LINUX Unplugged - Episode 266: From Jupiter to Beyond

Episode Date: September 12, 2018

We announce our big news, Jupiter Broadcasting is joining Linux Academy and what we have planned for the future is huge! Plus a new NextCloud lands, concerns are brewing for the Solus project, and a report from the recent Libre Application Summit. Special Guests: Alan Pope, Anthony James, Brent Gervais, and Martin Wimpress.

Hey, full-time podcaster, Wes Payne. Oh, hello there, Chris. Are you ready to do a Linux Unplugged program, Mr. Full-Time Podcaster? Like we've never done before. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 266, for September 11, 2018. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's not just covering the news this week.

We're making a bit of news. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And Joe's here too. Yo, Joe! Hello. Hello, guys. First of all, thank you for covering for me last week. Much appreciated. Much appreciated. We're back. I'm back. It's a full team this week because we have a lot to get into.

We have some major announcements that I am so excited to share with you. I have been resurrected from the hospital bed and transported into the studio just to make this very announcement. Plus, we'll be getting into some community news later on in the show. So before we go any further, let's bring in that virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hey, hey. Pip, pip. Hey, hey.

Woo, listen to that. That is a showing. Wow. That is a showing. And it's been a long time since I've been able to say this. Joining us this week on the program is the CEO of Linux Academy, Mr. Anthony James. Hello, Anthony. Hey, how's it going?

It's going fantastic, sir. Thank you for being here. We have a big show today. So I'm really glad you could be here. Episode 266. Now, you're down there in the Tejas. I was just down there recently. In fact, if things had gone as originally planned,

I would have been probably in the same room with Anthony for this episode right now. That was supposed to be last Tuesday. I was instead getting carved up by doctors, so I didn't have an opportunity. Let me just say we're all glad you are alive and well and you look great. Well, thank you. I mean, that's kind of you to say. Well, let's start with the big news before we get into the community news. It's not very often we get to be the news. We usually cover the news. We're not often the news. But this week,

we are the news. I'm starting off with a big announcement. Jupyter Broadcasting is joining Linux Academy. And let me be clear, this is a great development. We are kumbaya-ing, as they say. And the biggest change that's happening from all of this has already happened. Behind the scenes, the biggest change is that our shows are going ad free. No more sponsors on the shows. And that happened September 1st. I don't know if anybody noticed, but it did actually happen. I mean, there, right? Yeah. Or not out there. And we're very excited about that because Linux Academy is going to be our sole sponsor. We are part of Linux Academy now. So we're dropping ads and our shows are going sponsor-free.

That's the biggest change you're going to see. But behind the scenes, there has been some big news. Wes, Angela, Joe, and myself have become full-time – well, all of us except for Joe, have become full-time employees of Linux Academy. Joe is spending full-time working on JB Shows, doing production and editing. And Wes is now on board. He's going to be in charge of our content. And he's obviously been helping me out this last week as I've been out sick. We're going to be developing new processes.

And so we have a core team now that's been forming for the last couple of weeks behind the scenes. And it's so exciting for all of us. And Wes and Joe, you guys did above and beyond last week while I was out. And you and Ange all worked together to make sure the shows kept going out. And I don't think we could have done that without this transition. And the timing just happened to work out such that it was in place. So the week that I had to go, you guys were there and in place. You had to scramble, you had to work hard and work lots of extra hours, but it was the beginning of something

we could have never have done before. And that was pretty cool. So that's been huge for us, behind the scenes to be, and it's just been great, very exciting. And it means that long term, we're going to be able to make big investments in content, make big plans, do things a little differently. The flexibility we'll have now by being sponsor-free means we can entertain new ideas and new format options that we'd never really considered. And what's great about this is at the core of it,

this is Linux Academy looking for their way to give back to the Linux community. And this is how, and one of many ways they're going to do it. And I could tell you the numbers, maybe I'll get Anthony to share them, but the growth that Linux Academy has seen since 2014, when they became our sponsor back in 2014, has been just explosive. The numbers don't make sense. They're so big. And they've been looking for a way as they grow to give back to Linux as they have been successful because of Linux and building content around there. There is that shared drive that we have to contribute back. So at the core, that's what we're trying to accomplish here. And we're going to contribute

back in ways that Jupyter Broadcasting didn't have the means to do before. We'll be open sourcing our shows, our production pipeline, and we'll be open sourcing any tools that we create to automate our processes or validate or ensure production. We'll be doing that in an open way. We'll be setting up a GitLab instance where there'll be issues that we can track, code that you can see. We're still discussing licensing. It's all early days, but we're really excited about it. And I hope that we can help make tools that help other people create content on Linux. And we'll be using the funds that we generate via our Patreon to fund contributions to open source projects and free software. Something I want to experiment too,

we're going to do swag matching where we'll do match donations for swags. We'll help people get to events, community events that are important. And we'll even work to sponsor other podcasts in the community that are contributing something valuable back to the community. And I have a lot of experience in that area.

