LINUX Unplugged - Episode 252: Github Hubbub

Episode Date: June 6, 2018

Microsoft has purchased GitHub, sending shock-waves through the free software community. We discuss the bidding war that took place, and it leaves us questioning what the future of Electron might be. Plus we’ve found a great batch of Linux apps you're going to want to try, NextCloud turns two, big changes to the KWin project, and the details on Samsung’s Chromebook Plus landing Linux app support.

I'm somehow full of admiration that you take thousands of miles with the car just to go to a Linux fest. Well, and to visit Linux Academy, too. But, yeah, it's, well, I don't know. Sometimes I actually feel like I'm insane. But at other times, it is, there is something really good for me because I spend so much time on the computer. because I spend so much time on the computer, and I'm always working on the internet, to then be very, very much disconnected for long periods of time and driving down the road

does do something good for me psychologically, I think. It's sort of a rebalancing thing for me. I will be right back. I'm going to get a beverage. Grab one for me, too. Oh, absolutely. So we were coming down into Texas last night. We hadn't quite made it yet. We were still in New Mexico.

And it was about 100 degrees out. And I got the high temperature alarm on one of my rear tires. So I have four rear tires, two sets of duallys in the back. And one of them got to 124 degrees, which is pretty high. It's not super crazy high, but that's pretty dang high. And so that was the first time during this trip where we pulled over and just sat for a while while our tires cooled down. And it was towards the end of the night too. So by the time we got back on the road, the sun was

setting and it dropped about 80 degrees and the tires stayed fine for the rest of the trip. But there was a moment there where I went, oh crap. And the thing that was wild about it is just 45 seconds before i passed a class a rv on the side of the road with a blown tire their tire something had gone wrong and their tire blew out and then not even a minute later my alarm goes off for one of my tires and i was like i'm not even going to mess around with this so i pulled over on the side of the highway lots of big trucks going by because it was a real big commercial corridor. So they're shaking the whole RV as they go by. And we just sat there for about 40 minutes while the tire cooled down.

That was the first moment where I was like, maybe this is a little stupid. This is a little dumb. Maybe I shouldn't be doing this because it's always a bigger push than you expect. But at the end of it, I get to go down there. I get to hang out with audience members. And I get to go do Linux stuff, and then I just get to go home. And I just live in Austin for about a week. And then that's kind of a unique opportunity. So how could I say no? Already, already.

Did you get that beer? Yes, I did. I'm ready to go. Well, let's start the show. Did you get that beer? Yes, I did. I'm ready to go. Well, let's start the show. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 252 for June 5th, 2018.

Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's definitely the Hotbox sauna edition. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Wes. I'm chatting to you from Plainview, Texas this week, and we have got a huge show. Microsoft helped this week by buying GitHub. We'll talk about Microsoft's $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub. We'll talk about Nat Friedman, who he is, and why you might want to know more about him in the next few months. And then we're going to talk about what happens to Atom now that Microsoft owns GitHub, which owns Atom, which competes with Visual Studio Code.

It's a mess. We'll talk about that. And then we'll get into some project news, including some news around KWIN, the Linux subsystem that's going to be on Chromebooks, and something big for NextCloud. It's a huge, huge moment today for NextCloud. We'll tell you about that. And then the most app picks we've ever had on the show.

It's an app pick blowout. We've got so many app picks, you're going to need tabs for days. There's probably something in here for everybody. And then at the end of the show, after we let all of this soak for a bit, after we marinate in Microsoft's purchase, now that Microsoft is going to own Electron, how can Microsoft make it better? What could they do? Let's just say things work out and they are able to steward Electron into a direction that improves it for everyone. That could happen. We'll have to wait

and see. And I'll get the Mumble Room suggestions, my suggestions and Wes's suggestions. So that way we can maybe, maybe come up with something good out of all of this because Electron is getting a lot of deployment on Linux desktops these days, and now Microsoft owns it. So I think that's definitely worth discussing. But before we go any further, let's bring in that mumble room. Time-appropriate greetings, Virtual Lug. What's up? Oh, hey.

Yo. Hey-o. Oh, hey, indeed. Well, what's up is that it's like 100 degrees in this room right now. That's what's up. But that was expected. We won't complain too much. Wes, I don't know really where to start. I'm not quite ready to get into the GitHub stuff yet, because it's just such a big story. I feel like it's a big story. We should warm up with something

like you and I do this on the TechSnap program is we have like these warm up stories to kind of get us rolling. And I've kind of set one aside this week that's not super Linux specific, but it is kind of mind blowing where all this stuff is going. and the core tech runs on Linux. It's from Facebook, and it's their FAIR system, which is the Facebook AI Research, and their scientists yesterday unveiled a neural network capable of translating music from one style and genre and a set of instruments to another. So you take something that starts out with like Bach, and it's one of his symphonies, and it's symphonies, and he's playing, and the AI can translate that into a song played on a piano in the style of Beethoven, for example. So you can actually just, in a way,

translate the music from one set of instruments and styles to another. And FAIR becomes the first AI research team to create a unsupervised learning method to actually do all of this. Their results are kind of mind-blowing, and they're sort of patting themselves on the back this week because it's huge for the AI industry. If you think about it, it's something that a music professional could probably do fairly competently, but now you have AI doing it and it's their approach. Their approach involves a complex method of auto-encoding that allows the network to process audio from inputs it's never been trained on. Rather than trying to match pitch or memorize

notes, this unsupervised learning method uses high-level semantic interpretation. I guess another way to put this is you could say it's listening and it plays it by ear. Right, exactly. It's kind of crazy in that respect. That's kind of one of the fun aspects of some of these AI projects is just where they interface with things that are traditionally so human, like art and how we interpret that, and then trying to reason about how they, you know, to quote-unquote understand it. Yeah. Giving computers the ability to see and the ability to hear

and then make decisions based on that is the fundamentals. And they're very excited about the progress they're making. I, on the other hand, am a little apprehensive, just like I am with Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub for 7.5 Billy. Now, that's in stock, so it's maybe less impressive. No, that's still, yep, just checked, still impressive, still absolutely impressive. And today is the day after, the day after we got the official news. It was brewing all weekend.

They announced it yesterday, Monday. Tuesday, the 5th of June, 2018, is the second day after this announcement, and we've already learned new details that we didn't know yesterday so the first thing is is that they I think the biggest thing that we learned today is that Google was hot on the tail for this there was a bidding war between Microsoft and Google for GitHub so think about that for a second just Just that information right there, Wes, how would you feel if yesterday was announced Google bought GitHub? You know, I don't know. It's kind of complicated. Both are sort of gray areas. I might actually be happier with Microsoft buying them. It feels weird to say, but if someone had to, it could have been worse, I think.

