LINUX Unplugged - Episode 227: Peer Pressure | LUP 227

Episode Date: December 14, 2017

It’s time to replace Patreon, YouTube, Twitter/Facebook & all the other centralized platforms of the web. But can open source answer the call? This week we look at a few projects that could replace today’s information silos if Linux users just step up.Plus community news, some big updates & a lot more!

What the heck does this really mean? Netflix, add Netflix tweets to the 53 people who have watched A Christmas Prince every day for the past 18 days. Who hurt you? And then people are like, um, Netflix, why are you watching me? And Netflix responds with, well, we just care about you. We're just worried about you. And, like, Netflix has been outing people's crazy watching habits over Twitter for the last couple of days. Have you seen this, Wes?

Yeah, it's bizarre. I like it, though. It is good. It's like it's funny, but then it's also a reminder how these hosted platforms are constantly monitoring everything we do. And even when I like them, it's still a little gentle reminder. Every time you hit that play button, they know you're watching this. Someone is silently judging you. My buddy got hit with it.

It's funny and creepy at the same time. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. My buddy got hit with it. They checked in on him. Really? Yeah. He binge watched.

I can't even remember what it was, but nutshell. He binge watched like eight seasons of something within like four days or so. And they're just like, oh, your patterns look different. Are you good? You know what? I heard from somebody else. This is not the first time I've heard this story. And the person was legitimately depressed.

And they were in a funk and they watched a whole bunch of shows back to back to back to back. And Netflix support emailed them and asked them if they were okay. Wow. Netflix is kind of a crazy company. That is really crazy. I mean, it's good that somebody cares, right? Even if it's just some anonymous support person at Netflix, it's nice that somebody cares

at the same time. I care so much I'm going to stalk you, right? Yeah. Like, do they have, like, some sort of dashboard where they're like, somebody's having a bad day, like, alert comes up. It's probably a piracy thing. It's probably like somebody is downloading a whole bunch of content off our servers. Let's flag them. And then they look at it and go,

no, it looks legit. They're just depressed. Yeah, but that might not be... They lost their job. All they're doing now is watching Netflix. Oh, gosh. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 227 for December 12, 2017. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show. Get the hell out of here.

That is so fired up about today's episode, it might just strike a little too close to home. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Mr. Wes. Today on the show, we're going to tackle a few big topics. First, we'll bust through some community news, things you need to know about. And I'm not going to lie, the system debate rages on. Still. This time, your humble hosts are taking a flamethrower to the idiots that won't stop this. Once and for all, we're going to take a flamethrower to this particular discussion. And then, let's get in to replacing YouTube. Let's get in to replacing Patreon.

Let's get in to replacing Twitter. That's right. On this week's episode, we're going to attack centralized platforms and services and tell you how it's nearly within your grasp to replace all of these with P2P, decentralized, no single point of failure or control systems. The Internet is falling apart. And there's been a couple of things that have happened just this last week that honestly, as a Linux user, get a little like a throw up in my throat. You know, like when you throw up a little bit and you got to swallow it down. You're like, that was horrible. That's how these things make me feel. I've been throwing up in my throat. You know, like when you throw up a little bit and you've got to swallow it down. You're like, mm, that was horrible. That's how these things make me feel.

I've been throwing up in my throat all week. Okay. Well, proverbial. Not really. The proverbial throw up in my throat. I'll tell you why. And we'll bust through all of this and the solutions that are emerging that are all open source, that are all peer-to-peer, and that are all decentralized. How about that?

So it's not quite there yet, but who better than Linux users to push this crap over the edge? Speaking of Linux users, let's bring in our virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello. Hey, hey. Hey-o. Hey-o, everybody.

Thank you for joining me. I know everybody's busy as the freaking holidays approach, and I appreciate everybody taking a moment of their busy day to join us in the lug. It's nice. It just wouldn't be the same without you. It wouldn't. The beard's not here this week, I should mention. We're feeling lonely. We need you, Mumble Room. He sends his regrets, but he's out on assignment, assignment being moving.

Which, do not envy that. I'd much rather be here. Remember Dev 1? Yeah. The Ubuntu fork, or no, I'm sorry, the Debian fork that doesn't have systemd. No systemd in Dev1. And we've had some things here and there to say about Dev1, but nobody's had something to say about Dev1 like the owner of a server hosting company, not inside the U.S. His name is Nico, I think is how you pronounce it.

I believe so. Does that sound right? N-I-C-O? I'm sorry, Nico, if I'm mispronouncing your name. And he takes to the Internet this week to defend DevOne and to silence the system D lovers once and for all with his empirical data, his hard-learned evidence, and, of course, his links that are indisputable, which would be all the studies that he references in his...

I'm sorry, what? Mm-hmm. He doesn't have any of those things? He doesn't have any studies? Mm-hmm. This is all anecdotal evidence? Uh-huh. I've just been informed that my producer says that we're good to go with this story.

So here we go. We carry right on. Woo! So I'll dig into some of the most important parts so this is a defense of dev one he opens up he says i understand that some of you may think that dev one a fork of debian is an infinite waste of resources the problem is that you're small-minded and you don't understand how the world works you see because it's saving the world it's saving resources and i'm going to explain to you why.

And if you don't understand and disagree, then you're just not obviously a server person. So they tried to build a data center light, you know, like a thin, compact study version of a data center on Debian and Ubuntu. But you see, there's a fundamental problem with servers that run systemd. They don't boot. They don't boot, and they don't reboot.

And systemd Resolve D, that constantly interferes with core network configurations, made it very expensive for them to run Debian or Ubuntu. Their words, not mine. And while they're using flowery words, they say, the reason to use Dev1 is the hard calculated costs. They're a small team, and they simply don't have the time to fix problems caused by systemd on a daily basis. Did you know that you're having problems with systemd

on a daily basis with the systems you run? Did you know that? Every day. Did you know that? Yeah. See, I was under the mistaken impression that all of my systems with systemd have been running fine now for about a year.

I'm such an idiot. That might just be you. I'm an idiot. Their objective is to create a great, easy-to-use platform for about a year. I'm such an idiot. That might just be you. I'm an idiot. Their objective is to create a great, easy-to-use platform for virtual machine hosting, not to walk a fucking tightrope. So don't get it wrong, okay? Because they don't want to walk a tightrope. If you want to walk a tightrope, that's a different business.

That's somewhere else. Not in a data center. That's where Debian's at. That's where Ubuntu's at. Not DevOne. On that tightrope. The DevOne community creates infinite economic costs, sure. But that's not their fault.

Creating DevOne is simply a counter-reaction to ensure that Linux remains stable, which is of high importance to a lot of people. at a server is completely aware that if you can run a minority operating system that is tested by a very, very few fraction of the users that doesn't have wide use in production, that's the definition of a production ready system. If you can have a system that only a couple handful of 10s, maybe at most 15,000 users are using versus a system that's literally deployed by millions of users by the largest enterprise companies in the entire world, you don't want to use that system because their systems don't boot. See, what you want to do is you want to stick with the esoteric fork that's only used by a very small minority of people who aren't likely to bitch in the first place because it's confirmation bias and they don't want to validate confirmation bias. So you got to stick with that system.

Yeah, you read it right. Dev1 developers are creating stability. Think about it. If not for a few repeating system debugs or the insecurity caused by a huge monolithic piece of software running with root privileges, then system D would be okay. are tens of thousands of tiny programs that are no longer maintained that diffract our vulnerability landscape across thousands of lines of entry points in code. So you don't want to have one active project being maintained by the most important people in the industry who have their entire revenue model on the line to make sure this thing works. That's the last thing you want. That's the last thing you want. What you want, what you want to make sure

you have on your data center servers is something that is no longer maintained, something that is done by thousands of different pieces of software instead of one maintained code base, and something that's simply too large for any one individual to fully understand. You got to have something like that when you're running production. systemd not that that's a problem you see when you're running servers you got to make sure keep it as diffracted keep it as just deferred as possible really the key thing there and then and then you're getting as close to uh old linux as possible and everybody's happy there's no problems it's not too complex it's nothing like windows and it's stable remember how much fun we had when we tried

out slackware the other month? It was great. Yeah. Old school Linux. With SystemD, the main advantages to use Linux are obsolete. So what is the importance of DevWant? It's not only crucial to Linux users, but to everyone running servers, or rockets, or watches, or anything that actually depends on a stable operating system. Support DevLon.

Support DevLon. That's, uh, this is, uh, this is the shit that we deal with. And it's so funny because, um, you know, what really people who care have switched to free Bsd or another bsd another bsd like people that really care about systemd on their servers they're just i'm working on gentoo right here man no that's right we got to talk about that so you know the thing that i guess what i'm coming back to here is um if you if you see this as they do then you need to reevaluate why you're in the industry and you need to think about the fact that you may be a risk to your business. Your personal stubborn views on the way computers should run probably make you a risk. Not because you're even necessarily wrong about system D or the reason it was deployed

or the fact that one piece of code base is a singular target versus thousands of scattered applications. You could be right on all of that. but there's a fundamental fact of the network effect, testing, user testing, and enterprise deployment that makes system D inevitable if you want to run Linux in a major installation. And anything that's actually production important in the next few years, if you're not on system D, you're not going to be on Linux. And I'm sorry. I'm sorry it's that way. But it's time for you to either quit your job or switch to BSD. Not because you're wrong about systemd. You might be right.

You might be right. But it's just for the same reason that I think Manjaro is a chicken shit reason to not use Arch. It's literally the same thing, right? See, the whole thing that people like to pretend is great about Manjaro is that theoretically there's millions of users using Manjaro testing and that Manjaro makes Arch right. You could only have that when you have millions, millions of users using your software and all the different esoteric edge cases that find bugs that have unprecedented load on the network stack or unprecedented load on the disk IO or attackers hitting this thing remotely from Iran over the internet. Like until you are in those positions with your software, you're not production ready.