And so I'm going to lend my services, and I'm going to work with these podcasts to maybe help them grow their community a bit and become stronger. Just as an example, this is going to manifest in a lot of ways its early days, but as an example of something we're already taking action on, we've decided up early on to contribute a portion of Joe's production time to the Ubuntu podcast

to help them with their post-production. Because that's an example of a show that I think is just a great show. And we need more great shows. The whole idea here is to get people excited and passionate about free software and Linux. You know, the Linux Action Show was a showcase show. They always showcase the best in Linux

and the best in open source. At this show, we dive deep into the topics that matter to the users of open source software and free software. We talk about the new emerging technologies, the big trends that are coming, help you wrap your head around it. We go to the source of the people that are doing the work

and we help them communicate to you what they are doing. And I want more of that because I think that is vital to open source. We've had entire episodes where I've gotten up in my soapbox and talked about how the communication around free software and open source has a dramatic effect on the community. And we want to take some steps to help the podcast and the free software projects that we use, for example,

or that we get along with, we want to help everybody grow. And we want, even if that's just, they use the source that we create to help produce all of this. They use the automation tools that we extend to do all of this. Even if it's just that detached, that is a success for us. And we'll be using our Patreon funding to basically fuel all of that. Because Linux Academy is taking care of our run costs, and we don't have sponsors anymore. So we'll take that Patreon funding and we'll direct it at these types of initiatives. They'll be the funding source of our Linux community contributions and things like swag matching. But we're also going to expand the

lineup on the network. We're already kind of in the next phase of this right now, and I'm very excited to announce that User Air is coming back very soon. We have a new lineup with Joe and Popey and Daniel Foray from Elementary OS, plus a fourth seat that will be frequented by JB regulars, folks from the community, folks from Linux Academy. We'll have a good rotation there with a core set. And Joe, do you want to share the details on when people can expect that and what sort of the cadence is going to be? So yeah, we're planning to do that every two weeks, and it's going to be

released on Fridays, all being well. So the first episode, well, kind of the first rebooted episode, I suppose, will be this Friday. Yeah. Isn't that this Friday? Oh, I'm looking forward to it. Error.show is the new website. Error.show slash RSS if you want to subscribe. The new site is up. We're getting things in place in the back end, and the first episode should go out this Friday. That's great. People have been asking for user error, and people loved that show, and it was just, it came down to a limitation of

resources. We just knew, we knew it was a show we needed to be doing, but we knew we couldn't pull it off. It's a new world now. It's a whole new world. And so that's why Anthony, the CEO of Linux Academy, is joining us today, because I wanted to also have everyone out there listening have a chance to hear from him and kind of what their motivation is and learn a little bit more about Linux Academy if you're not familiar. And I think maybe, Anthony, the place to start here is how all of this started when I came down to visit you for Texas Linux Fest, and then we just kind of started talking from there about ways to work together more. Yeah, absolutely.

You know, if you don't mind, real quick, back in what, 2014, when you first had me on the show, and then we kind of started that sponsorship relationship a little bit. We didn't, it was just me full-time and a couple other people part-time, and we really didn't have very many users. I think we had like 50 users at the time. And, you know, this is a real testament to actually the Jupyter Broadcasting community and you and everybody and all your members and all the listeners. It's actually because of them, they helped us kind of grow specifically in the early days and even in the later days too. But if it wasn't for the Jupyter Broadcasting community, I don't know that we would be where we are today as a company, you know, Linux Academy. So,

you know, honestly, it does make a lot of sense, and we're really, really excited. It's hard to have different types of open source projects with what we do. We like contributing to them, but we really want to give back. We have a lot of training architects on staff with a lot of knowledge. We really want to give back and give back to the community that helped grow us. And it's funny, you, you came down because, well, it was on our April live show announcement. We were doing our 150 launches.

And you were so kind to send a, I told everybody on there we were using, what we were using, it was a Mac software. Yeah, Wirecast. Wirecast. Yeah. And I got this email from you and it was so nice. It was, hey, if you would like us to help you actually run Linux

for your broadcasting stuff, I'll be happy to come down and set you up. And so we said, yeah, come on down. Let's hang out a little bit. And you flew down. We joined up at Texas Linux Fest. No, I took the RV down, that first one. Oh, that's right. You did take the RV down.

How long was that road trip down there again? It was like six days down, six days back. It seems longer for some reason. Yeah, it did to me too. I think I could do it in three though. I think I could do it in three. So goals. We'll set that up as a goal.

You come down and we hang out quite a bit. Just had a good relationship. You come back. It felt like we were having a good time. H hang out quite a bit. Just had a good relationship. You come back. It felt like we were having a good time, hanging out with the community. You come back to the show. You spend a week there. Help us get set up with OBS on Linux.

And we have you on the show. And we do kind of a co-show. And I mean, it's that point in time I knew we were going to be BFFs forever. Yeah, it definitely clicked. And it was like, well, maybe we could do this. and maybe we could do that. And then the conversation changed to, well, maybe we should just consider this. Because the thing is, is we're both content shops. Like what we do is make content. And there's not very many people that understand what goes into making

content except for the people who make it. And that kind of click, I think, is really rare, where we lined up and we're both making content for the Linux community, and we both understand how hard that is. And that, I think, was the seed that kind of grew from that whole thing. And now, for me, it's just a tremendous opportunity because I'm now going to be the VP of community

at Linux Academy, which is a fantastic role that gives me quite a bit of leverage to interact with the community and grow the audience and grow Linux Academy's community and one day bring the communities together even possibly if we can find a great way to do that. There's so many options and including it means I'll be able to go to more events. I'll be able to attend, you know, things that are sometimes would have been way outside of my reach. And we may even see one day a version of Lady Joop's going down the road, fully wrapped up, totally loaded as a podcast official bus one day. So many possibilities.

