LINUX Unplugged - Episode 236: Microsoft’s Big Secret | LUP 236
Episode Date: February 14, 2018Chris goes to Microsoft & gets the inside scoop on the awkward situation Microsoft finds themselves in with Windows & why they’ve been releasing more code as open source.Plus we check in and & wrap ...up the Plasma Desktop challenge, Daniel Foré sets the record straight on the week’s Elementary OS news & more!
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Let's see, Dan, just before you go, will you say,
welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show?
Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show, dude.
This is Linux Unplugged, episode 236, for February 13th, 2018.
Welcome to Linux Unplugs, your weekly Linux talk show that's reporting back from the front lines of the desktop.
My name is Chris.
My name is Wes.
Hello, Wes. I'm very excited about today's show.
We've got a ton of great stuff. We do. We do. We have some follow-up items that are quite choice if you had an opportunity to listen to 235.
But there's a big embarrassing story for Apple this week, and us open-source enthusiasts can't help but laugh a little bit.
Turns out Razer, not so interested in supporting Linux after all, maybe put off those plans for a laptop.
But KDE's got you covered with a new Slimbook 2.
We'll take a look at that.
Gotcha, covered with a new Slimbook 2.
We'll take a look at that.
And then Mr. Foray is here.
Mr. Foray from the esteemed Elementary OS Project to tell us about why the hell they're jumping from 0.4 to 5.0.
What kind of gumption?
A whole new world.
We're going to figure that out.
Plus, last Friday, since we gathered here together,
I went down to Microsoft.
I visited the third floor
of one of the swankiest offices I've ever
been in, and
I asked them all of the
questions. Everything from
literally, are you trying to kill Ubuntu?
To why the hell are you
open sourcing.NET Core and
PowerShell? Wow.
Yeah. And they just let me ask whatever question I
want. I'm going to play some of that for you here on the show.
Talk about Azure and Linux and about
where that's going and the super
awkward position
that it seems Microsoft has found themselves
in with Windows. Plus, we will
talk about our
Plasma Challenge. We'll do a little check-in
on the Plasma Challenge and see where everybody's at, see who's moving on,
see who's sticking around.
There's tons coming up.
So let's not go a moment further without saying
holler at our mumble room.
Time-appropriate greetings, Virtual Lug.
Hep hep.
Hello.
Hello.
Hello.
Welcome to BSD Unplugged.
What? Get that guy out of here.
Who let him in here?
All right, guys.
Well, we have so much to get into this week.
And I have it all opened up in a tab on Firefox.
This is like, by the way, just totally random.
But I don't know.
I'm like week four into Firefox now, version 58 right now.
I never thought I'd hear you say it.
Yeah.
This is like the third or fourth unplugged with no Chrome.
No Chrome.
How's it going?
I mean, you're still here.
You don't seem to be pulling your hair out.
I think my favorite feature is how Firefox restores tabs.
Instead of opening a new window and then populating that window with all of these random-ass tabs,
it just resumes all of the tabs in the window that I have open.
And the reason why I like that is because I can do it while my browser is on camera,
and you have no idea I just did that.
Just all silently in the background without lagging out my browser, without lagging out my OS.
Poor broadcaster's tip for you.
I know, and my battery life's way better too.
Anyways, totally random.
And also random this week, I thought we'd start with kind of an embarrassing story for Apple.
They had some forced open source disclosure this week.
Did you see this?
The iBoot firmware.
Yeah, they call it iBoot.
Of course.
What else would you call it?
I don't know.
Anything but iBoot, to be honest with you.
Anything, actually, but iBoot would be what I'd call it.
Well, uBoot was taken.
Anyways, it sounds like an intern or somebody at the level of an intern posted Apple's super secret firmware source code onto GitHub for whatever reason.
They like the jail cell.
And within hours, within about a day or so, Apple got a DMCA complaint filed with the GitHub company. But it's sort of like no going back on this kind of thing.
Once this thing is out there, there's really no taking it back.
And you've got to wonder if maybe jailbreakers and hackers can use this stuff.
And what's weird is Apple's statement.
Apple responded with a comment, something about,
we do not rely on the obscurity of our source code
to enforce its security.
Yeah, like one of those, boom.
We were just happy to have it as a layer there for a while.
Yeah, for as long as we could.
Yeah, it sounded like the person involved
was pressured from some of the community
that wanted information about, you know,
how to develop jailbreak and other such applications.
I boot.
And then it's leaked further than that.
It's a second stage bootloader, Wes.
It's just so, I don't know.
There's something about all of Apple stuff.
You got the secure enclave.
You got the iBoot.
You got the T2 chip in the iMac Pro.
It really feels like Apple is circling in on jailbreakers and the Hackintosh community
just to give them the old traditional Apple butt wiener in about another year.
Like it's all of the things are lining up right now.
The T2 chip is going to be something that will undoubtedly ship in new MacBook Pros and the new Mac Pro.
And that is literally a iPhone system on a chip that verifies the cryptographic integrity of the Mac operating system.
I mean that's where their heart's been for a long time now.
There's no way the Hackintosh community is going to have a quick remedy to that that's
going to be easy for anybody.
And then, and that's just going to populate across all of the Mac platform.
And then you combine it with all of the other techniques that they're doing, like with
assigning of applications and the Mac App Store. It's just the Hackintosh community can't have more than two years.
I don't think you're wrong, and a lot of this is in the name of security, and a lot of it can really be understood.
Yeah, yeah.
Honestly.
We complain about things that some of this actually does solve, but from our perspective as the 1% techie crowd, it's not.
But OK.
But put yourself in the position of maybe you're one of these companies that's really buddy-buddy with IBM.
And IBM now preaches the gospel of Apple.
And they come in and they say replace all of your Windows 7 and Windows XP machines with iPads and MacBooks.
I already did that.
It's fine.
It's easy.
Okay, sorry.
Anyways.
That's just so funny.
Like, what are you going to do, right?
Anyways, so you go in there and you replace all your machines with Macs because that's
cheap.
And then you really want to get to the point where you can verify that the operating system
is secure and the applications are secure.
And so it's kind of within the corporation's best interest that Apple does lock this shit down.
Yeah, I mean, absolutely, right?
You could even say the Hackintosh community isn't even a factor in their decision-making process.
Well, they're not.
Yeah, they're not large.
Why would it be?
I think it's really just been a perhaps Apple being nice or not really caring about it up to this point.
But if it gets in the way of some of their security and marketing objectives,
then they really have no reason to let them benefit. I wonder if we could figure out,
like, wouldn't it be amazing if somebody could figure out, like, well, it's going to be
one in 15 Hackintosh users become desktop Linux users or something like that. That would be.
Anyways, here's kind of a fun thing about Apple using the DMCA
to take down the code off of GitHub.
Under penalty of perjury, on the case of Apple,
that means that the source code has to be legit
because if Apple is using the DMCA to take down that source code
and then they go to court over it
and it turns out it's not legitimately their source code,
they're screwed.
In other words, that means the source code
that now tons and tons and tons and tons of people have copies of is legitimate source code because they use the DMCA, which confirms it's legitimate, which is funny how that kind of works.
Right.
You're really enjoying yourself on this one.
I am.
It's nice to see you happy.
Thank you.
Thank you. Because, you know, then I reflect on another laptop company like Razer who was offered the source code to update firmwares on Razer laptops.
And they said, no, thanks.
This is, of course, by one of the folks involved with the Linux vendor firmware project where they are shipping firmware updates via GNOME software and other mechanisms.
We've talked about it a lot on this show.
One of my favorite things.
We've talked about it a lot on this show.
One of my favorite things. Absolutely.
And so one of the developers emailed Razor and said,
what could I do to help you start shipping your firmware updates?
How about I will write you code from scratch,
example code that you could actually just take and use that would be ready to go.
In fact, how about I do all of the work, I hook everything up for you,
you just got to give me some of the details and it's good to go. And nothing happens. And nothing happens. And then eventually an email comes back
and the email says, we've discussed your offer with a dedicated team and we're thankful for
your enthusiasm and for the good idea. But I'm afraid I also have to let you know that at this moment in time, our support for
software is only focused on Windows and Mac, i.e. you've done all the hard work, you've
gotten everything ready for us, you're actually even solving a problem for us and some of
our customers, but we can't be bothered to give you the time of day.
I've got an alternative point of view on this
i'd love to hear it so um odms who uh sorry or oems such as razor who go to odms may have to
enter into contracts which prevents the redistribution of firmware and BIOS images.
And this may be a well-crafted, polite reply to rebuttal the fact that they don't have an arrangement with their ODM
that enables them to redistribute these BIOS and firmware images.
So you're saying it's a way of answering the question without kind of crapping on their
partner saying, well, our partner's agreement doesn't allow us to do that.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And, you know, I don't know, I don't have any insight into who Razer's ODMs are, but
some of the other Linux focused OEMs certainly do fall into this category where, you know, they are not
permitted to redistribute these images. And consequently, you know, doing this work is
not open to them. Right. So to be clear, to sort of clarify what you're saying is based on your
experience and my experience in communicating with certain Linux-first
hardware vendors
that are reshipping upstream
original equipment
manufacturers' hardware,
like perhaps, say, a Clevo,
there is an agreement in place
in which, as part of that,
because these have been around for years now,
that part of that agreement is you cannot
directly redistribute our firmwares or any kind of updates to the firmware to your customers.
They have to be distributed directly from us.
And then there's different iterations of this agreement that might say, well, under these conditions, you can distribute firmware.