That's why you have something like ZFS and you have something like ButterFS. There's clear differences in which one's production ready. One has massive enterprise deployment where people are making millions of dollars off of product a year. And one has a few enthusiasts that are trying it out and losing data. But it is made of butter, so there's that. It is a common thread that we see, and I totally understand where they're coming from,

and, you know, it would be great if using Linux without systemd was going to be a viable option, but if you're in production, if you're accepting real internet connections, if it's a customer-facing environment, it's time to step up and learn how to use your computer. And in this case, it means learn how to use system D all of your complaints you have in there about system D resolve D and all this stuff. It's you not knowing how to use your computer anymore. You are now one of those people that doesn't know how to use their computer and you're blaming it on system D.

Think about that for a second. You're no better off than all of those users who blame something because they just simply don't know how to use it that's you now and if that's how that's maybe you're right maybe you're right i'm not saying you're not right i'm saying go use something else now because you shouldn't be running some crazy ass fork like this that isn't being properly maintained okay i'm almost done i'm just gonna wrap it up the reason why systemd was launched is because some of the things that SystemD replaced are no longer maintained by anyone.

You understand that, right? You understand that. SystemD started, not because they're like, hey, here's a random ass idea. Maybe we should just do X. It was because they were sitting around going, well, fuck. Nobody's maintaining these super important open source projects anymore and this stuff's falling behind. We've got to do something. That's why SystemD came about.

And when you understand that origin and then you look at people saying, well, let's not use SystemD, what they're saying is let's use software that's no longer maintained. It's dangerous. People packaging it for your distribution, your Dev1 or your Gen2,

doesn't make it maintained. That just means it's packaged. There's a big difference there. And you have to understand that if you're running servers in production, especially customer facing. You got some desktop, you got some laptop, you got some personal home machine.

I don't care, right? It doesn't make any difference. But if you're selling to customers and you got a responsibility here to keep these things secure and patched. That's how I feel about it. For me, the biggest problem I had was mostly tone. Like I'm not going to say they can't run

a production grade facility on this operating system. Maybe they're very skilled at it. Yeah, give it a go. Absolutely. And if this had been a case study in, hey, look, we tried out Devuan. It scaled super well. We had no, you know, here's an example of how this really worked for us and it's successful in production. I would not have a problem with that.

That's fine. Right. But to imply that you can't do that with systemd despite… Or to say that servers with SystemD don't boot or reboot. Yeah, right. Which is just insane hyperbole. And maybe you did have problems. It's not like SystemD is perfect. No one is claiming that in a real

discussion. Right. And it's fine if you want to run something else and you can do it in a maintainable, sustainable, secure way. Fine. Talk about that. Let's make that the story. I would love to learn more about that that's not where we're at that's how i feel and then it just gets me all fired up and i'm like well now you're just digging your head down and being a turd about it exactly that article is

riddled riddled with confirmation bias yeah he's accusing others of having confirmation bias that's true too eric good. Good point. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, I just can't believe it. You know, before the show started, we were talking about the stuff in 2017 that's really left a mark on us in Linux. Well, we're going to talk about it more in a future episode. So we were just sort of brainstorming and looking, you know, you could almost flip it around and say, what kind of things can you just not believe we're not done talking about

in 2017? Yes. Frickin' system day. Right? I mean, oh, my gosh. Yeah. Things that should have done talking about in 2017. Yes. Frickin' system day. Right? I mean, oh my gosh. Yeah, things that should have been over with in 2017. Yeah. Also, things that should be over with is frivolous lawsuits and trademark disputes.

Oh! So the Software Conservancy has a trademark dispute put against them from the Software Freedom Law Center. We talked about this on a previous Linux Action News and on this show in the past. And now we have some additional clarifications by Bradley Kun, the president of the Software Conservancy, the group that has the trademark action being taken against them from the Law Center. Law Center being run by Ibn Moglan, and the Conservancy being run by Bradley M. Kuhn. And then you have the executive director, Karen Sandler. I forget her exact title. And they started a blog post that sort of blew this thing out into the public a couple of – about a month ago that they were being shut down by the law center for trademark infringement of their name.

Even though the law center was their law counsel for seven years and helped establish the software conservancy. So it was pretty weird. And what's happened now is they've actually filed their motion to have this entire case dismissed. in this judgment motion, they've had to put it all out there. They have the full filing. I have it linked in the show notes. It's long. It's 120 pages, and I read it this morning.

Woo! And I've never read so much legalese in one sitting. I usually have to take it in spurts, but I wanted to get it all in before the show. Do you need a drink now? Are you okay? Jesus Christ.

It was... That explains the gray hair. Okay. Oh, I tell you. And It was – That explains the gray hair. Okay. I tell you. And there is nothing that we didn't speculate in there. If you read the conservancy's filings, you'll see various examples of personal vendettas between Eben and – or Eben and Bradley and Karen. There is bad blood there I think would be a way you could put it. And it's all laid out in the

legal filing in a very matter-of-fact way and um this software freedom law center which are the aggressors here have a history of complaining to the conservancy complaints about the organization's name were never among them though in the years that they have been complaining each time the conservancy took the complaint seriously, and each time discovered that they were generally just sort of over-the-top threats. And the conservancy says, Bradley specifically says, I hesitated for years to talk publicly about this bad blood. Historically, I concluded that unilaterally exposing privately made specious claims

interferes with the essential jobs of promoting and defending software freedom. Despite our differences, the Law Center is a fellow charity, and I have no wish for them to cease to exist. Only did they stop attacking us. A year ago, Mogan publicly described certain GPL enforcement work to which I have contributed since the 90s as a jihad. I was offended because I have dedicated my life to nonviolent principled activism for social justice causes. Even so, I did not likewise assail in response. I sought to keep the discussion about policy and not hyperbolic rhetoric. But finally on a meta issue, and this is the point that I tried

to make last time we covered this story. I've seen a lot of stories, blog stories, and comments on Linux or on LWN.net and other venues in the last few weeks about this matter. It seems to have burned more electricity and time than it warrants. I do appreciate the statements of support that so many of you have made, but I have a request.

While I understand that this kind of situation generates an intriguing distraction and seemingly endless discussion, I encourage those of you who are otherwise software freedom contributors to temper your time investment. Faced with the petition to cancel our trademark, Conservancy must defend ourselves before the Trademark Board. But I loathe the idea that time-wasted damage of the Law Center's action may extend to other software freedom contributors and activities. In particular, I ask those of you who are Conservancy Project volunteers to avoid distraction by this. The work of the Conservancy member projects is the work that the Software Freedom Law Center's actions seek to impede. So please don't allow them to break your focus and succeed,

even just for a little bit. I completely agree that I hate when all of this lawyer stanky bullshit distracts from actually creating code. I hate it. And what I respect about Bradley and Karen is they haven't been airing their dirty laundry with the law center when Eben's been contacting them saying, hey, I don't think you're doing this right. Hey, I think you ripped off some of our material.

Hey, I don't think that's properly creative commons. Hey, and every time they have, they've been pretty receptive and they haven't come out and said, yeah, these guys over at the law center keep giving us a hard time. They've never done that until this came up. And they clearly state in their legal filing that they never received any kind of preemptive warning that this was coming. No tweet, no email, no text message, no phone call. They didn't receive any kind of preemptive warning of this trademark dispute that was heading their way. And they clearly think, and they position it so in their legal filing, that this is a vendetta, a personal vendetta, and the conservancy is taking the heat for what is a personal vendetta between the people running the conservancy and the people running the software law center.

Freedom. Anyways, the names are hard to say. Yes. And it's kind of hard to watch because it is creating behind the scenes. I guess the meta story here is behind the scenes. There's a lot of connections. The software freedom law center has connections to the Linux Foundation. There's obvious contributors that have their software projects that are being managed by either of these entities.

People that have worked with both these entities together when they were partners. A ton of middle ground here. There's a lot. And it's awkward because it's filled with landmines. And it's one of these things when you read the headline, you're like, oh, lawyers are making money. And then you realize, well, one of these is an umbrella organization that is essentially home to about 30 open source projects. And if they shut down, those open source projects are screwed. So there's real ramifications to projects that we all use. And at the end of the day, we just want to see them do well.

Oh, man, Wes. We can't have nice things. This is why we can't have nice things, Wes. This is why right here. It's really extremely frustrating. Let's just. This is why we can't have nice things, Wes. This is why. Right here. It's really extremely frustrating. Let's distract ourselves with a little Gen 2 challenge. Just open up the challenge.

Fascinating. It's Gen 2 challenge time, Wes. How are you feeling about today's Gen 2 challenge? Oh, boy. Getting system D right out of my life. Are you. How's your kernel build going? That's where we left off last week, right?

Oh, it's finished now. We got a kernel. So now we're doing our bootloader? You're doing Grub? What are you doing? Where are you at right now? What's going on? Yeah, well, we're setting up networks, some fstab, all that fun stuff.

Then we'll do the bootloader. And then maybe a little later today, we're going to see if this whole thing will reboot. Fascinating. All right. I look forward to it. We will check back in in just a little bit the gen 2 challenge continues on yes it does this is week two i think so wow so i wonder if within within two episodes if you're going to get a graphical environment i wonder i bet you'll get booting

yeah that's what i bet you won't get x until next week next week we'll get some then we're gonna try to get some remote screen caps going and all kinds of stuff so that's gonna be good that is going to be good. That is really going to be good. So, Bashful, you're not running Gen 2, right? I mean, you're not running SystemD right now? Are you... How are you doing this?

How are you pulling this magnificent feat of engineering off? I don't know. I was making a joke. I said he was about to reboot Gen 2, and I said not if it's running SystemD. Yeah, well, that's right. You can't. You can't. SystemD just doesn't boot, right?

No, you can't. Or reboot, Eric. Or configure your network. It's a feature. Wow. I am using the wrong system then, obviously. I have been for months. I'm an idiot.

I didn't even know. Years, in fact. And here I thought I was rebooting, booting, and having networking. I am such an idiot. Looked like it to me. I'm sorry, guys. I apologize. Well, Wes, you continue on the good work.