I thought that we were doing that first thing. I know. We got to get on that. Yeah. It's really great because you're actually part of the leadership team at Linux Academy right now. So, right. And what's so great about that is, you know, your love and passion for the community and working with the community. And that's what Linux and open source is all about, is giving back to the community, be part of the community, helping people grow, helping them, you know, stay up to date, stay in touch, learn new things quickly, so on and so forth. So it's just a really exciting time. And, you know,, you know, quite frankly to you and the entire team too, where I, where everybody,

and I'm really excited to have you on, uh, and you guys have just done nothing short of amazing job with Jupiter Broadcasting. Your listeners are amazing too. Well, thank you. That's very kind. And I'm, I'm, I'm really proud of what we've built here. And, um, you know, I never really had a big end goal in mind of being like some huge podcast mega corporation. I always wanted to do it in a way that would be sustainable, that would allow us to make content that is really focused on the actual bits of the show and not focused on trying to make ad sales

and not focused on trying to be flashy and click-grabby so that way people want to throw money at us. And I never even wanted to entertain the idea of anything like a paywall to try to make this sustainable because that seemed so opposite of what is natural to the free software community. And this gives us an opportunity to stay focused on the content,

not worry about jumping and chasing sponsors, while also coming up with new ways to maybe talk to some of the people at Linux Academy that are just really, really massive topic experts on some of the things that we cover. I've been so, it's just incredible. There's so many resources, so many knowledgeable people at Linux Academy.

You know, Wes has had an opportunity recently to go down and meet the Linux Academy folks. You spend a little time in Texas and you really see, it's an institution. It's an operation. And there are people there that are really smart from Red Hat and Rackspace and people that are deep into Azure and people that are deep into OpenStack. And I mean deep. And they care about it, right? This is what they live and breathe. And there's just so much passion. They're contributors in some cases, and they have been so heads down

and focused on creating content that they haven't really had an opportunity to put their heads up for air ever and talk about what they do or talk about what they know. And there could be some big opportunities there for future shows and future content. So my head's spinning with all of the ideas.

And I'm not kidding. I drug myself out of the hospital to be here to talk to you guys about this. I am so excited. I'm a little concerned that you referred to us as a mega corporation. I don't know now. No, I said an institution. Well, I mean, what was it that we just saw in the Dallas paper? One of the papers in the Dallas area came out and listed Linux Academy as one of the things that's attracting people to the area. I mean, they are seeing phenomenal growth. So it's, you know, it's,

you're humble about it, Anthony, but you have, I think, I'll just, let's just put it as this, you have a way of talking about the students and aligning people's priorities that it isn't bullshit. Like it really registered with me because you do it even when no one's ever going to see it. When no one will ever hear about it, it's behind closed doors or it's in a private secure chat, you still do it. And that is how I feel about the audience. And this is the same kind of respect that I have for the audience that you have for the students. And that I think was the thing that I said. We have a lot of common ground there. Oh, yeah.

People in the chat room are asking how I feel about it. I'm very excited. And I think it's going to be great for the community because we'll be in a position where we can contribute back in a way we never could, which is something I've talked about for years trying to accomplish. And for me personally, it means I have things like medical insurance now, which probably just saved me from total financial ruin because I've spent, I've just gone through two

visits to the ER, one major massive surgery, a week plus recovery in the hospital. And I have two months of intensive recovery at minimum ahead of me. So I could only imagine what the cost is. I have not yet even seen the first bill for the first ER visit. But I can imagine that it would be financially devastating to me. So this has been a very good opportunity for me. The timing of it worked out pretty good. Both from having Wes to be able to join us full time,

to have Joe to be able to join us full time, to have Joe to be able to join us full time and become even more integrated in our production pipeline, which is bringing up our quality across the board. World-class editor. Joe Resington, everybody. And to be able to reach out

to the Ubuntu podcast and say, hey, we'd like to do this for you because we like you and we think what you guys do is important and we want to help make it sustainable. Like having the ability to do that now is the kind of thing that I've wanted to do for ages. because we like you and we think what you guys do is important and we want to help make it sustainable. Having the ability to do that now is the kind of thing that I've wanted to do for ages. And I think it's what takes a Linux community podcast to the next level

when you can start to become an active participant in the community and how you contribute. So there's a lot of possibilities down the road. It's early days. We don't really have much more plans to change things immediately other than adding user error. And things that we have now are just going to change things immediately other than adding user error. And things that we have now are just going to get better and have more focus and attention.

Yeah. And so with that, that is our opening to the show. Anthony, is there anything else you think we should touch on? You know, I don't think it is. I just want to say it's great to have you all on and don't underplay your situation there. Make sure you get some rest and take care of yourself. Community needs you.

I know, I will. Amen. I will. Wes and Joe and Ange are going to have me covered for the next few weeks while I recover. I'll be on some shows as I can because I love doing it. But yeah, I'll definitely be tapping the brakes a bit more and those kinds of things a little slower on social media.

But I'll still try to make my presence and try to respond to people as I can. And we need to thank Wimpy as well for stepping in for TechSnap. That was very much appreciated. Yeah, thank you. It was a great episode. My pleasure. It was a lot of fun.

So with that all said, if you have questions about this or concerns, let me know. You can email me or you can tweet me and I will be collecting them and creating a FAQ at some point and releasing that. I want to give the other shows on the network a chance to also collect the questions. The shows remaining, the BSD Now guys and Ask No are all staying on the lineup, and we're excited about that too because I think it's going to be better than ever. We'll have more resources than ever, and we don't really have – there's no editorial influence in what we'll be doing or anything like that.

