LINUX Unplugged - Episode 245: Microsoft of Things
Episode Date: April 18, 2018Azure Sphere is Microsoft making silicon as a service with Linux at its core. We’ve chatted with the folks behind Azure Sphere and breakdown this huge announcement. Plus a bunch of community news, a... string of app picks, and maybe even a concerned rant.
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Utopian.io. I'll go look for it. Yep.
Yeah. Okay.
And they basically take open source projects, okay,
and they induct them into the Steam blockchain
and build up a community around them.
And people who actively contribute back to the project
can get rewards back in cryptocurrency.
So it doesn't have to be code necessarily.
It could be things like translations or manuals or
graphics or anything else.
And it builds this idea around the
open source project actually making money
direct from people who contributed to it.
It's a very interesting point.
And your comparison there would be something
maybe for content creators too.
The point is that Steam
also has DTube
which is decentralized tube and DLive.
And they basically work in the same way.
So you put content out in DTube,
and you're earning money in cryptocurrency,
by people upvoting your videos.
So the bottom line is, the popular ones get upvoted,
and you earn money from being popular.
So you put out good content, you make money.
That also could, how does that not turn into
clickbait 2.0 though?
This is the cool thing about it.
The whole idea about upvoting
people for good content
is that
it's community managed about
the weighting of the content.
You have to have so many people
of sufficient
steam power to be able
to upvote your content to say
it's legitimate content. So you earn
steam power by being a good person in the community.
The more steam power you have, the more your
vote counts. Interesting.
Ha ha ha ha.
That's particularly interesting.
That's a really interesting take on that.
The problem with DTube is it just sucks at delivering video. That's the problem.
I get to see a single video actually play.
This is Linux Unplugged, episode 245.
Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's running the numbers, looking at the distros, and watching all of the projects.
My name is Chris.
My name is Wes.
Hello, Mr. Payne. It's good to be with you again on episode 245.
Coming up in this week's episode, we're going to do all of our traditional community news,
as well as some new project releases, some app picks, and some development sprints. But then, towards the end of the show,
we're going to talk about Microsoft's new Linux-powered devices
that will be coming to the market soon.
It's all of the news this week, and it's part of Azure Sphere,
which is an overall, large, three-stage, three-component effort
that Microsoft's putting on that may just wind up dominating iot and we'll tell you
how linux is playing a role what component of this is linux based and what you can expect in the
pretty near future wes and i got on a phone call with one of the core creators and developers from
microsoft they took the time to get the team on the phone with us before the show and we asked
them all of the hard questions we got the specifics about what they're running on these devices and we'll share
what we learned with you later on in the show straight from the horse's mouth we couldn't have
gotten better people to describe the tech to us it was really pretty awesome but before we get all
of that there's like news community stuff and a mumble room to bring in. So let's do all of that right now.
Time-appropriate greetings, virtual lug.
Hey, two pints of lager and a packet of crisps.
Wow.
That kind of made me hungry, actually.
Now I have a bit of an appetite.
Well, guys, we have much to cover today,
and I don't really know where to start other than maybe with Linus.
That just seems like the appropriate place right now.
Linus Torvalds on the Linux kernel mailing list
announced plans that you should not be excited about
and mean absolutely nothing,
so would you please stop talking about it?
Except for Linus keeps talking about it.
So he says the next release doesn't really seem to be shaping up
to be any particularly big release,
and there is nothing particularly special about it either.
The most special thing that happened
is just sort of a numerology thing.
The Linux kernel has passed the 6 million git object mark,
and this, he says, is reason enough
to call the next kernel version 5.0.
This version is completely meaningless.
It should mean that it's just silly
and that maybe I won't even switch to it
because even numerological rules
would be a silly reason
so I may not do it
and I may just surprise you
but 5.0 will happen someday
and it will be and should be meaningless
you have been warned
I like it
I can't wait
yeah right
I can't wait for it
I have no reason to be excited
I am really looking forward to Linux kernel 5.0
for no reason at all
I thought okay all, all right.
Thank you, Linus.
Thank you.
So that's how we started the show out today.
But let's talk about something that's a little bit higher up in the kernel stack.
And that's the user interface.
And Mr. Martin Wimpress tooling away like a soldier at Ubuntu Mate's high DPI support.
And it was almost a year ago that Wimpy came on here and told us about the first steps of bringing high DPI support to BuntuMate.
In fact, I'm looking at the post right here from April 2017, where it's a screenshot that Wimpy took on his XPS 15 4K screen.
And with a few dirty hacks, with Ubuntu 17.04 as a base, we had a high DPI.
So fast forward now about a year, where are we at with all of this, Wimpy?
We're all done.
It's all high DPI to the max in all the right places.
So I think I last spoke to you about this maybe five or six weeks ago.
And I said I wouldn't talk about it again, but I'm lying because I'm going to talk to you about it now.
So what's changed since then is we had a few bits that weren't implemented.
So one of the big changes is now that Marco,
which is the window manager for the Marte desktop,
that now all of its window controls and everything,
all of those scale and work correctly.
So where before when high DPI was enabled,
we were standing up compies underneath in order to fill that gap we we don't need to do
that anymore wow so the behavior is just like what you used to have you can either choose to run
marco or comp is uh and that is it's not constrained by whether you're using high dpi or not
so that's one of the big changes and then um kaja the file, has now had the full high DPI treatment.
And in terms of user facing changes that are going to be obvious there, that's really sort of we've made sure that the icons are all using vector icons and what have you.
So it all looks a bit crisper.
Very good.
And nicer.
So, yeah.
And there's been a few tweaks and touches all the way through to just improve things.
So there's some improvements to the way that font DPI scaling works.
So it gives you the ability to sort of do pseudo fractional scaling by having a scaled desktop and then manipulating the font DPI.
So, yeah, it's all it's all looking really good now.
manipulating the font dpi so yeah it's all it's all looking really good now and all those patches have landed in 1804 as of about a week ago uh all being tested looking in good shape so our high dpi
journey's finished and interestingly you said it was a year ago we we had that first discussion
about his uh rather shonky setup but the actual journey started a year before that just after 1604 closed and we embarked on
our journey towards um gtk3 so this has been two years in the making wow yeah good point um and
congratulations let me start there let me just say congratulations and then also uh work well done
really nice to see this we were just you know just talking on the pre-show about how there's just a few systems right now.
I can't really decide if my next rig is going to be high DPI,
and so I'm really happy to see this getting pushed forward by more and more desktops.
Yeah, I think the state of high DPI in general is in a good place for Linux now as well.
Yeah, I can remember some, I think when you got your XPS,
I think that was the the third
gen so that was about two and a half three years ago i think you got that laptop correct and you
know you were saying well you know these applications don't scale and i think firefox
and chrome both didn't scale at that time you know these days um and it's not just you know
it's nice nice obviously that the desktop that i am involved in now has high DPI scaling.
But when I install lots of other applications, I see just about everything scaling.
Now, you know, the one obvious standout that doesn't scale is GIMP, which is, you know, disappointing.
And they're getting there.
They've got some cheeky workarounds in uh
gimp 210 which is still based on gtk2 but they they do some magic to use larger icons and bump
up the font scaling to sort of fill the gap in the meantime yeah but other than that there isn't a
whole lot that i run and think oh this doesn't this this isn't uh high dpi scaled it has
gotten better it's it could be the story could be a bit better still on the plasma side of things
there's still three or so places you have to go to really get it all working um but cheese bacon
asks an interesting question and i don't know if you have the rough idea but it just from like a
raw number standpoint do you have any idea of roughly how many assets
had to be touched to get to a high dpi version or had to be replaced like icons and things like
that oh crikey thousands yeah thousands uh every icon um those were those were retouched by daniel
foray he did a an icon rework for us in 1704 uh michael tunnel did all of the the small assets to provide scaled versions and
recolored them so that's everything from like the the check boxes and the the the outlines around
the buttons because all the buttons are styled and themes so and then all of the css at the back
end for the gtk3 stuff whole chunks of that had to be adapted so it knew
what how to apply styling when it was in a scaled mode so you know when i say it took two years to
get there just building on top of gtk3 is only one of those steps and you know reworking all of the
themes to understand how all of these assets scale and are provided you know that was a whole chunk of work
and there were numerous themers and digital artists involved in in that endeavor so yeah
thousands and thousands of assets have been touched along the way wow well i'm glad you
guys are doing the hard work there uh so that'll be all all good to go in 1804 so when i get the
final 1804 i so i'll have that yeah i think i think there's one
teeny tiny thing we're gonna fix post-release regarding high dpi but it's so insignificant
i'm not gonna mention it and nobody will notice it okay then don't pay any attention over here
well thanks for the update yeah it's misdirection yeah yeah, we're good. You know, while we're on the Ubuntu vein here, Eric, I know I saw news about a week ago, I think, about the Ubuntu Studio project rebasing or making big changes.