Under these other conditions, you can distribute the firmware once we've signed off on it.
There's a bunch of changes to it, but that's essentially what you're saying exactly that because if you
enter into an agreement with say clevo and uh as the equipment manufacturer you are requesting some
customizations to buy awesome firmware those are not something that they, that Clevo want to be re-shared and redistributed
because it's specific to your contractual obligations.
Right. And the customization of that firmware is sort of the product that they are part of
the product that they are selling back to the reseller. So Clevo is going into some sort of business arrangement with these resellers and saying,
all right, we will make these changes.
You go validate this on your hardware and then come back to us with the changes you
want.
And then Clevo makes the changes at the firmware level.
And then the seller tests that again and validates it and sends back more suggestions.
And it's a back and forth process.
And then eventually they have a custom firmware that Clevo has created for that particular vendor. And that's part of the value
that Clevo offers. Exactly. And this is also why you sometimes see that the Linux device
manufacturers are a little bit behind on offering certain chipsets of products
because they have to go through this validation and tweaking
and customization exercise for their products
in order to deliver them in an out-of-the-box Linux-compatible way.
Yeah, okay.
Right.
That makes sense.
Yeah, unfortunate, but reasonable.
So one of the devices that is probably kind of along the same line that I first was sort of skeptical of, but now we're seeing a second iteration of, and I'm kind of starting to get it now, is the KDE Slimbook.
And now we have the KDE Slimbook 2.
And it's not like it's going to, like, blow you away with the hardware specs.
It's a 13.3-inch screen.
It does have an SSD.
You can get it with a pretty fast 2.7 gigahertz i7 CPU, which will turbo boost up to 3.5 gigahertz.
And you can get up to 16 gigs of RAM. You know, but again, it's not going to blow you away in
terms of performance. But it is one of these situations where it's, how do you describe something like
this, Wes, where a project can focus in on a singular target? It's not like they're designing
the hardware, but it gives them sort of like a...
Like a reference platform they can really focus on.
Yeah, like a narrow set of variables, right?
Yes.
And that's what's interesting about the Slim book is because I feel like this could be a harbinger for what we could see down the road as it becomes more available for people to ship upstream OEM hardware, make slight modifications at the hardware and firmware level, and then have open source projects hyper-target that for a few months in development and then release it. And that's what we're seeing here. We're seeing this with some other hardware. And I think this is an interesting idea because when I first started getting into Linux, you would buy like a six CD set for $65.
Yes.
And you'd go home with a box and a book and like a whole bunch of CDs where you can install your Linux.
And that was the thing you bought.
But that's obviously gone away with ISO downloads and whatnot.
But this is almost like a new version of it today.
Like if I was a student and I was really passionate about Linux and open source and the Plasma desktop, I'm pretty sure I would aspire to a piece of hardware like this.
Like this would be sort of that thing that I would want to get.
Like, you know, I would go mow those lawns.
I would do what it would take.
I would go get that side job
so that way I could get the perfect Plasma desktop laptop.
You know, it's been tweaked for it, designed for it,
thought about, cared for.
Yeah.
So it's nice to see this.
Go ahead.
This dovetails with the previous conversation, right,
about working with ODMs
in order to make the necessary customizations
that the device that ships out of the box
works with the distribution or operating system that is pre-installed.
So I'm a big fan of this because this is the step change that Linux on the desktop needs.
Downloading ISOs and sticking them on USB sticks and installing them on whatever you happen to buy is all very
well and good. But actually being able to buy devices pre-installed, pre-configured with the
operating system that you want to use, that's how you really step up adoption. It also interests me
the tighter coupling between the desktop maker and the actual hardware details and not having one layer of distributor or system in the middle there.
Maybe there's some real-world concerns that will get addressed more quickly.
You know, it's funny.
And this could just be Softpedia.
But in the screenshots on Softpedia, I'm seeing screenshots of elementary OS and home desktop.
Oh, and there's Mate right there there's even a unity below so you know book by guys are very good um while while they have a specific i see i
see right kde right they support all of the all of the of course of course right and that's what's
kind of nice when you're buying you're buying a slim book to run plasma but you know you can run everything else it's all just lit it is right
you can also buy a slim book without plasma if you want to um do you before we move on producer
michael do you have anything else you want to mention about the slim book thing because i i've
just sort of covered on a high level but it kind of i mean i don't know if you've ever seen one in
person but it with the version two it kind of feels like it's it's essentially like a galago
am i right about that uh they're not it's not the same odm but okay oh it's not it's not i don't think they
have clevo now oh it looks pretty nice though we were fortunate enough to that they were at
sorry sorry slim book were at um ubu con europe in paris in september year, and they had all of their devices out.
And there was lots of drooling and pouring at the quality of their devices.
And I think this version, too, looks particularly interesting.
And just to plug another podcast, if Curry happens, which it might,
I would desperately love to see one of these in for
review on the ubuntu podcast with kde neon me too me too i would like to see that it's a it's a sick
looking laptop it reminds me of max but uh you know max have decent looking hardware and this
one looks like you know you can get a better powerful machine roughly about the same price and still looks like a Mac.
So, hey, there you go.
Now, do you have any idea, Rodan, about how much might go up towards the Plasma desktop or the KDE project?
Is there any kind of like – is it just – is there any – do you know if there's any financial contribution?
Am I giving anything towards the project?
There is a partnership.
I don't know what the percentages are, but I do know that they do something
with it. I could find out, but I
don't know offhand.
I just think this would probably just
be great for anybody that just wants a machine
dedicated to run KDE
Neon. Just go for it. And it looks
like great hardware. I do hope to one day see my hands
on it, maybe at a conference or something like that.
Or if they ever have enough units to send out for
review, I think that'd be pretty sweet.
It's a nice looking machine.
I'm still shopping for you, Wes.
That's right, you are.
You have a first gen XPS 13? Is that a first gen?
No, it's a second gen.
Well, that's understandable. Is that an i5 or an i7?
i5.
An i5, huh?
I mean, it's really just a terminal and a web browser.
Yeah, but you get a shit ton of work done with that.
That's not your daily driver.
No, it is not.
Okay, so your daily driver is a desktop?
Yeah, I have a desktop replacement at home and a real desktop at work.
So like a big laptop at home and then a desktop at work.
Yeah, okay.
And then this is the portable version.
Good man.
But you're right.
It does need replacing.
A little bit. So I'm shopping for you all the time.
I'm just always looking for you, you know? I just gotta
make sure you get the right thing, Wes. I gotta make sure.
It's gotta be right, yeah. The only reason is because I gotta sit
here and stare at it every single week. Exactly.
You have incentive.
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You're like a ninja with this stuff too, Wes.
You know that?
Oh, yeah.
As much as you want.
I've noticed that too.
Like when Wes gets here, he's like, hey, what's the Wi-Fi? I got to get on the Wi-Fi here. I'm like, what's going on over there? I look over at Wes and then boom, he like syncs up all his stuff once he gets on the Wi-Fi.
I'm not an animal. I mean, come on. I need the Wi-Fi.
A gentleman Wi-Fi caller. They got nationwide coverage, CDMA and GSM networks, no contracts, nor the termination fee. And you can try Ting totally risk free with CDMA and GSM, too, that means there's lots you can bring over
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You know, I went from paying over $140 a month
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I just think Dan just can't stay out of the news.
Elementary OS every single damn week is doing something that's causing some bit of discussion.
OS every single damn week is doing something that's causing some bit of discussion.
And maybe this is just what happens when a project gets to a certain size, like every single thing they do generates discussion.
But Dan joins us this week to discuss the crazy outlandish idea that they dare go from
version 0.4 to version 5.0 with the next release version juno that's a big jump so
dan you've uh just gone off the deep end and you're just uh jumping numbers like open susan now
yeah so um i mean we're just thinking about you know what if we took that zero and then took it
off that didn't do that what if we didn't do that oh Oh, well. All right. That sounds good. Moving on then.
Bold thinking, Dan.
Now, honestly, there's kind of two reasons, right?
One is a marketing reason and one is kind of an organizational reason.
And we kept getting a lot of people saying, oh, you know, when is Elementor OS going to get out of beta?
Like, you guys are still in beta. We keep hearing people saying, oh, you know, when is Elementor OS going to get out of beta? Like, you guys are still in beta.
You know, we keep hearing people saying,
oh, Elementor OS is in beta.
And so it was really confusing for people
to have that leading zero in there.
So we thought, okay, well, you know,
we've got to version bump that, right?
We've got to move that up into at least 1.0 territory
so people stop thinking this is a beta product.
Honestly, I feel like you got there with Freya, really. Yeah, you know... Which was 0.0 territory so people stop thinking this is a beta product honestly i feel like you got there with freya really yeah you know which was zero three right and it's been it's been quite an
evolution to be honest and we're we are kind of holding off on the 1.0 because we wanted to make
sure that we had i don't know if control is the right word, but at least influence in everything that the user sees and touches, that we're able to fix the issues that our users report to us.
And so we're kind of, we're way more there than we were before.
And this Juno release has the most elementary stuff in it out of any release before.
Ah, that's it.
As far as our desktop environment and all the apps we ship.
And now we have an application ecosystem that people are developing apps for elementary
OS.
So it's like a huge shift from where we were when we started out.
It's the stuff that actually makes a platform, to be frank about it.
And I like how this post, i don't know if you guys intended
it for this but if i had never heard of elementary os and all of a sudden i saw why do these uh
cocky sons of bitches want money from me if i read this post i would be compelled to donate lots of
money because within the if you just look at the damn screenshots it is so clear like here west i'm gonna do you ready for this west i'm gonna do a little so here is uh we start look at the damn screenshots, it is so clear.
