LINUX Unplugged - Episode 25: Culture of Shiny | LUP 25

Episode Date: January 29, 2014

Aaron Seigo joins us to call out the new and shiny culture that’s pervasive in the free software community. And even your own humble hosts have been afflicted with from time to time. The reality is users want new features, but hate reduced functionality. And often free software developers want to build something new. But what is the cost of this constant form of “progress”? How do we shift value from new and shiny, to tried and true to help enable wider free software adoption?

This is Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's not too big to admit when its own fantastic foot has been stuck in its own amazing mouth. My name is Chris. And my name is Matt. Hey there, Matt. Episode 25, buddy. I'm pumped up because it's like a marathon for me tonight. On the live stream, we're doing the State of the Union coverage on Unfiltered. That's like right after we're done on this show, man.

Oh, wow. It's like big time over here. But not only that, but I think we've got a really good episode ahead of us. We're only going to talk about Steam. No, I'm kidding. Oh, we got some Steam feedback, so we are going to talk a little bit about Steam, but every time Steam comes up on any

of our shows, there's always the chorus of folks who chose Linux because gaming just doesn't even interest them, right? So it's not even on their radar, so when we have an episode about Steam, they're like, oh man, they're talking about this again? I don't like gaming. They're like, not again. I mean, it's like, when we have an episode about Steam, we're like, oh, man, they're talking about this again? I don't like gaming. I know, they're like, not again. I mean, it's like, I think they fail to understand how important it is in the grand scheme of things.

But we'll get to that. Yeah, I mean, yeah, exactly. I can relate that it's not big to them. That's why they chose Linux in the first place, because they didn't, gaming wasn't a huge priority. But, oh, so many big things are changing up. And I'm actually really excited because coming up on the show, right off the top here, we're going to be getting into some feedback. And one of the which, I just thought it would be perfect to bring in our guest this week. Joining us in the mumble room, our virtual lug, as it were, is Aaron Saigo.

Now, you guys know Aaron Saigo. He's a longtime KDE contributor. He's also what I like to call a free culture thinker. And he's really the heart of the improv project. And he's going to join us. Hey there, Aaron. Hey, how's it going, guys? Quite good. quite good.

Thank you for coming today. Now, see, Aaron pinged me on the super secret bat line that I like to thank Google because Google makes it possible for people to get a hold of me in all kinds of new ways, including. But in this case, it actually worked out really well. Aaron was able to get a hold of me. And when he messaged me, I was actually editing the Linux Action Show. So I was responding to Aaron using the voice dictation because my hands were busy editing. And, like, it was doing okay.

I mean, Aaron, what would you say? Was it okay? Was it passable? Yeah, it was. Actually, I didn't know until you actually said, yeah, I'm using voice dictation. Did you just think I was, like, some sort of maniac with the keyboard? Because, like, there was a few things that just didn't know until you actually said, yeah, I'm using voice dictation. Did you just think I was like some sort of maniac with the keyboard? Like there was a few things that just didn't make sense. Yeah, you know, you've got that filter, that automatic filter that happens, right,

where you just skip over all the errors. It was actually pretty good. That's good. That's good. So I was like, okay, well, instead of dictating, why don't you just come on Unplugged on Tuesday and talk about this? Because, you know, Aaron called me out on a thing that after we wrapped up Linux Action Shows in defense of GNOME, I always kind of think back over the show and I critique it myself. And one of the things that I felt was sort of unavoidable for that type of episode but was still sort of the underlying message in a sense is that the show was really championing new and shiny. Look at this new thing. It's been rebuilt and it's finally getting to a usable standpoint.

It's sort of a celebration of the fact that it's new and it's been rebuilt. It's something, you know, that it's almost like a sense of consumerism that I feel is really kind of pervasive in the U.S. culture. And it's sort of that same sort of mentality put towards software development. You know, what have you done for me lately? And when somebody is sturdy and solid and building a reliable platform, then they're boring. But when somebody's rebuilding and starting over, well, then they're crazy because they've just shot all their functionality out the airlock and I'm really frustrated as a user. So Aaron called me out on that. And we're going to talk about that today because I actually think it's a fantastic topic. I've kind of coined it as the term of the new and shiny culture that is pervasive on the internet, and it plagues open source more so than ever.

We constantly see projects get thrown out and rebuilt, sometimes for completely justifiable means and reasons, like potentially OpenShot could be a good example. I was about to say OpenShot, yep. Yeah. shot could be a good example. I was about to say open shot, yep. Yeah, but then, you know, there's other projects you look at. Unity! Where it was sort of obvious from the onset what they wanted to accomplish was already out there, and they didn't necessarily have to reinvent

the wheel, and when they did, they sort of chose the wrong direction, and then now they're sort of facing this reboot, and I think, you know, when you look at Unity, Unity 8 is what it's going to be called, when that comes out, I think users are going to be shocked with some of the stark differences that aren't there and some of the things that don't work the way they expect

after Unity 7's been built up over years and years and years and polished, right? Especially right now as Unity's going through this sort of, I mean, for lack of a better term, refinement phase, where they don't really add much to it. And then we're going to get this big reset. And I think that's going to be a stark comparison where you see something start over again, much like when GNOME hit version 3 and started over again.

But before we get to that, I want to do some of our feedback because, gosh, we got some really great feedback. But first, I want to thank our first sponsor this week, and that is Ting.com. Ting is mobile that makes sense. My mobile service provider. And, Matt, what about you? Oh, yes. Love these guys. Yeah, this is something that if you're sort of a consumer who likes to be informed and vote with

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And then there you go. If you're a Ting subscriber, you'll be entered to win. They're going to pick on January 31st and announce on Google+. So you can go to ting.com slash blog to get more details about that. You need to be a Ting customer. So if you're not a Ting customer, go to linux.ting.com and get started. Average Ting bills for our listeners are usually around $30 per month for a full-fledged smartphone with hotspot, tethering, caller ID, voicemail, all that stuff. I mean, it's a full phone. It's got everything. They also have

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at 1-855-TING-FTW, and a real human will answer the phone. So go to linux.ting.com to support this show. And a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. Yeesh. That's right. Okay, so let's read Jonathan's post here.