Can you fill us in on that?
Yes.
So we've got some great things going on.
First of all, we established a council so that we can take some load off of the project later, which is really a good thing.
But what we're doing is we are trying to do something such as replace our meta package installer
with something like the Ubuntu Mate Welcome,
which I guess has also been forked to Budgie.
Cool.
And so we're going to be including that
to let people tailor the experience the way they want.
And we're also considering perhaps a change of default desktop environment
and perhaps add additional desktop environments as
options. So there's a number of things we're kind of brainstorming and working on.
We definitely want to get Ubuntu Studio out of the stagnation it's been in for
the past two years. Well, I look forward to seeing how that goes because I've used it on and
off. It's a pretty solid distro for people that maybe want to get into podcasting, as an example,
or something like that.
It's pretty great.
So Ubuntu Studio will have some changes.
When do those start landing?
So it sounds like the console stuff is already in place, but other changes, is that a release
or two away?
We're aiming for 18.10 for the first of the big changes, but 18.04 is really just going to be iterative
and the only thing about 18.04 is
for us, it will not be an LTS
just due to load manpower.
Okay. Yeah, I think I remembered hearing that. Well, great.
Thank you guys for the updates and
definitely keep up the good work and keep us
posting on how that goes. I love watching them projects
and it's always cool to see
that kind of stuff. It's just so
darn great. so darn great.
So darn great.
You know what else is great?
Ting.
Linux.ting.com.
It's smarter than unlimited because if you use less, you pay less.
It's just a base $6 for your line
and then your usage on top of that
for your minutes, your messages, and your megabytes.
That's it.
So if you only get a dozen text messages a month,
you don't need to pay for 500 text messages.
If you can download podcasts and listen to music via Wi-Fi
and cache it locally,
you probably don't need 12, 15 gigs of data.
So just pay for what you use.
If you want multiple devices, like a Wi-Fi or a cell phone,
or if you want a backup phone, it's great for that.
Because at $6 a month, you can afford to be really, really flexible.
And they combine that with a great control panel,
fantastic customer service, and a ton of devices that are ready to go.
And maybe the most important thing about Ting that I don't talk a lot about because it's just obvious to me now is they don't have like a strategy to get into media. They don't have
a streaming service. They don't have a Ting app store. They don't have an experience,
a branded experience with partners
that they want to push down to my phone they don't do any of that they don't care how you use the
service they just want you to have service and you can pick from cdma or gsm and they won't have
they don't have like some sort of ting rom that you'll have to install so they don't get in the
way of updates if you got a phone that gets frequent updates like the pixels and the next
eye and the motos they don't get in the way of that.
You get the updates as soon as the vendor releases them.
That's by far one of my favorite things about Ting,
and embarrassingly uncommon in the U.S. when you buy devices from carriers.
But there's so many other great things about Ting.
The customer service, like I mentioned, is bar none.
The control panel, always the best, and much, much more.
Start by going to linux.ting.com.
Take $25 off a a device or if you
bring a compatible device 25 in service credit linux.ting.com big thank you to ting for sponsoring
the unplugged program linux.ting.com wes you found this cool cool terminal app that for once isn't
powered by node.js but it's still super cool. It's written in Go, actually.
And how would you ever know
it's named GoTop? Yeah, exactly.
Gotta make sure you know. And it's
another terminal-based graphic
activity monitor, and it's
so epic. First of all, because
it's in Go, it's really simple. It's a small
little thing, no big deal. And
it has a
colored NCurses graph and it has
boxes of memory usage in your process
list and it boxes everything out into individual
segments. It's the exact
kind of thing if your boss is
walking in and you want to have something great up on your
screen and you could just have this up in an SSH
terminal and you just tab
over to that when your boss walks in. Oh yeah, just
pulling down some metrics off the old server.
Meanwhile, you're watching YouTube
on another tab. Yeah, right, probably also
in Terminal, but in the other T-Mox
pane. Yeah, actually you did have a pick
for a bare minimal YouTube
this week too that almost made it in the show, which could go nice
with this. Minimal YouTube, I don't,
do you want to check, check the, check
your link, see if you have it, because we should almost bust that out.
It has a, it has a light and dark mode
and the installation is just dead simple.
You just get, clone it down.
You run the shell script.
You've got it to go.
And, of course, it's in the AUR2 is gotop-bin.
Where was it?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
So it's minimalist YouTube.
And if you go to tube.quinzel.tech, it's Q-U-I.
Put a link in the thing.
Put a link in the IRC for that.
Yeah, we'll put a link in.
That is like the Google search page for YouTube. It's Q-I-Q-U-I. Put a link in the thing. Put a link in the IRC for that. Yeah, we'll put a link in.
That is like the Google search page for YouTube.
It's just nothing.
It's just blank.
It's minimal.
It's easy. So simple and clean, yeah.
It just gets you the video.
It's a great way to use YouTube if you just want to go watch a video,
but you don't want all of the rest of YouTube.
So, yeah.
Wes will drop a link.
He's in the irc.geekshed.net.
Anyway, so this is called Gotop.
And Gotop is a super slick looking terminal that we wanted to point you guys to.
So you have an app to download this week after the show.
And then a call out to a project that used to make it a break my day.
It's Clonezilla.
And Clonezilla got a good update this week.
Version 255 38 and the most interesting feature is a new massive deployment mechanism
based on bit torrent technology so the machines that you're imaging become part of the distribution
network well that is just slick it's obvious too really if you think about it uh now it does
require some additional disk space to do this, but I've worked on some large networks
where you're imaging 30, 40, 50 systems or more,
and this could be so useful.
It's such a neat, neat thing.
They're also baking in some part image support,
some additional part image support,
and the ability to change Windows 10 host names
when you restore an image.
Ooh, slick.
In Clonezilla, yeah.
In Clonezilla, they just keep on going
and it works so well.
So appreciative.
It's not something
I use frequently,
but I am so appreciative.
Every time you need to,
right?
It's just boom.
And there's a live CD
that has now been synced up
to Debbie and Sid
and running Linux kernel 4.15.
So it's a pretty modern,
pretty recent live environment
to run Clonezilla from.
And then they're baking
in that BitTorrent distribution.
I got to play with that sometime. I don't have any need
for that, but I gotta play with that.
It just sounds so cool. And then to
round out
sort of an app pick-ish
section, FontFinder
is a GTK3
application. Yes, I'm still talking about
GTK applications.
It is a really easy, smooth
front-end to browse Google's
free font archive from the comfort
of your Linux desktop. And it's
super straightforward. It's exactly
what you'd expect, but at the same time,
it's pretty nice. You can search
for the font you want. So say you want to go get Google's
Robo font, or Roboto, I think it is.
So you put in Robo, and then it'll show you
Roboto, Condensed, Monos slab, all the different fonts they have.
And then in the client-side decoration header bar thingy,
it has a nice install button.
It'll pull that font down from Googs
and load it into your Linux box.
Bob's your uncle.
Robert's your father.
Now you've got a font.
I like it.
Simple, easy, and we'll have a link in the show notes for that
because it's up on GitHub.
So that's Font Finder.
I did notice there, Chris.
Did you pick it because it was Rust?
Is that why?
You're a little favorite?
It actually did.
That was legitimately what pushed it over.
You know me so well.
That was totally it, too.
I was going to make a Rust joke about it, but then I just got to let it go.