We'll check back in with you towards the end of the show. We do have much, much, much to get into, including some community news. Let's take a moment and talk about the perfect holiday gift, Ting. Go to linux.ting.com, support the show, and get $25 off a device or $25 in service credits. And here's why I say that, because if you bring a device, that's the way to go. They got CDMA and GSM. This is how I got into Ting. You following me? See, I brought over an old Evo 4G CDMA phone. I got $25 in Ting credit when I did that. $25. I was like, okay, I'll play with this. I'll play with this, right? What's $25 going to get me? Like 15 minutes, you know? Paid for

more than my first month paid. Yeah, the average ting bill is just $23 per phone per month, because it's $6 for the line. And then just your usage on top of that your minutes, your messages, and your megabytes, and then whatever Uncle Sam's going to cut, that's sort of unique to your area. But you just pay for what you use. It's a fair price, however much you talk, however much text or data you use nationwide coverage, no contracts, no determination fees, linux.ting.com, you're in or data you use, nationwide coverage, no contracts, no determination fees, linux.ting.com. You're in control. You get to see usage. You get to take alerts. You can set like, hey, you've used 15 megabytes, send an alert. Or, hey, you've used 20 gigabytes, send an alert.

You've used 15 messages. You've used 15,000 messages. Whatever is your mark, you can start generating alerts for you. They have a great dashboard to manage all of it, fantastic customer service, and a ton of good devices. I'm going to give a shout out, though, to the Motorola Moto G5S Plus. Ting's got it in stock, and you can get it unlocked.

No contract, nor the termination fee. Pay for what you use, not interrupting your experience. If there's an update, you get it. $254 from Ting. Pay for what you use, not interrupting your experience. If there's an update, you get it. $254 from Ting. Pay for what you use. Nice. Now the stock thing, the downside, like the downside to the G5, to me, isn't that big of a downside. So where they save their money on the G5S is the storage. It comes with 32 gigabytes of built-in storage, but you can put up to 128 gigabytes of additional storage with the micro SD slot. And one of my favorite things about this series of phone

is it has the turbo power charging. So you can get up to six hours of power in 15 minutes when you plug your phone in. So like just driving somewhere, you get six hours of battery life. battery life, and it has a 401 PPI screen and Gorilla Glass 3. This is a serious, oh, and fingerprint unlock. This is a really nice phone with a really clean Android experience, under $300, unlocked, pay for what you use. Motorola G5S Plus, $254 when you go to linux.ting.com because you're going to take $25 off the device. That'll knock it down from $280.

You need a new phone. Maybe you think a little present for the holidays. This is perfect. The other thing is, well, I don't know why, the trend is going in the wrong direction. This has a physical button, just one physical button to take you back to PPI screen, Gorilla Glass 3, and you get six hours of battery life and a 15-minute charge, all metal design, and a fingerprint unlock. For $254, pay for what you use.

This is a great phone. Ooh. Or you just bring your own. Just start by going to linux.ting.com, linux.ting.com. And a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring the Unplugged program. linux.ting.com. And a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Linux.ting.com. Go there. Go there and check out the blog, too.

I want to give a shout-out to MailSpring. I've installed it this week on all of my systems. And if you remember Nalaeus, I know you turned me on to Nalaeus. Yeah. So thank you to that because this is the continuation of Nalaeus. I have yet to try it, but boy, this makes me curious. Yeah, you and I have talked about it for weeks. And MailSpring works with all IMAP providers, works with Gamale and a lot of the other online ones.

The thing that's nice about MailSpring is, first of all, they have a pretty decent Linux user base. Over 10,000 active Linux users, so it actually matters to the developer. I like that. But the other thing that's really nice about it is they've just this week packaged it up as a Snap. So check this out. Hey-o. See, I don't know if they have a...

If you go to their website right now, if you go to their MailSpring website there, Wes, you go to the MailSpring website. I know you're in the middle of installing Gentoo, but if you go to getmailspring.com and then you go to download MailSpring and you click on the gnu slash linux option their first option here is linux auto updating snap yeah wow look at that how great is that

they've got the traditional dab and rpm if that's for you yes yes they do yes i'm on an arch over here so right snap sounds great well and so here's what's so nice about mail spring um if you're using thunderbird and you've been looking for another local email client, give it a look because it works super well with multiple accounts. So that for me is a killer feature and it supports unified inbox for searches. I like that a lot.

Now, I don't have experience with MailSpring, but I assume this is similar to the way Nalaeus did. But the real freaking creepy magic that I love is the read receipts, link tracking and more. It's like genuine. It's read receipts if you could redo the way read receipts worked in 2017. And I don't know how they do it, but it's great because it gives me push notifications when somebody's opened my email to my desktop and it uses the GNOME notification systems. And so it integrates in with my desktop, or in this case, Unity.

And it's a brilliant way to know right before somebody's going to email me because everybody opens up their last email that they got from you before they send you another email. Yeah, right. So I get a good 30-second to 15-minute heads up before I get an email. And I can just sort of mentally prepare myself for it. It's got great shortcuts, super nice search. It's got a dark theme that

looks good on Linux. And it'll tie in with like, it'll look at people's like LinkedIn profiles, and it has multiple theme support. It has a pro version. And the reason I mentioned that is because it actually has a monetization strategy that isn't like advertising or tracking you. I was about to say, I think you do need the pro to get some of those things like link tracking. And the quick reply templates, which is also great for somebody that gets a lot of emails. But like you said, like it's nice to see this open source project. Yeah, they've got some, you know, some long term stuff going.

They can actually get some good revenue. Exactly. So Ben is one of the lead developers of the project. And I invited Ben on the show next week if it works out for him. It's crazy with the holidays and all of that. But I just I want to talk to him and say, hey, did you expect such a big Linux reaction? And does it change the way you're developing this? And why build it in the technologies you have?

And why are you continuing this when there's something like Thunderbird out there? Why not just contribute to Thunderbird? And I've got my assumptions to those answers, but I'd really like to hear Ben's answers. And so I sent him an invite. He was going to try to make it today, but he had something come up, couldn't make it today because it was kind of a last-minute thing, and might be able to make it next week. Really? Any time? Yeah, really.

I'm excited. I've been using it now. I've got it installed on all of my systems, so I'll just keep using it to have more things to ask him about it. Now, you know every now and then, Wes wes the mainstream media tries to cover something that's our wheelhouse this is cnn breaking news and they just really blow it they really so uh afronaut mark shuttleworth has become a billionaire from his bet on ubuntu linux software according to bloomberg and they have one of these pictures of Mark where if you have

if you've seen Mark in the last few years Mark doesn't look a lot I mean, Mark looks fine but Mark doesn't look like this anymore. This is an old picture, right? So it's like always funny when people go like 10 years ago and get like these really old photos. This is 2002. Like what? I know.

So Spaceman, Mark Shut Shuttleworth was interviewed by Bloomberg. Not a Ubuntu creator, not a canonical CEO. No, no, Spaceman. Spaceman Mark Shuttleworth. Is that like where you've served in a political office once and then you get that title as an honorific forever? Once you go to space, that's it. I guess, kind of. Because, like, how many people have gone to space?

It's a handful of people. It's true. Yeah, so the headline on Bloomberg.com is literally, Spaceman Shuttleworth finds earthly riches with Ubuntu software. Not the editor's best day. Oh, man. So why? Why such a ham-fisted headline? And why Bloomberg?

Why Bloomberg? Well, this is a messaging piece. You see, kids, this is Canonical positioning themselves for a little investment. This is Mark communicating to the investment community. That's what Bloomberg's all about. They're all about the investment community. So it's been written for that audience. So I'm going to read a little bit of it. Keep in mind, though, this isn't really for us. This is for the investing audience. And it's pretty bad. So they say he's best known for being the world's first Afronaut. But since returning to Earth from his 2002 trip on the Russian Soyuz TM-34 rocket ship, Cape Town native

Mark Shuttleworth set about with the conquest of much more lucrative universe, the Internet of Things. As if in 2002, the Internet of Things was even some stupid term we were using back then. Exploding all over the place. I love it. Shuttleworth created Ubuntu, an open source Linux operating system that helps connect everything from drones to thermostats to the Internet. His company, Canonical Group, makes money from about 800 paying customers, which is the first time we've ever

gotten a number publicly, including Netflix, Tesla, Deutsche Telekom. They all pay for support services. Of course, they don't mention HP, Dell, you know, any of those. No. Success has helped boost the net worth, his net worth, Mark's net worth, to $1 billion. But Mark says it is destructive to focus on that. It's just a distraction. And you have to keep your finger on what's the pulse for next. Now, it's funny how they position this. So they use terms, again, you have to keep the market audience in mind here.

They use terms that you have to keep the market audience in mind here uh they use terms that are rough so mark mark shuttleworth in this interview which is the sort of the poll quote is the industry term for this he has a poll quote that is pretty good he did a really good job actually and the poll quote is um open source is defining innovation in 2017 and or today he says it is the defining innovation of today it says he went on to say that it gives me the luxury of being able to focus on things that i thought were really meaningful and interesting and deep open source software is deep you have to get under the hood a little bit then you realize it's everywhere it's defining innovation today what do you think of that Because I think if you ask the average Bloomberg

consumer who's defining innovation today, they'd say Apple or Google or Amazon. It'd be a big proprietary company of some sort. But I think this actually, while obvious, gives you the insight to the layer that Mark Shadoworth works on. Because Mark knows, because he's an intelligent man, that all of these companies that are making their billions of dollars right now are doing it essentially on the backs of open source. Do you agree? Oh, yeah. Absolutely, right?

I mean, these are the underpinnings in the engine house of a lot of these companies. Right. And it's always this, like, where you see about the, yeah, the big managed services, the things that the everyday consumer uses. You hear a lot about those, but you don't hear about back-end infrastructure. Right. So you've got Google, obviously very, very dependent on Linux for everything from their ad platform to Android. You've got Amazon, the entire EC2 infrastructure and the Echo infrastructure and all of the things that support their e-commerce infrastructure. Linux. You've got

Apple. Everything that's in iOS and macOS is BSD based. It comes from so many open source developed applications and libraries. But you also don't hear about it. But you know what their cloud runs a bunch on? Linux servers. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess he's kind of right. And so this is the area where I think investors read this and they go, oh, yeah.

