I played with Gentoo a little bit. OK, you know, Portage, whatever. But Slackware, I've never had a reason to.

Now, the tools he mentioned specifically regarding that, because he lost me at dependency stuff. I have I will literally gargle glass shards before I chase down dependencies. It's 2014, kids. I'm not doing it. Arch doesn't make me chase down dependencies. It's 2014 kids. I'm not doing it. Arch doesn't make me chase down that stuff. It doesn't. It's, it's providing an effective experience for me.

I don't use it because it's geeky. I use it because I'm lazy and it appeals to me. So that's okay. You know, there is a little bit of that. That is part of my motivation to using arches. I don't like tracking down this stuff and everything I want. It's in the repos.

I'm not totally opposed to trying Slackware. Probably not in the immediate future. But I do kind of feel like it's sort of like the thing I've just never really got into. And I need to give it a fair go. I've never had the motivation. I just, I can't. To the back of my mind. I'm more likely to revisit Gen 2, honestly.

Yeah. As weird as that sounds. Because, I mean, Portage, I've done this. I mean, it's not, like, my ideal thing, but I can deal with it. Yeah. But I don't really get my, I don't really see the Slackware advantage, I guess, is one of them. Knowing what's in my stuff, I don't care. I love that it's there. It's open source.

I'm going to, you know, at some level, the NSA is going to do what they're going to do, whatever. I'm just not that concerned about it. I just want it to work I the other thing too is like I understand like I do kind of see what you're saying like you know exactly what's on your system but that to me also isn't a huge requirement in the sense of like you know a library bloat or anything like that so I I don't want to put it down because I I respect anybody who chooses to use it but for myself it's never quite resonated and I'm still gonna have some thought I might try it like maybe in the summer I might give it a go I respect anybody who chooses to use it, but for myself, it's never quite resonated. And I'm still going to give it some thought.

I might try it like maybe in the summer. I might give it a go. I mean if Arch burns me or something or whatever variation of Arch I'm using happens to burn me or something, yeah, then I might have an interest in actually pursuing it. At this point, I need a motivation. For me, I was burned out on PPA. So I was just – it was just time to try something new. OpenSUSE was cool. I had a lot of fun with that. I wanted to roll into something new.

But I'm kind of happy where I'm at. I don't know. Yeah, I just don't know. All right. Well, as we wrap, one thing I wanted to mention is I think it's going to be an awesome year for Qt. Yeah. For Qt. Qt.

And I don't know what that will mean for the GNOME desktop. And I'd like to hear your guys' thoughts on that. What do you think is Qt's success going to come at the cost of quality GTK applications on Linux? Because, you know, when I sit there and I use the GNOME desktop, one of the things that brings me back to KDE frequently is K wins awesome, for one. Yeah. for one. And number two is I feel like QT is the way of the future and that slowly over the next couple of years, my favorite applications are going to be replaced with QT versions and I should just get on the KDE bandwagon now. So I'd like to hear your guys' thoughts on that. That's my question for you out there in the audience. You can go over to jupyterbroadcasting.com, pop the contact link and leave your feedback. And here's the other question. And this one,

I really want you to give some thought. Does groupthink, or maybe call it management by consensus, tamper open source innovation? So does backlash to aggressive and sometimes new or risky ideas inhibit bold innovation sometimes in open source? Here's an example. So Debian cannot get off the pot about their init system. They can't just choose systemd. Even though choosing systemd, by the data I can tell, would only impact 0.8% of their user base negatively. That would be the ones that have a BSD derivative and that's using voluntary stats. 0.8% of their user base would be affected by the switch to systemd, but the entire Linux ecosystem could be benefited by it, not just Debian. Yet they can't make the call because of this group debate, group think, management by consensus aspect that a lot of open source projects are driven by.

So I want to get people to email in. You have any thoughts? Well, here's the first thing that comes to mind, and it's adorable that people think Debian does anything quickly. I just find that just adorable. It's Debian. You know, they move at Debian pace. But why is that? Is that because of this groupthink management by consensus consortium? That's part of it, but also because of the

fact that they don't, they are, they have what's working for them now. They like to take their time and really slog through everything at a snail's pace. And I don't mean that in a negative way. I mean, that's working for them now. They like to take their time and really slog through everything at a snail's pace. And I don't mean that in a negative way. I mean that's just how they operate. I think you can look at a lot of things in the open source development where you could see that the group debating really trivial stuff really slowed stuff down. And then there's good examples where like somebody comes along and Lenart says, boom, we're going to do system D.

And then all of a sudden there's a bunch of energy behind system D or Mark comes out and says, Hey, you know what? We're going to build our own display server. And even though a lot of people can disagree, there is this declaration at the top and the focus is made, the commitment is made and the team gets to work. And, and you, you know, you can see this play out in some commercial companies like Apple. And then you have the other side where Microsoft, right. where they just can't seem to really execute because they have all this middle management. And I'm wondering if maybe the open source community suffers from a little bit middle management. You can't take it all out, but I want to know what the audience thinks. So go over to JupyterBroadcasting.com, pop that contact link, choose Linux Unplugged from the dropdown, send us your feedback for next week's episode of Linux Unplugged, and we will read that during the top of the show next week on the show.

I think that'll be a good topic. It's just something I've been kicking around as I've been watching the SystemD stuff and Mirren, Wayland. Just put it out there. See what people think. Alright, Matt. Well, coming up on Sunday, I got kind of a surprise. Oh, yeah? I'm not going to announce it yet because I'm not sure if it's going to work out.

So we're going to cover it if it works out, but I'll talk to you about it offline. So we'd love to hear from you. Don't forget you can join us live. The Linux Unplugged show is live on the Tuesdays over at jblive.tv, 2 p.m. Pacific. Go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar to get that in your local neck of the woods. We'll convert it for you. All right, everyone. Well, thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged.

Matt, I'll see you on Sunday, okay? Sounds good. See you then. All right, everyone. Thank you so much. See you next Tuesday.