No. I can even give you the reason why Microsoft or anybody wants it, and it's to do with search for code references. Microsoft, a couple years ago, you guys reported in here, I think, a tool that allowed you to search for actual solution snippets, and Microsoft wants that, and Google wants that too. It also gives developers for their infrastructure, solution snippets, and Microsoft wants that, and Google wants that too. It also gives developers for their infrastructure, which is looking for developers.

So those are the reasons. I don't think anybody would have been a better buyer than anybody else. They are all terrible because the reasons they want it is... No, seriously, I think GitHub, if a foundation was made out of it, it would be great. But somebody buying it, there's nobody that's going to buy a business

which is founded on selling storage. That's what GitHub is. So, Dar, what do you think, though? If you were going to have to pick between Microsoft or Google, as far as open source projects go, which one are you think, though? If you were going to have to pick between Microsoft or Google, as far as open source projects go, which one are you more comfortable with? I would say Google, I guess.

And the reason for that would have been just because Google at least has a legitimate reason also aside from demining your code as data. Reason, which is code.google.com failed. It was terrible. It closed. So they need a replacement. It wouldn't make sense. Microsoft, they kind of have this whole tooling. They're going to change

GitHub. It's going to be worse. Yes, it would be cool if it was a foundation, but that was never going to happen. They've always been maybe not actually making a bunch of money, but attempting to be a for-profit company. GitHub is convenient. I have no love lost. It really just seems more like business

to me than anything else. And maybe it means we re-evaluate it. But that's exactly, Google would have probably kept this convenient if they only bought it for the code.google replacement thing. Because that's what they had with code.google. It was just sitting there and people could use it. It was a back burner that they didn't mind.

Yeah, that also means it wasted away. I think Microsoft will probably be a much more active and probably better steward. They have been doing a lot of Git things. I think they actually care about Git. There's obviously other reasons for this acquisition, but their developers are already using it. They're one of the largest open source contributors

on the platform, so I think it's in their own interest to actually make it work pretty well. What that actually means is now you're going to be filled with Microsoft products all over, and Git will change to accommodate the Microsoft tool chain, which means that if you love GitHub right now, it might not be as pretty in the future when it's connecting with all of the tools you don't use. I think that's definitely a likely possibility, for sure. So Nat Friedman, who's going to be running it,

said that they're going to remain an independent entity, sort of like how LinkedIn has. We'll see if that's going to be true. Even find that there's another problem with this whole situation, which these big corporations are compliancy, they're full compliant. And remember the takedowns that GitHub had? Expect more of those.

Oh, and by the way, in the future, we probably don't need certain governments to develop Stuxnet. They can just inject in normal daily software because they have control of the repos and who gets to see the code in the first place. So you're building from source, who cares? So I think what we have here is grounds for serious concern, but we don't have anything that's even going to really change for probably another six months or so. Like the deal isn't finished until at best the end of the year. And then at the end

of the year, Nat Friedman takes over. And he's been in open source since the 90s. He writes on his blog, he says, I was blown away to discover a free operating system that came with an editor, a compiler, and a debugger. All of the tools you need to be a developer and all of the source code. It was an incredible opportunity for a teenager in a small town in Virginia to learn from the best developers in the world, he goes on to say. I spent 15 years working with Linux and founded a couple of open source companies. My first commit to GitHub was in 2009 when GitHub was just a year old. Two years ago, I joined Microsoft and acquired Xamarin, a developer-focused company that I started with Miguel Atacaza.

And he goes on to write about how GitHub will operate independently as a community platform and a business. GitHub will retain its developer-first values, distinctive spirit, and open extensibility. And he says we're going to support any language license tool, platform, or cloud. And they're going to retain their product philosophy as well. Now, he's not going to run the place until the deal is over. But you got to give them some credit here. They've made a lot of inroads with.NET Core, with Visual Studio Code, with a lot of the other projects they have

up on GitHub that we don't even mention very often. Plus the Windows source code is up on GitHub. And a lot of people have reached out to me that work at Microsoft and said, you know, we just use Git a lot internally. If they screw up Git, we're going to just go ballistic. So there could be a potential for a new dynamic here, a new Microsoft that we've witnessed sort of change and evolve over the years. And when Satya Nadella took over and the tone changed, I was the biggest skeptic of all of it. I thought this is just marketing. You know, a company doesn't just change on a dime.

When you change out the CEO. They have deep, deep, deep cultural beliefs. But then over the years, we've learned that there was a lot of internal layoffs and retooling and refocusing. And I ended up talking to individuals that were fresh out of college that were brought in that were using Linux at Microsoft. It's possible they're not going to screw this up. I think we have to also consider that. Both things are possible. Only one way to tell, we will just have to wait and see.

I guess. I guess so. My recommendation, still clone all your repositories, keep a local backup, rely less on GitHub, and hope for the best. Yeah. That's exactly what I did. Yeah, and I think you're seeing a lot of people this week say that. I think a lot of people are saying,

all right, I'm out of here, I'm on GitLab, I'm out. And although PFSense just announced that they're moving some stuff to GitHub, as a lot of people are leaving, a few folks like, I know Michael Dominick has considered this on Coda Radio, and now PFSense are moving over to GitHub to essentially, from what I kind of read from this, is to outsource GDPR compliance.

To just say, all right, well, they're handling those things, and so now we're compliant. In fact, it's the number one reason PFSense lists on their blog. They say, we don't have to worry about storing any personal information about contributors, and contributors don't have to worry about creating an account with limited use cases. That's the number one reason is GDPR compliance. And then they talk about a bunch of other things that people always talk about when they go to GitHub. Yeah, well, I think that plays into it, right?

Like where I think of GitHub a lot kind of like YouTube, where it might not be your favorite place. It might not be where you wish that you had to find stuff, but it just has that social component. So yeah, either you're an open source developer or a personal user, and you should already take advantage of the decentralized nature of Git and have your own local clones, or push things up to multiple, or run your own. There's so many options. Or, if you're a business, then it just kind of makes sense,

and it doesn't matter, because that's a separate world, and that's a private business agreement. So are you a user of Atom? I can't remember your text editor of choice. Well, I kind of use all the things that rotate. I have used Atom a little bit. I don't use it all the time.

So that's been the big speculation is, well, what happens with Atom? Because you have, as they say, in the corporate world, redundancies here between Atom and Visual Studio Code. Well, one of the core developers to Atom tweeted, I actually don't know where he posted this. I think it was actually on Discord. Just to let everyone know, I've been given assurances that Atom remains

key to GitHub. Our product roadmap is set and the team will continue all of their work. So Atom continues on. So you're going to have VS Code and Atom sort of duke and doubt. Both based on Electron, both kind of the same fundamental technologies trying to accomplish the same thing. They do feel slightly more redundant now, but I suppose it's a large enough organization. If they really are this separate, then it's sort of, you know, they don't necessarily care about that too much as long as it doesn't suck up a huge amount of GitHub's energy.

