LINUX Unplugged - Episode 4: Are Linux Users Cheap? | LINUX Unplugged 4

Episode Date: September 4, 2013

We crunch the Steam and Ubuntu Software Center numbers and we have to ask: Are Linux users cheap? Or is the answer more complex than that?Plus how we think Microsoft buying Nokia might impact Ubuntu Touch, Firefox OS, and other open mobile startups, replacing Dropbox, and more!

This is Linux Unplugged. Pour yourself a cold one, because honestly, this show probably makes a lot more sense after you've had a few drinks. Otherwise, it sounds like a couple of Linux users rambling about using Linux. My name is Chris. My name is Matt. Hey, Matt. So we made it to four episodes. That's a month solid, man.

That's awesome. So I was just telling the, well, I was just about to tell the story. I thought, no, I'll share it on there because it's embarrassing enough that I should share it with the audience. So when my wife was pregnant, you know, one of the things preggo ladies do is they get into these, they like to have certain foods, right? They want to have a food.

For my wife, it was citrusy flavors. So lemonade was perfect. It's summertime, it's hot outside. Let's get some lemonade going on in this house. I got hooked, man. I got hooked on lemonade. Like, I've never been hooked on it. Every day, got to have a little lemonade.

Oh, this glass of water doesn't have any lemonade in it? I'll fix that. Pour a little, you know, it's drinkable. Just every day a new thing, right? Yeah, got to have a little lemonade. Oh, this glass of water doesn't have any lemonade in it? I'll fix that. Pour a little, you know, drink. Just every day a new thing, right? Yeah, got to have lemonade. So I'm mixing it with everything. So I'm at the grocery store doing the shopping because the wife was on bed rest. And I'm like, we got a lot of lemonade at home.

Look at this. Lemonade vodka. Didn't know that was a thing. Oh, no. I mean, I never tried it. I knew it was a thing, but I'd never tried it. So I grabbed myself a big bottle of lemonade vodka, or lemon vodka. And it turns out you could pour like half of that into a cup and pour half the other half with lemonade, go half and half, and it's just a delicious treat, Matt.

Well, I had two of those like a week ago, and I'm still feeling a little hungover from that, just a little bit. Oh, yeah. Well, vodka doesn't play around, especially if you get the good stuff. Well, I did not get the good stuff, I don't think. Oh, that's why. It was being sold in the grocery store. Alright, so we have a fun show today. One of the

things that's new is we've dialed into a new Mumble server. We called up on our 56k modems and called in. And no, we got it set up. It's now hosted on Scale Engine. Price TX has been working as took us off, getting it all dialed in.

We were on a hosted solution that Arbulus had set up for us that was awesome, but we kept hitting user limits. Turns out people wanted to hang out and chat with each other while we're doing the show. They wanted to be involved

with the show and it was a lot more popular than we expected. So now we're on a new mumble box at ts.jupitercolony.com and uh the uh hopefully somebody in the uh in the irc chat room will paste the uh port in there but it's like it's on a funky port i'll try to put in the show notes so you guys can because it's going to be open 24 7 so if you guys just want to hang out it's essentially kind of like the it's a it's an it's an adjunct to the IRC. That's always going.

And we got rooms in there for every show. We got general hangout rooms. So we're going to jump in there. We've got an on-air channel now. It's port 64, 7, 3, 4, which by the way, if you just highlight that, that line that talks put in the IRC and then you open the mumble client, it will automatically detect that on your clipboard and, and fill it into the server settings for Mumble. It's really nice.

That's kind of slick, right? Yeah. You know, that's an application you can really feel like was meant for the Linux desktop. Yeah, I like that. And that audio ducking thing they do, it feels like that Linux version of Mumble is a first class Linux desktop application. Makes me excited what we might see in the future. Oh, definitely.

So we're going to chat with one of the folks that's in there. He's replaced Dropbox with InkFS and I think Git and a couple other things. He's sort of put these things together. He's wrote a good post about it, and we caught it in our subreddit and said, let's talk to you. So he's come on. He's joined us.

It's like 11 p.m. where he's at right now. And he's had a heck of a day. Today was one of those days, Matt. So on Friday, I went to PAX, as you know. Yep. And while I'm at PAX, go figure, my phone starts buzzing. And I look down.