They're still their shows. They own them, and they get to produce them, and we'll be doing or anything like that. They're still their shows. They own them and they get to produce them and we'll still run them. But they'll be ad-free now because we don't have to run ads anymore to sustain them. So that's I think probably the biggest change there. But if you have questions about any of this, email me, tweet me, and I'll be creating a FAQ. I'll also

be listening from the guys on the other shows and correlating all their questions too. What do you think, Wes? What do you think, Wes? This is just so exciting. You've said all that really could be said. The thing for me is just that you care so much about this and this is just a move that means you and the rest of us can spend

more time focusing on it, doing it, having more time to engage with the community and the audience and just spending all of our energies making this better. I'm really excited to be working with you and Joe. It's a great team we've got going here. It's something like you have been doing in your spare time for years now, and Joe's been cramming it in as he could for a year,

at least with LAN, plus, a year plus. And now it's a formal thing. It's a real thing. It's our job now. And I think it's a great team and it's going to get even better. So it's so wonderful for us because it's behind the scenes. It's just super exciting. And that energy just feeds into the show. Yeah. So stick with us. I mean, this is all very new. We're not going to make a bunch of huge changes right at the start, but there's a lot building and JB's not going anywhere. It's going to be better than ever mark's in the chat room from the ubuntu podcast

mark go ahead hey yeah um i mean from our point of view it's really good to um like have joe on board doing this it means that we we can focus on the bit which we really enjoy doing which is you know being up once a fortnight and having a chat about stuff and not so much about all of the other stuff we've got to do around it to get the podcast out which about stuff and not so much about all of the other stuff we've got to do around it to get the podcast out which we try and automate as much as possible but you can't automate joe yeah yeah that is well put yeah i'm that's exactly and that's exactly what we were thinking you know keep and make it sustainable that way make it fun keep it going so i'm i'm i'm really glad that that worked out um yeah i so yeah, I'm elated.

And I also get to be a big boss now. I'm a VP at Linux Academy. So, and Anthony's going to have to put up with me as part of his leadership team now. And that's going to be wonderful. You're going to love it, Anthony. Don't worry. I'll just be ruffling feathers.

It sounds great. Yeah, it sounds great. Doesn't it sound great? Well, thank you. Thank you for coming on and chatting with us about it. You know, the Mumble Room's always open if you ever want to join us for a show and chat about stories or anything like that.

And yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, if people are excited, go check out, I'm going to say this, nobody asked me to, it's not an ad, but if they don't have a heck of a sale right now over at Linux Academy, if you're excited about this, go to Linux Academy right now and sign up because it's $299 for the year, which makes it like less than $30 a month.

And correct me if I'm wrong, Anthony, but if they get that price, it stays that. Like that's their membership price as long as they are a member. It doesn't like reset at the end of the year. Yeah. And in fact, we actually have, if you recall our pricing back in 2014 when we first started talking, we have people who have never canceled their membership, and the price has always been the same. And we always like to reflect pricing for what was, I think we had like 12 videos or something back when we first talked.

So the pricing was a lot different back then. They still have that same pricing regardless. So if you have it, you get to keep it forever. That's phenomenal. As an individual. So if you're even half as pumped as we are, there's a really great time to sign up with that $2.99 a year because then you can lock it in. You don't have to think it forever. That's phenomenal. As an individual. So if you're even half as pumped as we are, this is a really great time to sign up with that $2.99 a year

because you can lock it in. You don't have to think about it. You just have access. When you want to learn something, there you go. Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, Anthony,

I thank you very much for joining us and enjoy your evening down there. Stay dry because I know the weather is getting crazy down in Tejas. Yeah, I appreciate it. And welcome to all of you.

Really excited to have Joe and Wes and Angela and you and everybody on the team and welcome to the community. And again, thanks to the entire community for your support on Linux Academy in the early days. That really kind of helped us make it is what it is today. And without the community, it never would have happened. So I appreciate you letting me come on, Chris, and join in on that announcement. I know it's for you guys, but I appreciate being able to come in and do that with you. And I look forward to working with everybody as we go forward. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, thank you for making it. And let's keep rolling into the show. Oh, boy, there's more show? Yeah, there's more show.

Again, if you folks out there have questions, send them in to me, chris at jupiterbroadcasting.com. And I'll be collating a FAQ later on. I don't know when. Once we get enough questions in, I'll put that all together. But let's talk about some things that I suspect people may be interested in. We'll just do a couple of stories, and then that'll probably wrap us up just because I'm starting to hurt a little bit. But NextCloud 14 came out this week. Oh.

NextCloud 14 came out, and everybody Oh. NextCloud 14 came out, and everybody is probably kind of familiar with the whole Dropbox situation, so these announcements are even more attractive than ever. A couple of features in here, though, that I think are pretty fascinating. They're doing something called video verification. When I saw that title, I was like, what does that

even mean? It's not like Face ID. It's just a way to identify the person you're about to share a password with before you actually send them the password. You know, a camera pops on. Is this actually the right, is this Westpain that I'm about to send this password to or is it somebody pretending to be Westpain? Right. I mean, like so often you have to establish some sort of side channel anyway to go communicate a password. You don't often send it in the same medium that you're discussing other things.

This just automates that. Yeah. things. This just automates that. Yeah, so NextCloud 14 is also bringing in two-factor authentication support with a new gateway system that lets you use SMS or Telegram or Signal. Hey, I use those already. That I love.

That is super, super great. And then last but not least, there's been some improvements for system administrators. It's received restructuring of app management so you can update apps across multiple categories. And the one feature they added that I think is pretty cool is NextCloud now supports logging to the system D log. And users are notified of major changes with a pop-up first on login.

So like when you upgrade now, you get a pop-up saying here's what's changed. Oh, hey, that's professional. Yeah, yeah. So there you go. There you go. A little news for you. There you go. Of course, that's not all the news we have.

No, we also have some strange developments and also really positive developments over at Solus. A distribution that we used to follow quite closely, but things have quieted down. Yeah, it's been a while since we've talked about it here on Unplugged. Yeah, and Josh over at Solus just recently posted about supercharging some of the infrastructure. And I have noticed a lot of package activity, a lot of development happening over at Solus just recently posted about supercharging some of the infrastructure. And I have noticed a lot of package activity, a lot of development happening over at Solus recently. But when you read through the changes in the infrastructure, it appears that the core team that remains, SANS Aiki, was unable to maintain that infrastructure fully. And they were unable to get communications with IKEE to take control. And it also sort of lined up with while IKEE, I think, was traveling, and they say because of the timing of these upgrades and our lack of access to the soullessproject.com domain, Brian and I are going

to be shifting soulless services over to a new getsoul.us domain. They're hoping it's a temporary measure, but it's unfortunate the timing of this has lined up with IKEE's move to England. However, we take full responsibility for not prioritizing for several bus factor issues that would have made this transition smoother. So I'm assuming the transition is that IKEE is no longer involved with the Solus project.