I'm sorry, his name is not Jonathan. I was reading something else. His name is Scott. Scott James Remnant, I think is Remnant. Aaron, you got a vote on how you say his last name, Remnant? As far as I know, it's Remnant, yeah. Okay. All right, so he was a previous Canonical employee,

and he was one of the original software developers of Upstart. So he has some interesting perspective to share on his Google Plus feed, and I'll have that linked in the show notes if you guys want to circle him. And I'll just read it. He says, The open source and free software communities work on the principle that when I contribute patches to a project, I'm donating my time, expertise, and resources. In return for that donation, I receive the time, expertise, and resources of

the rest of the community on equal terms in which they have received mine. I benefit and the community as a whole benefits. Certain projects make you sign agreements when you contribute that instead make the terms unequal, usually benefiting just one party. When you contribute that instead make the terms unequal. You, sorry, usually benefiting just one party. When you contribute under one of these agreements, the community may benefit, but one individual or company benefits more. They receive all your time, expertise, and resources, but reserve the right not to return the favor. I'm a coder in my day job, and I give my time, expertise, and resources to that company. They are not under any obligation to return that favor.

In return, they pay me. The CLA is employment without wage. Without a wage. The CLA is employment without a wage, because it's the same sort of arrangement. I contribute my code and my time, but when you work, you get a wage. So Aaron, I know you've talked about CLAs in general, and lots of projects have them. You've talked about them for years, though, and I wanted to get your reactions to Scott's post here, because as Debian's looking at this whole init system debate, it's really sort of exposed the whole CLA issue that a lot more people in the community are talking about now. And as somebody who's sort of been trying to get this conversation rolling for years, I'd love to know what you think. Sure. So right off the top, I'm not anti-CLA carte blanche. In fact, I helped bring in a version of the Free Sauer Foundation Europe's fiduciary license agreement, or FLA, into the community. Europe's fiduciary license agreement, or FLA, into the community. So I think that there are benefits that can be realized by having formalized agreements that cover contribution.

But I think that what Scott gets at, and it's really insightful, is that there are systems properties to these agreements. And when you approach it from a systems thinking point of view, you do get people looking at it and going, well, I'm not benefiting anymore. And therefore, I'm not going to add into the system and into the pot anymore. And so the point that I think Scott was trying to make and really accurately is that these CLAs intended to grant advantage and make it even maybe possible for the company to see a profit or something along that lines may actually be having the exact opposite effect

that they expect because it shrinks the contributor pool. And the whole point of having source that's open from a perspective of contribution and benefit is you're sharing development and risk. And so anything you do to limit that is defeating. Is that true? If we just kind of look at the success that Canonical has at getting contributions over the years, wouldn't you say that perhaps the CLA is a non-issue because people just want to contribute? They want to follow their passion. The CLA is a non-issue because people just want to contribute. They want to follow their passion. The CLA is a non-issue until either the company starts to get big or the company is on the decline. And then all of a sudden, these flaws are exposed. But as long as they're on top, everybody's so passionate and motivated, they almost just don't care.

Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the issues that in the past free software developers have not been aware of these issues at all. Yeah. And they've made them just with the assumption that everyone's intentions are good. And therefore, they're going to create good things. And that's not entirely true, unfortunately. Not that people have bad intentions, but that not everything that's being created is good. So three years ago, in 2010, I actually had patches that got kicked out of a canonical project because I refused to sign a CLA. Things that fixed bugs in a project that they had under their CLA. And it was specifically because of reasons like what Scott mentioned,

where it's asymmetrical. But even worse, and this is really where not all CLAs are equal, the CLA in particular that Canonical uses is extremely broad and has no termination clause. So you can't tell what it's going to cover in the future because it basically just says anything that they host and they say is covered in future is covered. And that really, yeah, yeah i mean i couldn't sign

such a thing with a good conscience um so it does affect right you know in the net here and now and now we look at two other projects upstart and mirror um there are people who are not contributing to mirror because of the cla i know that's for a fact, because they've said exactly that. There are people who otherwise have no bone of contention or axe to grind. Upstart is, of course, controversial. I mean, the reason why SystemD, according to the Red Hat evangelist Jan, and I won't even try his last name because I always mess it up, great Dutch guy. He said the other day on G+, that one of the reasons SystemD started was because of the CLA. What about the alternative side, though?

It's in the here and now, and it's not just on success or failure. That does make sense. But what about the alternative side to that? So say, for some reason, maybe there was an agreement with a carrier for Ubuntu Touch, and they had to flip some code that a lot of people have contributed to, to a proprietary license. What about the argument that everything that was created at that point still remains open? It's still open source software. It's just there's going to be a fork of it now that has been re-licensed, but that code isn't taken away from the community. Well, so there's two flaws with that.

One is that there are people who engage with free software on ethical grounds. And so for them, the fact that there is a proprietary fork goes against their ethical position. I would be one of those people. But let's just say that we're the weird fringe minority. Once a company can take something proprietary, if there is no safeguard in place, there is nothing to say that they won't continue adding to the proprietary code. things. And at the end of the day, what you're agreeing to is a asymmetrical relationship where your contributions are not of equal value at the end of the day to other contributions. And of course, Canonical does say, Marcus said this publicly, well, but we pay for the majority of the development in this project. So we have a moral stand or an ethically backed stand that we can

say, well, we deserve to be able to do this. And I agree with them. If they're paying for it, they have an ethical position that they can say, we can take it proprietary. The result, however, from a systems point of view is people will disengage. So I wonder though, okay, so explain to me in your mind how if a CLA hinders contributions to, say, something like the MIR project, how does it not hinder something like the QT project that also has a CLA? Right. So I'll say, first off, I'm not a huge fan of the CLA in Qt. It's there for practical and historical reasons. But there's a very very important difference besides the fact that it's well defined and only covers the cute uh world there's also another group or another

agreement um the free cute foundation and this has an agreement with the owners of cute and it's actually been passed on from troll tech to nokia to now did you and what it says is um it's a legally binding contract that should and they go in should go into the path of proprietary only. So they can take the free software code and release it under proprietary or grant proprietary licensing terms. But if there's ever a difference between that proprietary licensed code and the free software open source code, the entire Qt stack is immediately

relicensed under the BSD license, which pretty much destroys their business model. So you sort of have an insurance policy. Mutually assured destruction agreement there. Right. It's an insurance policy in a sense. Exactly. Now other groups treat it right. And that creates a reasonable expectation of symmetry. Other products do it differently. So with the FLA and KDE, for instance, there is a secondary document that accompanies the primary document that gets signed.