Hey, can you give us a call? We have an emergency. Oh. And so the way this works is I don't have any clients that I go to on a regular basis anymore. But in a few circumstances, if their main IT guy is out and then their backup guy is out and they're really, really screwed, they'll call me. I'm like third guy in line. And if you're calling Chris, at that point, you're really screwed, right? At that point, you really don't want to be the guy going in.

So true, man. So true. So there I am at PAX. I'm getting the third guy call. And I'm like, oh, no, this is bad. This is real bad. So there I am at PAX, and I'm getting the third guy call, and I'm like, oh, no, this is bad. This is real bad. So I ended up working out a schedule with them and worked them through some problems Friday night.

Then Monday was Labor Day, a holiday here, so they were closed, thankfully. So I was able to do Coda Radio and all that. Go in there this morning, first thing, I roll in there at 8.30 a.m., and they've been down now for three days, essentially. They went down roughly Wednesday night, Thursday morning. They were down all day Thursday, all day Friday. And they are under contract with Washington State to have certain things posted on their website within four hours of receiving it from the state. Or they're in violation of this contract.

And that's a huge revenue source, right? So if they violate that contract, then the contract goes up for bid, they lose it, and then they lose like 70% of their funding. So, of course, everything's on the line. And that was my morning. Oh, my God. And I got into this whole custom scripted up system using rsync and NFS mounts all over the place.

Every server's got a mount to every other server. rsync's running. GNU Parallel running all up in this place. It was, I mean, it is a spider's web of automation, Matt. It sounds like a mess. It was a mess. So before we get to talking with Remy and do a couple of follow-up items,

I wanted to just do a quick public service announcement speaking of things that are fantastic and optimized. Today, just before we went on air for Linux Unplugged, the Jupyter Broadcasting browser plugins for Chrome and Firefox, which are linked at the bottom of our website, were updated. Now, first thing you should probably know is at least in Chrome, I'm not sure about Firefox,

it's requesting permissions. So you have to go in there and re-enable it. It'll be under the little hamburger menu, the little three-line button. That's officially, by the way, being called the hamburger button. The hamburger button. Yeah, you click that, there'll be a notification. The reason why it is requesting new permissions, and it's very vague the way they make it look but the reason is is we've made it a little more polite so uh uh now if you if you're on somebody else's website

and they have an amazon affiliate link and you click it our our extension will not override that it'll detect that it'll be graceful about it so that requires um permission changes for that to happen but that's that's one of the things and then we've added woot.com so now if you're shopping at woot.com and you have our browser extension installed we will get a portion of your shopping session which is awesome and then on the firefox side of things i'm not positive you have to re-enable it or not i haven't tried it on my firefox install yet but we have uh firefox integration improvements performance improvements and goodies as well, of course, as Woot and all that stuff over there as well. So new extensions being updated today, so your browser will probably get the update.

And if you don't know about this yet, these are open source extensions. We have them linked up on GitHub in the Linux Action Show show notes, or you go to jbdev. Where was that? I can't remember. There's a jbdev site I have linked to on the show notes. And those are posted up on GitHub. They're open source. And we've actually got a good amount of people now.

This is so funny. When we launched these extensions, I said, well, let's go open source. So that way people know, you know, we're not doing anything shady and anything like that. And, you know, if people want to use them, they can. That's fine. And people didn't necessarily think that was a good idea because there are other podcast networks that take them, right? Oh, right.

But the other thing is... Yeah. I mean, that happens. But the other thing that's been really interesting is it's been big in churches. Oh. So I've heard from several people that are grabbing it for their church, setting it up and coding it for an affiliate code for the church. And then the people, the members of that church, when they shop at home, are using a modified

version of the Jupyter Broadcasting extension to benefit the church. That's clever. Yeah, so I thought that was kind of a neat use of it. So there you go. So you can find links to those linked at the very bottom of JupyterBroadcasting.com. And then when you have those installed, they just automatically take your shopping session at Amazon, Newegg, Woot,

Monoprice, eBay, lots of popular sites. And then it helps keep us on the air. All right, well, I'm going to unmute our Mumble channel here and say hi to the folks in the Mumble room. And specifically, I want to welcome Remy to the show. He's been a contributor to the network for a while. We send an email to many of the shows and he's active in our subreddits. Remy, welcome to the show. So now, Chris. So now, do I have it right? It's about 11 p.m. where you're at right now? Yes, that's correct.