So this is what Shuttleworth is working on. Oh, OK. Now, they also talk about how Shuttleworth started programming Ubuntu years ago and stuff like that. So it's pretty bad. But there is one other quote in here that I thought, well, what the hell does that mean? And I kind of want to get the mumble's take on this. The vision for Canonical is to provide the platform that you see everywhere other than the personal domain.

Other than the personal domain. We won't make a dent in phone or PCs. But pretty much your entire data center runs Linux, and every other thing in the room is running Linux. What do you think of that, Bashful? I mean, you're working on a Linux desktop distro right now, and Mark says we won't make a dent in phones or PCs. Is he talking just investor speak there,

or do you think he actually believes it? I think it's a bit of both. He's looking at what's profitable, which, I mean, running a business, you can't really blame them, but where they're making their dollars and cents is not on you know the desktop and things like that it's all you know server support or uh the data center stuff their kubernetes you know all of that stuff's where they're pushing hard as a quote-unquote company you know and even the snap initiative

really drives that as well you know it's like availability of software, their snappy core stuff for the IoT. The desktop, you know, they obviously haven't bailed on it, but it's not their focus as a company. They're still heralding it, you know, being a curator of sorts, if you think about it. But isn't the server a PC? Well, is it?

No, I suppose not in terms... It is in terms of platform and, you know, architecture, but I suppose not in the way the market? Well, is it? No, I suppose not in terms. It is in terms of platform and, you know, architecture, but I suppose not in the way the market talks about it. It's not a personal computer. Yeah, right. It's not a personal computer. Because he already said it's not like the consumer front, right? He didn't say PC is in servers and underlying infrastructure. He's just talking about like, you know, what Apple's doing or even to a degree some of the other vendors. You mean those guys are out in front in your home.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah, that's a good point. I wonder too if there's any signaling to maybe more of some savvy investors that have followed the company for a while and were perhaps worried about some of their direction. Is this a little bit like reassuring that this is our new focus? This is our focus. We're not going to be silly. Yeah. We're not going to be silly.

Yeah. We're not going to be trying any more phones. We're not really pushing to compete with windows or Mac OS. I want to hear. So, Hey citizen, what is your take on Mark's on Mark's quote here? Is it disingenuous?

Um, I don't know. Do you feel like, I really don't know. I mean, to me it feels a little disingenuous. I'm going to be honest. It feels disingenuous to me.

It feels like, well, I have these staff members, and I know what they're working on, and I have these contracts with Dell and HP, Lenovo, and others, and I'm making a pretty good profit off them, but I don't want to talk about it. Doesn't that give you pause a little bit, Mr. Citizen? I mean, to me, it does, just a slight degree. I'm a little worried that I've just sort of switched everything over to Ubuntu Desktop. Just a tad. Should I not be? It's hard to know, like, what the agenda is. Yeah.

If there's something not being told. Right. If something is being told that may or may not be true. Right. I kind of sit back and go, well, you're right from a revenue standpoint. You probably never will. And there's probably no other company that's going to get in on this game at this point. It's not like Samsung is not going to come along and launch the Samsung desktop.

The Chromebook is the closest we've gotten to cracking the desktop duopoly in decades. But we're also like you and I, we're in a a different position in that you maybe aren't looking to the same extent for this complete Windows 10 style desktop. And I think as we've seen maybe with Fedora and Red Hat as a parallel, there is enough, I think, incentive to maintain the developer or power user focused desktop

just in terms of like, I want to use Ubuntu to develop Ubuntu. Yeah, fair enough. And that's all part of your ecosystem. Right. It's all part of your eco. But it is not the big thing that you're really pushing to the market. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Well, speaking of ecosystems, Steam has made an adjustment that I think Linux users should be made aware of just so that way they can vote a little bit to get developers to support more Linux development. You may be heard. Yeah. So Valve has made a change

to the developer side of Steam that actually gives them more information. it gives developers a breakdown of the different platforms that people are choosing when they add a game to their wish list you know you might think that this is a small change but i happen to know from a netflix developer that this is how netflix signs multi-billion dollar content deals. They actually look at what's in your wish list, what's in your queue versus what you're watching. And if they have tens of thousands of users that have a show or a movie in their wish list, they work way harder to get that content provider to license it for Netflix.

way harder to get that content provider to license it for Netflix. Steam developers can now take the same tact. See, now platforms that don't currently, or games that don't currently support the Linux platform will at least get a vote to let the developer know that, hey, there's some interest here to get your port over to that platform that might not be Windows. And it's also going to be the same for Mac users. But now when you add something and you say, I want the Linux version, they're going to get that metric back, which may actually end up in getting us a few more Linux games.

Yeah, who knows? But from the developer perspective, it's pretty hard to be motivated if you just have a big question mark, right? Like maybe you don't even use Linux. You've heard about it. Maybe some people emailed you saying they want it. But I don't know. What percentage is there? Is there really any revenue here?

I don't know. And it means as Linux users, we need to start adding this stuff to our wish list. Yes. Right. That's the thing we can do. And then maybe the developers will sneeze. Maybe they'll sneeze and then when they sneeze... We'll get lucky and they'll make

a game out of it. Yeah. For Linux. They'll accidentally hit the export option for Linux. Yes. I'm going to give a quick mention for LinuxFest Northwest 2018, April 28th through the 29th. Wes and I will be there with our pants on. I'm so excited. And we invite you to be there with your pants on as well. It's going to be a good LinuxFest.

19 freaking years of LinuxFest. That's stupid. Hey, boy. Wow. Wow. Wow, that's really something, huh? And rumor has it. And I thought Linux was just a fad.

Wow, that's really something, huh? And rumor has it... And I thought Linux was just a fad. Rumor has it that Alan Jude, that free BSD-loving Alan Jude, might make it again this year. Is that right? Oh, boy. I'm trying to talk a couple other people into making it out here. A few of our other friends from other shows that we do. Oh, I like that.

Trying to get that all worked out. We'll lay the peer pressure on them. Yeah, and we're also already discussing party options. So if you could make it out to Linux Linux Fest Northwest 2018, I highly encourage it. And go to linuxfestnorthwest.org for more information. I'm giving a little plug because we're going to be there and we're doing something totally different this year. I hope it's going to be good.

But now that we're not doing less, like it's our opportunity to totally refactor the way we do Linux Fest. Even more reasons for you to come. I remember there used to be a time, Wes, when I used to go to LinuxFest before I actually did any shows. And I would sit there with my notebook, and sometimes Angela would come with me, and she'd take notes too.

And then I would sit there, and I would go back, and I would do all the cool stuff that I'd learned at LinuxFest at work. Nice. And then I sat down, and I did all that stuff, and I went, shit, this is so awesome. I've got to do a podcast about this. And that's how we got last.

Here we are today. So LinuxFest Northwest has a real special heart, a real special place in my heart. Also, I guess while I'm sharing all, one of the cool things about LinuxFest Northwest for me is that it was, I had a teacher in high school, Mr. Bassett, who made some really cool open source software, by the way. This guy, he helped me get into Debian and he wrote some really great open source attendance management and grade management software. And he and I used to drive up to LinuxFest Northwest when I was, you know, 20 years ago. When LinuxFest Northwest was brand new and I was a young pup. I was out of school, but not by much back then. Jesus, I'm old.

And I would go with my old teacher, my old high school teacher. That's awesome. And we'd go to Linux Fest Northwest. Yeah. And so then it's just over the years. It's so much more. It's really, I mean, if you think about the number of people, even if even county people have only been there once, you know, but just especially having been there and seen people who've just kind of wandered in from the community or weren't that big into it or came down from the local school. Or just trying out Linux. They've

heard this thing. Or, hey, there's some event going on here. What is this? What are all these people doing? It's really touched a huge number of people. Speaking of touching people, let's go over and touch our servers. A little bit of touching servers right now. Nothing's better than touching servers, getting your hands-on experience with some open-source

software. And Wes? You here right here? You Wes, you hear right here? You know what I have right here? Well, you got secrets. I got fresh secrets. I've got pages and pages of secrets. You want me to share them with you? Oh, please do. Otherwise, I'll have to steal them after the show.

Understood. Understood. DigitalOcean.com. You go over there and learn about all of the secrets. Use our promo code D-O-Unplugged. D-O-Unplugged. It's one word. You get a $10 credit at DigitalOcean.com. You can get started in less than 55 seconds and spin up a system on their awesome infrastructure. probably have Uncle Joe OS, and they even have free BSD. They got block storage.

They got object storage. Now, what's the difference? What's the difference? How would you describe the difference between block storage? I guess I would describe block storage as, hey, you know how you can hook up a storage device to your Linux box and it shows up as like a dev slash SD device? That's block storage. Object storage, it sounds too meta,

but I would describe it as programmable storage. Yeah, right. It's a higher level of abstraction where instead of thinking about blocks and having to format a file system, you're just saying, hey, I want this file. Put it somewhere for me. And the back end just manages all that stuff and generates the storage for you. It puts it somewhere on all those SSDs. And then you can destroy it.

You can set time expirations. It's great. They got team support if you're an open source group or you're working by yourself and want to bring somebody else in eventually. And everything is super fast networking. 40 gigabit connections coming into the hypervisors. Monitoring and metrics to tell you how things are doing. Load balancing as a service. Firewall at the network level.

And an API that is simple and easy to use with tons of open source applications. Love that API. It is nice. And the nice thing about it is so much stuff's already built around it, too. You can just use it. There's a ton of apps, a ton of scripts. It's supported with a bunch of things, you know, all the tools, Terraform, Vagrant, all the stuff you're already using. Yep, yep.