But, yeah, you caught me.
You caught me.
So Rhi was going to join us from system 76 but mumble is um mumble is off-putting if you don't use it on an ongoing
basis so i think they had some audio troubles i might try to try to grab him later on the week
and just have an offline chat with him about it but system 76 is joining the gnome foundation
advisory board and i believe it's actually Sri from System76 that'll be doing this.
And I find this to be a fascinating move
because it's, while the advisory board
isn't super influential over what GNOME does,
because at the end of the day,
some developer has to do the work.
And it's not like they have a lever they pull on
and then a developer comes out the other side.
So it can definitely set directions and things like that.
But it could also,
my understanding, and I was going to ask Sri about this,
is it can be sort of a sounding board
for organizations that are
using GNOME, or groups that are using GNOME
for different projects. That
seems like a super
sweet position for System76 to be in.
It makes sense, right?
To be able to get sort of a wider
industry data collection of how people are using GNOME
when they're building Pop! OS on top of GNOME seems really, yeah.
You're part of the conversation in the community.
Yeah.
So good for them.
System76 joining the GNOME advisory board.
Boom.
How about that as a rapid fire set of app picks and news?
That's what we do here on the Unplugged program.
We busted through that quicker than I expected, even with a bonus app pick.
Linux right to the brain. Man. Man. If we could just hook it Unplugged program. We busted through that quicker than I expected, even with a bonus epics. Right to the brain.
Man, man. If we could
just hook it up to your eyeballs, it would be even better.
Just suck it right in through the neurons in your eyes.
Coming next week.
Yeah, we're working on that, aren't we? In fact,
maybe I'll mention a couple of things. So,
there is a new mysterious
operator behind the scenes.
I can't say more than that, but
I don't know if you guys remember,
but many, many weeks ago,
I announced around episode 250,
we'd be making some changes
to the Unplugged program.
Yes, you did.
I think I might have mentioned it around 200.
I don't know.
Well, they arrived a little early.
And so we've been,
for about a month and a half,
we've been every week,
there has been small incremental changes
for the better behind the scenes.
The poor folks on YouTube have it the worst, but the folks on the podcast version have it the best.
So it's been a mixed bag, although we are adding new features to our YouTube video.
We're trying a new experimental encoding that will post the video on YouTube and in the show description section include time links for the different chapters of the show.
Slick.
Yeah, that's something we're working on for a bit.
So we've been making changes for a few weeks on the Linux Unplugged program.
And the core of it is if you haven't updated your RSS feeds, it'd be a good time to go to linuxunplugged.com and slash RSS is the feed directly.
Linuxunplugged.com slash RSS.
Subscribe to that new feed.
Let us know what you think and start sending your feedback about it at the slash contact. So you can go to linuxunplugged.com slash RSS. Subscribe to that new feed. Let us know what you think, and start sending your feedback about it at the slash contact.
So you can go to Linux Unplugged.com slash contact
and let us know what you think.
Because it's been a slow iterative change,
and we're going through another change.
So we've hired someone to do the editing for a bit
and see how that works and see what you guys think.
So I have been editing the show for the last few weeks.
I'll be pulling back a bit.
I'll still be involved with all that stuff,
but more changes are coming,
but they're starting now.
We're sort of at the end of it all.
So it's a good time to kind of take stock
and see what everybody thinks.
And if you're on the YouTube side of things,
just be patient with us
as we sort of retool some of that workflow
because that stuff is a changing.
But it's exciting times in the Unplugged universe.
Times would be a changing. Yeah. Oh, and also, speaking of times changing, Tech Talk Today is back on the air is a changing. But it's exciting times in the Unplugged universe. Times would be a changing.
Yeah.
Oh, and also, speaking of times changing,
Tech Talk Today is back on the air twice a week,
technology show, Tech Talk.Today.
Yeah, yeah.
With me and Ange predominantly,
but we're going to have folks in town for LinuxFest Northwest,
so I'll probably try to get folks to jump on the mic
and hang out with us.
Special guest stars.
Yeah.
I bet that Noah Chalaya,
I bet I could talk that Noah Chalaya and that Alan Jude.
There you go.
Getting on the mic.
And then, of course, we'll do a live, we may do a live Linux Unplugged from Linux Fest.
I don't know.
I think we're also going to try to do a tech talk.
So we've got a lot we're doing.
But you can just stay subscribed to get the best stuff there at linuxunplugged.com slash RSS to get the feed directly.
All right, so let's move into a couple of final news items for the day.
And let's also then get into the huge item of the day, the one that I think people are
still processing, and that is that Microsoft is now shipping a Linux product based on the
Linux kernel, which I think has caught a lot of people by surprise this week.
So we'll talk about that as well.
But first, we'll mention DigitalOcean.
Here's that.
Hold on, Wes.
Let me pull out the prop paper.
You ready?
We got to be prepared for this.
This is serious business.
dio.co slash unplugged.
That's where you go to get a $100 credit.
dio.co slash unplugged.
Go there, sign up with a new account,
and get a $100 credit for 60 days.
You can try out their new mix-and-match droplet.
They're a flexible droplet for $15 a month.
You choose how much CPU and
disk and memory you need. You mix and match the different
resources. They also have CPU optimized
droplets with massive high-end
greatly, just huge
massively powerful. And then,
if you want to, you can just throw in a few hundred gigs of RAM.
Just throw in a few hundred gigs of RAM too.
I don't know what you're
doing, but damn, it's amazing.
I mean, they have a whole scale.
But for me, for my humble needs, I have my favorite sweet spot at $0.03 an hour.
Oh!
Fact, the rigs that I don't have at $0.03 an hour, they got upgrades recently from DigitalOcean.
And now it's like they're more than...
I already have them at $5 a month
total. Like that's plenty because they're just doing
like metric collection or they're like alerts or
or it's one's a bot and it's like
doesn't need a lot. But DigitalOcean
recently adjust all their prices and
retroactively just
upgraded my machine. So my machines just got
better recently. It's so great.
You didn't do anything. It's better. I love it.
do.co slash unplugged. You can deploy a system It's better. I love it. do.co slash unplugged.
You can deploy a system
in less than 55 seconds.
Everything is used
in SSDs.
They have 12 data centers
all over the world.
20 gigabit connections,
40 gigabit connections.
I don't know.
It's gigabits.
I mean,
they're just gigabits
for days.
Plus private networking
on the back end.
Block storage
they have available
as well as S3 compliant
spaces storage.
Very nice. Very slick. Network level firewalls. Monitoring baked in to give you metrics they have available as well as S3 compliant spaces storage very nice network level
firewalls monitoring
baked in to give you metrics on your CPU
your disk and graph it all
for you it's a really
really really compelling offer
and you can get $100 of credit to play around
when you go to do.co
slash unplugged do.co
slash unplugged well my favorite
Linux video editor
is having a development sprint
as we're on the air, I think,
or at least in the next few days,
if not that.
Their team is going to Paris
and they're going to dedicate the time
to discuss long-term goals,
review application workflow
with professional editors,
and prepare for the next major release,
which is labeled 1808.
So the KDN Live team's going there. And then after that, after that, they're going to the next major release, which is labeled 1808. So the Cadian Live team is going there.
And then after that, after that, they're going to the Libre, at least a sub part of the team, is going to Libre graphics meeting for a Cadian Live workshop on the 30th.
So if you're going to be in Paris, you can come say hi to the team.
If you're going to the Libre graphics meeting, you can go say hi to some of the Cadian Live team.
That's fantastic.
So a couple of weeks ago, I'm like, who is using KDN Live?
Is anybody else
using KDN Live
in production?
And I said that
CrazyCast over at
Linux Gamecast
and Van Stone
was editing an open shot.
I have been corrected.
They are actually
using KDN Live.
Nice.
So yeah,
another one to the books.
I'm trying to keep track.
So if you know anybody
out there,
a YouTuber or
actually somebody
who's maybe not
on YouTube too, just somebody that's making content in some other capacity, I'd love to know who is using KDN Live out there.
I've been tracking them.
Who's me?
Who said that?
Popey.