But was maintaining a lot of that core infrastructure. There's not really clear communication here if that's the case or not. Right. Obviously, there's problems of some level. They don't have access now exactly why and how much communication that we don't know. It's very odd. And it really pisses me off because it means Noah was right. And I just hate that.

I just hate it when Noah's right. Because he and I would get into arguments, and I'd say, no, Solas is different. Ike is a passionate visionary. And he would say, it doesn't matter. They're a small distribution, and they disappear, and then you get screwed. And I would argue back, but this time it's different.

This time it's different. Look, he's gone full-time now. He's gone full-time. It's so different, Noah. You're so wrong. He was completely right. Or, I mean, was he? I mean, there's still, there is, it's getting different, Noah. You're so wrong. He was completely right. Or, I mean, was he? I mean, there's still, there is, it's getting supercharged now.

Yeah, I hope. Maybe, maybe you might be right. Maybe there's a chance. I wonder, though, I'd kind of like to open that up to the mumble room. What happens when the main visionary driver behind a project fades away? Are the projects, are they ever really the same? I'm trying to think of some examples. I'm trying to think of maybe some projects we know of.

Python's a recent example, but a little too new to comment on how it goes. But that same kind of vein, though. You're on the right track there. If you think about it, there's a lot of projects that were started in the Linux world that the people who started it are nowhere even near it. Yeah, you're talking just like old, old projects that have been around forever? Yeah, and a lot of the big ones, like most of the big ones have the people

who started those are nothing to do with it anymore. Okay, okay. A good example would be like Emacs. Yeah. Yeah, GCC.

Or Gnome, or Debian, or KDE. Ooh, Gnome, yeah, Gnome is a good one. You're right, you're right. What about things like Budgie though?

Like Budgie seemed like it was, you know, sort of an IKEE-specific creation. Does Solus now continue their investment in Budgie, which is based on some maybe older technologies that were going to get replaced? Solus and Budgie aren't the same thing, though, right? Right. But it's their default desktop environment. Well, it is, but it's a desktop environment. There's nothing to say that Solus couldn't live on using another desktop environment as its default. Right. That's what I was just speculating is maybe Plasma. There's a lot of effort in the GNOME version of. Right, right, right. That is true. And Wes just did a little review of GNOME 3.3.0 on Linux Action News last week. Sounds like you're running it right now too, yeah? Yes, I am. Yeah, all right. So maybe it's, right now we'll just call it a transition.

And it could be a good thing, could be a bad thing. I mean, really, it seems like Josh and the folks around the project are still working their butts off on it. Like, I was just looking at some of the updates. Like, they're still cranking. It's a hard question to answer, right? Like, I think you'd be hard-pressed to pick distros at random and see, well, how real is that bus factor?

How much community support is there? Or is this really the work of one or two people? It's an interesting case study. Yeah. And I find every time this happens, you do have to take each incident into its own individual space. You can't immediately lump in past projects that have faded away and things like that. But it's tempting. I'm certainly tempted people said things about solos changing things and it was gonna you know end badly and it didn't at any so far you know when they went rolling it didn't like they didn't

really collapse or anything right right yeah there have been yeah the sky is falling calls before joe you've been awfully quiet on this topic you don't have thoughts on this i have a lot of thoughts on it but it's very awkward for me because obviously i worked with IK for the best part of a year on late night Linux and had a lot of off-air conversations with him and have a lot of insight into this, but I don't know how much to share publicly. I mean, it was quite clear that he wasn't that happy with his life and he made some major changes. He posted all over Google Plus about it, you know, how he was getting a bike and getting fit and losing weight and, you know, paying attention to his appearance and everything. And then suddenly he says that he's going to move to England. And, you know,

I think he'd said on air that moving to England was not something that he wanted to do. Even going there for things like Fostalk Live and Odd Camp were just not on his agenda. And then suddenly he goes over there and then goes AWOL. I mean, there's a post on the Solus forum, someone asking, this is a couple of weeks ago, where's Ikey? You know, when he first moved over to England, he posted about having the flu. And, you know, which is not surprising, you know, when you do, he talked about driving for nearly 12 hours or something to from Ireland to England. And if you do that without sleeping and stuff, it's not a surprise going to somewhere new

that you're going to get something like flu and be potentially laid up for a couple of weeks. But then one of the devs replies saying that he was struggling to get an internet connection. Now, there are very few places where you can't get at least some internet connection to at least talk to the team and sort out this domain issue. It's not a good sign when you have to change domain for your project. It means that whoever was controlling that domain cannot be contacted or is hostile.

I don't think that he's hostile in any way. I think it's just that he's disappeared. His life priorities changed, shifted, and clearly he's not involved with this project anymore. You only have to look at the evidence. If you look at the fabricator for Solus, you look at the GitHub, he hasn't committed,

he's not pushed any commits for a long, long time now, since July, and he's just not involved with the project anymore. And it's a shame to me that Josh is running this thing and not being straightforward about that I mean if you read between the lines you can see that clearly IK isn't involved and I just don't understand why Josh doesn't come out and say it I've messaged him about that and he just didn't reply to me and I can see why he would want to be a bit cagey hoping that IK is coming back but at some point you just have to admit it and you know say to your community ike is gone and we're plowing

on without him i don't know that you can necessarily draw that conclusion though you i mean from the outside it's it's very easy to speculate you know someone hasn't posted they've they've not done any development and we've not heard from them for a while but yes real life gets in the way whether it's you know children or surgery country or yeah surgery or getting married or whatever it might be things get in the way and and sometimes you want to go offline for a bit and you want to do whatever you want to do to get your life in order and that doesn't that doesn't mean that he's gone it just means he's not here now we've had people in the ubuntu community

who've disappeared, like properly disappeared, and then they just pop up out of the woodwork years later and say, hey, you remember me? And everyone's like, yeah, welcome back. Come on back in and welcome them back. You don't have to like have a funeral for them. Right, okay, that is one thing to disappear, right?