But when I'm sitting by the fire at night, Wes, and I'm rocking in my chair and sipping on a little whiskey, I think to myself, nothing's like that dashboard. They got a dashboard for days. It's simple. It's easy to use. It's simple. It's easy to use. It's fast. It works on your tablet. It works on your phone. It works on your web browser.

I don't care what you use, and they don't either. And they got apps on top of it. It's so nice. It is so damn nice. I am so appreciative that they have really done this well. And I think that their interface

is actually an API client. I'm not positive about that, but it seems to be as soon as they added something to the API, the interface has it. As soon as they add something to the interface, the an API client. I'm not positive about that, but it seems to be as soon as they added something to the API, the interface has it. As soon as they add something to the interface, the API has it. So I think their super good UI is actually an API client, which is, it's all dog food. Mind-blowing. DigitalOcean.com, create your account, use the promo code D01plugged, and go look at a couple of their different tutorials right now. I like this one. I mentioned

this on Coda Radio recently, how to create a highly available setup with heartbeat and floating ips on ubuntu 1604 lts that's boss level right there and in look at this guide like even if you're not a digital ocean customer just shut up and go over here look at this thing look at this freaking chart yeah this diagram with animations dude and then you notice when you click on it to get a bigger version of the animations it it doesn't take over the full screen. It just pushes the content below down a little bit. Oh, that's so considerate. Look how nice that is.

This is so well formatted that if you literally had no idea what failover and heartbeat was, you could read this and understand it. And if you'd set it up before and just needed a refresher, you could jump around and set it up. It's freaking magic, Wes. It just kind of brings a tear to my eye. DigitalOcean.com. Go over there. Create your account. DOUnplugged is the promo code.

You get the $10 credit. You can try out their $5 rig. Two months for free. It's magic. I assume. There's no other way to explain it. Ponies and fairies. It's the only way.

DigitalOcean.com. Promo code DOUnplugged. And maybe a little Linux and open source in there as well. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. No DevLon, though. Let's talk only way. DigitalOcean.com, promo code D-O, unplugged, and maybe a little Linux and open source in there as well. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. No DevLon, though. Let's talk about platforms.

I actually, this paper I was making noises with here earlier, I printed my statement out, actually. Wow. Okay. So it is secret. I got a printed statement for you, Wes. I got a printed statement. So it is secret. I got a printed statement for you, Wes. I got a printed statement. Lay it on me. A couple of things have happened this week that have pushed this topic, I think, to the front of my mind.

It's all about platforms. It's all about commercial, proprietary, lockdown, closed source, pain in my ass platforms. Pain in your ass too, audience. Let's talk about it for a second. So this is on the backs of a new YouTube and Amazon and Google war. This is on the backs of big leaks coming out about YouTube demonetization

policies and the way they walk people through it. It's all about platforms. It's about building the biggest platform with the most engaged users, with the most control over what they can and can't do youtube is a platform iphone ios platform patreon is a platform libre pay is also a platform it feels like the walls on all of these platforms are closing in tighter and tighter than ever before. And then you combine the weight of net neutrality on top of all this

as if it's about to lock all of these new regimes in, all of these platform regimes into place. Early Linux users watched this as Microsoft used the position of their platform, the Windows desktop, to keep Linux off the desktop, to keep Linux off of hardware. And now these platform wars that used to be the defining thing about the technology industry, the Microsoft platform war, now they happen every single day at an exponential rate across every tech category. every tech category. Just recently, Google has started blocking YouTube on the Echo shows

because Amazon doesn't sell Nest cameras and Chromecasts on Amazon.com. So everybody who's bought an Amazon Echo show to watch YouTube videos, yeah, screw you. Too bad. It's always the users who lose on these platform wars.

The creators, the users, and the large corporation, they don't care. There's no cost to the collateral damage for them. The collateral damage being the end users. And we're starting to see some cracks, I think, in these platforms. There's a couple of open source solutions coming, but they're not quite there yet. So I want to talk about which ones we do have, where they're at, and how we could start using them as Linux users. Now, if to talk about which ones we do have, where they're at, and how we could start using them as Linux users. Now, if you're watching the video version

right now, you're going to see women bending over and showing their asses. You're going to see a guy's junk in tight underwear, and you're going to see an Asian woman showing her breasts. It's not Chris's background. No. I know it's tempting not yet but what it what it is is the youtube guide on how people should decide how they should flag sex nudity or other controversial topics and it's all very fucking subjective what they consider inappropriate and these heroes of youtube

who are answering these things and this is a a real problem. It really shuts down speech. And that's the antithesis of what open source is about. So I want to look at solutions that we can take on as a group to get rid of these platforms. What can we start using in place of YouTube, for example? I mean, there's nothing quite locked in yet, but there are some options on the horizon. And I think for a moment here, I want to talk about PeerTube, which I'm pretty excited about. It's a federated video streaming platform using BitTorrent directly in the web browser with WebTorrent and Angular. And its early days is definitely a work in progress. But if you think about it, legitimately, guys, we have zero chance of some other commercial company coming along and offering streaming alternatives that are commercially viable to YouTube or Dailymotion or Vimeo.

It's not going to happen. It can't. It's just the peering agreements in place and the net neutrality rules that are about to change. The huge backers involved. The massive amount of money, the corporate interest. One organization alone doesn't have enough money to pay the bandwidth and the storage for something like this. It has to be peer-to-peer. The next replacement for Facebook and Twitter and YouTube have to be peer-to-peer and decentralized.

So we have to get this working. and you need something like PeerTube, which is using peer-to-peer software on the back end, and WebTorrent makes all the stuff. They actually have a demo. I'll link to it in the show notes, and they have a GitHub page, but you can go to peertube.cpy.re,

and you can actually start to watch demos, and it's pretty nice. So I'm watching right now a video on PeerTube and it shows how many peers are seeding it, shows me my quality, all of that. And you've got comments down here just like you would on YouTube. Actually, I don't see comments, but it looks just like YouTube and it's streaming over WebTorrent in my browser. One of the nice things about this is that they don't get punished if somebody's video goes viral or somebody gets popular because the more people watch it the more people distributing so it's an obvious replacement and there could be something else that comes along i'd like to hear the

audience's recommendations but peer tube seems like a pretty pretty good replacement for youtube who is they allow these creepy like uh uh elsa videos Have you seen this stuff? Like, Spider-Man has sex with Elsa kind of stuff. Meanwhile, BSD Now and Linux Action News and Ask Noah on a weekly basis get demonetized. We're pretty extreme over here on JB. Yeah, we're super extreme. But meanwhile, Spider-Man can dry hump Elsa and it's totally fine. It can make millions of dollars. It's just good old-fashioned fun.

God forbid Alan Jude talk about ZFS. He does get pretty excited. Yeah, he gets really excited. But this week, the real cluster bomb has been Patreon. They really pissed off a bunch of people. They changed the way the fee structure worked. They essentially raised rates on all of our patrons. They communicated in a way that was slightly disingenuous.

And it caused, as one would expect, an internet outrage mob seeking justice. And I mean, I can't even tell you how many times it was demanded

that I give a response immediately to what Patreon has done. As I record this, I checked a day ago, we've had 17 people cancel their Patreon accounts. No longer supporting Jupiter Broadcasting because of a change Patreon's made.

Something completely out of my control, and ultimately a change that gives the creators more money. But people are pissed because they were already at the line. They couldn't really afford more, and something just changed on them. Now one of the number one solutions that I have had suggested to me is LibrePay. LibrePay is a reoccurrent donations platform. Now, the thing with LibrePay is it suffers the same problem that Facebook and YouTube and Patreon and Twitter all suffer. It's a centralized platform. In fact, because of all the attention they've been receiving recently, it wasn't until today that I could even load their webpage.

People have been telling me, demanding, screaming at me all week to switch to LibrePay. I couldn't even get en.librepay.com to load until today. In fact, I wasn't even sure if it would load for this show so I could show it to you on the screen. They just aren't there yet. It's a centralized server that is kicking out a few hundred bucks a month to creators. There's nothing that's fundamentally different here. They still have to go through the banking system.

They still have to do clearing of credit card transactions. It suffers all of the same damn problems as a centralized platform. Yeah, the server code's open source, but it doesn't solve the problem. Right. There's still this middleman between you and the people. You don't have any control. As long as they do what's in your interest, okay. But as we see, that is not always the case. And sure, you know, I'm some podcaster, but what about the developer of your favorite file system? What about the developer of your favorite Linux desktop application? What about the creator of

your favorite distribution? How do we fund open source software in a world where a platform can make a change that pisses off a huge percentage of your users? And in a world where the internet is ready to go to mob justice mode in two seconds flat. They go from zero to mob justice in two seconds. It takes one tweet, one Facebook post, one link in IRC, full mob justice mode. So how can a content creator or an open source developer secure reliable development? I mean, holy shit, am I glad I'm not Ike Doherty right now.

Am I so glad I'm not Ike trying to develop the Solus project right now? Because people are pissed off about Patreon, and he just went full frickin' time off of Patreon. And people are pulling off. I think he said something like on Late Night Linux, I think he said he had 22 people cancel their subscriptions. That's stressful. That is stressful. Yeah, right, absolutely. We've got to build in a way to prevent this problem.

Because as long as one central authority has control over the platform, they're going to make changes users don't like, especially as Patreon begins to get more profitable. They start looking at larger creators who have people that are maybe donating more money, $10,000 more a month, creators. That's the real that's the sweet spot for them. Yes. There's less incentive to work with people that are supporting one or two creators. So everybody says go to LibrePay. But LibrePay has some of the same limitations and essentially has the same fee structure as Patreon. What do you do? Yeah, you know, in this other context we talk about, like with these services, yeah, you're just like, you know, you know, you might have to move. And that works okay for the personal use space. But when you're trying to run a small business or you're trying to be an independent creator, that kind of churn ruins it.