Like, here, Wes, I'm going to do it.
You ready for this, Wes?
I'm going to do a little.
So here is, we start here at the beginning.
There is elementary OS Jupyter 0.1.
And it looks like a GTK GNOME 2 respring. No problems here, but yeah.
Then you get to version 0.2 and you're like, oh, okay, it's GTK 3.
It's got a nice theme going for it. But by the time you get to Freya, 0.3, you have a whole lot of elementary OS features, including a whole bunch of nice styling, animations, a real clear visual communication.
You have their own application launcher, their own settings panels, a do not disturb system with notifications.
Like it's clearly its own product by 0.3. And then when you look at Loki 0.4,
one of the things that strikes me about Loki
is it's all of the stuff I just said,
plus kind of building on top of that,
a more refined look,
clear path for third party developers,
style sheets, APIs.
It honestly starts to become a platform by Loki version 0.4,
the current version. But the other thing that you guys have done with Loki that struck me,
and maybe this was the case with Freya and I just didn't notice it, but it feels like
Loki just keeps constantly getting better. Like there's new stuff that just keeps coming to Loki.
Like there hasn't been like this big gap while I'm just waiting for the next version of Elementary, the next big drop.
Because in this meantime, I am kind of waiting for that.
But in the meantime, stuff has just kept coming down to Loki, like updates like the App Center, for example, the updates, all of that stuff.
It just is new in Loki, which has been the current release now for a while.
And so you guys have legitimately built a platform.
And I think when people say that, some people get triggered because it sounds like cloud.
It sounds like vlog.
It sounds like blog.
It's one of these.
It's a term.
It's this nebulous term.
But it's an app center.
It's a design language.
It's a clear path for developers.
It's a lack of nebulousness, right?
Like, yeah, exactly.
It is something concrete now.
Yeah.
So, but I mean, not to belabor this point, but just because this is the thing that everybody's
been talking about, why not just say 1.0?
Right.
And the reason why not to go 1.0 is less marketing and more organizational.
So that's kind of the other component of it.
And what we're looking at is we want to try to bring everything into alignment with semantic
versioning so that we have, you know, that major, minor, you know, that whole thing going on. But
what we have right now is a lot of version numbers throughout all of our different products that are misaligned and some of them are more than 1.0 and and so by just kind of removing that
leading zero then we can eventually get to a place where across the board like all the apis
for our 5x series are 5x and all the applications are 5x you know get everything all kind of aligned very nice is a windows 10 effort
then oh i have no idea sure no but i get what you're saying you're saying developers can say
okay so you have the 5.x version of this api support or this application so i know what i
can target there and then eventually down the road it'll be 6x and 7x yeah yeah exactly so
the version number for all of our products aligns with that release.
Damn.
Very nice.
Forward thinking.
Yeah, you're taking what I always compliment you guys.
Here's the clear developer story.
Here's how you target the platform.
Here's the design language you use.
In fact, here's a widget you can use to make it look like everything else.
And now you're going to the next level and saying, here's the APIs that you can guarantee work.
Yeah, I mean, we're really trying to get to a point where that level of clarity permeates throughout the entirety of the stack and not just with, oh, you know, it's clear for users to use applications, but it's clear for developers to write them as well. Right, because 5.0 is going to mean, it's going to mean what? It's going to mean GTK 3.22,
it's going to mean high DPI, I mean, it's going to mean kernel Linux version something X. Yeah,
I mean, so elementary 5.0 actually means GTKX, kernel version X, system DX, X.org or Wayland X,
MKX, kernel version X, system DX, X.org or Wayland X, doesn't it?
Yeah, right, because the new 5.0 release is going to be based,
or we're currently building it on the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
So it does bring a hardware enablement stack and a ton of new APIs from all our upstreams as well.
Yeah, I mean, that's the practical version of it is it's 5.0 is going to be 18.04 LTS, but developers won't even need to understand that esoteric differentiator.
It'll just be 5.0 of the elementary OS platform has these capabilities.
6.0 has these capabilities.
But what's with the need of the.0 anyway? Is there any need for like a.5 release just for beta possibly or anything like that?
Yeah, so what it is is like basically the same like we did with Loki where we had a.4 release and then we had.4.1.
And what that was is it's a bump to a new hardware enablement stack or adding new major features or things like that.
So we do have those minor revisions that we'll push out if we make a new ISO release.
So it's something significant enough to trigger a new build, but not significant enough to break API.
Also, real quick, why did you name it after a very infamous film about a pregnant teenager
oh do you know it could be or or a city in alaska i mean let's be honest so for our code names we
use uh the names of deities and uh right it turns out that the the majority of the really nice
sounding deity names are like Greek and Roman usually.
And so we did a couple of Norse ones.
Yeah.
The problem is I took a bunch of the solar system names with Jupiter Broadcasting, right?
Yeah.
Well, actually, not only does that make sense, Dan, but it goes deeper than I first understood.
So I really appreciate you coming on and explaining it to me.
Wow.
That's great.
I mean, that is so great because it clearly contributes to the developer story.
Just as a super quick follow-up, if you could, how has the one week reaction reeked for the announcement about charging for upgrades or attempting to
charge for upgrades like now that you've had a you've had a week to marinate with it how's that
gone i think it's been really good we've got a lot of really positive feedback and interesting
comments from people and it's interesting a way of saying controversial like really like how is it
is it like are you guys like pulling back at all or does it feel like full steam ahead
no i mean interesting in terms of um
bringing up things that we were looking for people to bring up like hey what what happens in this
case kind of thing and by discussing it with with other people and bringing it up where we've had
more plans um to push into okay well now how does multi-machine work or how does a fresh install
work as opposed to an upgrade or things
like that? Or like how that was one of the major concerns that people brought up that we're
currently working through is what happens if I want to transfer my purchases to another computer?
That seems like a huge problem to solve. I mean, that's the number one issue that I raised. And I
have even gone on the record and said said I'd be willing to pay a bit
more if I knew that it would
persist across all machines, but
that just, that seems
like... Can it kind of be expected to be persistent?
It's kind of, it almost is, right?
In this day and age, yeah. Because of other app stores, yeah, I think that's
a great point, but the
technical limitation means you have
to somehow track me across all my machines.
Yeah, so that's the major balance point, right, is how do we set things up in a way that is convenient and adds these features that people want, but also in a way that is secure and respects your privacy.
Yeah.
I do not envy that task, my friend.
Not in the least.
No, Wes and I cover that kind of stuff all the time on TechSnap, and it is a massive technical challenge.
And if you ever want to talk about it, you know where to come because we'd love to hear more about it.
But I'm sure that's all down the road stuff.
In the meantime, anything else to note about the Junos release or about the announcement about the bump?
Anything like that?
release or about the announcement about the bump? Anything like that?
Well, you know, that wallpaper that I just made for the 5.0 beta is pretty fire. You can go check it out on our blog and you should download that. Nice. Even if you're not running the beta,
which you aren't because it doesn't exist in the public, you should just stick that wallpaper out
there because it's pretty sick. That does look nice. I think I will. Good call on that.
I've been following with more and more interest, Dan, so I appreciate you stopping by.
All right.
Well, we'll have a link to all of that shenanigans in the show notes.
Go check that out.
I think it's going to be a big release.
You know, for a couple of years, two maybe.
No, no.
I don't know if it's two years.
I don't know.
I guess we stopped doing Lass in 2017, yeah? Yeah.
And I think we – I don't know if you look at Lass.
I think we kind of pulled back on reviews a year before that.
That's a good point.
Yeah, you kind of did.
And right now, I've got the itch.
I mean, so not only do we have a new version of –
Spring is coming up.
I know, right?
There's distros to try.
Oh, I thought you were going to say it's allergies.
Oh, well, that too.
It's a nasty itch. I'm so sorry for you. Yeah, I call it Mint 19 right? There's distros to try. Oh, I thought you were going to say it's allergies. Oh, well, that too. It's a nasty itch.
I'm so sorry for you.
Yeah, I call it Mint 19 right here.
It's got a rash.
No, I just – I have a good feeling about some of the distro releases that are coming
because a lot of them are based on Ubuntu, which is going to be a major update soon.
But a lot of them are also trying to differentiate.
I've recently started following the Solus project again
with a lot of close intensity.
I don't know if Ike is just trying to lure me
with his sweet siren song,
but they're talking more and more about their plasma version.
And there's just a lot of good releases.
We just recently talked with the Fedora group
about Fedora Atomic and all that. There's just so much
good stuff coming down the pipe.
It just means that you and I have
a bunch of good stuff to talk about.
And a ton of great things to try.
Anyways, let's keep going. I got
a chance to go down to Microsoft last
Friday.
Have they turned you? I mean, should I be
suspicious? Am I safe right here in the studio?
Do you like my Windows 10 system here? It's nice, isn't it?
No, actually, in all fairness to them, they did not try to convert me to Windows 10 at all.
So I got to give them credit for that. We will talk about that in just a moment.
But first, I want to talk about DigitalOcean. It's infrastructure on demand, super fast, really reliable infrastructure with eight data centers all over the world.
In fact, by the time you're listening to this, it could be more.
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It's one of the things that Wes and I do all the time for TechSnap is when we're trying something
out, like, how do we talk about this in a way that makes sense? Wes knows exactly. There's
something we did recently. I don't want to say it. You know what I'm talking about.
I do know what you're talking about.