Oh, Popey.
Oh, what are you using?
Popey.
It's a Ubuntu podcast video and I didn't even know it.
Well, it is, but we don't use Kdenlive. I used it just briefly today because I wanted to record a video
and I needed to redact some personally identifiable information,
and I didn't know how to do it.
And it turns out that I just Googled blur credit card info or something like that,
and I found a tutorial.
And within like under a minute, I figured it out and added an effect,
drew a box around a thing that I wanted to pixelate,
and it just did it, rendered it out, done.
It was so easy.
Kdenlive is just awesome.
Really?
Wow.
So what about the fact that it was, you know,
video is moving, right?
So the object kind of moves around in the frame.
No, it was a web page with credit card info in it.
But it did show how you could move it.
But I didn't need to do it,
so I didn't follow the rest of the tutorial. I just
oh, that's what I need to do. That's enough.
Shut the video down. Yeah, it was great.
Yeah, I've played with it lightly
and I like it quite a bit
and I know that
when you're working with really long
projects, that's sometimes, that's why I was asking
you, like, what is the Linux Gamecast using these days?
Because when you're working with really long projects,
a program can get a lot a lot more crashy it's it just totally makes a big difference
have you ever watched him he sometimes live streams him editing his own shows um i think
on a sunday afternoon he does it my time and i've i've watched him on twitch sometime and he's just
like chatting to people and saying does this music fit here what should i do here and you
can just see him going over and over and over the edit.
I think I've seen
Caden Live crash once for him
on a live stream.
It seems to work for him.
I haven't seen it. That's usually probably when I'm
recording LAN, so I don't really have a chance.
I've been experimenting
on a couple of behind-the-scenes projects just for like,
when we go to Linux Fest, if we have a camera with us,
how do I want to edit the resulting footage?
Because if I don't figure this out now,
it's going to end up on a Mac.
That's what my thought process has been.
I've also been experimenting with Reaper, which is an audio editor.
Oh, yeah. Nice.
On the other end of things, on Linux.
I think the situation with Apple and the Mac Pro
is the canary in the coal mine for Apple,
that they have no idea how to build high-end computers.
They have no idea.
The people that are making those computers have obviously lost touch.
They don't understand thermal throttling.
They don't understand all of these things.
And it's just, I think it's too late.
Even if they ship something decent in 2019
by hiring a team of highly paid professionals to tell them,
yes, you're doing everything right, Johnny, I think it's too late.
So it's just not a professional workstation anymore
unless your workload is doable on laptops
or laptop-like components
or systems that are cooled like laptops.
So I think it's behoovent upon all of us,
if that's a word I can make up,
to try to replicate our workflow
or replace parts of our workflow as much as possible on Linux.
The only problem is KDE Live is getting better for simple edits for me, but Reaper is commercial software.
And so it's like, am I really any better off?
Because I'm just moving to another commercial solution.
But it needs to be sophisticated.
It needs to have certain support for industry plugins.
It needs to support multi-track.
I've got a mixer with ungodly
amounts of inputs and outputs
and my recorder needs to be able to read
all of those and bring us all in on our own track.
It's stuff that just
Audacity can't even do.
It's not even capable of doing. So you have to have a certain level
of software to do this.
It's a start, I think. It tends to be commercial.
At least it's on Linux, though. Noah's trying
to convince me. I'm not so convinced yet. So I'll be curious to see what comes. Yeah, at least it's on Linux, though. Yeah, Noah's trying to convince me.
I'm not so convinced yet.
So I'll be curious to see what comes out of the Cadian Live Sprint.
When these things happen, it seems to be pretty good for these projects.
Like, the results that we get out of it seem to be pretty positive. I don't think I've given it a shot yet, so now I have a new something to play with.
You ought to do, like, a day in Seattle with Wes.
Yeah, totally.
And then edit it on Cadian Live.
I think I will.
I would so watch that.
Yeah.
You could be a vlogger, Wes. You then edit it on KDM Live. I think I will. I would so watch that. Yeah. You could be a vlogger,
Wes.
You could,
I would watch the Wes vlog,
downtown Seattle,
Wes vlog.
Is there any Seattle vloggers?
You could narrow,
you could,
you could just own the market
and become the next YouTube star,
which sounds wonderful.
Yeah.
Great.
Yeah.
I've been,
I've been debating whether to talk about this on air.
And so I'm not going to put links in the show notes
because I don't want to encourage traffic.
But I also feel like it's something that we need to be aware of.
And so I don't know if you guys have seen,
and I really don't know much about it,
but what's been going on with Linux Deepin this week?
It's really, it's a disgrace, really.
So there was an unsubstantiated youtube video that goes live that says that
linux deepen is spyware and that it's spying on you um and then the project after it gets enough
traction of course because reddit is a cesspool of d-bags uh it gets upvoted it starts getting a
lot of attention so it becomes on the deepen projects radar and they respond with a blog
post and of course there's a communication barrier
here so there was a couple of things that are misunderstood and they come back and say well
we're not really spying what we're doing is we're collecting the number of installs and they're like
they list like the three or four data points that are pretty basic bitch metrics that aren't really
going to offend anybody unless you're looking to be offended and And of course, then there's a follow-up video that then sort of just makes hay out of their admission
that they are collecting some metrics.
And I told you, here's proof of the spying.
And then everybody in the Reddit comments,
oh, they're saying they're not spying,
but then they write a blog post saying exactly how they're spying on us.
And it's just outrage after outrage and um i think we have a
problem here because i and i won't go through the whole thing but you guys know i i'm a big believer
that unlike the windows admin community or the apple user community or these different subsects
of technology the open source community is vulnerable to this sort of insidious infighting
in a way that I think is destructive to people's motivation to contribute to open source code.
So I think it's worth talking about just really quickly. I won't go on to it because there's
episodes dedicated to it if you want to hear this. But I think we have a particular problem
with YouTube. It is a toxic cesspool of clickbait one-upism.
And it's compounded by adpocalypse and constant demonetization that forces people to continue to pivot,
to try to flail around and find a new way to get people's attention
and prey on their emotions,
so that way they can click on a YouTube video
and somebody can monetize that click for a penny.
At the same time, there is competition inherent in the platform
because there's multiple people that are trying to cover these topics.
You've noticed that probably if you are on YouTube,
you've noticed, oh, well, really since we ended last,
Jupyter Broadcasting has been significantly pulling back on YouTube.
And the rationale has been because I think it's toxic
and I think it's damaging to the open
source community because of its inherent nature of how the system works. It's designed to encourage
clickbait because of the way the YouTube algorithm works. It's designed to encourage people to try to
elicit an emotional click. But the other problem is, and this is a secret that Google doesn't really like
to tell you because it's really bad for ads, but anybody who creates content for YouTube for a
little while, and I've been doing it for about 10 years, I've been posting to YouTube, so I have
some standing here. A huge portion of the audience on YouTube is kids.
And I'm grateful you guys are watching.
This isn't me saying, hey, kids suck.
It's just saying the reality is a huge portion of the YouTube audience is children.
Not all of them are logged in, but it's a huge percentage.
And especially on the large YouTubers, like your Roman Atwoods, your Casey Neistats,
your large channels where they get hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views, a ginormous percentage of that that Google
does not want you to know about, because again, that doesn't play well to advertisers, is children.
When you remove the child metric from YouTube, what's left, the adults, well, you have to realize
that now these people
that are making videos about Linux and open source are serving to a very small niche of YouTube
already, the adults. And then it's a niche within that niche of people who care about Linux and
open source and are willing to watch production values that tend to vary and people who tend to
be varying presenters talk about these topics that's like
a super double triple niche right now we're way down the stack and so these people that are
creating these videos are really fighting for a small number of audience on youtube and i would
argue it's a number that is actually too small for them to successfully monetize so we have this
really toxic nature where they're competing against each other because you only have so much time in the day to watch a youtube video
they're competing against an algorithm that's a total black box and it drives clickbait nature
of content creators to put something out there that i just need you to watch because i have to
grow my audience because unless i'm getting about 25,000 views per video, I can't really monetize this, especially if I'm living anywhere on either side of the east or
west coast of the United States. You got to get around 25,000, 30,000 views per video to make a
decent living. That's not accounting for adpocalypse. That's not accounting for demonetization.