The only long-term solution I can think is you have to get rid of a centralized platform, a central point of failure. And you see, it's funny that we're having all these conversations about YouTube demonetization or YouTube censorship, net neutrality, or Twitter being shit. All of these conversations are happening at once. And there's another big conversation that's happening right now that may actually be giving us the answer to the LibrePay problem, to the Patreon problem, to the PayPal problem, to the credit card transaction processing problem. Like I could build my own system for Jupyter Broadcasting. Donation page, a subscription

model, and just get rid of Patreon. You know, have somebody write something that uses Stripe for the back end, with a custom page, and all of it is managed by us internally. Maybe even hire another person to actually stay on top of all that, like Philip DiPranco has. But I'm still using Stripe.

I'm still using a central clearinghouse. And Stripe is still trying to do batch processing with banks. I'm still stuck to a platform that doesn't have my best interests or my users' best interests at heart. But for weeks and months and years, we've been talking about something that solves this problem today. It's free. It's open source. It's available to anyone on the internet. It's cryptocurrency. See, cryptocurrency solves this problem. There's no bank. There's no central

clearinghouse. There's no processor. There's no middleman. You have your cryptocurrency and you send it to your creator. Now, I know it's too early days for this to actually take off and replace Patreon. But again, a lot of this stuff is. So is PeerTube. It's early days. And we've all talked about Bitcoin, but not a lot of discussion has been had on these shows about Dash. Now, Dash, just as an example, I'm not saying everybody should go buy Dash, but Dash is an example of something that one day could replace PayPal, could replace Patreon, could replace LibrePay. And they've done a couple of things that are better than Bitcoin. You know, do you remember one of the cool things about Skype before Microsoft bought them was they had this really nice peer-to-peer network that the FBI bitched that they couldn't get access to.

Yes, I do. That was a big deal back then. Yeah, right. And then as the Skype network grew, you had this problem where the peer-to-peer network was so large that you didn't know who was online. You couldn't really coordinate it all. So then you had these master nodes develop, which was still part of the peer-to-peer network. And then that would sort of be like the master repository of information. Dash sort of launches with that concept.

They call it a next generation P2P network. At Dash, its core is a unique, fully incentivized peer-to-peer network where miners are rewarded for securing the blockchain and master nodes are rewarded for validating, storing, and serving the blockchain to users. Now, what does that mean? What does any of that shit mean? It means they have reliable, fast transactions that don't have a huge transaction fee and a huge leg like Bitcoin, and it's anonymous as shit. That's the thing. Masternodes represent a new layer of network servers that work in the highly secure cluster called quorums to provide a variety of decentralized services like instant transactions,

privacy and self-governance, and eliminating the threat of low-cost network attacks. So this is an area, it's a self-governing, self-funding protocol. It's anonymous. It solves some of the tracking problems that Bitcoin has. It solves some of the transaction validation problems that Bitcoin has.

And currently, as we record this episode, the Dash coin is at $800 a coin. So it's also a pretty high-functioning, high-value cryptocurrency. Yeah, last year that was big money in the cryptocurrency game. And it still is, really. It really is. Yeah, last year that was big money in the cryptocurrency game.

Yeah, and it still is, really. It really is, yeah, absolutely. It's open source. It's fully open source. It has a masternode system for fast transactions. And you could see how open source developers and content creators could potentially build a funding model around something like this. Guys, I know some of you out there hate cryptocurrencies.

It's going to have to be something like this. It's going to have, guys, I know some of you out there hate cryptocurrencies. It's going to have to be something like this. It has to be. Because anytime you come back to a clearinghouse, anytime you come back to the banks, you end up with your PayPal, your Square, your Patreon situations every damn time. There's no way around it. And in particular, in some of these cases,

you're uniquely tied to US institutions as well, which for 30% of you out there that listen to this show is not applicable to you. Right. And we've seen a ton of problems with like maybe there's different laws. You're developing open source that's legal in your country, but not in the U.S. There's all kinds of things. Jeez, that could...

Think about this for a second. Think about all of the talk recently about installing backdoors into encryption and secure protocols. About how all of that could change when if you are a open source rogue developer making software that doesn't have backdoor encryption, I could see the federal government pressuring PayPal to discontinue your donations. Yeah, absolutely.

We have seen that with WikiLeaks. Yep. Once it becomes political, I mean, all things are out the window. And again, the idea of this segment here is how do we create something that's truly decentralized, that is platform free, that if you were today to have all of the time in the world to build all these different like a peer tube system and a dash power donation system, you could really divorce yourself from these information silos on the Internet. But there's one last piece that I think is fairly important. Not a big fan of social networking, but I can't deny the value. It is

useful. And this is another area where we have a pretty hard lock right now with Twitter and Facebook. Now we all know about Mastodon. It's the world's largest free open source decentralized microblogging network where you can really build a custom community. So now we're talking PeerTube, peer-to-peer torrent-based YouTube. Now we're talking Dash, peer-to-peer decentralized funding models. And now Mastodonon peer-to-peer decentralized federated microblogging for communities all kinds of aspects or or maybe instead of mastodon if mastodon's because it's not my thing it's not my thing if mastodon's not your thing maybe something like matrix rocket chat something like these where we have individual components

now that are getting pretty damn good. They've come a long way. Yeah, especially Mastodon and Matrix and Rocket Chat. They could truly replace Slack and Twitter and Facebook and Skype. Decentralized, federated, ready to go. Open source code. Nobody owns it. These components are coming together. Cryptocurrencies play a

piece in this. Mastodon plays a piece in this. WebTorrents and Peertube play a piece. I don't know if Peertube is going to be it, but surely some of you sat around and gone, what the hell is it going to take to replace Facebook? What's it going to take to MySpace Facebook? What's it going to take to replace YouTube? What's it going to take to replace Facebook? What's it going to take to MySpace Facebook? What's it going to take to replace YouTube? What's it going to take to replace Google Docs? It seems like an intractable... Like, when Windows 98, second edition released,

and Windows 2000 released, I couldn't foresee a world where the entire industry wasn't completely dominated by Microsoft. Yeah, that was the future then. It was impossible to see it I couldn't foresee a world where the entire industry wasn't completely dominated by Microsoft. Yeah. That was the future then. It was impossible to see it because Microsoft owned the entire landscape at that moment. That's what serious people did to get work done.

Yes, to make money. We're at the same point now where there's these open source initiatives, these P2P initiatives, these decentralized initiatives that are making cracks in these platforms. Nobody's giving you one solution that ties it all together. Nobody's just going to give you a package where you can go create an account and link it with your Facebook account and get going. It's not there yet. But if you know how to spin up a few servers, you know how to set up a few systems, you could replace a lot of these information empires now with open source software. And I don't know if it's the other, I don't think any of it's quite there for JB because the core problem with people that are

creating a lot of content or people that are writing a lot of code and open source is that's what you have time for. That's what you have passion for. And that's what you have time for. You don't have time to go build this stuff. At the end of the day, we've tried to use matrix. We ended up back on Slack because we don't have time to run matrix. We ended up back on Slack because we don't have time to run Matrix. But I feel good that it's close. Like it's so close that I could almost taste it. Like I could almost launch a podcasting network based on these technologies today, almost, and get somewhere with it.

I wonder, too, does that open any room for, you know, small businesses, right? Could you have a local IT firm that runs it for you? But then you still have the option. Should they go out of business or whatever else, you could take that infrastructure and bring it in-house if you absolutely needed to. I can't say who, but I was just talking to a commercial company that wants to go – they want to take something they've been developing for 20 years and they want to make it open source. And they're trying to avoid the whole throw it over the wall and now all of a sudden here's a huge open source code dump. Right. Because they want people to actually engage with them and improve it and maintain it. And so they're at this stage right now. Like how do we build a community around this in a way that's genuine, that gets them engaged, that isn't tied to these platforms that people can just pull the rug out from underneath us? These are conversations I've been having with them and I'll talk about more when they go public.

But it's a real problem and it's something I've been thinking about in the context of Jupyter Broadcasting recently, especially with all the Patreon stuff going on. I'd really like to hear what the audience thinks is best, what works best for them out of these solutions we talked about. Right, because they're the other really important half of this whole puzzle. Totally. That's the whole point of this is that we don't want middlemen. We can't have these kinds of fluctuations that really hurt the communication and the relationship between us and the audience. I want to build a business and I want to sit down here and I want to work

and I want to make shows and I don't want to be sitting here worrying about jumping funding platforms every two years. That just is not sustainable. It's dangerous. It's risky. That's in the way of you making this awesome content. At the same time, I've got to be where the audience is. None of these answer the whole network effect problem other than perhaps the way of you making this awesome content. At the same time, I got to be where the audience is. And I,

none of these answer the whole network effect problem, other than perhaps people just understand this is the way things have to go. But, boy, Wes, look at this stuff, you know, PeerTube and whatnot. I am very excited about the future. It's not quite there yet, but jeez, if I'm not going to be watching it

every single week to see where it gets. Right, and there are a lot of issues. As you just pointed out, right? There's not that level of polish, that level of integration, the level of constantly everything wants you to use this account. It's tied in everywhere. If you have it, it's easy. Right. Or apps on every device, et cetera, et cetera. There are a lot of those blockers. And sometimes, especially running a business, those are enough where you're just like, I don't have time for this. It's not important enough. But a lot of those are ultimately, I think, surmountable problems. But isn't that why it also has to start with the technical elite,

the open source crowd? It needs some early adopters to start shaving down these rough edges and making this shit usable and productizable. Somebody has to do it. I think this is too where we need to do better as a technological elite, doing better interface with people in design. And we've talked about some of this on this show and other shows on the network,

but bringing those people in, you know, an open source version of the whole product manager, design, UX, UI consultant. And so we can have this start with, yes, it works for the technological elite, but something that ultimately can be palatable to everyone. What do you think, Bashful? Is the network effect too much to get over? You because if if i build these things it doesn't actually mean

anybody will come well that's always going to be the challenge i mean look at the same thing like even with the chat program if you break it down like unless your people are there you're not going anywhere so something something it's a chicken and egg something's got to be there first that's going to draw people over there whether it's people whether it's content maybe it's a chicken and egg. Something's got to be there first that's going to draw people over there, whether it's people, whether it's content, maybe it's exclusivity. I mean, it's a little hard to tell, right? I agree. And Eric, the IT guy, you were pointing out that, yeah, this is all good. But then once you do all of this, now you're maintaining servers. You're like NextCloud. Like if I go set up NextCloud, I'm maintaining NextCloud instead of just using Dropbox. And that's a split of my focus, isn't it?