You know what I'm talking about. And it's like's like well we want to talk about this in a way where we have actual
knowledge like hands-on experience with it so you just spin it up on a digital ocean droplet you try
it out done i mean i mean we had that whole thing done within 10 minutes and then we just played
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Oh, that'll help.
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I had a, I had a, I have a, hold on, Wes.
Breaking news.
Breaking news from the back office.
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And a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Unplugged program.
That was, I tell you what, going down to Microsoft stressed me out.
Because this is why one of the main reasons I got out of IT contracting is I have this really super weird anxiety about going to a certain place at a certain time when I have to navigate like a comp.
I'm actually having a slight panic attack just telling you about this.
I mean, really.
Take it slow.
Where if I need to be someplace that's like way south of Arlington at a certain time and I have to like park somewhere and then navigate like a series of buildings.
Especially somewhere you haven't been to.
Specifically, it comes up when I go to Amazon or Microsoft or T-Mobile. Like whenever I go to where like a multi-building campus and I have to be in a certain conference room at a certain time and just like I've never been to that campus, so navigating it.
Do you know what I'm talking about?
Absolutely.
I'm legitimately having a panic attack just telling you about this.
And so that is how I spent my entire Friday last week
because I spent the first half of the day having a panic attack
and then I spent the second half of the day going to Microsoft.
And then once I'm on site, I am as cool as a cucumber.
Legitimately, no anxiety. I am 100% comfortable. I just have to get you there. Yeah. I just have to get there and like get to where I
need to be. And once I'm where I need to be and I have plenty of time, I'm completely comfortable.
So I showed up, uh, an hour early. I mean, with traffic and anything else.
How else can you plan for that?
Yeah, and I had my lady, Hediya, come with me for emotional support
because she's really good at navigating.
When I'm totally, just like totally anxious out,
she'll do the driving, the navigating, the parking in the parking garage
and like all of that that totally takes care of my anxiety
and lets me just focus on the
task at hand. And so she came with me to essentially be my emotional support partner. I know that
sounds ridiculous, but I don't know what it is about these companies, but they give me this
sense of anxiety because like when I go to meet other business owners or community members, like
we go to a bar or I go to their house or something like that.
But they're standing behind the counter and you're like, oh, hi.
Yeah, you own the business.
It's a totally different thing.
And so when you go to Microsoft's Bellevue campus, which I had never been,
I've only been to the Redmond campus at Microsoft.
It's like a totally different experience.
So you park in the parking garage and you work your way up the elevator and you go across what they call the breezeway.
And I have a picture of it on the video version if you're watching right now of the breezeway.
And it feels like you're walking through an old Roman palace with marble everywhere, fountains, Gucci stores with gold walls and LED lights.
So that's why you look so nice today.
Yeah, it is full of stores that I think get one or two customers a day.
I mean, this is a very ritzy place in Washington.
And Microsoft has a temporary, they have two buildings. And the building I was
going to is a temporary building. They call it the Braven building. And when I finally got there,
and I got past the Gucci stores and the Prava stores and the water fountains and the statues,
and I got through the elevator and got to the third floor, I arrived at the reception desk.
Oh, yeah, I'm checking in.
Can I have parking? Get validated? Oh, if I at the reception desk. And of course, I had to get the parking validated because
that's what you do in Bellevue. Right. Absolutely. But you know what was a little disorienting is
the first thing that you see isn't the reception desk. It's actually, it's funny. It's one of those
things that's really, it just drove home to me. I'm obviously in a business filled with geeks.
When you walk in through the main door, the first desk you see isn't reception.
The first desk you see is tech support.
Seems sort of appropriate.
So you get there and you open up the glass doors and you see this huge desk.
And you walk up to it and you're like, I'm here to see.
And before you get those words completely out of your mouth, you see IT, you see support, and you see guys that look just like you.
And you go, oh, this is tech support, isn't it?
Wow.
They're like, yeah, reception's over there.
We get this all the time.
So obviously for geeks.
And so we get there.
We check in.
I get the parking validated.
I'm sitting around in like these future space chairs that look like they're off the set of Star Trek Discovery.
Are you wearing any Linux swag?
I did, dude.
I wore the – thank you for asking.
I wore the last finale hoodie with the final last logo with the year.
It's the shirt I'm actually wearing now only with our full run year on it.
Okay, great.
And so I wore the hoodie,
but underneath it,
I wore my nicest blue business dress shirt,
button down business shirt.
You're a professional.
And I wore nice slacks.
So I was going for the corporate lifestyle reject look.
So that way they could acknowledge and accept me
and wouldn't feel
off-put, but yet would understand I'm not one of them.
Right. You speak their language, but you're not a part of them.
Yeah, that's exactly. And so we're sitting around in these Star Trek Discovery future chairs,
and you're looking over this marble promenade that has fountains and glass fixtures and the
Gucci stores. And then behind us are these future lights that look like
they might be the transporter room on the USS Discovery. And as I'm sitting there just sort of
taking all of this in, Jeffrey's assistant walks up to us. I mean, after all, Jeffrey is a fellow
at Microsoft. So I hand off the microphone to Hadiyah and we go through several different I'll just take you up. Sorry, man, it's a cold. Oh, no problem. Will you hang on to that for me? Yes, I will.
So I hand off the microphone to Hadiyah,
and we go through several different layers of glass doors
that she seems to authenticate with her badge.
And then the glass doors open.
And then she says something to us that sort of stuck out.
And I had to think about it for a moment.
Before we sat down and before we did all of our conversation.
She says to me and to Hadiyah, would you like to buy something to drink before we go into the conference room?
Not would you like something to drink?
Would you like to buy something to drink?
Now, my experience at the Redmond campus was on every floor.
They just have like a store area where
you can just go in and get anything you want for free. But this is a temporary building that
they're only in for a couple of years. So they don't have the traditional Microsoft infrastructure.
And it gives it like this small company feeling because they're not like regular Microsoft.
Yeah, we've got the soda machine out back if you need something.
So I turn around the corner and we meet, Hadiyah and I, we meet Jeffrey and Joey.
Thank you. Hi, Jeffrey. Nice to meet you. Joey. Nice to meet you. Hadiyah. Hadiyah. Nice to meet
you, Hadiyah. Like quesadilla. Excellent. Where should we sit? You own the room. Oh, well, okay
then. And Jeffrey might have been the room? Oh, well, okay then.
And Jeffrey might have been the most perfect person for us to talk to.
Yeah, I'm Jeffrey Snover.
I'm a technical fellow at Microsoft.
He's been there for 18 years.
Wow.
And Joey also joined us.
He's the PM for PowerShell.
And what's great about both these guys is they're Linux guys.
I'm Joey Aiello, and I'm the program manager for PowerShell Core.
But while I was setting up
for the interview, and so I apologize for the audio
and some of the noise in the background, but we just
had the recorder going. While we're setting
up to start talking to them,
Jeffrey tells me that
18 years ago, he never
thought he'd work for Microsoft.
I was reading your, or listening
to your podcast about, oh, they're doing this
and this, and I was like, no, that's not it.
No, that's not it?
Okay, good.
Exactly.
Well, that's a good place to start.
Exactly.
You can give us way too much credit.
Oh, really?
Oh, I see.
See, I had some sort of master plan.
Yeah.
Well, I do tell you.
You know, that was the thing.
When I started the company, the last thing I wanted to do was to come and work for Microsoft. You know, I thought then the evil corporate, evil empire, I knew
all this. And, and then when I came in and visited, you know, I actually, my joke was
I never joined Microsoft. I joined this one executive. He was just an awesome exec. And
then I got in here and it's like, oh, yeah, no, it's not malice.
It's not evil.
It's just people whose hair is on fire.
People whose hair is on fire, which totally echoes some of my other industry experience.
And so I'm like, oh, that's super interesting.
Joey, the PowerShell project manager, says, oh, yeah, me too.
I was a Gen 2 guy.
I never thought I'd work at Microsoft.
It was the same for me.
Yeah, really?
Come in, yeah, I mean, come in from college, and I've been here almost four years, and it's... You weren't thinking you'd be at Microsoft either?
No.
But, yeah, you come in and meet a bunch of smart people, and everybody's solving problems, and it's like, oh, okay.
Yeah.
It's just, you realize very quickly, you know, everything is always official, right?
It's like you see something come out, like an update or something, and it's like, oh, it's Microsoft, right, that, like, put this thing out.
And then you're like, oh, it's just like there's three guys over there that just, like, did that, you know.
Yeah.
Especially when it's a big company.
You tend to think it's like, oh, it's a team of 1,000.
Right.
A team of 2,000.
Right.
Right.
Exactly.
Now it's like Joe.
Wow.
Yeah. Exactly. Now it's like Joe. Wow.
Yeah.
It was really kind of interesting because they felt – I felt from them like they wanted to advocate their position.
And I got a sense that's kind of why I was there and the PowerShell team specifically.
Now Microsoft has open sourced a lot of things including.NET Core, Visual Studio Code, and then PowerShell came along.
And I think they knew that there would be a lot of skepticism in the Linux community. And they also knew that they had
a long road ahead of them. But I got the sense that they were completely committed to it.
And that's why I was there.
We just knew we were not going to be greeted as like liberators to the Linux community.
It's like, OK, how do we deal with that?
How do we get the tone right? How do we get the tone right?
How do we get the culture right, both in the product and how we engage the community? We're still trying to figure that out.
Yeah, there you go.
That's what the conversation was in Coder Radio.
So what is going on here?
So I kept having the conversation.
I got them on mic.