These are the only terms under which the organization you're entering into the agreement with, KDEV, is allowed to relicense your software, and it's all free software licenses. You can't take a proprietary, even though the FLA you sign, which is optional, not mandatory, would in theory allow this. And what the secondary document says is that should the KDEV, the nonprofit organization, decide to go evil and do this, your FLA is immediately rescinded and void, and they cannot do this. So there's different ways of ensuring symmetry.

Of course, one is not having a CLA or an FLA. But in certain cases, there are downsides to this. The reason why KDE has one is to allow if someone disappears from the face of the planet and GPL version 4 comes out, we can move forward without having them there. If you die, for instance, that's the big one. Or if someone sues you for some patent issue or something that

involves... Or you murder your wife and go to jail. It allows the non-profit organization to represent you... I'm just making a Rise or FF joke. I don't want people to think I want to murder my wife. I was going to catch that. I caught it right away. Okay, alright. I don't want people to think I want to murder my wife. I was wondering if anyone was going to catch that. I caught it right away. Okay, all right. I just realized that sounded really creepy out of context.

Well, you know. Well, Aaron, I mean, that makes a lot of sense. I'm glad I asked because I think that's probably a common response that people would have is, well, QT and other projects. But yeah, okay. There's sort of a give and take in that scenario. That makes more sense. Okay. Well, all right.

We'll leave the CLA topic there for now. And thank you, Aaron. And we'll pull you back in a few minutes when we get through the rest of the feedback. Our next feedback is sort of a collection of a lot of comments, several threads in the subreddit, a few emails,

and also some posts on G+, and Twitter, where in response to our Steam Streaming Showcase episode on Sunday for the Linux Action Show, Jonathan Houston, who's in the chat room right now, he says, Okay, I'm curious to see what everyone thinks about this. My friend and I have been discussing the implications of SteamOS and the potential impact on Linux.

He brought up a very good point on how, and I think I agree with him, Valve may have shot Linux gaming in the head with the ability to stream games from a Windows machine to a Linux machine as recently demoed on LAS. The reason being, with SteamOS developers, we're seeing good reasons to add Linux support. Now they don't need to.

Now they can just keep doing what they've always been doing and some Linux user wants to use their game, they'll just have to stream it from a Windows machine. They've removed many of the reasons to spend money to develop on Linux by shifting the cost to the consumer. Now the onus is on the consumer, and we just have to accept buying a second computer. Not only a second computer, but one capable of streaming the games and programs we want on the machines we want. Boy, you know, I think I would agree with

the fact that I think developers will consider this, but I think at the end of the day, the argument can go further and say well, if they want to play the game badly enough, they'll just go ahead and buy a Windows machine. So I think it goes both ways. I reluctantly disagree. I think that I see where he's coming from, but I don't think that's going to actually, I don't think they'll pull the trigger

on actually winning. I say you take that doubt and you get it out of here. Because here's the thing. This is Valve being super slick at this. And you get it out of here, because here's the thing. This is Valve being super slick at this. And what this is, is this is a transitional technology. This isn't like wine. This isn't like anything else. This is a transitional technology to add value to lower-end machines and machines that yet do not play the games that the market demands. And it's good enough of a temporary solution that it could be a permanent solution. And that, my friends, is a very good sign for something that's this early in the beta stage. But here's the reality.

You and I, we might be up to having an extra Windows machine and even understand with the concept of remotely encoding a video game stream and then sending it to a remote client that can then interpret that, decode it, and then send back the keystrokes or controller strokes in real time. Like, we grok that concept, even if it's loosely consumers, that that is an alien idea to them. And Valve and developers can never and will never be able to depend on Steam box users having another computer in the house capable of playing video games because it's simply too much to expect for the average consumer, for the early enthusiasts, for the people that are going to buy the first generation of Steam boxes, i.e. everybody buying a Steam box for the next year, year and a half,

they might have that expectation and they know that they can lean on that streaming to help fill that gap. But by the time the Steam box goes mainstream, a couple of years down the road, there's no way any developer who's going to target SteamOS that wants to actually make some money can rely on that. So they have to go native. Market Dynamics will force them to create a native application because that's what the vast majority of Steam box users will expect. And so it's actually not that bad. And in the meantime, it gives us some really cool tech to play with, like the application streaming. I wish people go watch. We had some people that just chose not to watch the episode because I had Steam in the title. And I think that was a mistake on their

part because we demoed some really cool tech.. I'm happy that the streaming tech is so good that it makes us a little nervous. I think this betrays that Linux users have been beaten so many times by a commercial company that just disappoints that now we're just expecting it. We're just looking for it. I also think there's confusion on, they say, oh, well, isn't this just

remote desktop? It's like, no. No, no, no, no, no. This isn't accessing a remote desktop. This is bringing that, no, no, no, no, no, no. This isn't accessing a remote desktop. This is bringing that desktop's experience fully accelerated into your own experience to where you might as well be running it natively, meaning you can run Netflix and things of that sort. Yeah, exactly. You know, we demoed QuickBooks, Photoshop, Netflix. And what's great about this is to me, it lets you rip off that Windows Band-Aid, but then not be SOL stranded on Linux Island because there's a lot of offices, especially as, I mean, I know you can't really expect businesses to do this, but there's going to be enough out there with a savvy enough IT

guy or gal, and she's going to know about Steam, and she's going to know that, hey, we need to replace Windows XP. So you know what we can do? We can take one nice Windows machine, and if you're just streaming desktop applications, it doesn't even have to have high-end GPU, and we'll put this in the office. And the three times a week that Cheryl and Larry need Photoshop, and that Bob and Rick need to use QuickBooks, they can do it, and it's no big deal, and we know we'll be okay, because we know what kind of experience we're going to

be able to deliver. And I think that's a really good thing, even outside of gaming. Agreed. There you go. And it's coming at a good time when we need some transitional tools. So speaking of things that are coming at a good time and maybe not being ready, remember last week we covered that guy who was sort of trolling Linux users, coming up with all of these reasons why Linux was totally not ready for the desktop.