Yeah. I think both you and I follow Ben thompson on certechery i think you follow him too i can't remember yeah and i've liked his recent takes on the shutdown of some of the windows teams at microsoft and whatnot so i'll link in the show notes at linux unplugged.com slash 252 is it was that what we're on um so i'll link the whole thing in there because it's super long and i'm just going to read you one of the last paragraphs but he says what Microsoft wants from their purchase from

GitHub is fuzzy they want to be developers friends in large part because it has no other option in the long run particularly as Windows continues to fade the company will be ever more invested in a world with no gatekeepers where developer tools and clouds win by being better on merits,

not by being able to leverage users. Do you agree with that? You know, at least partly, I do think it will be, it is fuzzy, and Windows has sort of to fade. So it does kind of feel like a play there, too, of we want to be relevant. We want to be in these worlds. And I think there's probably also a lot of tech startups or other companies with a lot of MacBooks in there, or maybe even Linux laptops

that just don't have that much of a relationship with Microsoft unless they're using some of their tools. So the further they can spread that, it's more mindshare and maybe a backdoor sales account for the enterprise section, too. So remember the prediction of Linux distribution from Microsoft with a desktop environment? Windows desktop environment? Like in the past, they have, look, the guy that is going to be managing

is a guy that came from Xamarin. Exactly the point. Microsoft is not acquiring companies on the exclusive merits of the products that they have, but oftentimes because of the human resources without having to signal the market that they're hiring for such positions. Because you can't lie on the job advertisement what the skills are required and you indicate what you're going to be working with. Now, GitHub is a team that deals a lot with Linux, deals a lot with cloud, deals a lot of making good APIs, and that just goes straight into the vision of making that Linux distribution. I would love to see it just because it would be such a massive disruption. So I kind of hope you're right. I kind of agree with Ben Thompson here. I think this is what we're watching as Microsoft continue to try to carve out a new area of relevancy before they're really bleeding. And I think they're being pretty clever about the way they're doing it. While they still have a great, strong Windows

customer base, and they still have plenty of dominance in the market, they're moving into this new area. And that's how I see the GitHub purchase playing into all of that. As far as the speculation about what's going to happen to it, as far as like deploy on Azure buttons or integration, you know, I'm sure some of that is going to come eventually. I want to table the Electron discussion, though, because I think that almost outside of all of this, like imagine for a moment if Microsoft had just come along

and bought the whole Electron technology stack. Now, of course, it's MIT licensed and all that. But, I mean, just we're going to talk about it for a moment if Microsoft had just come along and bought the whole Electron technology stack. Now, of course, it's MIT licensed and all that. But I mean, just we're going to talk about it for a moment, like just zooming out from GitHub and just talking about Electron. But save that. We'll talk about that later in the show. Because while we're still talking about GitHub, let's talk about GitLab. Now, a lot of the audience members have either tweeted me, or they've been talking to the Telegram groups, or coda radio they emailed in a bunch and people are trying out gitla a gitlab like like crazy and i think i think that's been the number one response i've seen is okay i'm moving to gitlab and uh gitlab if you're not familiar with it is an open source core style business so gitlab itself is open source you can go install

in the linux box for free. It's Git compatible. It's pretty great. Wes, you must have played around with it before, I'm sure. Yeah, absolutely. I'm a user of their free service as well. So I have code both on GitHub and GitLab. They've been doing a ton of stuff with their CI, CD tooling. They have some neat, you know, sort of continuous integration just baked right in, as well as

integration with Kubernetes and other things. There is still the fear, of course, that that as they've evolved to the open core model, more and more things are not in that core. Sometimes things that you get on GitHub or some of the other platforms, or you might want fancier merge support, that sort of thing. So how much does it get you? Yes, it's open source. Yes, that's important.

It's also just nice, maybe if you care less about that, or if you feel that it's not as genuine, it's also just nice to have another player that is plausibly competing against GitHub. And it's easy to move between them, yes? Fairly so. There's definitely differences, but if you're not super tied into all the feature sets of one side or the other, if you're just using it for storing a repository and cloning it and sharing it, then yeah, it's pretty easy. Yeah, I think probably the biggest advantage, it sounds like, to GitLab is that you can self-host it.

And this whole event is a reminder of the massive centralization we're seeing in the tech industry. Now one of the top five tech companies now owns GitHub. And I'm a believer of the narrative that this was going to happen eventually. If Google was going after them too, that just sort of doubles down on that narrative. A lot of people online have been saying that GitHub should have remained independent. That's what made them great. And I've been arguing this was always going to happen.

GitHub has had leadership issues for a while. They've had money issues. They've just sort of been primed for purchase for a little bit now. I mean, it ties back in. They're a business. They're just going to have to operate that way, whatever the community wants, regardless. And since self-hosting is such a big component

of why people are moving to GitLab, let's talk about DigitalOcean for a moment, our sponsor, do.co.unplugged. You can get a $100 credit when you go there for 60 days when you sign up with a new account. This is a way for you to deploy GitLab in seconds. I'll link you in the show notes to a one-click deployment of GitLab and to a guide where you can build it yourself from the ground up. So whichever approach you like, you can get started with this $100 credit and you can experiment with moving over. And if it works for you, just keep it in production.

My favorite system that would be way more than you'd need for something like this is $0.03 an hour. You could probably get by with the $5 a month rig, and with a $100 credit, that's going to, well, go with a nicer rig, because you can just really play around with DigitalOcean. They have all SSD systems.

They have data centers all over the world. They have a great interface to manage all of this and a really clear, easy, well-documented API that there's tons of good open source applications already built for. So they bring all of that together with that dashboard, with these one-click deployments and that documentation, and you get the $100 credit when you go to do.co.unplugged. You can deploy lots of different distributions if you want to build the system yourself. You can attach block storage when you need to add more storage. They have a 99.99% uptime SLA. They have cloud firewalls so you can block traffic at the network level before they even touch your rig, which is brilliant.

That's how it should all work. And they have monitoring and alerting built in, too. So you can check on the metrics, get alerted if something goes down. And with global data centers, if you have people that you're working with in a team around the world, you can put something in their area that's super fast. And with those enterprise SSDs, you know it will be. So if you're ready to get started, go to do.co.unplugged,

take advantage of our $100 credit. Why not try out GitLab for a bit? So I'll have in the show notes the how to use GitLab one-click install image to manage your Git repositories, or also the step-by-step, build it all the way up from the system up, because they just have fantastic documentation. do.co slash unplugged.

Big thanks to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Unplugged program. So let's talk about the KWin maintainer that we often mention on this show, stepping down, Martin, who I think is a brilliant individual. And he announced on the KWIN development, or I'm sorry, the Plasma development mailing list, that he is stepping away from the maintainer position. And he has several reasons in here that, you know, some of it seemed to be personal opinions, and some of it seemed to be experiences that he's had. And they kind of come down to maybe the design group sort of running

away with the decision process. He says, I really dislike the development Katie is taking, where usability is the goal, but we don't stop to see if something is long-term maintainable, if we can, you know, after we develop it, can we actually support it for a while? When we started Plasma 5, the fundamentals of the project were focused on the basics and only what we can maintain, and we've moved away from that, he says. And I don't know if that's true or not. That's his opinion. But he would seem to be in a position to make that determination. He says, for the usability project, my wish is not to take every user request as a mission.