So don't say a bad word. It's a very, very difficult landscape,
and it pushes people to do things like call a Linux distro spyware simply because it's checking
how many people have installed Firefox. And it creates this negative momentum and this negative
discussion and this confirmation bias that you see then spread throughout discussion forums do you think
that deepin was looked at more closely because it originates from china yeah yeah and do you
think that that betrays the content providers mentality yeah and maybe the people that uh all
got their pitchforks as well, although I could
easily see it happening to Ubuntu, especially if Canonical hadn't been fully out ahead of, hey,
you know, in six months, we're going to start collecting some basic metrics that we should
have been collecting all along. If Canonical had messaged that ahead of time, it would have,
and you guys, that's why you met, that's why Canonical messaged it, right? Because it would
have been a huge controversy. um but i i just feel that
you know that there is a mentality which is because something comes from china it should
should be eyed with suspicion first absolutely i think that's absolutely true i'm not saying i
subscribe to that by the way i think that it's actually a rather dangerous position in default position to have yeah but i feel that deep in has been
has been picked out in this way more than once in the past by a similar group of content makers
on youtube there is a common theme that something that comes from china it's like cheap chinese
rubbish yet what a lot of people forget is they also buy expensive chinese stuff like
you know they're very expensive device that they fondle all day every day it was almost certainly
made in the far east and that's okay but it's the cheap chinese rubbish that's terrible and
and decrying everything is cheap chinese crap because they can buy something cheap on alibaba
but it turns out it's actually cheap to manufacture something over there that doesn't mean it's all
crap right and the same goes for software just because there's a vast number of
developers over there creating software at low cost doesn't make it inherently rubbish yes they
might make mistakes so does everyone nobody in any of those threads on reddit is perfect
none of them have ever not made a mistake in their life and like never been found out and
then everything's okay like everyone makes mistakes right and these not made a mistake in their life and like never been found out and then everything's
okay like everyone makes mistakes right and these people made a mistake there's a communication
barrier between our western youtube friends and those guys over in the far east and i think there's
a massive misinterpretation of basically what was in in essence um like Google Analytics, that everyone has turned on unless they've got an ad blocker
and everyone uses, yet it's not okay for them to use it over there
because they are them.
That's why.
Yep.
You're pretty much that.
It does feel, and you see it too, it's not just China.
You know, a lot of people don't trust Telegram
because it comes from Russia.
And that's reason enough to be skeptical of it.
But that's just as bad because it doesn't come from russia it's not like russia is one amorphous block that is how it is seen right exactly it's one guy who
happens to be russian who made that thing russia is a effing huge place with a lot of people in it
lots of different things one guy happens to be r Russian, doesn't make all of Telegram bad. There are other things that make Telegram bad, but it's not that.
Yeah, I think, Poby, you nailed it on the head right there. I couldn't say it better myself.
And so maybe that's part of what gets me going about it is the sort of insidious
thing that sort of creeps in. You don't even realize it's what's driving your motivation.
And it just seems so damaging in the open source community. I guess part of it
comes,
I got another email this week
from, I don't know if he's
a well-known developer,
but the project is well-known
and he's quitting
because of just feeling like,
the most common thread in there
is this awful sense of entitlement
and this sort of inflexibility
in respecting the fact
that I'm a human being
and it's just it's really sad to see that i can't agree more with that sentiment you know the other
thing that some of these um youtube videos and and other outlets on reddit is this huge sense
of entitlement you know i'm just going to dog pile on this thing that you make in your spare time
for the love of it you know i'm going to criticize it like it's a professional project i'm gonna i'm just going to dog pile on this thing that you make in your spare time for the love of
it you know i'm going to criticize it like it's a professional project i'm gonna i'm gonna build my
own profile off the back of you know shit posting about whatever linux distribution or whatever
application it is that you you think you've got superior opinions on and it is extremely demoralizing for the people that
invest huge amounts of time in a positive way to actually try and create something for anyone to
use free of charge in in open source and then and then to have it shit on by yeah you know a bunch
of monkeys in reddit is is really dishearteningening and it does make you think twice sometimes you know
you know i'm sat here this evening whilst we're talking in another window i'm i'm fixing the last
of the bugs that are you know blockers for for release next week and i've been doing that to
the early hours of the morning for several weeks now and i'm pretty tired and when you see posts
like that in the corners of the internet where these discussions run, it really turns you off, you know, putting the effort in.
Yeah, I find a super irony too.
So people that are sort of stuck in this cycle of trying to create crazy content so that way they can build audience, so that way they can reach sustainability.
It's sort of like pissing in your own well.
build audience so that way they can reach sustainability it's sort of like pissing in your own well and there's they're they're devastating they have devastating consequences
on people that are working on a passion project that are doing something that fulfills them and
then you these people come along and they they they just devastate them and the irony is how
fulfilling must their work be if they're if they're creating content like this that is just
this shit content these shit posts they can't be proud of themselves they can't be they can't be fulfilled by this and
so the very thing that's probably robbing them of fulfillment they use to take away from somebody
who has found something that gives them fulfillment it's sick it's the smug attitude that you see you
know in the in the comments and the and and some of the content it's well you know
you know i i i'm i'm making a funny now by by you know pointing out this this thing that i've found
and it's just like well if that's the best you've got to contribute to open source i'd rather you
weren't a part of it and you shut the fuck up yeah i have found um that it's not everywhere
and it's not like i i wouldn't i wouldn't say most of these things about anyone in the Jupyter Broadcasting audience.
I have had so many wonderful interactions.
People – you know, I get notes from people that just say, thanks for working as hard as you do.
Thanks for doing what you do.
You know, and I get a lot of that.
I mean, I get haters too, but I get a lot of that.
But there are corners where it's really prevalent, and it seems to be areas where there's a lot of incentives
around getting as many clicks as possible,
whether it's upvotes or ad revenue.
Wherever those dynamics come to play,
it just seems to be really toxic for open source.
I don't know.
I think we've made this point enough,
but it's something I've been thinking about
watching this go down with Deepin.
Because, you know, I see this go across my radar and it's like,
how do I treat this? Is this a news story?
I don't want to even give this legitimacy.
Now, if there was legitimately like spying taking place,
I absolutely would cover that.
But when it's this sort of rough shot, no fact-based opinion stuff.
It really breaks the trust that is oftentimes kind of the heart of the open source community.
I kind of feel like we do this with stuff from Microsoft, too.
Like it came from China.
It came from Russia.
It came from Microsoft.
So therefore, we're automatically skeptical.
And it was in full force this week when Microsoft announced Azure Sphere, which is a multi-part component.
But the most headline-grabbing component is the fact
that there's an OS involved that
uses the Linux kernel.
I have seen everything from...
This is now everybody... Actually, the most common thing
I have seen is this is Microsoft
embracing and extinguishing
Linux. They've begun the
extinguish phase, and
everybody's jumping to 11 on this one.
We decided, let's actually
talk to the people behind the project and figure out what's going on and so we discussed with a
couple of folks from microsoft that are involved in the building the product uh what it is what's
going on what kind of linux what are they using it for what's the hardware all of that stuff and
uh so we'll share you we'll share we'll share with you what we picked up.
Does that make sense?
We'll share what we learned.
We got the deets.
We got the deets.
But first, let's mention Linux Academy.
It's linuxacademy.com slash unplugged.
You go there to sign up for a free seven-day trial
and support the show.
It's a platform to learn more about Linux,
and once you sign up, you get unlimited access.
And they're about to add a whole bunch of new stuff
in the month of April.
70 new courses, challenges, learning activities.
It actually breaks down like this.
20 new courses as well as some content refreshes,
50 new cloud assessments,
hands-on learning activities,
and new challenges baked in,
as well as taking advantage of their new
real-time grader platform
so you can get feedback as you're learning.
Ooh-wee.
Isn't that great?
That is.
Yeah, so go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged,
sign up for the free seven-day trial.
You support the show, and then check it out.