Well, we were pretty hard on that guy, but John writes in defense of that guy. He says Linux isn't ready. He said, I read through that whole post myself, and I have to agree with most of what he said, although it was pretty exaggerated. The Linux community should be happy to get critiques like this this is solid gold user feedback you couldn't ask for a better feedback anyone interested in making Linux into something with potential of replacing Windows should look long and hard about at that post sure he's rude and exaggerated but so are disgruntled users any diehard Linux user would have similar

language about Windows. But see, here's the problem is we keep calling Windows power users the average user. That's the problem we're seeing here. This was someone and probably the person that initially did the post was a power. It was a Windows power user. This is someone that knows Windows backwards and forwards and installs their own operating system. That's not Joe Average. Joe Average doesn't even care as long as they can check their email and surf eBay. I think that guy was kind of in the FUD territory. I mean, there was some valid stuff in there, but

that shows that he was a power user. So that's the problem is they say, well, it's not ready for the prime time. It's actionably happening right now. It happens at my mom's house. It happens that you have relatives that use Linux. I have relatives that use Linux. I have friends and family that use Linux. When I retired from the PC repair business, I actually rotated people into Linux and then put them in front of a guy that would help support them. Yeah. It's here, and that was years ago. So it's – I mean just factually speaking, he's incorrect.

Yeah, that's true, and it's funny how as geeks, people just – they see the world through the geek lens and it's like, well – Is it right for Windows Power users? No. If you can't use SolidWorks, then it's not good as a desktop. That's true for a certain set of people. Exactly. All right. Well, last feedback.

Rick comes in. He says, hey, guys, I just want to say thanks for the DigitalOcean coupon. I set up my Mumble server using Debian and it's running great. Most websites that sell Mumble servers do it by the person. One sells a 15 slot server for six dollars a month well with digital ocean it's unlimited as long as you don't hit the one terabyte cap this works out great for myself most of the time with only a few friends but sometimes we have about 20 people on there he says but with my horribly inaccurate calculations one terabyte is way more than enough for my usage and he's got a question here about monitoring bandwidth usage on the Debian server, so I'll answer that here in a

second. But first, that seemed like the perfect opportunity to tell you about our second sponsor this week, DigitalOcean. Now, what is DigitalOcean? Well, if you haven't figured it out like our writer, what was his name? Ron, right? Yeah, Rick. Oh, Rick. If you haven't figured it out like Rick, then DigitalOcean is simple cloud hosting dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way to spin up a cloud server. Users can create a cloud server in 55 seconds. Now, me? I'm 47 seconds. So, you know.

You let me know if you beat that. I'm 47 seconds. We should have a chart. I don't think anybody's going to crush the champ, Matt, but we'll see. I'm Batman. Okay. All right. He says, oh, by the way, I just wanted to let you know that they have incredible pricing, too.

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Sweet! I know! It is really sweet. So I'm going to pull Aaron back down into our private little room here. And hopefully he wasn't in the middle of saying something to the group. So Aaron, let's talk a little bit about... You got kind of fired up when you were watching the episode that we did recently in defense of Gnome. And I think you really called me out on something that I was actually sort of kicking myself for. And that was sort of the celebration of new and shiny and rebuilt to have a rebuilt purpose. And

you sort of brought up this counterpoint and said, well, what about this methodology of refinement and evolution and working with something and staying with it for a while and building on top of a platform, building on top of something? And that isn't almost, in some cases, really even respected in the community. What are your thoughts? And share a little bit about what got you fired up. Sure. So just to make it clear for everybody right off the top, I'm not wearing my KDE hat at all here. This is really me with my free software must-rule-the-world-one-day hat on.

Okay. um this is really me with my free software must rule the world one day hat on okay um and it's this exact idea that yeah you know new and shiny is awesome and yeah i mean it is new and shiny is awesome but there's cost to everything that we do new and shiny um every rewrite every new adventure um comes with a cost so when you make a bunch of applications and you decide, we're just going to redo them all, you end up with being able to get the first 90% of functionality or 80% of functionality fairly quickly, and then you spend the rest of the 90% of the development time getting the 10% to 20%

that people actually need for it to become a reasonable application. And when we toss these things aside, the applications that work and that have reached this point of maturity, what we might do is we might deliver something with marginally better visuals or a slightly better workflow. But in the meantime, our users tend to be left with locations that don't have the features they need. And what happens, from a developer's point of view, who works on free software quite a bit, there is a real constant pressure from a lot of people,

especially the attention areas of our community, you know, the media and whatnot, to always be producing something new and flashy and cool. And it's more reward for promising something wonderful and starting off by scrapping whatever you have right now. At the same time, we also get our feet held to the fire if it isn't stable and if it isn't performant and if it doesn't have the features that people need. You were talking earlier about, you know, is the Linux desktop ready for the average person? Well, it never will be if we keep reinventing things every few years. And so there's this conflict, right?

These two motivations don't really gel well together. And this is both part of what new free software developers coming into it are bred and born on. So they come into it with this expectation of, oh, we need to redo things that's sexy and cool, or go the other way and be hyper hyper conservative there's no middle ground um and meanwhile those those projects that try and hit a middle ground i think come under a lot of unnecessary um pressure on the one hand but also just get overlooked a lot for uh trying to you know going through cycles of innovation but then also going through longer cycles of stability and support so uh you know i just to kind of abstract this to a level where people would kind of recognize it down to the desktop.

I would say, like, for me, I do kind of understand what you're saying in the sense that I look at like the GNOME desktop and their reboot has cost them, I believe, not only untold users, but years of basically progress on the desktop. I would say that while they've obviously been working very hard, it's really now getting to a point where I'm comfortably using it on a daily basis. If you look at the years it took to get there, that's a big reset. And it kind of came at an inappropriate time. Right when Microsoft was stumbling with Vista, there was sort of, I've always felt like, this golden opportunity where Linux could have succeeded a little bit stronger, where, you know, perhaps if Canonical hadn't rebooted with Unity,

and Unity was really quite awful at the beginning, and if GNOME hadn't restarted with GNOME 3, which GNOME 3.0 was really quite unusable at the beginning, we might have had a little more traction, perhaps. So then you look at it now, and these projects are getting to a good state, but one of them is about to face another reboot. And I see there's projects where sometimes there'd be value in starting over. And then there's other projects where I see it almost feels a little sad because so much effort and time will be lost while they rebuild and retrace things that they have already once completed and already once figured out.