This was all just on the preset up while we were getting ready to go.
I got them on mic, and I started to get a sense of why Microsoft is trying so hard. You know, you can judge how successful they are with engaging open source community with being a quote unquote good Linux community citizen. But I got a real sense that there is something that's driving them.
It's not just marketing.
I got a sense that perhaps the situation is becoming such that one of their biggest moneymakers, Azure, is simply becoming a predominant Linux platform.
And that's just the reality that they're in. And no matter how Microsoft spins the numbers, there's more and more Linux systems than Windows systems on Azure.
Yeah, no, I don't know if you've seen, but on Azure,
look, here's the reality.
I mean, you just look at the world and do the math, right?
If we say Azure is the Windows cloud,
okay, well, then you're taking off a very large portion of the world.
You're just saying, I'm not going to go get that market.
That doesn't make any sense.
And then you can't be a trusted supplier to those companies that said, I want a heterogeneous world. So we have been investing for years in great
Linux support. And now that number of Linux VMs is almost equal to the number of Windows VMs.
That's impressive. Wow. I mean, I think the last number I heard from Azure was 30 percent or something like that, which is getting higher and higher.
Yeah, it's going higher fast.
And he does one of these like way higher.
Wow.
Like gestures.
Yeah.
Like it's maybe more closer to 50-50.
And Microsoft can't spin that any other way.
They have to acknowledge that reality.
So he said something in there that sounded like spin, but I got a better understanding of it.
He said, you know, we've invested for years in Linux.
Well, what the does that mean?
Right?
Yeah, that's a very vague statement.
I went deeper on that in Coda Radio this week, and I kind of encourage you guys to go check that out.
I know that's a that's a super punt, and I apologize.
But we just talk about the tools that people use for developing software deeper in Coder Radio.
So in episode 296, Chris goes to Microsoft.
They specifically, Joey, who we haven't heard from yet, talks more about retooling their Windows only team around Linux and all of that stuff, which was really interesting.
So we do deep dive into how they made that transition.
which was really interesting.
So we do deep dive into how they made that transition.
But I wanted to talk with you guys about the really super awkward spot that I was sensing that Microsoft is in.
And I really appreciated what they couldn't say in this clip.
I want you to listen with certain kinds of ears on.
Microsoft, I think, this is Chris here speculating,
but I think Microsoft has realized that the future is not on windows.
The hot action for the future is not windows.
Perhaps maybe they even have some insights into what a shit show windows is
that we don't have on the outside.
Yeah.
And so they,
they,
they fundamentally understand at a level that we can't even appreciate on the outside of why windows is not our future i'm just going to speculate here for a moment
maybe i'm wrong but they seem to be in a very awkward position they can't just come right out
and crap on windows and say microsoft is no longer about windows anymore microsoft is all about open
source and linux because they have a billion users on Windows
who will go, well, what the hell, guys? What about us? At the same time, they can't come out and say
Windows is the best thing ever because they'll piss off all of the Linux and open source community,
which is where they're trying to get to. However, we've had some experience here. And
basically what we want to do is to not try and give a signal on any platform.
As much as possible, what we want to do is we want to support all the platforms that somebody
wants at the same time, right? So we had an exec that had come from Sun and they said, yeah, so,
you know, we're so committed to, you know, Solaris and people thought, well, we're not committed to
Linux. And so we said, you know what we're going to do? We're going to prove that we're committed to Linux. So we're
going to do Linux a week before we release the Sun thing. And then their entire customer base said,
oh, so you're not committed to Solaris anymore. It's like, oh, they've just got it wrong.
So we don't always get that right. But wherever we can, we're going to say,
these are the platforms we want to support and support them all at the same time.
And then I suppose right now from a lot of our perspectives on the outside, it's a bit of spinning up to Visual Studio Code is out now.
.NET is out.
PowerShell is out.
It seems like a bunch of catch-up.
But what this really is is going to just become the new normal.
Yes, that's right.
The new normal.
Wow.
So what is that?
The new normal is they slowly bring a lot of things up to cross-platform over time.
So PowerShell and OpenSSH come to Windows, and PowerShell comes to Linux and Mac, not because they just all of a sudden decided to flip a switch, but because they open-sourced..NET Core and then they rebase PowerShell
Core on.NET Core you see where we're going here I do and uh with that after they've laid the
groundwork for.NET and they've gotten developers on Git and then once they've gotten developers
understanding Git and taking pull requests and all of that then they get them on Visual Studio
Code and once they have everybody on Visual Studio Code debugging the software, then they can launch PowerShell Core.
And this – we go into more details in Coder Radio.
But the thing that they said, which I thought was pretty remarkable, is PowerShell Core, the version that's on Windows and the version that's on Linux and the version that's on Mac, is replacing standard PowerShell on Windows.
So no more PowerShell on Windows.
I mean, it's going to be there.
They're going to maintain it.
Right.
Well, of course.
But the version that's shipping on Linux
is the future of PowerShell Core.
Do you see what I'm saying?
Like the PowerShell,
the version that's on Windows,
like the original version of PowerShell.
I'm Joey Aiello
and I'm the program manager for PowerShell Core. And Joey here for PowerShell. I'm Joey Aiello, and I'm the program manager for PowerShell Core.
And Joey here for PowerShell Core is the guy that's heading all of this up
and helping them get ready to make this open source version,
to replace this version that's been shipping on only Windows for years.
It's been phenomenal, yeah.
So we actually were proud to state that in the release of PowerShell 6 that roughly half of the pull requests that came in for PowerShell 6 were from the community.
So they've open sourced PowerShell.
They went with PowerShell Core 6, and they've had a pretty good engagement from the community.
But I thought, you know, this was, I don't know, it's almost too perfect.
So I wanted to ask them a few other questions about it.
And I wanted to get specifically into bugs.
So I'm going to replay this clip from the beginning and take in a perspective of what about bugs?
What about like people contributing issues back to PowerShell?
It's been phenomenal.
Yeah.
So we actually were proud to state that in the release of PowerShell 6 that roughly half of the pull requests that came in for PowerShell 6 were
from the community. In particular, we had a ton of work done in the web commandlets, the invoke
web request and rest method layer by one contributor in particular, Mark E. Krause.
There's also been a number of guys just sort of cleaning up the long tail. This is one of the
great things about open source, right? You have people who know they need these really big features and are
highly experienced and are able to code up, you know, all these custom REST method and,
you know, authentication headers and proxy bypass and multi-part support and all these
things in the web request layer. But then you have folks who say, hey, all your error messages still say Windows PowerShell, right?
And someone who has a lot less coding experience is able to sort of jump into GitHub,
make a contribution for the first time, scrub all these error messages,
and improve the product for everybody.
And it's one of those things that we know is important,
but that we'd probably not get around to.
Or if we did, something else would have to get sacrificed.
Right.
And by having people who, you know, the sort of Wikipedia approach, right, of like you have a thousand people, you know, fixing your typos, then you really end up with a much higher quality product.
And, you know, we've seen a lot of that in PowerShell.
And I think the, you know, that 50% percent PR community PR number is a testament to that.
Yeah. OK, so that is pretty good.
But I pushed Joey a little bit further.
I'm like, OK, yeah, but but but there must have been some sort of esoteric, typical open source community moment.
And Jeffrey and Joey kind of both smile and they look at each other and go, well.
Jeffrey and Joey kind of both smile and they look at each other and go, well, there was the very first issue that came in that happened to be a bit memorable.
And it happened to be from the curl developer. You know, so we're all sort of very happy and, you know, patting each other on the back.
And about five or six hours later, a pull request came in from none other than the creator of Curl.
I'm going to get his name wrong, but his first name is Daniel.
Really awesome guy.
We had an email exchange afterwards and just a super nice guy.
But the gist of the pull request was simply to remove two aliases from PowerShell. So some years ago, PowerShell had used a bunch of aliases
for some of the core cmdlets in order to entice or make things more comfortable for Linux users,
with no expectation at the time that PowerShell was going to ship on Linux. So for instance,
ls was an alias, as was dir for get child item, right? To get the directory listing or, you know, even CD, right? So, so some of the aliases that were added were curl and wget.
And those were there to draw users to invoke web request and invoke rest method.
Well, the creator of curl rightfully so said, you know, that's, that's the name of my project.
You're not invoking curl. Curl for windows has been out for a very long time and you're making things really hard for my users who have to tack on.exe in order to run
curl for Windows. So now that you're open source, you're trying to be good guys,
like add this back or remove this alias. And we responded in kind saying, hey, this is
totally agree with you. This is a breaking change. We got to follow our governance process here that we had fortunately codified very explicitly and said, this is our
process for breaking changes. And he was very amenable and understanding of that. But within
a few minutes of having posted that poll request, it was now number one on Hacker News. And we had
GIFs and trolls, Michael Jackson eating popcorn, you know, hundreds.
Like it took minutes to load in my browser kind of thing.
So we got a very good lesson very early on on, you know, the importance of optics and how, you know, these things.
It was, you know, these two aliases that really drove hundreds of people to our project.
But ultimately, I think we took care of it in an amenable way.
And, you know, we removed the aliases among a number of other aliases in PowerShell core.
We decided to leave them in Windows PowerShell for some period of time because users were depending on them.
It's now best practice not to use aliases in scripts so that you're not depending on them.
But the nice epilogue, as we were saying to the, to the story was that, uh, curl is actually now available in windows.
So, so we need to go revisit, uh, that and, and, uh, yeah.
And then the next version of windows we're shipping tar and tar and curl.