They got hands-on scenario-based labs.
They spin up servers on demand.
You pick the distro and adjust the courseware and the servers.
They have full-time human beings that can help you if you ever get stuck.
If you're busy, they got a course schedule.
It'll work with your busy schedules.
And they got Learning Pass, which are a series of content at Courseware
planned by instructors for specific career tracks.
Now, you combine that with all the new content they're rolling out in the month of April,
it's never been a better time to sign up.
LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged.
You can also try out the iOS and Android app,
the flashcards, which are forked by the community,
and the tiny bits of wisdom that they call nuggets
that go deep dives into single topics.
Like you want to learn file permissions on Linux.
You want to learn firewalling.
You want to learn basic networking and ports on Linux.
They have deep dives into those specific topics.
Other topics, too, including some development ones
at Linux Academy as well.
I love me some nuggets.
And Mexie fries.
We had a little Mexie fries with us too.
Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged.
Go there, sign up for a free seven-day trial
and try out the full feature training library
with everything you need to learn new skills
and advance your career.
Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged.
Big thanks to Linux Academy for sponsoring
the Unplugged program.
So help me not mistake the pronunciation of the primary gentleman that we spoke with.
Was it Galen?
Galen Hunt.
Yeah, it was Galen Hunt.
And Galen is the author of a whole line of publications of papers that came out of Microsoft that if you read them, would almost kind of give you a clue of where they were going with all of this.
Like the hint was out there.
Like the one that was published last year,
the seven properties of highly secure devices
or challenges to building scalable services.
And the background is you could see that there's been a lot of thought
that went into this.
So Wes and I wanted to be able to talk on some level of authority
of what Azure Sphere is
and how Linux is being used by Microsoft. And so Azure Sphere, think of it as something that
really has three aspects. Overall, it's a solution for companies that are building single chip
computer products, devices that are often even smaller than a Raspberry Pi, you know, truly like
the toasters and the hair dryers
that haven't yet been connected to Wi-Fi
but are just about to be.
Right, things that are running
like just little microcontrollers now,
maybe real-time operating systems,
not big, full-featured things.
Yeah, we were joking,
but actually, very realistically,
things like those Bluetooth sous-vides
and whatnot, it's really happening.
And Microsoft estimates that there's probably
10 billion units around the world
like this. I think that might have been a yearly number
two that gets sold. Lower-end devices
that you just don't traditionally think
of, but they would sometimes have
a real-time operating system on there.
Azure Sphere is stepping in here.
They're sort of making a product for these
manufacturers, a full end-to-end
product to run on these devices.
So it's three aspects, and this is where it starts to make sense.
You've probably heard of the new MCUs, these machines that are a system all on this one
slab.
It's part of a hardware solution that vendors will be able to use.
It'll also be available as a dev kit later on.
And they've built in some of the similar hardware checks that they have in the Xbox.
They took that hardware
root of trust. Each device has
its own secured identity. It uses
secure boot capabilities. It verifies
that the device software installed is
legitimate. And it's also possible to check
in with the server and have server-side and client-side
checks as well. Microsoft's going to be
licensing that silicon.
And I didn't quite get the license out of them, but it sounds like it's going to be licensing that silicon. I didn't quite get the license
out of them, but it sounds like it's going to be
pretty liberal.
And royalty free.
Yeah.
The second bit is, so this Azure Sphere
is three parts. That's part one, the hardware part.
The second bit is the OS.
This is where Linux sits.
It's a multi-layered OS. The reason why they
call it that is there's a lower level
that's doing the hardware and software verification.
The second layer is the Linux kernel, and we pushed them for some details on this, and they shared it with us.
It's using Linux kernel 4.9, and Wes asked them specifically, are you going to be tracking upstream kernel releases?
Is it based on another project?
Is this a derivative distro?
It is upstream Linux kernel four nine. And they
said they're going to be aggressively aggressively. That was their term. Yeah, aggressively tracking
upstream with that. And so I asked, so what are you using Linux for specifically, and they they
kind of they kind of shy away from this a bit, because to them, it's just part of like a three
part solution. I know that sounds so corporate, but that's really how they see it. Linux is sort of just like this enabling technology stack. It's not like this huge come
to Jesus over the GPL. It's just practical. Yeah, it wasn't designed around Linux. Linux
isn't a focus. Linux was just a tool that fit into the architecture. So we said, so how are
you using Linux? And so they're using process isolation via the Linux kernel, and they're using
sandboxes for all the apps, and they're using the kernel features built into 4.9
for sandboxing, and of course they're using
the networking stack and the disk I.O. stack,
so they're using the base elements.
And I said, okay, well,
honestly here,
is this something that you guys just
slammed in because you realized you couldn't
get Windows down on these real-time devices,
or was Linux baked in
from the very
beginning when you started this project? And the answer was, we started this project four years ago,
and Linux was from day one part of the solution. From day one, they were going to use Linux.
And then, so that's the second middle layer of Azure Sphere. And then there's the third part
to Azure Sphere. And that is the part that actually is on Azure, really. It's the Azure Sphere Security Service.
It's a cloud service that can reach out to every device that has a security Azure Sphere chip in
it. That's part of the MCU. It uses certificate-based authentication for authentication to the cloud,
and it allows for device to device communication
directly using these certificates and it also includes the ability to collect crash metrics
of applications which microsoft is planning to aggregate across the entire azure sphere ecosystem
so that way they can at large scale see if all of a sudden a lot of devices are getting this port banged on
or this application
is crashing on a lot of systems.
But on top of that,
they can give those metrics back
anonymized to the hardware manufacturers
and they can see
how their devices are failing.
And then the last part
of the hosted part of Azure Sphere
is a software update channel
that Microsoft will host
and manage for them.
But the vendor will have a secure channel
to ship software updates,
and Microsoft will run support for 10 years.
They will support these Linux-based IoT devices
and give vendors a channel to ship updates
and give them metrics for 10 years.
They have an SDK coming soon coming soonish probably like summertime it's going to include a dev kit board hooks up via usb and then you can start
banging on it even visual studio integration yeah sounds like a pretty decent development
environment the core problem they're really solving is hardware manufacturers that say
want to make a sous vide, a Bluetooth sous
vide or a Wi-Fi sous vide machine or a crock pot, they don't have to now build a whole
server infrastructure to manage incoming requests, set up a REST API, set up push services, build
out through data centers all around the world so that way they can have low latency connections
and then have an on-staff software team that ships out updates
and looks and analyzes logs and ships out fixes.
Microsoft is now doing all of that.
They're figuring out the inter-device communication security,
they're figuring out how to push out the software updates,
and they're even using a Linux kernel for the actual low-end hardware devices.
It is truly like a, you want to make an IoT device product GE?
Well, here's Azure Sphere.
We'll take care of the silicon.
We'll take care of the software updates.
We'll take care of the metrics.
And we'll take care of 10 years of support channel for you.
You just have to figure out the product and figure out what you want to do with it.
And we'll handle the back-end stuff.
Seems like that's going to be a big, big thing.
And you tie it in with Azure, which is all over the world.
You know, Microsoft would probably price it extremely aggressively to get people to try it.
Right, yeah, I'm sure.
And then, you know, then it's oh, so easy.
Oh, we'll just keep, you'll host other things in Azure as well, of course.
Yeah, and fascinating that from day one, four years ago, Linux.
I thought another part that was interesting was that, interesting was that a large part of that was that their vendors, their silicon partners, they already knew Linux and Linux was open source.
It was easy for them to experiment, to take Microsoft's code and iterate on it, make improvements, ship them back, share them.
Kind of speaks to the things we like about Linux. I don't know if they would characterize it this way, but my personal takeaway from our call
was they were surprised how much attention
the Linux aspect has gotten.
They didn't see that coming because,
and kind of paraphrasing, they're like,
well, we've been shipping Linux on switches in Azure,
and Linux is a massively growing aspect
for that end of our business.
So when it comes to Azure, Linux has been part of their business for a long time, and
it's totally normal to them.
They're not even surprised by it.