Exactly. And when these products get to the point of, okay, finally, they're usable again, I can use them on a daily basis, have they really progressed the technology sufficiently to offset that cost? And I think with the wild abandon that we embrace new and shiny with at times, we tend to destroy that. I mean, the biggest problem I had with something like Pulse Audio, for instance, was not that we needed a non-crappy audio stack, but that it was pushed onto the user community when it wasn't ready. Right. It can be clearly seen by your troubles that people had. There was literally

a distribution that shipped where the volume slider didn't do anything. As crappy as the Linux video stack was, it finally worked for most people. Right, yeah, exactly. And so we seem to be, as you said, picking really bad times to reinvent things and doing it for what will deliver

marginal benefit, if any, at the end of the day. Yeah, I see. Here's the thing is this it's it's this interesting culture that's driven. And I feel like it's more than just one thing that attributes to this. But from a media production standpoint, like from the Linux Action Show, people are going to be much more interested in something brand new that they want to learn about than sort of retracing how great it is that every application I use under KDE has a proper notification icon on the system tray. Like that's an example of how staying stable and just having something and defining the way it works and keeping it that way for years benefits end users. But it doesn't make for a good segment in a podcast and it doesn't make for a good segment in a podcast, and it doesn't make for a good article on a blog. And so I do agree that that is driving the conversation in one direction,

but at the same time, that's because that's what the consumers of that content want to hear about, right? And the developers that are going into these projects, they don't want to work on the old guy's old busted code. They want to come up with their new hot concepts and bring those on the world. So that's their motivation. So it seems to be like this multi-dimensional problem that just sort of is maybe human nature. No, agreed. And so on the one hand, we need to not reward those developers who just want to come in with a wrecking ball, or at least reward them a lot less for doing that if they're not bringing any real large offsetting value to it the other side of it is yeah how do we how do we present um mature projects as interesting um and i agree it requires a little

more um positioning and thinking and and you know most free software projects and most people involved in free software are not great self-promoters and marketers. And so, yeah, I completely get that a new is an easier story. It writes itself. On the other hand, if you look at, you know, so a project that I've been involved with for years was Plasma, which most people know as a desktop environment. And it gets to the point where it's mature enough that we can actually start branching off and doing things like Plasma Active, where we can bring it devices and this this whole convergence story that has been really exciting for people around unity is actually where we were three or four years ago um now the question is why doesn't that why didn't that story get out

in a more interesting way why doesn't it um keep people's attention and and i'm sure there's probably things that you that I could have done differently or better to make it more interesting. But on the other hand, I also think that there's an expectation you can only tell a story once. And I think that the Convergence story, for example, is one that has a lot of legs if we can keep ourselves kind of moderately entertained and interested. And companies like Google, for instance, there's a bunch of people talking pre-show about things like Chromebooks. And what we don't realize with these things is that, I don't think consciously, is that they

bang on the same boring message for like five years before people get it. And when people get it, it's new and exciting to them. But you have to bang those old messages through. And when people get it, it's new and exciting to them. But you have to bang those old messages through. And I think that hurts the free software adoption as well, because we don't have the patience to bang the message through. That usually takes two, three years. And so what happens is we get projects that are less interesting to people. And until someone comes along with the wrecking ball and erects the new shiny that is not usable anymore um we don't they don't get the attention and so we kind of catch ourselves you also have these companies that um uh some people in the development communities idolize uh

apple where you know you'll see apple from time to time completely reboot a product even if it's a high-end product like final cut or the mac pro into something brand new and just say suck it you take it or you don't take it and this is the the way it is. And I think in some weird, creepy way, that messages to people that that's an okay thing to do, because they see Apple doing it, and some people hold that in some level of regard. And so it seems to me, too, that there is a bit of commercial... The commercial companies like Google and Apple are also sort of driving this mentality a bit. And it takes a certain wisdom to sort of see past that and be still motivated to work on something that is tried and true. How do you incentivize somebody to want to do that?

Well, I think that most tried and true software, Well, I think that most tried-and-true software kind of, how do I say this politely, has areas that suck after a number of years. Yeah. Software doesn't stand up to the test of time, you know, if you don't change it. now I'm involved in rewriting one small part of a project that I'm involved with that's yeah, it's a rewrite of one small component and it's very interesting and it will have important it will bring

important value to the users. It's not a rewrite of everything. So I think on the one hand, finding ways to create a culture of you don't have to rewrite everything make your thing make your your software you know a little bit more modular with a more forward-looking design which is something that we need to teach each other how to do um and then you know you can do incremental important evolutionary work where you can talk about it i mean my blogs in the last two

weeks have featured quite a few times this component that I'm rewriting. And people are finding it very interesting and exciting. And it's done in a very low risk way. The other thing is, is that there are tons of topics that free software does not touch, does not cover. We don't need to be rewriting the image viewer application every two years. Let that that that topic area go and let's find the other eight million application categories that we have no answer for and create a new shiny there no kidding um you know instead of just chasing our tails so but maybe that's just me maybe we actually do have a complete software catalog but last time i checked we didn't well i so uh i guess if you if you move if you kind of zoom out a little bit and you look at like the whole like free software ecosystem there's certain

aspects of like linux that have linux itself have had have had pretty even curved development and and stability and also innovation the linux kernel has then been adopted by every company under the sun to power their product. And I think that speaks to sort of what you're talking about when you have a group of people that just stay at it and keep building it, don't keep throwing it all out and restarting again. It gives people certain assurances. But because that hasn't happened really at the user space as much, we haven't seen a stabilizing there. And so, you know, you see these, we had a great thread in the Linux Action Show subreddit saying, why has Linux on the desktop failed?

He looks at – this was Ersk in the chat room. He looks at the market shares. Linux is at 1.73% according to netmarketshare.com. And he says, regardless of the distro, it's at 1.73% while XP is 12 years later, still at 29% market share. One of the reasons this could be the popularity of XP in Asia, of course, and things like that. But honestly, XP was this quote unquote stable in terms of it's an easy target for developers to quantify, develop for. And I wonder if perhaps, remember when Miguel Itacaza wrote that the problem with the Linux desktop was always changing and always, always incompatibilities always being brought in?

I wonder if he sort of nailed it in a sense where, like, what we really need is something. Now, I know I'm just going to sound like I'm blowing smoke up the KDE project, but we need something like KDE 4.x that is just what you see is what you get for years. Like, it's like this for, it's snapshotted like this for years, much like Unity will be in the next LTS release. Does Linux need a little XP-ification right now? I think so. And this can be done without ossifying or fossilizing things either.