Instead, evaluate whether it makes sense for the project. Perhaps also consult the domain experts prior to writing patches. It's way more difficult to say no to a mission. Instead, evaluate whether it makes sense for the project. Perhaps also consult the domain experts prior to writing patches. It's way more difficult to say no to a change if the patch is already there. And when I read through his entire post here, what I kind of took away from this is there was some decisions around the login manager and some borders and a no-border discussion that he was left out of how it, for whatever reason, you know, maybe it was in a place he doesn't, he doesn't lurk or whatever. And they,

the design group created patches and it, it created a bunch of momentum and it was essentially the decision was made. And then when it got in front of him and he realized, well, wait a minute, we have serious technical implementation issues with this. Why wasn't anybody consulted about this? It was too late. And then it becomes sort of a political fight because you have somebody who's

got a precious baby that now they're trying to get born. And then you have somebody coming along and popping their bubble. So it creates a lot of feelings, I guess you could say. I think so. Yeah, right. I mean, on both sides, right? When you work really hard on things, you care about it. And there's not always a right answer. Yeah, exactly. Because, you know, as a recent Plasma user, I've been so happy with it that I hate to see anything like this. But it does, you know, some of this does kind of strike me as true.

They say we should, he says we should strive for satisfying 90% of the user base and not everyone. Currently, we try to satisfy everyone. This is a road to failure, in my opinion. We're on the road to KDE 3's configuration nightmare and creating an unmaintainable monster. And I could kind of see that perspective because I've been advocating now for about a year and a half that we need to just forget the idea that we're trying to find the new Linux user. There is no such thing as the person who is unfamiliar with how computers work and is also buying a Linux computer or building a Linux PC. These two things do not exist. They may get

a Chromebook and may eventually one day run Linux apps, but you don't have like, we've always tried to design our desktop environments and our applications for new users, for new users. Well, new users, the new users that are coming to Linux are technical experts. They're system engineers. They're software developers. They're enthusiasts who love hardware. They're people who love to mess around with source code and write free software. It's people who know how to mess with computers.

and write free software. It's people who know how to mess with computers. And what his point is, and I kind of click with it, is that perhaps Plasma has gotten on this usability kick because of the years and years of Plasma's too hard to use, too much configuration, you know? And now they've run away with it. Do you think there's something to this, Wes? I know you don't use Plasma a ton, but you've been using it more and more.

Yeah, I have been using it more and more. You know, I can see maybe a soft trend. I don't know if it's as bad as this. I just don't follow it that closely. But I do think it's a legitimate concern, especially for a large, long-lived open source project where there's not necessarily one very careful, curating, benevolent dictator sort of situation. You really do need to only add things that you can maintain. And as we've seen, as we're talking about with GNOME, if you're not careful, if you do build on unsolid foundations or add things that are going to increase your debt and make

things harder and less agile down the road, it takes a long time to undo that. Yeah, and hopefully Martin sticks around because I've always really respected his technical opinion, and he's always been willing to go to the mat to defend what he thinks is the right decision technically. He's also a really, he's just a good communicator, and I think has given us a lot of really interesting views into what's going on behind the scenes of Plasma development. Yeah, and I'll link to his full post on there,

because when you read it, you really take away somebody who cares about the project, and he's not even, he's not like rage quitting and going away. He's like, I'm still going to stick around and maybe write a few patches and help out here and there and answer some questions. But I'm just not really enjoying the maintainer aspect anymore. And you've got to respect that too because you could just see someone after all these years just saying, that's it, I'm out.

I rage quit. And he's like, no, I'm going to stick around. I'll still be part of the community. So I respect that too. Now, I did just mention that Linux on Chromebooks thing there. Well, you know already, everybody's been talking about how the fancy Pixelbook, if you get in the dev channel, is going to be running Linux apps like either now or very, very soon. But we weren't really clear on like some of the lower end, quote unquote lower end, even ARM-based Chromebooks until today. The Samsung Chromebook Plus is getting Linux support.

As spotted by users once again on Reddit, if you have the Samsung Chromebook Plus and you opt into the developer-only build of Chrome OS and enable things that are labeled as beta and then use the terminal, you can apt-get software and you can run Linux apps on this ARM-based Samsung Chromebook Plus,

which you can pick up used for like 300 bucks, I think. Oh, wow, really? Somewhere around there. Yeah, so it's not the cheapest, but it is an ARM Chromebook, which so far this had been limited to the x86 line or I guess you should say x64 line of Pixelbooks. It's 2018, Chris. It's 2018.

I know. I got tweeted about that. Stop saying x86, Chris. I'm like, you know what? He's probably right. I could say i686, but I think I'll try to say x64. So it was limited to the Chromebook Pixelbook before, but now we have an ARM version of a Chromebook that more average mortals can buy and afford. You can get it off Amazon right now. And it's probably not going to be the same range

as an x64 Pixelbook, but it's still going to be a bunch of apps. And it immediately is turning that thing into a much more useful tool. Yeah, that was what I thought too, right? Like suddenly I wasn't really interested in Chromebooks before, maybe as, you know, for other people in my life, but not for me. But now, maybe like as a travel laptop

or you just need something to spare while you're main machine, you're switching machines or getting something repaired or just something to throw in your bag and not have to worry about, not have to futz with it once you've got it. You know, if you have a terminal and you have Chrome and then whatever other Linux apps you need to get your job done, perfect. Yeah. You know, you and I have talked about this arrangement in the past where you've got sort of like a lower end front end laptop and then back at home or in the office or in my case,

the studio, you've got a much more powerful machine that you remote into and do the actual work on. And that's what I've kind of been doing for this whole road trip. I mean, I'm on an XPS 13, which is like three revisions old now or four revisions old now. I don't even know anymore. And the real work is all being done back in the studio. When we render video or encode audio, I'm executing those jobs on six core machines in the studio and not on my little two-core XPS 13 here. And it is time for me to replace this thing because I busted the side and stuff,

so it's kind of falling apart. God, is it super hot right now too. It's really warm. It's funny, like everything's hot around me. The microphone is hot to touch. Like the mics don't heat up, right? But this one is hot to touch. Everything's super hot.