It's now just 11, 9 p.m. in the Netherlands. Well, I know that you were fighting server outages all day, so I appreciate you joining us after the day of hell that you've had. And you caught my attention, I think it was last week, when you submitted a blog post about your encrypted file synchronization solution. Can you tell us what it is and what tech you're using?

Okay, yes, it's correct. I just recently bought a Chromebook and I used SpiderOak, which is a locally encryption and then upload to the cloud tool. Yeah, yeah. And it doesn't work on OZM and I have an ARM Chromebook so I had an issue I was already having issues with SpiderRub

because of RAM usage because I have over 90,000 files in there and he doesn't really like that I've also tried Wala and it's also a local encryption and then dump the blobs in CloudTool and it also had RAM issues so I was looking for something else

and I already use AnchorFest AnchKFS is a user space tool that mounts your local folder and you have an encrypted folder and you mount it and then you have the unencrypted part just work for the password and that's the encryption part and synchronization part because that's really important that you also have the files on multiple devices, is using DVCS Autosync. It's Distributed Version Control System Autosync.

And it works both with Git and Mercurial and other version control systems. So you're not using Spyderoq at all because you're on ARM. Yeah, I had to switch because I also needed the files on my Chromebook. The Chromebook runs Arch Linux, but Arch Linux ARM. Oh, okay.

So you're using, okay, so just I want to make sure I got this. You're using InkFS for the encryption. You're using SSH to get? How are you doing SSH to get? Well, I have a VPS just somewhere else. And the point is the InkFS folder is only decrypted when you mount it. So the folder which I sync to the cloud is the folder, the encrypted data.

And how does it handle like a small file changes? Like if you do like you're only updating maybe three lines in your notes file, does it update the whole file? Well, the AnchorFest part works like this. It works per file, so that's very nice. It's not like you have a true crit volume and you have to unmount it. It works per file, but because I have it set very strictly, you can give options if you want per file chaining and that kind of stuff.

I've set it very strictly so that every change I make in a file after a write makes the entire file gets re-uploaded and synced. But you can also set less restrictive options which make only bigger changes to a file make it upload again. Now, any way to make this work with a Windows machine?

Yes. You have, I think, a few tools which support SSH on Windows. You have a few tools which support Git on Windows. What is your solution for mobile? Well, Android. I only use Android phones. And there is an open source application in the Android App Store.

It's called Ankydroid, which I use to mount it. Oh, okay. The encrypted folder. And there's also a few Git clients in the App Store, so which you can sync back the encrypted folder and there's also a few Git clients in the App Store so which you can sync back the encrypted part. The beautiful thing is you only in the cloud you have the encrypted part and everywhere where you have AnchorFest you can

mount the local part. So with InkDroid, I'm going to go look that up right now. I didn't even know about that. You also have an app that's called I think it's Boxcryptor, and it's a closed source app, and it supports Encafes, but it's for me really important that you have open source code

so that you can make sure that nobody else gets your password and key. Yeah, big advocate to that here. Wow. With this solution, when you set it up, and I use it on a Chromebook, on a MacBook Pro, which I have for my work, on an Android phone and on two other Ubuntu and Arch Linux machines. And it really works fine.

It also handles deletions of files and folders. So when you say deletions, do you mean it handles revisions of deletions? No, just when I remove a file, it's also removed in the version control. Yeah, okay. Okay, so that's it. Spider OK had issues on that.

When I deleted the file in one machine, on the other machines it would just re-upload it because it thought it was a new file on the machine on which it was deleted. So with having all of your files in Git, then are you able to go in with a Git Explorer and pull out certain versions of stuff that you want and things like that? No, and that is because in Git, only the encrypted part is. Ah.

So that's quite a disadvantage. Not really for me. Right. Because the important files, yeah, I make manual backups. Yeah. So because Git doesn't, because it's encrypted, Git can't make revisions because it doesn't know. What is what?

Yeah. Yeah, it makes revisions of the encrypted data, but not of the decrypted data. That's the whole point. Right, yeah. That makes sense. One other disadvantage is that you cannot have selective sync, so you cannot have a big mess with all your files in your phone with just a few, and also because it's a disadvantage

of not knowing what is what and having to mine it encrypted locally. Right. Selective sync is nice, but it does allow you to be lazy, too, which honestly, that's how I use it. And complacent. Yeah. And one of the other nice things with this solution is that, as I said, I have a lot of source code for companies I work for in my encrypted folders. And as I said, I had over 9,000 files.