Now, you brought the Linux kernel. I completely agree with what you said about it and why it's successful. But the Linux kernel. I completely agree with what you said about it and why it's successful. But the Linux kernel is like this massive constant churn. So it's not like they're sitting still and moribund. They've managed to marry the two. So a really good example, I think, of this in the user space is so we've had the whole many years of UDEV, UDISCs.

Basically, the hot plug and disk management facing the user space side has gone through a number of revolutions. And not always. In fact, at each break, it was a radical API change. So what the KDE developers did was they decided to create an API that did what application developers could wrap their head around. Because the lower level user space APIs were also pretty hardcore for the average person who just wants to write a cool game or something. So they created a slightly simplified API, but they masked what was going on down below. And the CSS opened up the ability to port to Windows and Mac and now iOS and Android. But when the UDisc thing came in, while other desktop environments like XFCE, for instance,

had to do a lot of work to catch up their applications and rewrite them, no KDE application had to line a code. A new backend was written for that framework called Solid, and everything just continued working. Even more magical, no one got left behind because the people who were using the old stuff used the old backend, and the people using the new stuff used the new backend,

and no one was stranded on an old version. So it is possible to do, but it takes forethought. And I think that Miguel de Ocaza was correct in his criticism or his critique, except that we do have projects and communities out there that do exactly what he said we should be doing. And the challenge we face is that the community as a whole, on the one hand, I don't think recognizes that. You know, when someone does something like Solid, there's a certain community or group of people in the community who hurl stone saying, you're just writing, you know, yet another abstraction layer. And, you know, you should be writing to the Linux

stack directly. And that's the way to go. And so there's like a popular backlash against doing the responsible thing. And I think as a community, we need to take stock of what really matters. And if we do want to get that stable, approachable user land, and especially at the GUI level, we need to start valuing that kind of work that isn't very glamorous, but pays off in the long run.

And we need to start supporting those people. And the people who don't do that, maybe we should say, look, I love you guys, and you guys and you guys are doing free software which is freaking awesome but you know what we need you to do it responsibly and so we're going to go over here and support these people that are looking at five ten years down the road um and i think if we did that if we shifted what we value everybody would start

doing things a little more responsibly and then I think the whole new shiny thing would resolve itself because people tend to do, by and large, that which is rewarded. Matt, let me ask you the million-dollar question, and then I'll open it up to the mumble room. How do we shift the end user's value, which would hopefully then influence developers and media coverage, how do we shift the value from new and shiny to tried and true? Well, I think the opportunity definitely lays with XP. The problem is that the end user looks at XP, not realizing the fact that it's going to be a major problem here in the coming months,

and doesn't see a reason to switch. But I think if you speak to the fact that they could potentially continue to use the hardware they already have without having to invest in new hardware, I think money is really going to be the sweet spot. Yeah, I think you were, so the point you're driving at here is like, there's a certain class of user that absolutely values tried and true. And then there's a certain class of user, the more sophisticated user,

who maybe is a little more on the, I want the shiny, right? Exactly. That's exactly it. And I think that, you know, it's really hard to hit that nail on the head. But I think the biggest problem Linux has for both groups is

they really suck at marketing. I can't stress that enough. They have this amazing product that is driven through very much an echo chamber world. It really is. And it's a shame, because I introduce it to people, and they're just blown away as to why the hell they've never heard of this before.

And they have an Android phone. They have no idea. So it's interesting. So it's going to be tough to say for sure. But I definitely say that it's going to be the real opportunity for growth that's going to come from the people that are using XP. I think that's really where it is. The new and shiny people, honestly, I don't know. Maybe they're always going to want new and shiny.

Yeah, it's like trying to herd cats. I don't know about that. Well, I think we can do both. But I do completely agree with you, Matt, when you say that people who want the tried and true, that's – how do we market to them? And that's the gap, the marketing bit. And this is kind of what tweaked me when I listened to your show. And I'm often like one or two weeks behind that I've been on the Linux Action Show to catch up. And it's what

tweaked me about it, right? It was like, you guys are the people who market us best. Because we do suck at it. Full stop. And so when I see people who would be our best and brightest um in terms of getting the message out of marketing you know rewarding really and for good intentions i think you know the new and shiny because i want to support and and push forward everything i mean nobody wants to be the grumpy guy who goes well you're really putting your heart and soul into this and i can see that and you're doing this free software but really um no one wants to be the grumpy guy who goes, well, you're really putting your heart and soul into this, and I can see that, and you're doing this free software, but really?

No one wants to be that guy. I get it. But if we want to succeed, there's some level of responsibility that needs to come in, and the people who do the best marketing for us, who is not me and the other software developers, right? We need you guys to, and not just two but you know the media in general who follows free software to do it and what goes even one step further of pain and heartache is when i read certain people in the media who cover free software basically going fine okay great the free software projects will never get together and again it's a systems thing because we've been rewarding the wrong things all along fine then now i'm just going to say that google with their services are

where it will be and to me that feels like just running the white flag straight up the flagpole and unnecessarily and i i just i'd love to find some way to break that feedback loop so that we can start rewarding um strategically useful uh behavior and then getting that message out to those people who would most benefit from it, such as the XP crowd. It's not an easy thing that, you know, I realize that's a gigantic thing to take on, but I think that's the path of success lies in that direction somehow. Very good. That's a good point. It's well taken on my end too, because it's something that I, it's definitely on my radar

because I always cringe a little bit when, like you say, I have that same feeling. It's like, okay, it's good that you're doing this and I really appreciate the hard work. And, you know, especially in the Gnome case,

it's like for years, everybody's been so hard on them. It's like, okay, they've finally gotten it to a point that it's okay. It's worth talking about now. It's really gotten good. But at the same time, like in the back of my mind, it's like, okay, they've finally gotten to a point that it's, okay, it's worth talking about now. It's really gotten good. But at the same time, in the back of my mind, it's like, you know, I do understand that I'm sort of encouraging, like I called it,

a form of consumerism. And I'm not generally comfortable with all those kinds of things. But before we go any further, I want to bring in the main virtual lug here and ask these guys if anyone in the room here wants to raise defense or comment. Go ahead, Riley. Yes, I have a couple issues with all of Aaron's things. Like, everybody is guilty of beautification. Even KDE is guilty of it.