So if I were to burn through my XPS 13 on this road trip, is hot to touch. Like, mics don't heat up, right? But this one is hot to touch. Everything's super hot. So, if I were like, burn through my XPS 13 on this road trip, which is kind of falling apart on me at this point

because I dropped it, I almost could make it work on a Chromebook. I could almost do it. I could almost do this whole road trip. I couldn't do Unfilter

or this show, but I could do almost all of, hell, I might be able to do unfilter on a Chromebook if I had just a couple of Linux apps. It's getting really serious if you do big tasks on more

remote, high-end systems or on a server. There's also maybe a weird, I wouldn't have thought this, but maybe there's a nice aspect too about if you spend all the time configuring the studio machine, you get that just how you need it. And then if you can just pick this up and not have to do much, not install an OS, not customize Plasma, which sometimes is nice,

but if you just use the machine while you're traveling or not every day, it's kind of just like you can buy it from a store, maybe the security or some of the other things are easier or simpler or just managed for you, and that's kind of convenient. If you travel a lot, that kind of flexibility is, I'll talk about it more in a second, but I'm going to Linux Academy to help them move their broadcast system from a Mac to Linux. And one of the things that I talked about is, I said, when we get a PC, let's get something that's Linux compatible. But keep in mind, one of the advantages now that we are gaining by moving from a Mac to Linux is we now have general availability of PC hardware. So when you go

somewhere for a live Linux Academy event, like when you fly to Denver for an event, or you fly to California for an event, and you get there and your PCs died because something got rattled on the flight or something, or you ship it and they screw it up because that happens every other event to us. It's so bad that we try to carry all of the equipment in the rv whenever possible because when we ship it we we it just constantly gets damaged even with serious pelican cases real packing i mean noah really knows what he's doing with this stuff and it still gets damaged and so i said to him i said the the the biggest advantage you have now is you can go into a store and if it's got the right components, you can buy it right there, take it back to your hotel room, load Kubuntu on this

thing, and within two hours, it's broadcast ready, because it's this general availability of hardware. And that's what I also dig about the Chromebooks. If you could make that workflow work, you know, if I burned out a Chromebook sitting here right now, or I dropped it and it really got damaged, or if I was on a flight and it got damaged or lost i could just replace that machine it would be an expense but it would be a manageable expense and i would be right back up and working so i really i think this is one of those events that it's like the big bang like it starts somewhere and you're like oh that was that looked like a little explosion over there and over time it expands into this massive sea change.

I think it could go that direction. I don't think it's going to be like a smartphone revolutionary, but I think it's going to change the way a lot of people work on computers. In two years, we'll just be quietly talking away on Chromebooks and not have a second thought about it. Speaking of two years, today, NextCloud is celebrating

its second birthday. 732 days later, they say they've shown their ability to execute on their vision. NextCloud is widely recognized as the most innovative, forward-looking projects in the open-source world, pushing boundaries in the areas of security, collaboration

and communication. Their company has grown to more than 40 people and one of the things they're most proud of is when they started out with Nextcloud, they promised to make upgrades work. And they think this area has really stood out, and they've kept that promise. And within a week of Nextcloud 13, over 10,000 servers had already successfully upgraded to the current version. And they also say they're proud of their security insights. They've started a bug bounty program.

And in the two years, they've paid out $8,000 to security researchers with over 100 reports that they've closed as a result. It's a pretty cool milestone. And I've been using it more and more. I just, you know, since Fedora 28 came out, actually, I sort of doubled down on my Nextcloud usage and had it going in the background as a test.

So it's a neat, it's a really neat project, and when you have a need for it, it's really, it can fit that niche really well. You're making me think, though, maybe I should give Nextcloud, you know, I tried out, back when they, I guess about two years ago when they were first, you know, first Nextcloud. I haven't

run it for a while, though. So these features are looking pretty nice. I say it is worth a go. And now that you can throw it up in a container just a few minutes, an official container from them, I think it's kind of worth it. Yeah, that does make sense. It lowers the barrier to entry considerably. So I am here in Texas sweating in a way that I have not sweated

very many times in my entire life. It is unbelievably hot. It's about 101 degrees where I'm sitting. And because it's Texas, it's Plains View, Texas, there's really no trees to be had. We just made it into Texas this morning, actually. And we decided on the way down to our current spot to maybe go get some dog food for Levi because we were running low. And that was a bad decision, Wes. Oh no, why? Well, you know, I'm trying to get here to do the show. And I've got to get connectivity tested.

But we've got to feed Levi, though. We've got to get food for Levi. Well, we don't want him hungry. No. So as I'm pulling off the ramp, it's too small. Like the lanes are too narrow. My rig doesn't fit in them. So I'm kind of like in a lane and a half and i'm pulling i'm pulling off the off ramp and my back two

duallys on the passenger side go over a little curb just a little curve just a little i'm sure and it tosses jupes really bad like it's like it's like if a massive wave were to just crash up along the side of a boat because it's just this huge shift. Like, the whole rig leans all the way to the driver's side. And that's when the new upgraded suspension kicked in. As if we were intentionally testing it. See, we have these new sway bars. And the way sway bars kind of work is the amount of force that's applied into them is then applied backwards to sort of correct the sway, if that makes any sense.

And they really did their job. I mean, we swung back up real quick, right back into place. And much better than before the upgrades, we would have swayed back and forth like a boat, like swash, swash to right to left, boom, which is really hard to drive. It was really bad because it's, you know, it's a 25,000 pound RV on top of a suspension system. And, but the upgrades really helped that. They resolved this. There was no swaying back and forth. It was right back up to the top. But in that swing back to the right position, it was because the amount of force that gets applied to the sway bars is also then used to sway back. It sprung us back like we came out of a pinball spring and everything dumped on the passenger

side of the RV, which is where our kitchen and our bathroom is. Oh, no. Everything came out of the fridge. It came out of all of the cupboards. All of our food came out of the fridge. It came out of all of the cupboards. All of our food came out. All of our bathroom stuff, like, you know, vitamins that were in little pill jars, Q-tips everywhere, Tums. The Tums bottle exploded. Like, it was just everywhere. Beard oil went spilling.

It was the worst incident we've ever had on the road. And it was thankfully recoverable because it's all in a contained space all the slides are in and it's not a very big rig so all i had to do was get us into some shade because it's 101 degrees outside and it's just bacon when you stop moving and so i found some shade alongside the pet store building and for about 20 minutes we just sat there and had to clean up all the stuff put it all all back away. Throw a bunch of stuff, stuff that got broke. So that was a bit of a bummer.

Was there any liquids that spilled all over or anything like that? Oh yeah. The beard oil spilled, some water spilled. Yeah, it's okay. It happens, you know, sometimes. The important part, did Levi get his food? And did he like it? Did he like it? Yes, all those things. And he got to walk around the pet store too, which he liked quite a bit.

Oh, perfect. But now we. And he got to walk around the pet store too, which he liked quite a bit. Oh, perfect. Yeah. Yeah. But now back, we were back on the road heading down towards Texas Linux Fest and we've reached Plainview, which might be the actual hometown of Levi. Plainview is on his paperwork. So we may be in Levi's hometown right now. And then he made his way up to Washington where we got him from a rescue. And we're in this little RV park called the Hitching Post. I'm going somewhere with this story. And when we got here, we were a little rattled from that whole shakeup. We'd already cleaned up. We were rattled. When we got here, we talked to the manager, Karen, and we said, we'd like to buy a night so we can just park and hook up and get some air conditioning because we're dying. And I'd like to have power to do the show and whatnot. And Karen said, well, you're just working? Yeah, we'll just be here for about five hours or so. She said, you know, just go find a spot and park.