So they weren't quite expecting the amount of reaction it got because their mindset has
been, well, yeah, of course we're using Linux, which was weird for us to kind of get up to
speed on because they were like, I don't know why everybody's so surprised by this.
And we're like, really, guys?
You're shipping a Linux-based OS now.
They're like, yeah, well, this is the Azure team.
This is what we do.
Like, okay.
Yeah, and from that perspective, it does make sense.
Yeah, it fits.
It was the right tool at the right time in the right place,
and good on them.
Yeah, I suppose so.
And they talk about, so you'll hear in the announcements,
you'll hear Microsoft has put certain Windows security technologies into their version of Linux.
You may have read some version of that in the press releases.
And we said, what is that?
What are these Windows security techniques that you're now applying to Linux?
And predominantly, it was around the crash reporting, the Windows crash reporter, tying that into their existing infrastructure for that.
But also came down to like a couple, the way they designed some of the permissions. You remember
there was like a third thing that they took from Windows. It didn't seem like a huge deal, but
I didn't note it down. But the crash metrics collection, oh,
the way they're slip streaming the updates in to be low bandwidth so that way they can slip
updates in, they're using that same system they use for Windows
10 to do that, it sounded that. That's what it was.
So anyways, kind
of a compelling offer. I didn't ask
them this, but when I first heard the
announcement, I was a little
surprised it wasn't based
on an existing distro.
Like your Ubuntu Core
or something to that degree.
I was a little surprised
that they decided to roll their own.
But when you hear about the other stuff, they've wrapped
around it. I think I can understand why.
Yeah, and it may be, you know, that these devices are
special purpose enough that you don't need a full-featured
regular sort of user lander tightly.
Yeah, the kernel really sounds like an enabling
piece of technology. It's not like the
core aspect of these devices.
It's just the sub-aspect of three
parts of a component, really.
But a big turn of events for Microsoft,
either way, from where I sit, it seems like a big deal to me.
And they
went out of their way to make sure it was
clear to us, including
setting up a conference call.
I think they said they were at a conference,
an RSA call?
Yeah, they're at the RSA conference right now.
So they grabbed a room
and they got a group of people from the Azure team in a room
and got on a phone call with us.
That's why we didn't do an interview,
but they got on a phone call with us
and let us just bang questions at them for a half hour
about this thing.
And I walked away feeling pretty impressed.
I went in not really understanding what's going on,
wondering, is this embrace and extinguish?
But I walked out of it with, well, those takeaways that I just shared with you.
Yeah, I mean, it really seems like they are motivated.
They see the business case for all the terrible IoT things
that already exist in the world and why that needs to be fixed.
Whether or not it's going to be adopted, I don't know,
but it might be a good thing if it is.
I wouldn't be too surprised if Microsoft doesn't have success working directly with, like, fridge manufacturers.
And, you know, they can do that big business to big business.
And they're already in on so many different devices.
And some of these devices have tried to ship versions of Windows embedded.
And now they can just shift those hardware partners over to this, possibly.
I don't know.
Anyways, I was really thankful.
And I extended them an offer to come on the show down the road if we have more questions.
So if you have some questions or comments, leave it either where you're watching or linuxunplugged.com slash contact.
Is there anything from the Mumble room, any questions or thoughts about Microsoft shipping a Linux distro?
That's kind of a big development in itself.
I mean, I guess it's not fair to call it a distro, but a Linux-powered product, I guess we could say.
I think Linus Torvald says he won.
Yeah. Yeah, that famous quote, when Microsoft starts making applications for Linux, I guess we could say. I think Linus Torvald says he won. Yeah, yeah, that famous quote,
when Microsoft starts making applications for Linux, I've won.
Yeah, yeah.
And there was a real, like, just practicalness in their mind.
They just thought, you know, for these ROT devices,
these really kind of lower-end, real-time operating system devices,
Linux was just a better fit.
And then you have to wonder, would they have done this
if the last few years of work on containers and sandboxing hadn't been going to the Linux kernel?
Because those are some of the core features they're using to secure the applications that
run on these devices. Right. I mean, you need a certain amount of those primitives available
so that you can build. If you're trying to build a secure OS, you need to be able to achieve that
goal. Yeah. And if those weren't there, they wouldn't have had that goal.
Minimac, you have a point about sort of the future.
Yeah, see, with all these changes,
they did the last thing,
meaning restructuring the whole company.
It looks like they want to be a service provider
in the future.
So selling software is not that important.
Selling services, that makes money.
You know, we've been talking on the Coder Radio program, Coder.show, about Microsoft sort of becoming the new IBM.
And it started about three weeks ago, or four weeks ago, when we did a retrospective look at Sun Microsystems and their influence on the IT industry, their influence on Android and Java.
And that retrospective then got us talking about IBM,
which we did last week.
And at the end of our retrospective of IBM,
sort of at its heyday in the 80s,
we realized that Microsoft is very much getting to a new version.
My co-host Michael calls it a platonic ideal of what IBM wanted to be,
is what Microsoft is becoming.
I don't know.
I'm watching this, all of these events,
and you go into it with,
at least I can't help,
because I came up during the good old wars
of Microsoft and Windows and Linux.
I mean, that's just,
that was the fire I was raised in.
Yeah, you were raised, yeah, exactly.
So when I see these stories,
you know, that, oh man,
this is Embrace and Extinguish,
does go across my mind. And I have to like, I have to really one of the handful of companies
that has successfully, and I mean very successfully, monetized Linux and open source.
And we have a hard time with that in the open source Linux community.
We don't like people making money.
We have a few handful of blessed companies like Red Hat that will even celebrate when they make money.
They're allowed to make money.
But otherwise, you're not really allowed to make money in Linux.
And so when Microsoft is becoming one of the clear leaders of people making a profit off of Linux and open source, I think it doesn't sit well with us.
I think below all of this is what if one of the companies at the end of this war, everything we fought for,
at the end of all of it, when all is said and done, the company that's making the most money
off of Linux or making some of the most money is Microsoft. I think that's what's really bothering
people. They shouldn't be allowed. They fought us the whole way. They shouldn't be allowed to
have this. This is ours. But they're a smart company with a lot of smart people, and they
made some smart changes,
and now they're going to be one of the number one money makers off Linux.
You see, they don't have to destroy Linux.
They don't have to take over Linux.
They don't have to convince the Linux Foundation
to slow down development or any conspiracy theory
that people cook and bake and come up with,
because they can make money off Linux just the way it is,
and they're making more money than ever.
And the GPL will keep Linux Linux.
That's done.
The GPL's done.
GPL 2, unless they convince Linus to re-license,
I think we're pretty much safe here.
And so what we really got to wrap our heads around
is that Microsoft is going to be one of the biggest moneymakers off of Linux.
And we've got to think about how that makes us feel.
And maybe that's what's influencing our reaction to some of this.
Are they better at Linux than we are?
Yeah, I mean, that's just it, right?
Not to be Mr. Linux podcast psychologist here,
but I think that's at play a little bit.
Because it's unsettling.
You're not allowed to make money off of Linux.
You fought us on this. You called it a cancer.
But we all know that things times
and things change.
And this Azure Sphere, shipping Linux at the core of it
may be just the tip of the iceberg.
Think about that for a second.
If.NET Core, Visual Studio Code,
all of those things have been brewing in the background for years,
four years, and then PowerShell Core comes out for years four years and then powershell core
comes out another four years and now we've heard of this azure sphere using a linux kernel
about four years in development something big happened at microsoft well we know what happened
but four or five years ago that all that stories all those stories about sachet taking over
we heard about the top echelon of management getting re-org'd.
But just like how it always goes, the actual worker bees down below, people that got
moved, fired, shuffled around,
we didn't hear about them. But that's where
some of this work started. Down in
the bowels of Microsoft where lots of
re-orgs happened that didn't
make the headlines. And that's
the hard part we're having a hard time wrapping our heads
around when it comes to how Microsoft is behaving now
is because we've seen Saatchi,
we've seen the top layers
because those are people on their websites.
And when they make changes,
they got to update the website.
They make a press announcement.
But when you're 10 managers down the chain
and you're working on some prototype product
and that doesn't make headlines.