And it has totally no performance issues with that RAM usage of the syncing process. And the ANCFS is, I think, less than 90 megabytes, whereas Pyro was on 3 to 4 gigabytes. Holy cow. I got to play more with that. That's interesting. So you've got how you've done all of this written up on your site, rayme.org, and I'll have a link to it in the show notes. It's also linked in the subreddit. You know what a nice part was about?

I put the article on Saturday evening. It's the first article I did with a picture, with a diagram, and it was also on the front page on Hacking News. Normally, my website has about 1,000 visitors a day, and it got 40,000 extra visits in the last four days. Oh, my goodness. Whoa. Whoa. You really notice that people are looking for such a solution. Exactly.

It's not a one-click easy solution, but it still is there. People are really looking to go off the grid in a sense. Not actually off the grid, but off the surveillance grid. Well, to put themselves in more control too, I think is really the big focus. Yeah, isn't that interesting? And it's funny how on the other end of it, I've seen such an explosion in bit message adoption. I'm just buried now in bit messages.

It's awesome. So it's like people are really looking, and we've seen a huge interest in mail servers too. Well, Remy, before we move on to the next topic, is there anything you wanted to mention about it, or anything you want to touch on? Well, just as I said, it's not an easy

one-click solution, but I hope it will help people with having their encryption and data truly secure and locally. Yeah, I mean, you've got an encrypted sync solution here that is off the surveillance grid, and it's using all open source code, right? Yes, that's totally correct. Yeah, I mean, that's awesome. That's very awesome.

That's very cool. So we'll have a link. Thank you for having me on. Yeah, you bet, man. Thanks for staying up for us after your rough day. I appreciate it. Have you experienced raid cards that only detect issues when

you reboot the server? Oh, yeah, it's funny how something about that reboot process, if there's something that's going to die, that's when it'll die, even if it's a drive. But yeah, I've had the raid card go out on the database server. Today I had eight servers which had that issue, and about

24 drives are now dead. Eight separate servers? Yeah, with all the same RAID card and the same firmware, the latest firmware from HAPE. Oh, did the firmware nuke it? That might be it. The RAID card only detects changes in disk issues when you reboot the server, so we had to reboot after scheduled updates, and eight servers just said, whoa, my hard drives are dead, bye.

Oh my. Oh. Goodness. That is not a good day that's a bad day that's okay i was up at 6 a.m and it's now 11 p.m and i'm only home for about an hour so i'm going to sleep now and my my alarm goes at 4 a.m the next morning because i have to be in the data center again oh well arm that coffee pot man and uh thank you for joining us yeah we, well, have a good show, and I will listen to it tomorrow. All right. And thank you for having me on. Yeah, you bet. Very good. Go get some rest.

Thank you. Bye. Yeah, bye. Bye. Thanks. So I wanted to just mention a couple of follow-up items before we chat more with the mumble guys there. I meant to follow up on this a little while ago.

I mentioned that I was frustrated that the GNOME search in GNOME 3 is not searching documents. It's just on my machine. Oh, is it really? The only GNOME time I've ever used GNOME 3.8 is in this installation of Arch. In fact, when I installed this installation of Arch, it was one of the few places you could actually get GNOME 3.8.

It hadn't hit the other distros yet. I don't know why it doesn't work on my machine it does work for everybody else on the internet though and they all told me so we even got like on the uh comment section for this for last week's show we even got like a really nice screenshot i don't know if you saw that but it like was like yeah it was even it even looked of course it's gnome related so it just looked gorgeous sure sure but that's bizarre that's bizarre of course then you know i'm using uh synapse or whatever you want to call it. And so I just, yeah, you know, I don't really have too many troubles there.

Yeah, your days are numbered, my friend. That Synapse project, they haven't been pushing new code for a while. They have not. I'll probably go to GNOME, too. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. And also, just a quick update. I made an app pick on LAS, GDMD map for scanning your drive and showing up in blocks.

For us KDE users, K4 Durstat. Durst? Really? K4 Durstat. And that is a KDE version. Sounds very German. Some people say that even WinDurstat is based off of. So, take that as you will. Okay.

off of. So take that as you will. Okay. So I wanted to get to a topic today that it kind of got me thinking. In the subreddit, I think it was like an episode, actually one of this show, I said, man, it sure would be great. Gosh, it'd be great if there was some sort of website out there collating the Steam numbers and giving us some nice charts to look at. That would be fantastic. Right? And, well, that happened. One of our listeners, Matechi, I think, Matechi? How do you... Matechi. Matechi. I bet it's Matechi.