So, um, yeah, it's, it's, we, we live in a brave new world.
Yeah.
A brave new world that ships tar and curl and windows.
Heck yeah.
You know, I bonded with Joey.
I mean, I, so Jeffrey, what impressed me.
So that's where you got that pro license from.
Yeah, I see.
What impressed me about Jeffrey is that he has been at Microsoft for 18 years.
And we cover this in Coder Radio.
Again, sorry, obnoxious plug.
But he talks about how he went into Microsoft and created PowerShell with the intention of essentially trying to rip off some of the stuff you can do in Bash.
Totally.
He's like, I even wrote a blog post about it.
I've always acknowledged this.
And it turned out it failed horribly.
And then he totally talks about why it didn't work on Windows.
And it's super interesting because it's much more about where Linux is now with Journal
CTL and all.
It's a great talk.
Obnoxious plug one more time.
Go check out the whole interview.
Because I really went down there for Coda Radio.
And I grabbed that stuff for this show.
But I went down there.
So go check out Coda Radio 296 where we have more.
But I love talking to those guys because neither one of them thought they'd be Microsoft employees.
And then they ended up there.
Jeffrey's been there for 18 years.
Joey's been there for four years.
And he and I were Gen 2 users at the same time.
So we, after we were done.
Kindred spirits.
Yeah, we chatted about all of that
and had a good chat.
But JJ, I know you had some things
you wanted to mention
and I wanted to open it up to the vlog
for anybody else.
But JJ, did you have something,
I saw something go by
that you wanted to start with.
So I opened it up to you, sir.
So me, personally, I am a dual booter still at this moment, at this time, in this conversation.
And I also still pay attention to a lot of Windows news.
And it's not really a surprise that Microsoft is embracing open source.
surprised that Microsoft is embracing open source.
Satya Nadella, during the early days of Satya Nadella's tenure, he sort of emphasized
the future is with devices, but not specifically Windows
devices. And I do remember that presentation he had with that
iPhone with Microsoft services on it.
And that was like a shock to probably a lot of Windows geeks.
And also with the fact that Windows Mobile is not really a viable option at this point
and other stuff like that.
And there's also talks about also with the future of Windows 10 S
and also with the rumored Polaris devices,
it seems that Windows seems to be less of a power user OS and more of a normal OS.
But I'm not sure if Linux will probably take over the power users to those who really actually really want it.
There are still those enterprises who sort of are not looking at Linux at the moment.
And I'm sort of, it's sort of a mix.
So I couldn't like put this in recording and play it as a clip.
But the thing that I walked away with, the understanding that I managed to achieve, like the meta understanding was – how do I put this in a way that's not insulting to myself?
Isn't so much that as it is the result of about three and a half years of people that used to be suppressed that now have a little more leverage.
And certain people were laid off and made room for folks like Joey about four years ago.
And guys straight out of college that were running Gentoo four years ago were allowed to come into Microsoft and run things like the PowerShell group.
And they did a bit of a changing of a guard.
And there were people like Jeffrey,
who's been there for 18 years,
who were always kind of hip to,
I'm coming here as a former Unix user and I want to bring Bash to Windows,
which is where PowerShell came from.
So he was already kind of hip to the future direction.
So folks like him
now have assistants and their own corner office and their own people working beneath them and
they can summon podcasters like me to their office yeah because they hold they hold way
more authority than they did under balmer or gates and folks like like jeff like joey who's
four years out of college are running the the PowerShell core group now.
And he's got people on his team where they run Macs.
That's all they do is they use Macs.
He's got a guy on his team who runs Arch.
He's got plenty of users.
We talk about people that are running Ubuntu because they're working on PowerShell, which is a shell.
working on PowerShell, which is a shell,
so they have to be using it every single day to work out the things that, you know,
shells do differently on different operating systems.
Absolutely.
Yeah, and also I would like to say that
I do have a connection to, I think,
the head of the Microsoft graph,
and he's a Linux user.
He's an open-source proponent and Linux user as well.
Well, I'm not sure he's an open- proponent and Linux user as well. I'm not sure if open source is a proponent, but
he does use Linux.
Yeah, I kind of
wonder if it's, if they're
not, if the big secret
about Microsoft
isn't
anything that we've speculated
about. Like, the thing that
we've missed is the
dirty secret, the elephant in the room about Microsoft is they've moved beyond Windows before their customer base has.
Oh, yeah, definitely.
Right?
Very much so.
But they're still making money from it.
So they can't say anything.
And it's super awkward for them.
And so like you go down there and these guys are pretty enthusiastic about what they're doing.
But they can't come right out and say Windows is the past because they'd be happy for people to continue using Windows for the next 25 years.
Go ahead.
They'll sell it to you.
Yeah, go ahead.
We'll ship it on Windows.
We'll ship it on the web.
We'll ship it on the Mac.
We'll ship it on Linux.
We're happy to do it.
They used a term that we go into more detail on Quota Radio,
but they use a term called ambient Microsoft.
Ambient Microsoft.
They just want to be anywhere and everywhere that you might need them.
And he said, Jeffrey, the mission that was communicated to him by saje directly
make it possible for our customers to do more with their computers
and our sales guys will figure out a way to make money from it
so that was the directive not make it work on. Not make it a platform lock-in.
Figure out how to make them more money and get them to do more work with their computers.
And our smart sales guys, who we pay way too much money to, will go out there and figure out a way to nickel and dime them for it.
Wow.
And so he's detached now from that.
And if you think about that, that's an interesting thing because that's where PowerShell comes from on Linux because now Linux administrators from their Linux – from their Ubuntu desktop can manage with one script an Ubuntu box and 15 Linux servers and 15 Windows servers and 15 CentOS servers and 15 SUSE servers, right?
And a handful of Macs.
Like all of these now can be managed from one script.
And they take care of all of the communications between RPM and Debian or all the different – a little different like implementation layer things.
If you're a Windows shop and you've got a bunch of SUSE systems and Ubuntu systems and CentOS systems,
that's pretty valuable all of a sudden.
Or you buy someone else and they have those systems.
Which is actually something that happens more often than we talk about.
Totally.
Then you start to understand, oh, that's why it's ambient Microsoft.
That's why they're open sourcing.NET Core and PowerShell.
Because then all of a sudden,
when you're coming from a huge Microsoft infrastructure,
an on-premises setup that's really deep in Windows,
you can use some of your investments in scripts
to administer your systems, to set up users,
to create databases, to set up patches.
You can start to leverage that time across Linux systems.
And it can be on an Ubuntu, Asusa, Fedora, CentOS machine.
And the name attached to it, the brand attached to it is Microsoft,
which is about as damn good as Google, Apple, and Microsoft.
And then whether you need new infrastructure, be it Linux or Windows,
you'll reach for their cloud.
I'm not sure where I sit with all of this, but I
do recognize from a position
of somebody who was in the trenches
trying to implement this stuff, and when somebody would come
at you with, well, this is IBM
Tivoli backup.
It's made by IBM. So
we should implement this. And then we
did it. And it was the worst
frickin' backup system we'd ever used.
And then later on down
the road, well, Microsoft recommends that you should upgrade an NT4 network to Windows 2000
and definitely don't use this Linux thing. And then that all of a sudden became a benchmark
in which we were judged by. And it was this, you couldn't avoid the brand.
Well, now that brand can be used to manage Linux systems and they can be on-premises,
they can be in Azure cloud, they can be on-premises. They can be in Azure Cloud.
They can be on DigitalOcean.
It doesn't matter.
And they don't care.
They don't care.
They legitimately don't seem to care.
If you want to run it on an Ubuntu box and you don't have any Windows systems on-premises,
but you want to use PowerShell, they're happy.
Go for it.
Yeah.
They're good with it.
Like, okay, we'll be there.
We're ambient Microsoft now.
It's really something. Just like the rain, man. Just like the rain. I don't know what to make of it. Yeah, they're good with it. Like, okay, we'll be there. We're ambi at Microsoft now. It's really something. Just like the rain, man.
Just like the rain. I don't know what to make of it. Yeah.
They're basically taking the Pacific
Northwest weather patterns
and applying it to the
technology marketplace. It's an interesting structure, too, for the
business. Instead of building what the
salesmen sell, the salesmen are selling
what you create.
It also leads to uh
better better products and all that with from microsoft with regards to like the microsoft
garage experimenting on uh android and ios with many of their apps um those seem to then this
sort of um idea sort of stem from their mobile give up of windows mobile i would say yeah yeah they i think yeah after windows mobile kind
of failed and and windows rt and all that stuff and then sachi nadella takes over there's just
sort of this uh all right well we'll figure out how to make money at doing this and that's just
sort of been the drive so i have a question um i'm actually seeing Microsoft moving away from providing an ecosystem with their operating system to more something like providing infrastructure and projects regarding software.
Yeah.
That runs maybe everywhere.
Right.
I would agree with that sort of summarization.
Yes.
Okay.
But what about all the legacy software that is out there that relies on the Microsoft
and Windows 10 code base.
And they're happy to keep making money from that, too.
Yeah, sure, but that's definitely not something
that will change in a few years.
That's not going away that quickly.
I think that's why they're more than
happy for the situation.
That reason.
And there's also the bridges...
Wait, hold on. Let Producer Michael go.
Sorry.
I was just going to say that Microsoft is compartmentalized.
So yeah, this one group might be...
We want PowerShell to be everywhere.
We want Azure to have Linux,
and.NET is open source and all that stuff.
But the other side is making Windows 10
and they're locking everything down.
There's different priorities.