And some people do that. And, you know, if IK had just disappeared, but he is the lead, the founder of this project, who it seems controlled the main domain for them. And we're not talking about just the website here or the forums or the fabricator. We're talking about the repos and everything. Yeah, that's a mistake.

You know, something has gone badly wrong here. Oh, yeah. I'm a glass half full kind of guy. I think I see it both ways. I think Poby's right. You know, people need to human up sometimes. Oh, yeah. I'm a glass half full kind of guy. I think I see it both ways. I think Poby's right. You know, people need to human up sometimes. I have changes I've got to make. And, you know, I've got to deal with that.

And IKEE probably went through something similar. At the same time, when you create something like a semi-popular to popular Linux distribution desktop, there is a responsibility to the end users as well. Like there is a contract essentially there that you're making when you're saying, I'm making this product and it's like Josh writes in the post,

like if you don't plan for the bus factor, then it's your responsibility to take care of it and be at least communicative of like domain passwords and things like that. So I can see both sides of it. I hope that the end result is the Solus project continues and Ike is able to make whatever changes he needs to be happy. That would really be the best case scenario.

And I think as someone who's enjoyed Solus, I have nothing but support for the current team. They're all good folks and they're all hard workers. So hopefully it works out. What do you think? There's plenty to be hopeful for here. And you're right, it is complicated, especially in this. This is something we all worry about.

Maybe this can be a good example if you're out there and looking to start your own distro or working on your distro. Bus factor's real and especially when you're volunteering your time to a project that you just have, you know, just spare time. Anything can happen. We've had a great number of examples. Get that taken care of early, at least if you have trusted people

that you can share credentials or set up a system to do that. Wimpy and I, and I know you too, Wes, but Wimpy and I have talked about it off-air quite a bit, is we're big fans of automating as much as you can of processes like this. So that way things are more push-button, they're not as manual, and it's easier to hand off something like that. Automation often forms a sort of documentation as well. I'm always sort of impressed with the things that Wimpy's automated.

You know, we've looked at, it's pod publish, right, Wimpy, that you've tooled away at for a while? Yeah. Brilliant little system that maybe we can help with someday, you know, and add things to it, like chapter markers, chapters. Yeah, that would be good. Yeah, it would. And I really think that's the way to do it,

you know, is try to build a system that you can hand off. And I am learning that very hard this last week. And it's an easy thing to say, right? Of course, because we all know it. We think it in the back of our heads. But you're busy and you're just trying to get the next show done or whatever it is. But it is a

serious thing. If you ever wind up in the hospital and you're sitting there responding to work questions in the hospital bed, it's not fun. Yeah. So in the case of PodPublish, my circumstances were fortunately much more luxurious than yours, Chris. I was away working and then away on holiday, which meant that I wasn't involved in the Ubuntu podcast for a month. holiday, which meant that I wasn't involved in the Ubuntu podcast for a month. But because we've created PodPublish and that tool automates so much, Poppy and Mark were able to publish those episodes that I wasn't involved in because normally I do the publishing bit. But because that tool is there and it automates 99% of what you need to do, it was trivial for them to just keep on running. That's exactly it. So that's really all I have planned for us today.

I wanted to have those conversations and I wanted to share our big news. I guess, too, we could take a moment if anyone in the Mumble room has questions or thoughts about the announcement of JB and Linux Academy joining up. But also the audience is welcome to submit them via email. Yeah, reach out to the hosts that you are curious about

or just the network in general. Yeah, and I guess I'd leave, too, with just maybe that you are curious about or just the network in general. Yeah. And I guess I'd leave, too, with just maybe expect to see a little less of me for a while. I'll still be around, but I won't be as working as much because I'm going to have to take days off and whatnot for recovery. Quiet force in the background, keeping things going. I only really got my voice back a couple of days ago because they put a tube down my throat to breathe me, you know? And so I'm still a little scratchy right now even.

So that probably means as the voice runs out, it's time to wrap it up. I know these episodes have been short recently, and I do apologize for that because I don't intend them to be less than an hour, but it is what we've been working with because it turns out I had been broadcasting for a few weeks in a pretty bad situation. I didn't realize how bad my situation was. And so I was just pushing through it thinking it would get better, and it didn't, and so there you have it. So they have been a little shorter. I apologize just pushing through it, thinking it'd get better, and it didn't.

And so there you have it. So they have been a little shorter. I apologize, but we've packed so much into this episode, and we have so much in the works and so much planned that trust us, that's just the beginning, really. And with all of that, I'll add, go get more of Mark and Wimpy and Popey over at the Ubuntu podcast, ubuntupodcast.org, and keep an eye out for User Air,

starring one Mr. Popy, Joe, Daniel Foray, and your friends that'll be joining from time to time on the User Air show. It's air.show. Air.show. And air.show slash RSS for the feed. And like Joe said,

there should be a new episode on Friday, and it'll be kicking off from there. Super excited about that. It should be in all of the Friday, and it'll be kicking off from there. Super excited about that. It should be in all of the podcast directories and whatnot already. So go get subscribed. Go get more Wes Payne at TechSnap. TechSnap.Systems, where you can hear a recent special episode with one Mr. Wimpy, which was fantastic.