Right. And I'm really torn on this particular issue because I've spent the last year separating myself from the Apple walled garden. I've given up iCloud Drive and moved to NextCloud. That's all well and good for myself. That's all well and good for myself. But what about my spouse who is tied very, very concretely to our iOS and to our macOS devices, much less the rest of my family who are very tech illiterate? And so do I just start walking over to them and hand them a Linux laptop with NextCloud and all these other services on it? And become like the IT guy for the whole family. Right. You may have to be the admin and you're not getting paid for this.

Yeah. That's a great point. And the thing is they don't have your moral convictions or your motivations, right? So while they care about their technology working well and they care about having power over it, you know, they just want their shit to work. Can I cast PeerTube to my TV in the living room? It's time to watch TV. Exactly. Exactly.

And you're completely right. You sort of take the burden on as the advocate. And that's why I feel like some places will be able to be early. Like Jupiter Broadcasting can be an early adopter of this before, say, PewDiePie or some other large YouTuber can because they're sort of tied down by the popularity of their YouTube platform where we have a technical audience. popularity of their YouTube platform where we have a technical audience. We've always just viewed YouTube as one of the many publishing platform, not our only publishing platform. Like maybe Linus Tech Tips does, you know, they were there all in on YouTube. We're like, eh, we'll send our videos there. But really, we're all in on our RSS. It doesn't define us.

Go subscribe to the RSS if you want the canonical versions of our show without getting censored. But we'll publish there because they got apps for days. They got every single platform. If you got shitty balance situations like I do, YouTube is one of the few things that actually works. Like there's reasons to be there. Right. But yeah, it's really hard to sell it unless people understand the technical reasons. So Eric, I take your point completely because it would be essentially our job to make all that happen. And then you have the fact that really it's a huge overhead for all of the projects or other content creators. It's not an easy solution yet. Do you have any follow-up thoughts, Eric, before we move on? Well, I mean, my family I could pull it off with, but what about my neighbors? And what about their family? Someone who doesn't have an open source enthusiast like a lot of us here at JB? Yeah. I don't know. Maybe they're unsavable.

Just like the normals won't use encryption ever unless it's done for them automatically. I don't know. I wonder if there's any room for local government or small community-run services, especially in some sort of mesh system, right? You know, your community association perhaps has a few of these services, maybe just for

intra-community communication, but possibly providing more, you know, more actual services. Wouldn't that be something like a community mesh network? Yeah. I like that. That connects out to a greater internet at that point, potentially, to like retrieve other broader things. Yeah. And maybe you pay a little bit. Maybe you've hired a greater internet at that point, potentially, to retrieve other broader things. Yeah. Maybe you pay a little bit. Maybe you've hired a local admin to help keep everything running. I don't know.

I feel like I want to punt to the audience and ask them what they think about solutions to replace these information silos, these proprietary platforms. And what do you think about Linux users brunting this a little bit? You know, like, you've got to go to a special website. Maybe you've got to go create a Mastodon account. I don't know. I'm not a big Mastodon fan. But you know what I'm saying? Just from a theoretical standpoint, should we be the ones to brunt this to help the rest of the web?

Or should we just get to sit back and enjoy it just like everybody else? Why does that have to be our fucking job? Why has it got to be us that does this? Why is it our burden? You know, I'm not Batman. I'd answer you, but I'm busy watching YouTube over here. Liar, you're busy building Gentoo right now. Actually, Mr. Wes, why don't

we do a little Gentoo check-in? How's it going over there? Got a thumbs up or a thumbs down right now? What are you thinking? Well, it's going pretty well right now we're emerging xfs progs because i know how much you love xfs i do i couldn't i couldn't build this thing on ext4 with you around i mean i would quietly judge you i don't know if i would have vocalized it i would have seen the look in your eyes so we're doing that uh then we're going to get some bootloading going and then later we're going to see will will it come back online? All right. That's pretty good.

So is that what I'm hearing in the background right now is XFS building? Oh, yeah, absolutely. That's nice. I didn't realize that if you output the terminal to the sound card, we could actually hear it. Just typing it right there? Yeah. That's nice, Wes. I think I could fall asleep to this. Wes building software.

You wake up, you feel really productive. It's awesome. All right. Well, speaking of feeling really productive, linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Go there to sign up for a free 7-day trial. It's a platform to learn more about Linux, but more importantly, it's a platform

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They'll match the distribution you've chosen for your courseware. You're busy. I understand that. And they got course schedulers for that. And they got learning paths to go in deep, right on the specifics, like series of content. Time to get up to speed on OpenStack, let's say, just as an example. They got learning paths that will do that for you. You got a couple of days to get up to speed. They got that for you.

They got certification training if that's your goal. And they have practice exams and quizzes to help you get ready for all of that. So when you go in to take the big test, you kind of feel like it's old hat. And that's invaluable. They also have nuggets where, again, with the holidays, family, I understand, you're busy, a little bit of nuggets here and there. You go in there, you get a little sparkly bit of wisdom,

deep dive for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 45 minutes. I don't care. Depends on the topic. And then you walk away, you're like, damn, I just got some value. Damn, learn one single topic. LinuxAcademy.com. Sign up for a free seven-day trial.

Community stacked full of Jupyter Broadcasting members. iOS and Android apps so you can study on the go. Tools to listen to like lesson audio or read stuff offline. No internet connection required. And then public profiles to make sure you can show your employer, your contractor, or just yourself all of the great things you've accomplished. It's gotten so easy, too, to sell Linux Academy. Like if you're trying to learn some new stuff on the job, they have a ton of good materials you can send to your boss or just like walk them around.

They've got a great site and it's really useful. And it does have all those tools so that your boss or others can check in and make sure that people are actually learning. Yeah. And they have team training, too, which is nice as well if you do have a group of people. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. You go there, you get the free seven-day trial and support the show. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged.

And a big thank you to Linux Academy. And as we record this here episode just two hours ago, they have announced new courseware. They're always adding new courseware. You're constantly getting value out of the subscription. But they've just added a whole bunch of new stuff on AWS, on serverless applications, all of that stuff. So if you're hearing that stuff thrown around a lot, definitely go check out Linux Academy. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. And a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. So, Mr. Wes, as we sit here today,

many, many people have asked us about Gentoo, so it's time for us to do a little Gentoo. And we've been covering Gentoo now for weeks on the show. Building up to it, some people thought it would never happen. But I'm happy to report, for the last two weeks now, going on three weeks, Mr. West Payne has been building a Gentoo

install. And we've been checking in on that Gentoo install now. Up your shaft. So, Mr. Wes Payne, has been building a Gen 2 install. And we've been checking in on that Gen 2 install now. Up your shaft. So, Mr. Wes. That's me. Last week, we decided going on Sway. This week, you've decided on XFS. Oh, also last week, you picked your kernel build options as well.

Damn! This is going pretty good. All kinds of fun, unique options here. So what is next on your horizon? So you did a stage three install. Let's recap. So you did a stage three install after we decided, well, what's the audience most likely to do?

So you did a stage three, which is all pretty good. So what's next after we get XFS built? After that, we're going to make sure that it actually reboots. That's a big step right there. Really? Really. Well, you never know. I've been running it from the install environment, actually reboots that'll be that's a that's a big step right there really um really you know you never know i've been running it from the install environment so we've we've been a little privileged in that respect i'm pretty confident it will i think the kernel's pretty nice so it

should just come right up now to all the file systems now have you uh have you done a gen 2 install before or is this your first is this your first year on the show i i was there like one not my first ever but the last time was probably like six years ago, and I was also building it to run on a Wii, so it was a little bit different. I'm sorry, what? Yeah. I'm sorry, what? It was a little bit of a different environment.

Let me check a fact check in here. Yeah, I just got a note from my producers here. You can't install Linux on a Wii, so turns out you can. What? That's right. You put Gentoo on there? Yeah, and it worked super well. What turns out you can. What? That's right. You put Gen 2 on there? Yeah, and it worked super well. What did you do with Gen 2?

The Wii was hooked up to the whole... At the time, I didn't have a really good... Stop it. It was before the Raspberry Pi was super popular or anything like that. So it wasn't a great streaming option. But I got Gen 2, then I installed M Player, and I could just stream stuff right to it, play it all around my house. It was awesome. Does Nintendo

have internal storage you could write to? Like you got access? You could put in an SD card. And you're using this to watch videos on your TV? Yeah, watch some videos, play a lot of audio,

play live streams from the internet, all kinds of fun stuff. I just, I'm having a hard time understanding the use case where somebody goes to themselves, hey, you know what I'm going to do

is I'm going to take a Wii and I'm going to put Linux on this thing and then I'm going to do? I'm going to take a Wii and I'm going to put Linux on this thing and then I'm going to use MPV to watch videos when you could just get a Roku or something. This was before those days. Roku was maybe pretty primitive and I had an additional Wii sitting around.

Fair enough. It was perfect. But I've never done a full traditional PC-based Gentoo install. So it's been actually a lot of fun. I got to say I've been walking through the handbook. It's really quite nice. I'm used to the – a little more barren version of like the Arch wiki style.

I've also installed Arch like a thousand times. So I'm pretty familiar with it. The Gen 2 wiki does feel a little more verbose. Yeah. And it's not a bad thing. They've got some – it's a little harder for the like 100-foot view, overview. Just quick like I want this. What's the key that I really need?