There's different fiefdoms.
However, I did genuinely get the sense that what they're cooking, everybody else is smelling.
Like it starts with like one or two projects and then it's something else in the company and then something else.
And it does seem to be a bit of a snowball effect.
But I'm not going to sit here and tell you that they're going to open source Microsoft Office.
Right.
But the autonomy is interesting too, right?
It's more of a – in some ways it's about like they weren't told no.
Like, oh, you want to make VS Code an Electron multi-platform and you're not using Windows technology?
Not a problem.
And so that just gets fed back into the company.
And so that just gets fed back into the company.
Yeah.
And now, like, when they write the debugger for.NET Core, instead of it being a Visual Studio only thing, it's something that they just sort of, like, open sourced.
And there's, like, an Emacs plug-in.
You can do it in Vim.
You can do it in Visual Studio Code.
You can do it in Atom.
Like, it's just this. All right.
Yeah.
It's interesting to see this approach.
And I think it's going to make him just a crap ton of money.
Yeah, yeah, it is. It is. And they're going to get rich. They're going to make they're going to they're going to be they're going to be one of the biggest moneymakers off of open source.
Isn't that something? They've gone from cancer to this.
They've gone from cancer to this.
I mean, it was deep.
And I mean, think about this.
We need to move on.
But think about this.
It was in the DNA of this company.
Like Bill Gates goes to one of the computer clubs and says, you're devaluing software by giving it away.
He writes him.
He writes this letter, a manifesto and says, we've got to stop giving away software.
We've got to charge for it.
I mean, it's in the DNA of the company.
And then Bill Gates moves on.
He goes and becomes whatever he is now.
And Balmer takes over.
And it's all about Windows everywhere.
It's all about Windows everywhere.
Windows first.
And now here we are.
And Linux is a cancer when bomber's running and now here we are with sache and and the people that have sort of been reshuffled underneath sache uh three or four years later definitely feels like a different message what were you gonna say yeah so it seems like microsoft's got
the linux chemo in now yeah yeah right they did right yeah nice i mean wherever we're at i think
one of the bigger commentaries is the lin Foundation now will sell you a $300 course.
A $300 course on administering Linux on Azure.
LFS 205.
It is a course from the Linux Foundation on using Linux on Azure.
That's where we're at in 2018.
The Linux Foundation is selling you a $300 course
on that. I'm signing
up right now. I mean, that is really
I mean, if that doesn't tell you where things have
gotten in the last few years.
Everybody's waiting around for it.
I appreciate all you guys waiting. We're going to
do our Plasma check-in. You're
running it. I'm running it.
I've been updating like crazy.
Like crazy. Yeah? You even did too. I've been updating like crazy. Like crazy. Yeah.
You even did too.
Like I thought you weren't going to update this.
I don't know.
For some reason, I thought you were like on a different version or something.
I thought I was too, but no.
I've been keeping up better than I realized.
Look at me.
I know.
You know what, Wes?
This is what happens. Wes either manages all his systems with like this centralized management platform that can handle millions of systems,
or he's just app get updating like a maniac and then a little upgrade here and there and who cares, right?
You know it.
I like how you roll, Wes.
Well, so I've been trying out KDE Neon User Edition and other folks like I think Popey
and I know Noah have been trying out KDE Neon LTS edition.
Well, those evil planning sneaky jerks over at the Neon Project who have been setting all of you LTS users up for ages, preparing you for a big, big trick, have pulled out the rug from underneath you and devastated your lives by hiding the Neon LTS edition.
So I got to tell you, one of the – so every week,
there's a couple of stories that I get a bunch of feedback on or like links.
And I actually – I'm not saying this to stop any of it
because sometimes it's actually a very valuable data signal.
So I'm not disparaging those of you who did this.
But I got a lot of telegrams and tweets and emails this week about, hey, Chris, did you see what they're doing?
Hey, did you see what they're doing, Chris?
And they would send me the link to this blog post.
It's short.
It's one paragraph.
It's one dense paragraph by Jonathan Riddle over at the Neon blog, and it says this.
With the
new Plasma LTS came an update
to KDE Neon LTS edition,
and lots of people asking which edition to
use and what the difference is.
I'll say this, too, by the way.
Once we announced the
KDE Neon Plasma Challenge,
the number one question
without any kind of close competitor, the number one question that we got was, are you doing the user edition or the LTS edition, and what's the difference?
In fact, I would be willing to bet, Producer Michael, is that not one of the number one questions that's in the Telegram group and in the community?
What's the difference between the LTS edition and the user edition?
Yes?
That's the number one question I get every time someone ever mentions Neon at all.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so I'm not surprised when I read that that was the number one question that came
into the project.
And so they say this caused us to review the purpose of the LTS.
And as a result, we've just hidden it from the download page.
So I want to dig a little bit into this for a second, because it has caused some people to say,
what's going on? Why is the project abandoning their LTS? What's going on, Wes?
I don't know.
Figure it out.
Well, you know what? We have figured it out. We have. And we'll tell you more about it here in
just a moment. But first, as we do here on the show, we got to pay the bills.
We got to thank Linux Academy.
And I got to thank everybody for signing up at Linux Academy.
You might notice that we have the same sponsors here on the show from time to time.
I don't know if you've noticed that or not.
Have you noticed that?
Not at all.
Yeah.
I appreciate that a lot, Wes.
No problem.
I got your back.
Yeah.
Just like Linux Academy.
Yeah, they do, don't they? And here's why. We could spend our time researching show topics, contacting guests, building community, trying out different infrastructure items.
Or I could spend my time selling the show to different advertisers. And I could have mattresses on here. I could have food.
All the mattresses. Hey,
what about HelloFresh? Would you like to have some free food? That does sound fresh. Yeah,
well, there you go. And what I've decided to do instead is I've decided to invest in certain
sponsors that are genuine fits for our audience, like Linux Academy. I honestly know that all of
us can use the service. I'm a subscriber, so I can say that with confidence.
They give you advanced training tools to increase your skills and encourage critical thinking around everything about Linux.
So think about that for a moment.
That's where they start, right?
That's where they start.
So that's going to make you super competitive in the industry.
And then they give you the tools to accomplish this, like hands-on labs, scenario-based labs.
They'll spin up virtual machines if it's AWS or if it's a local Linux box.
You can SSH into that and get a hands-on experience.
They have human beings, actual instructors that can help you whenever you get stuck.
They have self-paced in-depth video courses on every Linux, cloud, and DevOps topic.
And my favorite freaking feature about Linux Academy is their course scheduler.
Because I've got three kids, I run my own business, and I fancy myself a road tripper.
So when the hell am I going to get any kind of studying done? When am I ever going to learn
about new things? Well, my friends, Linux Academy is a course scheduler. You pick what you want to
do. You set your timeframes, and they'll help you stick to it.
If you want like reminders or goals, you want to download the study guides, they'll help you do all of that.
And then when you're ready to take the exam, they've got testing for that too.
Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged.
Go there, sign up for a free seven-day trial and support the show.
Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged.
And a big thank you to Linux...
I know, right?
A big thank you to Linux Academy
for sponsoring the Unplugged program.
Okay.
LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged.
So, guys, let's do our Plasma updates.
Let's do our Plasma check-in
because I thought this would be like a big production
because we made a big deal about it last week.
And now that we're here, I just have a big,
meh, this is what I'm doing now.
This is how I'm doing it from now on.
Like it's just sort of now my life.
I don't have like a, oh man, Plasma totally failed me story.
I don't have anything like that.
It's just a big, this has been great.
And I would say I like it better today than I did the week before and the week before that.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Well, the 512 upgrade was solid for me.
And I think you experienced this today, too.
Yeah.
When I move between machines and then I open up console, and it's been like a week since I've opened up console, and that son of a bitch opens up in the same exact place that I opened.
You know what I'm talking about.
I sure do, yes.
It opens up in the west.
It's just right there.
Right where I left it.
Right where my memory goes, where my muscle memory goes.
It's like super small stuff like that.
I mean, it's that times a thousand i know that seems stupid and small but if you add it up to all of the stuff like uh the quadrant tiling when i'm moving my windows
around and the way it snaps then i can resize it just works so damn fast and efficient i can't even
help myself i just you feel like you're coming home a little bit more yeah no it's like mom's
cooking but you it was more like i was using a public terminal and
i kind of spun up a new shell no you know what here's what it is wes like no no one is like me
living out in the city you know i'm out living in the city it's clean there's a lot of different
delivery services uh it's it's kind of got like a coldness to it that's no that that that's no
but like plasma plasma is like coming home to mom's cooking.
Get it out of here.
And it just is delicious.
It just works the way I want it every time I come back to it.
You know, it's just the same thing mom's been making me for the last three weeks.
Cheesy goodness right there on top.
And if I haven't gotten – I'm going to underball this.
Everybody likes to exaggerate on the internet i'm
gonna under exaggerate here for a second i've gotten a hundred different tweets and telegrams
and emails and i'm on i'm under exaggerating and and i would say eight out of ten are switching
wow yeah i would say there's a there's a couple that are like not working for me.
In fact, the number one thing I
think I've heard, because it's about five
of them, is they're going back to
cinnamon.
Cinnamon.
Interesting.
Cinnamon.
Cinnamon.
I know, right?
Okay. I know. I mean, I've enjoyed cinnamon a lot at times.
Me too.
Me too.
Me too.
Me too.
It's just funny, though.
It is funny, right?
Okay.
I'm not trying to laugh at them.
No, not at all.
No.
I'm not.
I'm not.