Remember how bad KDE 4.0 and 4.1 was when it came out? Like, it happened, right, when Windows 7 Windows 7 came out too because they were trying to I mean, they looked almost exactly alike. I actually think that's a good distinction to make is there are times where maybe, you know, all things considered it is worth retooling and rebooting. And also, people always have a choice with Linux.

The reason why is the LXDs out there and XFDs out there they'll be around for a long time to come, and let these newer franchise projects keep going. People can use them if they want to. For me, of course. Those awkward transition periods.

XP was great. It was stable. But then they hadn't moved on, so they created Vista. Vista was awful, but that led to VII, and VII was a huge improvement over XP. And so I think that's the same thing that Ubuntu did between 10.10 and 12.04. That's the same thing KDE did, the same thing GNOME did. All right, hold on there. Hold on right there. Wait, wait, wait.

Nope, nope. Hold on. Wait, let Aaron respond to the first comment about KDE rebooting and things like that, and then we'll move on to the next topic. Yeah, sure. So first off, I completely agree that the results of 4.04.1 were not what we all desired, and we've learned from that, and we're doing the next major release, the 5.0, extraordinarily differently as a result.

And so, yeah, there's learning curves for everybody. That said, the reason to take on such a revamp was, or the choice to do it was only taken after a very extensive examination of the code base we had at the time and where we could go with it in the future. And on the desktop side, applications were a completely separate issue, but the desktop shell itself was at an evolutionary dead end. And looking at what we could do with it and to move it to the next step was more work and even more disruptive than doing you know what we did with with the reboot with with plasma um i wish it would have been different

but that was a necessary thing and that needs to happen we probably have the the ability to do that uh afford or afford to do that maybe once 10 to 15 years um which is exactly what either um because even to this day i'm on intel graphics and i still had issues with kwin rendering effects i don't want to make this a text part i wanted to go back to tyler tyler were you going to make the point that essentially seven was an iteration of vista and, and so Vista, in a sense, was a reboot, and 7 was the... I was going to say that a lot of people seem to forget that Vista was like an NT 6.0 release. Microsoft didn't magically do anything with 7 to make it better.

It was by the time 7 got released, all the hardware and software support was already there for the NT 6 series. Yeah, yeah. Yes, that's true. Vista had a good backend and a good security, if you remember. Well, SP1 did. So if I could just add a little thing there.

Now, the feedback that we got after the 4.0 release was anything but gentle. And while unpleasant, it did have the positive effect of making us seriously consider the lightness and the responsibility that goes into making such decisions. And I think that in that sense, the kind of feedback that was offered like, oh, that sucked, that's useful.

And I think it would be much more useful if that was kind of, you know, maybe not as brutal because I think a lot of it went over the top. But that kind of critique, honest critique is useful and needs to be taken on. Because if we don't look at it as, oh, you're just criticizing me horribly, but this is feedback. I need to take this on. Let's move forward. If we can all engage in that way, then we can actually be more honest and more critical in a non-confrontational way with each other. And then again, that moves, I think, the developers towards a path of actually being able to develop more responsibly. Okay, I wanted to change gears. I'm done talking about Windows.

But I wanted to ask a question to the room that I asked Matt earlier and see if you guys had a take on it. So Aaron, I think, made the astute point that if we could encourage the celebration of tried and true and developing rock-solid platforms and sticking with them and encouraging developers to want to contribute to that, encouraging users to be interested in that, does anybody have any ideas on how you actually shift people's values and perceptions on that? Anybody have a throw – maybe like an idea to start that process? Well, I think when we talk about mature projects and what Michael Dominic from Coder Radio calls, quote-unquote, the new hotness, I think we need to take – I think we need a balance between the two we need i think uh uh an ideology and approach that uh both uh uh gives people some something shiny something new to play with but also has that reliability and

maturity that people uh expect from from their software and their computers i think when we look at uh software in general and de's especially i think we also need to have we need to have uh new features and uh integration with modern technologies you think we also need to have new features and integration with modern technologies. We need to have JavaScript. We need to have HTML5. We need to have all those things. But we also need stability. We also need a lack of critical bugs.

To interrupt, if I could, what you're basically saying is we need to have developers who are experienced enough and savvy enough to need to know that they need to build something massive that they can build upon for years that will have the plumbing and meet the requirements for stuff they haven't even considered yet. And that sounds to me like we're asking too much of people who are just contributing to free projects during their free time. That is true, because a lot of times, developers do not know what the people really want, because, I mean, I just think at least sometimes it really makes you scratch your head,

especially like with, I don't want to say it, but Unity and Mirror, like, are you actually using it right now? It's like, think about that. Use what you develop and go from there. You haven't used it. Go ahead, Poppy.

I might be able to speak from a little bit of authority of the Unity side. I spent the day today in an office of 100-plus people all using Unity all day for all kinds of business activities, developers, kernel activities, developers, kernel developers, designers, finance people, HR. And it runs Linux a lot of times. It's Unity on Ubuntu and you see it in an everyday setting. Right.

And what I found pleasing was not only that, when I left the office and got the train home, I sat next to some random dude and asked him what game he was playing on his iPad because it looked like fun. And it turns out he happened to be an Ubuntu user as well and told me he'd been playing with Ubuntu on a mobile phone and playing with Ubuntu on a desktop. And so that kind of rekindled my thoughts that actually, despite how much flack we get for Unity and how much flack we get

for whatever we do in terms of licenses and packages we pre-install or don't pre-install, there are actually plenty of normal everyday users out there who continue to use this stuff, not just Unity but FaceOff in general.

And they have a whole different set of expectations and a whole different set of expectations and they have a whole different set of preconceptions before they go in and use a computer. And to really sort of underscore the point there is I find it – what I find amazing about it is now it's almost like – when we first did RunsLinux, it was a really big deal that all these computers in this office space would be running Linux. Now we're finding out about it because, well, of course, it's just a foregone conclusion. That's what we installed. And there's the desktop. It's like not even brought up. It's not even a big mention because it just seems obvious.

And, I mean, really, it's like seven out of ten times those are Unity desktops. And they're probably running a long-term support version, too, on top of that. So there really is a good degree of stability. And really a lot of what we're talking about is it sort of changes when you change the context. When you change the context to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, now all of a sudden, you essentially have what we're talking about for four or five years, which is a pretty good length of time, probably about the appropriate length of time. So it's interesting because it's this really complex issue because there's a lot of development actively happening at the front, and then there can be silos of stability that take place that are not really considered in this context, I guess.