Because I don't need to like – I'm not configuring this once and for all. I can emerge plenty of stuff later if I need to. I just want to know like what do I need. But there's a lot of really well-commented configuration files. There's obviously a lot of care has been put into this in certain terms of just getting you started. There's a lot I think I still need to learn. I'm excited to have this system around to play with it. But so far, it's been a pretty good experience,

especially considering that I'm doing this while also trying to do the show. Now, there is a configuration file, like the central configuration file in a Gentoo install, which I don't remember if you get to at a stage three, where you go in there and you add your use flags. Oh, yeah. Have you done this already?

Yes. I didn't configure them too much at this time. I was trying to keep it pretty simple. Yeah, that is kind of like the best thing about Gen 2. Maybe that can be something we revisit after this thing is a little more working. Because you can put a couple things in there that everything you build on your system follows those build rules. So maybe it's like certain optimizations for your processor or your video card or multiple cores or whatever it could be. Right.

And then you add all that in there and then everything you build gets a slight advantage, just a little advantage. And the idea is, you know, you do it for all of the things on the system from the most basic tools all the way up to your graphical environment and every time maybe you get like a two to five percent edge right you can actually target the architecture instruction set that you're actually running on yeah and you get all that flexibility where like maybe you don't like that they've configured this software with all the optional dependencies or maybe right right right you can start to choose those things and be like i really like this lean and mean or I like it really fat. So that's the thing about Linux distributions, right, is they're built for an Intel 64-bit compatible system.

And that's sort of the overall large target that they go for. But in Gen 2, you can say, well, yeah, but I have this specific version of Intel processor with these specific features, and I want you to build optimally for that or close to it. And some people believe it makes a big difference overall in your performance because every little thing has that edge. I don't know if it's true or not. In my experience, you almost don't notice it. But one of the things that brought me to Gentoo early on, and the reason why I ended up putting it on a ton of servers,

even though it doesn't seem like a good server OS, is those use flags and those build time options allowed me to install versions of Samba and Cups that could do stuff that none of the other distributions could do at the time. And so there is a place for that with Gen 2. So I'll be really curious to see. Maybe we'll talk about that more in a future episode when you've gotten a little bit further down the road. Right. And there's more things to, you know, especially when you're getting your graphical environment applications, that's really where it matters. The basic command line tools, like how fast can they be?

I will say that to your point, though, like, you know, it may not be, it's not the server OS that you'd want to run just like, hey, I'm running a server. But if you're a large organization or you have very specific needs or you're targeting specific hardware, it gives you this middle ground of control between I'm rolling my own full distribution and using whatever they've provided, right?

You have this flexibility that for some people is like, is the right choice. And it does kind of feel like your OS when you're all done, like, because it's, you know, like it's been built. Oh, yeah, that's right. It's been built with this in mind, because I always wanted to build with this. And if you're doing it on the server, you can probably also have, you know, build farms and other things. You can produce one big tarball artifact that gets pushed to server.

So there's a lot of options. Yeah, sure. All right, Wes, well. It's been good to follow. Bringing back the old memories. The days when I actually bought two Apple XSERVs. Did you ever see the Apple XSERV? Yeah.

You know about the Apple XSERV? I do, actually. Oh, my gosh. Nobody knows about the Apple XSERV, I swear. Because didn't sell a lot, and they don't make them anymore. No. But the coolest— They got right out of that market. So in full disclosure, I came into a shop that had two of these rigs, and they were neat.

It was right when Apple switched over to Intel, and one of the cool things that Gen 2 supported about the Apple XServe was the CPU meters right on the front. Did you see these? Did you ever actually see Apple XServes in production? No, I've used them. I'd SSH to them. I didn't actually get to see them racked. Well, okay. So one of the great things about the Apple XServes, and I wish more servers would do this today because go figure, Apple did it, is they had on the front LED indicators of CPU load. So you could look just at your rack and see how hard all of your... Look at that. Yeah.

And then they had this disk called the XServe RAID, which you could manage the RAID at a hardware level, and then they would just show up to the operating system, Linux included. And so I walk in, and they had two XSERVs and an X-Ray. And the X-Ray also had a CPU meter on it so you could see how hard your disks were working. That's awesome. And I walked in there and I saw one day, I saw these silver Apple servers in a rack. And I was like, what the fuck is this?

This can't be right. And I see these little LED lights bouncing and I'm like, what is going on? And of course they were crashing like crazy because they were running something called Mac OS X. Never heard of it. But I put Linux on there and I put Gentoo on there and it supported the LED indicators and boy, did they stop having problems.

And then I attached the X-Ray storage. It was pretty neat actually. I went in thinking there's no way in hell I'm going to get Gentoo working on this custom-ass Apple hardware. And sure enough, it ran for three years in production. See, I wish I had done that because mine was running OSX, and at the time I was writing C programs to run physics simulations,

and I had to go carefully recompile them or get them ready because I was developing on Linux, of course. Oh, yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, it was pretty great. It was pretty great because they were ready to toss these machines out because the Macs just kept failing. And the X-Serves were decently built, too. One of the things that was kind of nice about them back in the day was that they had these removable storage drives that were actually pretty convenient. Now, this is pretty common stuff, but it was kind of nice back then.

And so to be able to put Gentoo on them. Apple Touch. Gentoo. Gen 2 on them. Apple touch. Gen 2, and then I believe I had 700 users that were printing daily, at least sometimes multiple, often, often, multiple times a day, through these two XSERV printers, or servers, running Gen 2 as CUPS servers. Just so these two XSERVs running Gen 2 would run CUPS and Samba, and they would provide all of the printing services to a 700-user bank. And every time you came in and you got a balance statement or you made a

deposit and they gave you a receipt or anything like that, it was all being generated through these Apple XSERVs running Gentoo for a bank. That's fascinating. And it was one of those things where they would have customers that were sitting there waiting for the printouts and the printouts weren't coming. Oh, I'm sorry, ma'am. Maybe if you come back tomorrow, we can give you a printout. Stuff you just can't do in banking. No. You don't do that in banking. No. You're a business. And that was when they ran macOS. And when we switched them over to Gentoo, those problems went away. It was pretty, pretty good. Pretty good. And then eventually- Sounds like we're having a little Gentoo love affair right

here. Eventually,ups came to Mac OS but that was much later. Anyways, keep up the good work Wes. I'm glad you're going with XFS.

And that is a little Gentoo challenge update. I'm having a ton of fun so if anyone else has never installed Gentoo, you just want something

fun to do, play around with Linux, I recommend it. Yeah, I know we got a couple of people that are doing it along at home. Let us know how it's going

and let's see, I think now've got a couple of people that are doing it along at home. Let us know how it's going. And let's see, I think now is the time for people to start betting on if Wes is going to have to reload at some point. Something goes wrong. That is possible. So you start taking your wages on that right now. Will Wes Payne have to reload his Gentoo installation? Stay tuned and find out. But in the meantime, we're going to leave you with that. We'll be back next week.

We've got lots of stuff in store. The year isn't over yet, and neither is your unplugged program. If you'd like to join us live next week, in fact, come a little early next week, because I think we're going to be recording some of our holiday episodes next Tuesday over at jblive.tv. Go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash counter to get this show and all of the shows you may want to catch live converted to your local time zone by robots

that are likely paid in Litecoin. Let's go with that. Litecoin. Also the subreddit linuxunplugged.reddit.com. Thanks so much for joining us and we'll see you right back here not tomorrow, not the next day, but next tuesday Get it out of here. Get the hell out of here.

Get out of here. Get it out of here Levi did pretty good, didn't he? He was a good studio pup He did great Yeah Yeah, I forgot I was like, I wasn't even sure where he was at

He just was sleeping behind me the whole time What a good dog What a good dog Alright, let's see if we can get a title for this thing Mumble Room, thank you guys You were excellent as always Tight and concise I appreciate it JVTitles.com what do you think

wes what should we name the son of a bitch well i gotta look at the titles first got some good suggestions here saving the world one pit at a time nice pit one at a time i do like that uh that's pretty good. Let's see if we can get, let's see, kill all systemd, platforming war zones, look at you. So, yeah, something about open source alternatives would be good. Open source options. Options for open source. My nose itches today.

I was having some allergies. I've had some of those too. It's been rough this year. I don't know. I got a picture of the new dog on the Twitters if you want to see it. It's so cute. Mr. Record. Record. Record.

Levi, do you want to be my new best friend? He does. He does. He really does. Perfect. That rejection was going to be pretty hard. Yeah. No, he wants to be your best friend badly.

My nose itches, and I'm sick and tired of having allergies. All episode. I was basically scratching my nose and trying not to sneeze. You did a pretty good job. I had one sneeze. I did have one sneeze. It was unavoidable. I couldn't help it.

What about long live the X-Serve? There we go. Yeah, right. That'd be good. That'd be good. It's almost like it's like, I don't know how to help it. What about long live the X-Serve? There we go. Yeah, right. That'd be good. That'd be good. It's almost like it's like, I don't know how to describe it. It's like it buzzes. My nose is buzzing with itching right now.

And like no matter how much you touch it, it's not going to change. It itches more. It itches more. It doesn't matter. It just constantly itches more, and it's driving me crazy. I'm sorry. I'm sorry about the sniffing and sneezing in the show, guys. Punishing content creators, that's not bad where was that somebody submitted punishing content creators that's not bad what do you think wes what do you think uh nothing's perfect

bashful you had four XSERVs? I didn't see that. Nice, Bashful. Nice, yeah. Yeah, it was quite a while ago, but we had them around. Yeah. They ran OS X for a while, and then they got repurposed to Linux and became a cluster. Yeah.

Nice. Yeah. Which version of Linux do you remember? What were we running at the time? I thought it was like... Yellow Dot? Yeah, pretty much. I don't think there were any other options were they intel or were they actually power pc now they think about it power pc yeah at least the ones i had were yeah no i don't even think they ever made them as uh x86 now they think about it i think they were all power

pc servers which was what was so cool about them now that i recall yeah Yeah, at first thought, when you asked me about the distro, I was going to say, oh, it must be Red Hat, because I was thinking yum, but... Yeah, no Yellow Dog. Yeah, exactly. Gotta get that Yellow Dog update manager from somewhere, after all. Yep, that's right.