I bet that's how you say it. He started a Steam survey charts over at his site, and it is not looking good for Linux. Not looking good, Matt. In fact, when it is not looking good for Linux. Not looking good, Matt. In fact, when I say not looking good, I mean it looks real bad. It looks real bad. Would it be bad, and I'm going to get probably set on fire for this,

but is it bad to say it's because the folks that run Linux have jobs? I was going to say it's because I was going to ask you, so here's what I'm thinking. I think if we take a break, we'll thank our first sponsor. Then I'm going to toss it to you. I i got a couple things i want to throw your way i'm going to toss it to you our linux users on whole on a whole obviously there's going to be individual cases but our linux users cheap and i got a couple i got it because i got i'm going to convince you otherwise i think but we'll see we will see but first matt i want to thank our first sponsor this week and that is ting.com now ting is mobile that makes sense my friend and ting was uh the lifesaver at pax i think i mentioned this on sunday's last but really i was

the only guy except for another guy that also was on ting service that had a working cell phone and i cannot tell you when when i had a client who was in full-fledged freak-out mode and they needed Chris to make everything better, having to make that phone call, being able to make those phone calls while I was on the exposition floor of PAX was invaluable. I would have paid any monthly service for that. And, of course, I'm just paying for what I use. That's one of the great things about Ting. Look, go to linux.ting.com. We got Linux for this show. So go to linux.ting.com. That'll get you $25 off your first Ting device or $25 of service credits for your first month of service. I have the HTC One, and that guy powered through it real well, real good. I was

quite happy. However, now I know it's just the same phone, but I just noticed now Ting has the HTC Blue. Ooh, hey, that's new, right? Yeah, yeah. Oh, they also have this S4 Purple. I didn't know that. The HTC One Blue is going to be the phone I want, but what? I'm holding out. I'm going to see. I want to just say

if you've been looking at phones, go over to linux.ting.com and you're not sure which one you want to get because these are off contract. That's a good thing but it also means they're going to be a little bit higher in price. Of course, in the long run, you're saving money and even after the cost of the phone, you're probably going to save money in some

circumstances. Oh yeah, you're going to save big buckets of money. Right. However, you can buy used on Ting and there's really a lot of options here. On that tab, they have buy used and they have the personal shopping service where they'll go out and find a device. You just give them the parameters, screen size, OS, et cetera, and they'll go get you a refurbished phone that works on Ting.

That's awesome. Really awesome. However, maybe you might be in a situation where you want to have multiple people on the line. Ting makes that real easy. It's just $6 a month, and you pay for what you use. So you could have yourself a smartphone and maybe there's somebody else in your family. Maybe it's a significant other.

Maybe it's a parent. Maybe it's a kid and they don't need to have a full-fledged smartphone or you don't want them to have a full-fledged smartphone or maybe you don't want a full-fledged smartphone. I mean, I can totally understand that. They have got the Samsung, which is a really great flip phone, the Samsung M370. It's very sturdy, very reliable, 52 bucks. And if you go to linux.ting.com, Ting is going to take $25 off of that. That's practically nothing. Yeah. That's practically nothing to get you on a Ting

phone. And then you're only paying for the price you use. Ting just takes your minutes used, your text and your data, adds them all up at the end of the month, and then puts you in a bucket. And you can check on their online dashboard at any time to see where you're at, to know exactly where you're trending. And the great thing is if you go with a smartphone, you get all these great features like built-in hotspot and tethering. You've gotten caller ID and all these things that the other cellular companies will sort of fit into the tax brackets or sort of fit into like these bolt-on services, none of that happens. No ride-alongs with Ting.

It's just nice, easy, straight, simple forward mobile. They've also got that Airwave. So if you want to boost cellular service in your house, you can plug one of these into your house. It'll use your internet connection, and then you get four bars or five, whatever your phone reads. You get full signal in your house. But the phone, the OS, everything is just talking over the cellular. So everything that you would have work over your cellular works right over one of those things.