I guess the main point to take away from all this is my main selling point of Linux is you always have a choice. There's always one thing to fall back onto if something else isn't working. I feel like that's a trope that we lean on to say, well, even if we don't make software that's actually good enough to meet the expectations of users, we have a lot of software that's not good enough that you can choose from. It's not necessary.

I mean, XFCE, if you don't like GNOME 3, most people go to XFCE and it's not very good. But jumping around from one solution to another is not a solution I mean, XFCE, if you don't like GNOME 3, most people go to XFCE and it's not very good. No, it's not. But jumping around from one solution to another is not a solution for the average person. The average individual is not going to hop from desktop to desktop environment. If you're going to deliver to users, you're making a commitment to them. Now, I agree that the fact is like, oh, great, there's a bunch of people using Unity.

That's almost uninteresting. The question ought to be, are those people using Unity because it's Unity, or had they stuck with GNOME, for instance, 2 or whatever, would they also be using that? So is the differentiation point Unity or not? And if it isn't, and I'm not trying to pick on unity i think this is true every single out there right like that always says default is king it's just whatever ships is default right so if the game changer so the game changer is not unity then this is this is resources and time that we're not using wisely well i think i think that... I'll go ahead, Poppy. Sorry, it also goes back to what Aaron was saying about marketing.

And whilst I agree with Aaron that there is grassroots marketing that people like Chris and Matt do on this show and others, and lugs and loco teams and other special interest groups, there's also the very great power that comes from selling machines pre-installed with whatever operating system.

And brand. And that co-marketing. The Dell brand, the System76 brand. There's power behind that brand. Exactly. And so you can be forgiven for not focusing your attention on the older computers that have a you know a very low amount of memory and a um a single core cpu because those don't get you that marketing eyeballs what gets you the marketing eyeballs is the shiny in the shop and the online store and the what's the latest

greatest multi-core processor with you know gigabytes of memory and an ssd that's what gets you that marketing push. Or really look at the Ubuntu Edge, right? The Ubuntu Edge got a lot of... We're constantly to get there. I think one point that really should be brought up is we should be striving for stable and solid software regardless of what time of year,

what releases we're looking at because OpenSUSE could arbitrarily say, okay, this is going to be an evergreen release and it's not as scheduled as Ubuntu's LTS releases. Right, yeah. It's always something I think. And I think some of this too is there are certain things that are going to get to a maturity.

GNOME is going to reach a certain level of maturity. Obviously KDE is at a certain level of maturity. And in time, the new versions of Unity will be at a certain level of maturity. And in time, the new versions of Unity will be at a certain level of maturity. And all of this is really, it's sort of getting our ducks in a row. And I think maybe this might be a problem that a couple of years down the road

is not nearly as pronounced. Maybe. Now, you'll still have a lot of small apps that are changing all the time that we could argue about, user-end apps that need to stabilize. But I think like big picture wise, we might not really be talking about this in a couple of years.

If I may really quick, here's, here's my position on this. And I think it just needs to be said that we have LTS for the people that want stability and they want to work in an environment where everything will be expected and everything will stay the same whereas we have like the arch community where we work on these type of things and we we develop the future for the lts projects. So in a sense the people that do the development work in the future will also help the people that

have businesses that have or just want to have just a stable computer at home. And so I think the best way to go look at this is that to have a community where we, we proactively respond to the effects that we need to have for people that want to try Linux or want to have Linux as an everyday product and not, and not have to worry about like problems in the future. It's,

I think there's no need to over... Overthink it? Overthink it, yeah. All right. Last final words, gentlemen. Aaron, you got it. I have a question for Popey, actually. I'd be interested to get his perspective

as a canonical employee. What exactly are the purposes of the non-LTS and Blink releases? Are those supposed to be like testing rounds? Alright, hold that. We'll do that in post-show because I've got to wrap up. Go ahead, Q5. One thing that I've noticed

that we as a Linux community sometimes don't wrap our brains around is that we have multiple levels of development. Myself working with the Puppy Linux project, distro development is one step removed from, say, desktop environment development. And I think sometimes we try to lump all development into one bucket. one bucket. And that's a problem in my mind, because as a distro developer, most of the time, I'm limited by what upstream desktop environment developers give out. So we all need to work together, but people also need to realize that there are decisions that are made at the application layer that then the distribution layer has to then try to deal with.

Right. That makes sense. Aaron, were you going to say something? Yeah. So I was just going to say in response to what you said, Chris, about maybe in two years, this won't be a problem. If that was the case, we wouldn't be in the problem now because we'd actually achieved a position of relative stability, featurefulness, and then everyone went and did a bunch of new things. In large part because people observed or felt they observed that to be relevant, to be on that shiny new machine and that new hardware, you had to reinvent and rewrite and, you know, and now it's just a cycle of constant rewriting. I don't think that, or I think that if we do not change how we interact with our expectations, that this will just repeat over and over and over again.

And we will, that we'll only have so many more kicks at this can before we don't have any more. I completely agree. And I want to, I want to button it right there because I think that it's a good warning to somebody who's also been following this for a long time, you guys know I've expressed my feelings on this. Matt, you and I have talked a few times about how we feel like there's been some missed opportunities. And I think Aaron just nailed it. So it's a warning. It's something to think about. And you can send us in your feedback by going over to jupiterbroadcasting.com, clicking the contact link, and then choosing Linux Unplugged from the drop-down.

Or even better, you could join us live over at jblive.tv. Go in our chat room, do Bang Mumble, and guess what? You'll get our Mumble server and you can join our virtual lug and have your voice right here in this very show. Now, Linux Unplugged is live on Tuesdays at 2 p.m. Pacific. You can go over to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. And then you can just get that in your local time zone. Matt, we're going to get to that how-to on Sunday. Remember I was talking about the remote desktop thing?

Oh, right on. Yeah, we're going to do that this Sunday. We might do a slightly shortened show because it's Super Bowl Sunday. Oh yeah, right. Might as well at that point. That could be a problem. We'll see, but we'll figure it out.

All right, everybody. Well, thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. If we don't see you on Sunday, we'll see you right back here next Tuesday.