Don't worry about paying. You can just stay there for free. Wow. Yeah. So we have 50 amps of power, great cell reception. I can see the cell towers from here. And 50 amps so we can run both air conditioners when I'm not recording.

And we've got running water for a little bit while we just sit here and kind of recharge. And then we have about nine and a half more hours of driving. And then I'll be in Austin for Texas Linux Fest. That is so exciting. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, we're going to try to drive more at night for these last couple of days

because it's so hot out that it drops to about 80 degrees at night, and the roads cool down, so your tires cool down and all that kind of stuff. So going to be doing some nighttime driving for the next couple of days. After the show, we're going to hit the road and try to put in about five hours tonight if we can. It's the last grind, Wes. It's just a grind at this point. Nothing can stop you now.

And hopefully you'll meet additional really nice Texans who are just doing you all kinds of favors. You know, we've already got a good group going. If you're going to be in the area, jupiterbroadcasting.com slash Texas for our telegram group, we've already got a good group going. If you're going to be in the area, jupyterbroadcasting.com slash Texas for our Telegram group, we've got a really good group going. And then also, you know, the other reason I'm going down to Texas

is for Linux Academy. Linux Academy has just been growing like crazy. And as they've brought in more people and they've done live productions, they have some like, they have some productions where they have eight remote hosts, which is just mind-blowing,

complicated kind of stuff. And as they brought production people on, of course, they're trained on how to do all the stuff on the Mac. And they're trying to go back and write these ships as they've expanded and try to get everybody back on the Linux bandwagon. What's really, really awesome is I've been chatting with a couple of individuals down there, and they're totally on board. Like, there's no resistance. They're all about it. They think this is going to be great, and they want to do it. They're totally on board.

Like there's no resistance. They're all about it. They think this is going to be great and they want to do it. And so we started chatting and they said, yeah, could you come down here and help us move from Mac OS Wirecast to Kubuntu OBS? Exactly what we've done for Jupyter Broadcasting. So I would love to. So after Texas Linux Fest, I'm going up to Keller and I'm going to hang out at the Linux Academy for a bit.

I'll be parked in their lot, boondocking there, doing shows and converting their broadcast systems over to Linux. And I think it's going to be a ton of fun. It's going to be super hot. So that's like phase two of my trip. And then phase three will be the drive home, getting back up into Washington, where I can't even imagine. It's like 65 degrees right now. It sounds so wonderful.

But let's talk about Linux Academy before we keep going. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Go there to sign up for a free seven-day trial, and you can support the show. Linux Academy is going to be at Texas Linux Fest. In fact, if you go to their blog, they've posted their track, their schedules, for Friday and Saturday,

and some information about how you can meet up with them. And if you want to find me, a lot of my time at Texas Linux Fest is going to be at the Linux Academy booth. So that's sort of your surefire way to find me on the weekend if you're not in our Telegram group. So check out Linux Academy. It's a platform to learn more about Linux.

And they're a company that's super passionate about it. They really started because they wanted to spread the word about Linux and Jupyter Broadcasting had already started a podcast network about Linux. Really, and they're like, well, how else can we do this? They got together with educators, and they got together with developers, and they created this platform that's just been growing and growing and gotten a ton of industry reception, like just super well-received, really well-respected.

It's a name on the resume that matters. And they have public profiles where you can demonstrate to potential hires or clients the things you've accomplished at Linux Academy. So go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged to get a seven-day free trial and try out those hands-on labs. And if you want to know more about their LinuxFest Texas plans, well, then you can go over to their blog, linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Okay, we have an inappropriate amount of apps.

We have a disproportionate amount of app picks. People have been wanting that picks and holy crap, do we have some good ones? And, uh, I, I, I kind of have like a mix in here and Wes threw some in here and, uh, it's, it's just, it's great. So let's start with ones that, uh, work, uh, put together by the one and only Martin Wimpress, Mr. Wimpy. So the first one is a snap that he put together, which is Steam for Windows soaked in wine and all snapped up. So it's the Windows version of wine, or it's wine with the Windows version of Steam all ready to go. You install the single snap, and it's Steam for Windows for Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, and all the

other major Linux distributions that can run Snap. So that's pretty great. Now, the companion part to this Snap is Trackmania Nations Forever, which has been soaked in wine and snapped for Linux. This is a racing game that might, if you saw it, it would look like a higher resolution, better looking version of Mario Kart. And it's a lot of fun. And it's now available as a Snap as well.

I got kind of a gaming thing going a little bit this week. It's not all games. Just a little bit of a gaming thing going this week because I just had an itch and Wimpy happened to put these together. And I thought this whole idea is worth talking about where they've taken Wine and they've taken Steam and now a game.

And like, you can kind of build it all together like lego blocks isn't that kind of neat we're living in the future this used to be so hard to do you sort of had to know all the pieces that you needed to wire together just getting wine working right sometimes can be difficult so yeah all you need is snap and you probably already have it if you are on the snap pipe train then wow Okay, so this is the last gaming thing I have. Everything else is all serious stuff. But I wanted to mention Overload. It's on Steam and GOG.com.

It's a $30 game. So right there up front, this isn't free. There's nothing about it that is open source. But this is a remake from the original creators of the classic game of Descent. It is Descent for 2018. Overload combines intense action with awesome graphics and effects to create the ultimate zero-gravity shooter. So you're flying around in this cool little spaceship,

flying through like mines and tunnels. It features an awesome single-player story campaign. It has a survival mode, which is a lot of fun. They've brought online multiplayer, and just for Wimpy, they've also put VR support into it, as well as a bunch of customizations and stuff that were never really possible with the original game. I don't know if any of you guys ever played Descent.

This is one of my all-time favorite games growing up. Played this with my dad a whole bunch on the computer. It was one of the classics, and now it's been reborn, Wes. Interesting. I am not, I have not played it, but it's reborn. I might just have to give it a go after the show. While you're just

leaving away on the road, I'll be having a wonderful time gaming. GOG.com and it's also on Steam. I like it on GOG just because you can download the binary, and you don't have to be logged into Steam or nothing like that. All right, Gita, I think is how you say this. It's Git with a cup of tea. A painless, self-hosted Git service.

It's a community-managed fork of GOGS? I'm assuming it's something written in GO, but do you know what GOGS is, Wes? A painless, self-hosted Git service. What? Well, then that's perfect. Yeah, this is wes a painless self-hosted git service what well then that's perfect yeah this is this is something a little simpler than gitlab is kind of what i grokked am i correct yeah yeah it's not so fully featured it doesn't have all those you know enterprise

things and a paid plan that you can get with support and all that but it if you just need somewhere to stick some code and file issues and manage releases and pull requests. It's got it. Yeah, that's kind of cool. At gitt.io, G-I-T-T dot I-O, or we'll have a link in the show notes. And then this is the one you found this week that I'm like, oh man, I want this already. I want to just mess with this. Like, I don't have a chance while I'm on the road.