Because I've been there.
But it is like a weird one.
Cinnamon.
Anyways.
I sent them like a mate link at the end
um so i want to go around the horn here and i want to start with mr neon pobey because
uh i've gotten a lot of different people interested in this but the one i'm most curious in
is i i don't know maybe i'm wrong pobey but i think you and i were both like
unity seven for life uh before this experiment, correct?
Yeah, I'm not a distro hopper by any stretch.
I've used Unity for years and years, and before that I used Ubuntu.
I've used Ubuntu forever since it's existed, and before that Debian and before that Red Hat.
So we're talking a very, very long time ago.
So I just don't switch distro at all and that's not because i'm employed by canonical but it's but i didn't switch before
i started working at canonical it's a big waste of work and time like that's right it's getting
used to you so i was quite happy i you know it's like you know that whole question about why do you
use what you use it's because i like it it's not because the competition is terrible or because other things you know have awful workflows it's just i like the workflow that i have right so
everyone else who hates it fair enough use something else i like this yeah so i like
unity 7 so yes i have been you know unity 7 for life unity 7 master race and all that stuff
but um you suggested kde neon so I thought I'd give it a go.
Now, here we are.
You and I are over two weeks, really, in how long we've been using this.
But it's a solid two weeks.
What is your thoughts?
If you don't count the faffing around on the plane.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, sure.
You know, yeah, I'm still using it it i'm talking to you now from a mumble
snap on kd neon like i was last week still works i don't even think i've rebooted since last week
i don't know um but yeah it just works it wakes up super fast when i open the lid and all my windows
refresh and like you said you open console and it opens in exactly the same place, the same size, same font size.
Everything just remembered where it was.
Yep.
Yeah.
Everything seems to be working.
I didn't have quite as smooth experience as you did with the upgrade to 5.12.
Yeah.
You got it.
You went from 5.8 to 5.12.
You got it the day before I did. Oh, right. I went from 5.11. Yeah, you got it. It went from 5.8 to 5.12. You got it the day before I did.
Oh, right.
I went from 5.11.
No, no.
That's not why.
So you did it the day before I did, and I got it pretty soon after the next day.
The problem I had was their server went down while I was midway through an upgrade.
Or they rebooted it, or it had an outage, or it was just, let's be favorable and say it was super popular, right?
Because there were lots of people joining us on this journey, and lots of people were upgrading at the same time.
Could be.
That's entirely plausible.
And so I got network disconnections connecting to their server.
We unplugged them.
Oh.
Yeah.
But all I did was wait a little while and restart the upgrade.
It carried on fine.
So no problem.
And I've upgraded to 5.12 and everything seems tickety-boo.
Yeah.
So they're hiding the LTS version.
And my sense of it, and Producer Mike, I'd like to hear your take on it because I know
you've been watching the situation, is my sense My sense is, well, there was some bugs in the LTS version, specifically around Discover software,
that we just didn't catch because nobody on the team is using it, so we don't really want to put it forward.
Is the LTS version still going to exist?
Are repositories still getting updated?
The main difference between the LTS version and the user edition is that the LTS version ships Plasma LTS.
Right.
User edition ships current Plasma with the current Ubuntu LTS.
But wasn't there some sort of issue with Discover that sort of brought all of this to a front?
It's an issue with Discover every time they make a new version.
Is there really?
See, I didn't know that.
Is this, like, a common thing?
Discover is a, someone who's a Plasma fan, Discover is annoying.
Yeah.
I mean, it's one of those, it's like one of those features that's really kind of nebulous
because it's built for, like, the supposed new user, right?
I mean.
And Discover has, like, amazing ideas and concepts.
It's just they're not fully flushed out yet.
So, like, there's a lot of annoyances in that case.
But as far as this goes, it really is a discovered problem.
It was a – the main thing is that there's people not using it.
The developers don't use it.
So they put so little attention into it, it doesn't really make sense for them to do it.
And honestly, I never thought they should have done it in the first place because it defeats the point of Neon. Right, yeah. it it doesn't really make sense for them to do it honestly i didn't think i think they i never
thought they should have done it in the first place because it defeats the point of neon
right yeah because if you're going to roll your your entire stack on top of a lts base
why make part of that stack stop rolling for some reason i'd say i i haven't had any um issues with
discover um and i almost never open it.
As I mentioned last week, I installed half a dozen snaps, and I'm done.
I've got every application I need on this system,
and any additional libraries or command line tools,
I'll use AppGet to install.
The only time I've opened Discover is when I saw a notification
that told me I had some updates to do, so I clicked it and Discover opened and I pressed apply and they ran and then I closed the window and it went away.
And I was perfectly fine.
Discover 5.12 is 10 times better than 5.11.
Oh, nice.
Oh, really?
It's just that some people who are using the older versions, like if you did a full upgrade from Discover 5.11 or 5.8, it might not go as smoothly.
But if you use 5.12 to do any updates, it's perfectly fine.
Like I've done updates with Discover just to test it to see if it would do like the full thing.
And it most of the time works.
But when it fails, it fails badly.
So like that's why like it's not reliable.
I would just say it's like, well, 512 is so far.
I just don't think people should, you know, use the super old stuff anyway.
That's why I never really liked the Plasma LTS anyway.
So, like, it's, and they're not getting rid of it, right?
So, it's like, it's just.
Yeah, because they're still testing against it.
Yeah, they still use it for development.
And when I did the Plasma video, I had to do some benchmarking, so that was perfect that they had it so I could use 5.8. But other than that, I mean, I wouldn't bother with it because the fact that you get the stable upgrades from all the different Plasma versions is great. Like I've done multiple tests, multiple machines, Plasma never crashes on any
updates from any version. So there's no reason not to just use the regular Neon.
Yeah, I actually agree, especially from like an end user standpoint. I'll tell you where I can
see the purpose of an LTS version of Plasma. And that's when it comes to enterprise distros. Now,
take that for a second and then
let's sort of zoom out um a lot of the people that are talking here have been using desktop
linux for longer than 15 years so we all kind of have some standing in this area poppy were
you going to say something no um and we're all saying this is working for us and we're all saying No. It remembers my settings, and it crashes less. And I don't, like in Popey's case, he doesn't even think he's had to reboot in the last week.
I don't think any of us are saying it's perfect.
I don't think any of us are saying it doesn't have about a thousand defaults you might have to change.
Yeah, I just checked.
I've got an uptime of six days and 13 hours.
So, no, I haven't updated since last week yeah and you know let
me see so this machine here that i do every single show for jupiter broadcasting on currently has uh
yeah and this has an uptime of uh five days with three users and i think that's only because i
updated i rebooted after i updated it 5 12 five days ago and this is this is like a common thing
i do i tend to leave my i like leaving all my windows
open i just slam the lid shut open it up when i want to carry on and i like i i quite like having
quite long up times and i like systems that are robust that can cope with that this is the freaking
elephant in the room and we have to go because ask noah's coming up but i gotta ask you guys
like um so why is gnome the desktop the, the shipping on all of the enterprise distros
that are going to be supported until the middle of the 2025s or whatever?
What is it? Why is it not Plasma?
Legacy and branding.
People have known about GNOME for so long that it has the market share,
it has the recognition
the whole kde plasma kde's bloated thing that's been going around for years which has never been
true at all at any point and like people just kept saying it there was one bug in uh 4.3 no 4.3, no, 4.2 of plasma that made it sluggish for about four weeks until they replaced it with 4.3.
And at that point forward, it was fine.
But that one thing just created this weird onslaught of just bad reputation for KDE, bad reputation.
And it doesn't make any sense other than weird legacy, weird reputation, and kind of bad branding.
Because KDE isn't the name of the desktop, and it's still the most common phrase we're describing the desktop.
So they need to fix their branding.
probably the reason why people choose or projects have chosen gnome is probably because there's a billion dollar company behind it um like most of the uh if you if you asked any person in the street
who's behind gnome they'd say red hat they wouldn't say a community of developers which they
might say for kde or plasma they'd say there's a community of developers, which they might say for KDE or
Plasma. They'd say there's a community. Nobody knows who Blue Systems are or how much money
they have in the bank. But Red Hat are a well-known company, long-established, well-respected
company who are behind the known project. So i think that's a reasonable reason why people choose
yeah i i think that's it and that seems pretty reasonable to me uh the only problem is is that
we are heading full head it's full steam ahead into gnome uh even though a lot of us in this
room who've had a lot of years doing this are saying maybe and i think that's why we see a
lot of projects like solace and elementary os that are trying something a little different to try to strike that difference.
And Ubuntu Mate and the Mate project itself.
Also, I bet you it's something to do with, as far as the technical aspects, there's been a long thing of Qt.
People had a problem with Qt licensing and stuff, and they didn't want to deal with that, maybe.
True.
Yeah, that didn't help.
I don't know.
It's not a zero
sum game for kde to be good gnome doesn't have to be bad exactly for gnome to be good kde doesn't
have to be bad they can both be good in their own right absolutely it just happens to be that
plasma is good and gnome is bad oh no no come on it was so good there we could have been the
perfect ending and then you took it from us but i actually i want to echo that point i think he's
i think popey's completely right and it may be but i actually i want to echo that point i think he's i think
popey's completely right and it may be that they excel at different things and that yeah the mass
market perhaps gnome works well right kde works better when you have a foot in the game a little
bit yeah yeah either way uh i think a lot of us are sticking around on the plasma desktop which
is pretty awesome if you think about it that's that's gonna be you know i don't know it's a big
switch for a lot of us a new era
it is a new era