So much fun. The one thing that's been kind of neat for me is I really enjoy you and Joe on LAN, and I really enjoyed you and Wimpy on TechSnap. So I've been getting to listen to— You have more shows. I have, which has been useful because I've had a lot more downtime recently. Glad to help.

So it actually has been pretty neat for me. But I've been getting a lot of notes from people asking how I'm doing. A lot of people assuming I'm on vacation, which is flattering. Not the case. We wish. I do wish that. But in the meantime, the shows will go on, and I will be back in full health, in short. And we have so much in the works.

I've never been this excited. Stay tuned. We've got a great team now, full-time team. We're working for a company that knows content, who has developers and marketing and actual departments of people and PMOs that can help us make project plans and is behind us contributing to open source and sending me to events and all of it. It's just going to be a huge, huge upgrade for us. So we're very excited. We'll be sharing more details about the projects we plan to open source,

the licensing that we'll be choosing, all of that in future episodes. And I hope we'll see you right back here next Tuesday. Chris, I think you should go for a sit down and Eric, the IT guy, should tell us all about the Libre Application Summit. Oh, you're right. Oh, thank you for reminding me. Oh, I got so distracted by all the news. Eric, why don't we spend a little of the post show talking about the Libre Application Summit? And I will. I'll sit down and you can have the floor. What do you say? All right. Sounds good.

I mean, I did unpack my entire Jeep just for you, Chris. You know what? The good thing is the post show people will be listening to because it's a short show. So it's basically in the show. How was it? How was the whole thing? I had an absolute blast. I mean, there was about 60 unique people there. We averaged about 40 a day. The talks just got better and better every day. I think in the long run, going to that conference is going to cost me a ton of money. I got to tour System76. I got to sit and talk with pretty much their entire staff. And I really love Craig and his vision for 76. And then also attended a talk from Purism about the Librem.

Kind of the short version of that was that I feel like a phone, whether it was built for privacy or just built to run Linux, is something that our community needs. At this point, I'm probably going to pre-order it just because I feel, um, I feel like that's, that's something that needs to happen. It doesn't matter how hard or how long it takes to, uh, to get there. I feel like that's just something we need.

Um, but, uh, as, as you hear a lot from people that go to conferences, the best part was, was literally the hallway track. It was, we, we had really long breaks and people would pull out their laptops. And there's folks from Red Hat, namely the Flatpak project. And just about every talk, there was questions from the Flatpak guys about how they're developing applications and whether or not they could put that into a Flatpak. I mean, the only thing they didn't try to put into a flat pack was lunch. It was a great conference. One of the best things, I think, to come out of this particular conference was that KDE sent a few people.

So it wasn't as GNOME-centric as the first iteration of the conference. And I think for the, for next year, there's going to be some rebranding and some sharing of resources and personnel. Um, so that next year it was, it's going to be more community centric as opposed to gnome centric. Um, so I know, I know Katie is part of the, the reorganization plan for next year. They, they added a couple of people to the group um elementary uh daniel and cassidy were both there they they are some amazing guys um i had a lot of fun getting to know them and talking to them and uh and i think uh i think they both signed up to be part

of uh the libre application summit uh committee one of the things we're going to bring up is a rebrand and a rename, mostly because it's really confusing to people who are new to the community to, well, is this Linux Action Show? I was going to say, not to mention the acronym. Yeah, exactly. So that's definitely

on the plan for next year. We've got a bunch of folks from, let me see who i can name off the top of my head uh from spotify from i think uh nilas or the the company behind mail spring um and uh i know i know a bunch of folks from canonical one to come uh it just didn't work out timing wise so i think next year there'll be a slight shift and when this conference happens um that way more people can attend uh with expanding the by expanding the committee that's planning the conference we can get things planned and set up sooner that way next year we can get more uh we can get more attention

around this conference we can get more people we can get more attention around this conference we can get more people involved and try and present desktop linux as a unified front instead of gnome versus kde versus uh lxde right and it sounds like those seeds were laid uh you know in this one so that's amazing very much so and and uh and one of the probably one of the best parts one of the coolest things i got to see was one of the days I was there, I was sporting my Jupiter Broadcasting shirts. And so some people recognized me from being in the mumble room on this show. kind of a selfish take on that. But the best part was some of them were from the local colleges. They heard about the Libre Application Summit from the show.

And so they all pooled their money and they bought tickets and they all carpooled out. There's two different shows. There are two different colleges. And they were some of the most involved in the Q&A sessions. A couple of them have a digital signage project that they're working on and i'll try and track that project down i know i i know i put it in the asanoa show telegram but i'll track that project down it was a it was a neat idea to use to use python and raspberry pies to have a central server that's that's sending out all the content from PDFs to MPVs out to Raspberry Pis across their campus.

I think it's just their campus lab right now, but they've got some really cool ideas to spread their project across all of their campus. And so they kind of announced that and some folks took some interest and and i uh one of the schools as uh um there was a couple of gentlemen that will be joining the engagement team for gnome so they're going to try and uh summoner thank you so much it's actually in the irc it was the colorado school of minds uh called display was the name of the the uh application that they're working on and uh it was it was great to see college students getting involved and asking okay so how can i help spread the word around my campus and to to my uh computer security club and so it was great to see folks getting

involved and how much of it was technical then like what was the balance between technical talks and more kind of overview strategy stuff um the talks themselves were about 70 30 a lot of it was pretty down deep into the weeds um so as just a dumb systems engineer i didn't quite understand all of it but um there was um one of the talks uh one gentleman from a company called free hive is actually uh made me think of brent because he is a graphic designer who got tired of being held hostage by adobe and the creative suite and uh is rebranded rebranded his entire company and went open source and said it's a hard journey his company is called free hive f- R E E H I V E.