But this looks really good. Pulse Audio DLNA, a lightweight streaming server, which brings DLNA and universal plug and play and Chromecast support to Pulse Audio DLNA, a lightweight streaming server, which brings DLNA and universal plug and play and Chromecast support to Pulse Audio on Linux. So once you get it all set up, it just detects the DLNA device or the Chromecast and they show up as a Pulse Audio device that you can just set your output to, or because Pulse Audio is kind of cool these days, you could load Puva Control and you could just say like take Spotify and just send Spotify to the Chromecast. This was a great find, Wes. I know it's actually super useful. I'm using it right now in case I need to get up.

I've got my Chromecast loaded up with it. I've got you on it so I can get up, walk around the room, go grab another drink and still keep up with the show. That's how you did it. I noticed in the pre-show that when you got back with the beer, you knew what we were saying is because you're using this right now. That's right. My secret is out. Clever dog. You clever dog. Yeah. So behind the scenes over the last few weeks, Wes built out a great little home studio that he can broadcast from while I'm on the road, because why have him drive all the way up to broadcast from while I'm on the road. Because

why have him drive all the way up to the studio while I'm gone? Why? I mean, that's just, that's just, first of all, he's been doing that for so long. It's time to just take a break from doing that to begin with. But second of all, like when I'm not there, what's the point? Nobody's going to be barbecuing. Yeah, the main attraction is gone. So this is really cool. So I, I love how you're sort of making this space into like the ultimate Westpain broadcast setup. Because this little piece here for people who don't really do shows that are live like this, like there's no stopping once this show starts. And so every now and then, you know, you got to get up, you got to get another beer, you got to take a leak. Sometimes Chris is running his mouth for a bit.

But you don't know what he says if you put down the headphones. So, but you got, you did it right because I don't hear it in the background at all. So you got it turned down enough where it's not getting picked up. So well done. Is there much of a delay? No, it hasn't been too bad. I haven't tested anything that's like super synced up, right, for this use case. It just needs to be, you know, within a couple seconds.

Yeah, and if you're doing something like music, you know, like Spotify or your local music library, you don't even care about any kind of latency. It's great for that. So again, it's Pulse Audio, DLNA, and we'll have a link at linuxunplugged.com slash 252. All right, now while we're in the terminal, let's take a look at WTF. Yep, WTF, a personal information dashboard

for your terminal. And it is everything you would want from like a, remember Google's start page, their IG start page? Yeah, it's everything you'd want from like one of those old classic web portal pages where it gives you your calendar, your to-dos, last time you chatted with your friends. In this case, some local log files, mail, recent GitHub check-ins, things like Wi-Fi status. things like Wi-Fi status this is a heads up terminal based dashboard that is like an overview

of a lot of little things that you would want to check on from time to time not all the time but are very important that's sort of how they describe themselves so they have examples in here of like your to do's and recent chats and all the kind of things you might want to just be able to take a glance at

it's just a honestly guys it's a badass-looking terminal app. It's really what it is. It's just a badass-looking terminal app. And if you want something up on your screen that looks awesome on your virtual desktop that you can switch over to super quick, I'm going to say this is one of them. Yeah, if you have an extra monitor

that you just don't know what to do with and you have a lot of things going in the terminal, you might as well just have this running. Yeah, so there you go. So Steam, So soaked in wine, Trackmania Nations Forever, which is snapped up with wine, Overload on

GOG, GitT, which is a simpler GitLab alternative, GitHub alternative, Pulse Audio DLNA, Lightweight Streaming Server, which brings DLNA and Universal Plug and Play and Chromecast support to Pulse Audio, and WTF, a personal information dashboard

for your terminal. That's a strong list of, I don't think, I mean that's more app picks than we really have any right put in a show. So go get links to all of those. Over in the show notes, now I did say I wanted to talk about the bigger question about what happens with Microsoft now owning Electron and the fact that really

any major application that is an industry application that's come to Linux recently has pretty much now owning Electron and the fact that really any major application that is an industry application that's come to Linux recently has pretty much been an Electron. Looking at you, Slack, and looking at you, Skype, and a whole bunch of others that are all based on Electron that we've talked about a lot on this show. MailSpring and many more.

IRC Cloud. Boy, I just got a whole bunch of Electron apps stuck in my throat because it's like I have tons of them on my desktop or something. So before we go any further, I want to take a moment and I want to thank Ting. Ting's making this entire show possible right now. Linux.ting.com.

They are a mobile provider that makes sense. It's simple. You just pay for what you use. It's smarter than unlimited. You use less, you pay less. The average Ting bill is just $23 per phone per month. And the reason why is it's $6 a month for your line. And then your minutes, your messages, and your megabytes.

Whatever you use, that's what you pay for. They have nationwide coverage. They have CDMA and GSM. So yesterday, I was doing Coder Radio from the road, and I was on their CDMA network. It was just the better network in that area. I was kind of surprised. I thought it was going to be GSM.

Today, where I'm at, I'm within throwing distance of a GSM tower. I'm getting unbelievable, unbelievable performance on their GSM network today. 30 millisecond ping, which is great for a cellular connection, 21 megabits down, 22 megabits up is what my Ting CD CDM or I'm sorry, GSM connection is today. They, they, they are, they are so perfect for somebody like me because I don't really need my ting data for almost any time during the year, except for moments like this. And then I can pick between their GSM or CDMA network. So you just pay for what you use. They have a great control panel to manage all of it.

And they have a bunch of devices you can bring or you can buy or bring directly. And they have a review up right now on their blog of the Moto G6, which is a sweet looking phone. It's $249 if you buy it from Ting directly. But if you go to linux.ting.com, you get it for like $224. And this is a killer Moto phone. They have a review on their blog right now.