So it's a different Microsoft too.
So it's a Microsoft that's learned how to make money off Linux and open source,
and it's a different internal beast that we haven't really learned yet.
We have so many decades of experience with the old configuration,
but now we're dealing with Microsoft in a totally different configuration.
They're not as static of an entity as we want to think that they are, right?
I feel like an old version of Microsoft would have figured out a way to cram NT on this, or would have
crammed some BSD that they didn't
even have to name on there.
There just would have been a hard line.
It's clear something deep down changed.
Right, yeah, clearly the leadership doesn't
object, there's not this
entrenched resistance, at least
it doesn't seem to be. And it doesn't feel like it's the
light of Stallman either, it's just simply
It's just practical.
You've got to wonder if they're sitting around the boardroom going,
I wonder if we can make more money at this Linux stuff than Red Hat.
Yeah, right? I think we can make more money than Red Hat.
Let's give it a go.
You know, that's what's going on.
It's good old capitalism.
And then we're sitting back going, what the hell?
A Linux kernel.
Embrace and extinguish.
Embrace and extinguish.
It's just reactionary.
But maybe now we'll be seeing, you know,
security-related patches flowing from
Microsoft upstream. Who knows? Yeah.
Weird. Weird. Yeah.
Especially if they start shipping a lot of these things.
There's going to be a lot of Linux kernels out there.
How are they going to do 10 years of support?
That's a huge commitment. I guess that's just something
else I'd like to follow up with them, is are they going to
run their own internal forks? Because
you're going to have to do your own
LTS.
Or are they just going to be updated a lot?
Is this going to be like a continuous deployment style?
So they'll be on 5.0 in a few weeks.
Maybe not that
current. I don't know.
I guess we'll have to wait and see. We also don't know
quite what the licensing is going to be around the Silicon
yet. We don't know what
the, because they're going to also release the specs.
We don't really have a clear picture.
They said royalty-free, but we don't really have a clear picture.
And all that.
Will you be able to even design applications for it from Linux?
We don't know.
We don't know.
All that is still to be determined.
But it was something.
It was really something to see that.
I did not expect that story this week.
Did not see that coming. All right, guys. Well, is there anything else we need to that I did not expect that story this week did not see that coming
alright guys
well is there anything
else we need to cover
before we get out of here
this week
mention the Ubuntu podcast
we got to do that
Ubuntu podcast
go get more
Popey and Wimpy
over there
good show
and yeah
okay
go get more
Westpain
techsnap.systems
how about that
bam
should plug our own stuff too
I like it when we do that
okay everybody
well we'll get out of here
thank you for joining us if you want to join us on a Tuesday you're more it when we do that. Okay, everybody. Well, we'll get out of here. Thank you for joining us.
If you want to join us on a Tuesday, you're more than welcome.
We do this show live over at jblive.tv.
Usually, the live stream kicks off around 1.30 p.m. Pacific.
You can get it converted to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar.
Then you hang out, you join us, and then kick back and enjoy the Axenoa show,
which comes just right after this show.
Bonus show.
And then go get more.
Just go get more. Just go get more.
Just more JV.
Always more.
There's more shows.
Linuxunplugged.com.
There's more there.
Jupyterbroadcasting.com.
There's more there.
There's always more.
Tech Talk Today.
Yeah.
Tech Talk Today.
All right.
Thanks for being here.
We'll see you right
back here next Tuesday.Zither Harp Oh!
You know, ironically, I think most people catch the show
like on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.
So I really shouldn't say see you next Tuesday.
Just see you next week.
See you next week.
What do we call this thing, guys?
We covered a lot of things.
Thank you, everybody, for contributing. I really appreciate appreciate it i enjoyed the heck out of the show extend and
extinguish boom done title extend and extinguish huh that's not bad uh that is not bad uh i'm sure
i'm sure uh that would get it that would get a few clicks i'm gonna submit. JBTitles.com. Go vote. Can you give me a bit of YouTube consultancy, Chris?
Sure.
Can you create multiple channels under a single Google account?
Yes, I have it.
How the heck do you do it?
What I've done is I have different Google accounts,
and then I have them all logged in.
You can use a little switcher that works better from for me because then you can just go
in and add them as managers to the individual youtube channels but uh yes that's how i do it
so i have like a jupiter i have chris at jupiter broadcasting i have my personal one and then we
have a couple of like behind the scenes channels those are all different gmail logins um and then
i've logged into the browser and I just switch up in the little
YouTube thing. Okay, but I don't want
another Google account.
So what's your trick, Poby? I'm trying to figure
it out because I did it a long time ago.
And I can see them both there
in the Creator Studio.
I think there used to be a way to do it through Google Plus
and I don't think you can... I don't know. There's some
functionality that they used to do through Google Plus they've removed
now. They haven't replaced it but I can't remember what it was.
Azure goes Linux.
That happened a long time ago, though.
Azure as a service, how much Linux is in that Windows?
The bonds of Azure.
It came from Redmond.
What did I submit on your behalf?
I forgot, you had something.
Oh, yeah, Embrace and Extinguish.
Maybe one called Lindos. The end of Embrace and Extinguish. Maybe one called Lindos?
The end of Embrace and Extinguish?
Maybe. There was a new
snap that I saw recently that I was
surprised could actually be a snap.
And I thought it was something more like at the
system level, but now I can't remember what it was.
You guys, does that remind you of anything else?
I know it's pretty vague, but there was some new snap I saw
go across the news headlines, and it was like, that's
possible? Notepad++? The Windows version of notepad plus plus i'm not even kidding
the fastest snap right now really i'll give that a go actually yeah snap install notepad
hyphen the word plus hyphen the word plus it's pretty interesting that you can like and i know you know the first
thing everyone's going to shout at me is the flatback guys did this with with uh with um games
and chucked them on the pirate bay bundled wine and a game you know dodgy pirated copies of games
okay yes i know they've done it before but this is like the first time we've had a legitimate
application bundled with Wine in the Snap Store
because it's an open-source application.
It's not some proprietary.
It's not like someone took Photoshop and bundled it with Wine
and shoved it in the store.
This is a GPL application that's been bundled with Wine
and put in the store.
It's a weird one, but it turns out it's a popular application,
and so people install it.
And it got me curious as to what Windows applications
that you miss from windows that are
not proprietary which is a tricky one um would you would you want available as a snap i can only
think of commercial ones you know because i don't that's the only thing i use windows for if i want
to use free software i just use linux the lunatic in me thinks we should bundle wine and steam
inside a snap just for the lols yeah
totally those games yeah let me change topics here for a second um because i want to pick your
guys's brain i have a little birdie telling me that an xps 13 review unit may land on my doorstep
in the next couple of weeks so what is that now we've won with usbc port yeah he's probably your
used one poppy yeah yeah Yeah, yeah, totally.
I was very good with it.
I polished it and wrapped it all up just like it was new.
Actually, it may be.
Is there any identifying marks on there I should look for?
Was it a high DPI or a standard?
I can't remember.
I think you got the standard.
Have you not listened to our amazing review?
I did, and I seem to recall you got the standard DPI screen,
but I don't remember for some reason.
We got the best model, in my opinion.
So we got the one with the 1080p screen,
but with the 16 gig memory uplift.
And my personal opinion is on the XPS 13,
that 13.3 inch display, 1080p, super crisp,
and then you get the benefit of the enhanced battery endurance using that 1080p
display rather than a uhd display i think i should ask for that this is a thin one with only usbc
ports no i think it has regular ports still it just has usbc in addition they're not monsters
well i mean there are more usbc ports and very very thin it is those things that's true those
are true statements about it.
But I'm looking forward to it. I'm just kind of figuring
what's a new take on a laptop
review? That's what I'm trying to think of. So if you guys have
any ideas, let me know on a new take.
I'll probably try all the different smattering of
distros and different functions.
Take it to the beach.
Take it to the beach? Work a day at the beach.
Definitely trackpad.
Yeah, definitely track pad. Yeah, definitely
track pad.
Yeah.
I'm just curious.
We have time to
think about it.
I think it'll be a
few weeks, but
people have ideas.
I'd love to know.