Um, and he was a very dynamic speaker and he really brought some interesting attention to the developers, um, and Gnome and KDE about the problems that are out there and some projects that, that could use some extra love. Um, and I love how the IRC is throwing links in there. Hi, thanks guys. That way I don't have to free hive.com. Yeah. I see myself

in that and we need more people doing that, especially in the creative space. So yeah, spread it around for sure. You definitely should reach out to Ryan, the founder of Freehive. He was really, really great and very, very open. That's great. I certainly will. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. And in fact, that was one of the cool parts about being there and knowing people from GNOME and knowing people from elementary. Just as a lot of you know, I'm somewhat new to the doors opening, I was able to talk to someone who was working on a way to monetize open source, um, applications. And basically I had just met, uh, Cassidy, not 10 minutes before. And so I was able to take the, take this gentleman and go, go talk to Cassidy because they're doing that right now with elementary OS. So it was, it was great to just be there and enable the, uh, enable the community. And I've never tweeted so much in my

life. Well, thank you for the summary. That does sound like fascinating. It sounds like it was a really good event for you to go to. And so I'm really glad you could make it. And, uh, how many people do you think if you're going to take a wild guess we're in attendance? Um, I think we averaged about 40 people a day with probably 60 to 70 unique people. So there's some people that were only there for a day or two days. And then there's a few of us that were there every day. It sounds really quite intimate, actually, as an experience. I'm glad you went.

It really was. And intimate is definitely the right word to describe the technical exchange of ideas. We'll be doing some minor edits to all the sessions, and those will be coming out over the next few weeks. But the talks were really the sideshow. It was the work that got done. It was the exchanging of ideas. It was the fact that KDE and GNOME, people could see firsthand were not competing, that they were just two groups of people that both have a passion

for desktop Linux and that they're, I think, in the months and years to come, we're going to see more collaboration between the two projects. I know what you're saying when you say you see the two projects working together. It's like the turf wars of the internet sort of just completely become irrelevant.

And it's just two people trying to solve a problem working together in meatspace. That's the best spirit. And we need both projects. Because for me, I can only speak for myself, but Plasma doesn't work well for my workflow. It brings back too many bad memories of all the years I ran Windows. But when I moved over from macOS, GNOME 3 just, it worked. It fit right into my workflow. So we need both projects.

So the only people that would lose on a turf war like that is the entire community. Presumably there was quite a lot of hype about GNOME 3.30 then. Pretty good timing with the release of that just having happened. Yeah, that was pretty convenient. We had a release party and had cake and went to a retro arcade bar. So you could carry a

drink around and play Galaga and Pac-Man and some others, but it was a really convenient timing. And having played with 3.30, I was planning on coming on today and just being all excited, and you've got to try this out. But as Wes alluded to the other day, it's just another good release. There's a bunch of bug fixes.

There is a new podcast app, which I'm looking forward to trying. But it's a lot of good work. It was hundreds of commits. It was hundreds of people working on it. And all in all, it's a great accomplishment. I'm missing my Arch install right now, um, because I'm, I'm not running it on my main workstation. Um,

so if you're running Fedora, that should come out in Fedora 29, which is slated for the end of next month. So I'm, I'm debating, uh, putting my, my main system onto,

uh, onto the testing repos just because I, I really want to run it. Nice. Yeah. I understand that drive. That is something that is a spot I've been in. I have, as part of joining Linux Academy,

I have a work machine coming to me, and Wes does as well. And we got, is Popey still here? Yeah, Neon Popey. We got ThinkPads. We got ThinkPads. Indeed. So, very excited.

We have ThinkPads that are going to, they're actually being shipped to us, so they'll be here probably in a week. And I think I'm going to put Neon on it. Oh, Neon. Okay, yeah. That makes sense. I should do Kubuntu because we're doing Kubuntu on all of the production systems.

But, you know, I'd love an 1804 base. And I'd love the fresh plasma. So, Ron, I was kind of going to ask you, is there an ISO? Can I just go right to the 1804 version of Neon when that machine arrives? All my Neon boxes are still 1604 based. The Neon 1804 is a preview version, so it's in beta

now, so it's close to being released, but there's still at least a couple weeks or so. Do you think it's safe? I feel like it's probably got to be getting there, right? Well, the problem is but there's still at least a couple weeks or so. Do you think it's safe? I mean, I feel like it's probably got to be getting there, right? Well, the problem is that there's going to be bugs until they finish the migration between 16.04 and 18.04,

so they don't really know. I would... It depends on what you're doing it for. Just really want fresh plasma. If it's not for the potential of, you know, catastrophic if you lose some stuff, then I would, you know, it's fine. Yeah, I don't think it'd be catastrophic. Yeah, if you're not storing everything, because if you're doing stuff on the production machines or on the stable release of Kubuntu, you should be fine if you don't store a bunch of stuff on there.

I don't think it would break things, but there's some times where I had K-Win crash a few times, and there's a couple times where I had K-Win just pretty much just obliterate itself and not think it existed, so that system wouldn't even boot. Like, I could get in TTY, but that was about it. We had that same problem in the studio happen once. Now, so I'm thinking, like, in a month, though, the laptop is going to maybe, well, I guess actually more than a couple of months. I'm sort of grounded for a few months months but eventually it'll be my travel broadcast machine so I do want it to be pretty rock solid but I probably have a few months before I before I

before it's necessary so you need a rock solid distro on that laptop right and you're thinking about possibly neon or maybe kubuntu well Chris come on there's only one distro that you could put on that solus