Just a couple of things that stood out to me. It's got the headphone jack. It's got a 3000 milliamp battery and turbocharging. So it charges in super quick like minutes. It has a really nice 5.7 inch screen. It's got a 2.1, which is 18 by 9. I don't know the math on that. It's weird. Aspect ratio, nice fast processor, and you have the ability to hook up Moto mods to this thing too. It's a really cool looking phone. They have a review up on their blog. Start by going to linux.ting.com. You can bring a device and you can get $25 in service credit, or you can pick up a device. I, if I was searching for a phone right now, would seriously look at that Moto G6. For $224 when you go to linux.ting.com, that's a great deal.

linux.ting.com. So how can Microsoft improve or evolve Electron? Now that they own GitHub and GitHub owns Electron, it's now a Microsoft product. And I have a couple of ideas on things that they could do to make Electron better, specifically for Linux too. But I doubt those things will happen, but I might mention them as well. And I don't know about you, Wes, did you have some before I jump off? Like, I don't want to, I don't want to like just run with, run with them because I want to hear some of your

ideas too, but what do you think Microsoft could do to just improve upon Electron or maybe even just evolve it, like just reasonably make it better? That's a good question. There's like, there's a lot of potentials here. I think they do have a lot of experience with this, especially having built Visual Studio Code. I feel like they probably have some good opinions about what their limitations that they see with Electron is. And I will just say, Visual Studio Code, it's a good editor. It's snappy. It may not be for everyone. I don't actually use it that much. But every time I have used it, it's been a really nice experience. So I think they're in a good place to just take care of it, to provide maintenance, to just generally improve it, even in its current form. Some things I would like to see is, you know,

there have been a couple vulnerabilities in the past, so I think maybe a tighter eye on security and just make it more minimal. As few resources as it can use, find some clever ways to just make it less impact. Because if we're all going to run like 10 of these all the time, I would like it to be a little skinnier. Maybe something more radical also is a huge amount of the appeal, right, is that you get to use technologies you're already familiar with.

You get to use JavaScript, HTML, CSS. And so if you're already doing that, you're already building a web app. There's some other competing technologies in that space, things like React Native comes to mind in particular. So if they were able to keep some of the easy workflow of doing that, but then actually render more native components, that could be a huge win. So that's sort of in the lines of what I was kind of thinking

they could do to it. And there's, I could see this going a couple of different ways. I could see them changing it. So that way you could have a modular backend. So it's not just Chromium. I mean,

this is Microsoft after all, maybe they'd make it so that way you could run edge as a backend. Electron on edge. Yeah. Whoa. Or, but maybe if it's modular, you could also support the Gecko engine or whatever Mozilla's engine is now.

Because if they make it an interface or something like that, that could be kind of cool. You could even have maybe even some open source, other just smaller engines that maybe are lighter weight, they're more purpose-built, that could make it safer because it's such a large attack vector. Yeah, exactly. You can just do a minimal if you don't need all the fancy features

or some of the performance of things like that if you could just have something smaller. Yeah. Or what about even maybe being able to use a different language altogether than, say, JavaScript? Maybe something... I mean, you could see how they could maybe do.NET Core, of course,

but maybe it could also be something else, like, I don't know, my favorite Rust. You know, like, that could be kind of a really big improvement is change some of the tooling that you're using to build these apps that are maybe a little safer tooling. I think multiple browser backends, if you could decouple it somehow from Node and JS, I think that would be worthwhile.

And I'm sure they'll come up with all kinds of other things that could potentially happen to it. But if anything dramatic happened, at the end of the day, it's an MIT-licensed project. It could just, you know, we could have free Electron or something. So there's not a big risk, like there kind of is with GitHub here, or like there was with Skype. Like Skype is now a really different product than Skype was before Microsoft bought it. Yeah, right. But yeah, there's just, we don't have to worry about it.

If they take Electron in a way that we don't like, well, we kind of don't like it already. And it's open source, so we can keep the version that we do tolerate. Yeah, I'd like to know the audience's ideas to linuxunplugged.com slash contact. There's probably a lot of ways you can improve Electron, including, like, I would love to see lighter weight backends and things like that, or even just more secure backends. But it's sort of the bigger, well, I feel like it's a bigger story for me personally, that they now control Electron. Like, I'm not a GitHub user, really. I mean, obviously, I have a GitHub account.

We have some Jupyter Broadcasting projects on there, but it's not part of my daily workflow. But Electron apps are part of my daily workflow. Significant changes there, for the better or for the worse, would directly impact my daily workflow. So it is one aspect of this purchase that I'm like, I'm watching a little bit closer and I'm a little spooked that so few people are kind of talking about it. I know it's only day two and stuff, but it seems like it should be at least a larger conversation, but everybody's so busy freaking out. I think they're still in shock. Yeah. If I could write a prescription though, I think, I think you've made some good points and I think I would say

modular backend. So that way, you know, Mozilla could maybe write a backend and the open source desktops could perhaps write a backend. WebKit could, instead of having Chromium, it could be like a smaller, tinier WebKit backend, perhaps something like that. Yeah, anything to streamline it. Mumbleroom, do you guys have any suggestions on what could be done to improve Electron by Microsoft

or maybe how they'll mess it up too? I mean, that's also open. Improvements to Electron? It's almost a joke. You don't think it's possible? That's why? I mean, just kill Electron in the first place, please. Yeah, maybe.

Maybe we'll see an exodus there too. As people are trying to exit out of GitHub, maybe we'll see an exodus out of Electron. Doubt it, though. It seems like the momentum is already pretty strong there. All right. Well, I think that's just about everything we have for today's episode. Another on-the-road edition of the show, which was much easier than last week.

So much easier. Our magical, unnamed, officially unnamed editor did unbelievable work last week. Like, really just top-notch. Yeah. If you heard the live show at all and then caught the download, like it didn't maybe sound as good as it could have because I was in a loud, echoey, tiny hotel room. But it was a remarkable recovery based really all on the skills of our unnamed,

very, very good editor. So thank you to whoever that may be who has yet to be named. You know who you are, and we are grateful. He's done a really good job on last week's episode. Anyways, thank you everyone for tuning in this week's episode of The Unplugged Program. We'd love to have you join us live. We tend to do these shows right here on a Tuesday. It's kind of a Linux sandwich because you got Ask Noah, who comes in right as we're kind of wrapping up, and the mumble room keeps rolling into that show, the chat room keeps rolling into that show, and then he starts taking calls.

the mumble room keeps rolling into that show, the chat room keeps rolling into that show, and then he starts taking calls. And then who knows what happens? I suppose that's up to you. So you can hang out with us, and then you get a little Noah afterwards, sort of like your dessert, your brown bear dessert.

Brown sugar. So I would love to have you join us. Go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact to send us your feedback. I'm trying to remember all my URLs before we get out of here. jblive.tv to watch it live. jubilabroadcasting.com slash calendar for where you can get it converted to your local time. You managed it. I know.

You know, Wes, it's because of you. It's because of you. Holding the fort down over there in Seattle. Keeping it real. I've got all my clocks set to Wes time right now. So that way you can keep me straight. But thank you so much for tuning in this week's episode of The Unplugged Program. We'll see you right back here next week. what about like what about a way where you could uh i didn't think about this in the show but

like if you could use the same backend for apps that like where the security made sense or you trusted it. So you could just have less copies of all that stuff running. Oh, interesting. So it's like a shared backend is what you mean? Yeah.

Closer to just tabs in a browser, but maybe with some of the same, you know, integrations that we like from Electron. You'd have to be careful. I don't know if it's feasible, but worth a shot. Seems like it would reduce RAM usage too. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Alright, jbtyles.com

let's name this thing and then I can turn on my air conditioning and peel myself out of my chair. Oh! Ah, Texas.