It's really, really quite good. That's cool. Yeah, and to be able to take $25 off of any one of those, especially that little flip phone, that's pretty cool. I know. When you're starting at $50 and then you take $25 off and then you're paying just for what you use every single month, this is the bet this is

the value this is the best value out there and the service is great the people are great and the company's really good too so go to linux.ting.com and get yourself something nice on a really easy to use simple to follow site i was so impressed when i activated my devices how easy that was man you just recently did that i tell me is that not the most straightforward device activation process i couldn't believe how simple it was. I mean, even though that it was still I had to make sure it was basically deactivated from your stuff because I got the phone from you,

it was brain-dead simple to do. It was just like type in a couple buttons. I mean, the instructions were easy to set up and then once I actually activated the phone, it was like three seconds. I feel like good UI designers and i think maybe maybe ting's got like a real good group on their hands and maybe here's what their trick is

if i was a good here's what makes a good ui designer i say you get three or four beers into the wind then you try to use your site and if you can use it efficiently you know you got a really well-designed site well let me tell you ting passes the three or four beer test i've done i've been on ting's website several times three or four beers in and I've been on Ting's website several times, three or four beers in, and I never get lost. So I just say, if you're an interface design person out there, go take a look at their site, learn a little bit, and try the beer challenge for yourself. And it makes for a fantastic website. It makes it super clear and easy. So that way, when you have family members, like my mom's on Ting, and when I have her go to the Ting site, I can just remember it all from the top of my head when I'm walking around because it's so straightforward. So I'm like, yeah, click there, click there. Okay,

you're done. Bye mom. And we're all set. But if mom wanted to call into Ting, she could. Ting has representatives that answer the phone. You can call them 1-855-846-4389. And they're available 8am to 8pm. You call in and a real person answers the phone. And so if there's something mom can't do on the website, I just have mom call Ting. Well, that's awesome because not only are they going to get a real person when they call in, but if maybe they're not really into doing stuff on the website, they prefer to deal with the person. What a great option. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So go to linux.ting.com and start saving right now, you guys. Don't be crazy. Don't be crazy. All right, Matt. So here we go. You ready for my Linux users might be cheap. And I'm a Linux user. I'm not cheap, but I'm just saying. So I got an inside guy. I don't know if he's in the chat're looking now, Ubuntu, supposedly,

the number one deployed desktop Linux operating system. Our own web stats would back that up. The number one app in the Ubuntu Software Center right now is FileCryptor Professional. The number two app is WPA Generator

and the number three app is FileCryptor. All right. Out of these top apps, the first three app is FileCryptor. All right. Of these top apps, the first app goes for $4.99. The second app goes for $3, and the third app goes for $2.99. Now, here's the thing. These are the top three applications in the Ubuntu Software Center. None of them have ratings. None of them have average, none of them have comments, nothing. They're all blank.

I should take comments back. Ratings, none of them have any interaction on that level. And when talking to these developers, they're making, at best, a couple hundred dollars a month. And that's being pretty generous. From the software side. Yeah, that's pretty generous.

It is. And that's like the top, that was like the top app, actually, that made that much money. Now, the time skew was a little short. It wasn't a full month, but still, it is, the numbers are devastating. Now, we go over to Steam. Since Steam has launched,

it has gone in a sharp decline. On January 13th, Steam had, Linux Steam usage had a 1.12% market share. On February 13th, Steam had Linux Steam usage had a 1.12% market share. On February 13th, it went up to 2.02%. That was after we were out of bait and all this good stuff. Then from that point forward, June goes down to 1.07%, July 1.06%. Now in August, we're below 1%.

We're at 0.93%. So we're dropping off. Okay. Now. Okay. Now, you've got to ask yourself, because Linux is free and a lot of the software is free, is it more attractive to people who don't want to pay for software? Is this not a marketplace where you can make a living writing software and selling it to Linux users?

So here's how I see it. First of all, if I'm going to buy anything, if I can get an equitable alternative for free, I would be mouth-breathing stupid not to. So of course, I'm going to go that route. Now, as far as the two marketplaces, whether it be Steam or the Ubuntu Software Center, the Ubuntu Software Center is a little bit like trying to do grocery checkout at your dentist's office or at the DMV. It's horrible. It is absolutely hideous. Now, for free apps, it's reasonably painless because all you're going to do is enter a password and you're done. Yeah, but when you buy an app, you've got to put in your shipping address and everything.

Oh, God. It's just stupid. Yeah. So that's hideous. Steam's is actually not so bad. But I think that the bigger problem, especially when you look at it from the fact that, like, I'll use Steam as a better example because that's really where

we had a nice peak and it kind of dropped off. I think the people that were really excited about getting on the games have then done so. And I would be interested in comparing a contrast with what's going on in the Windows space. Is there also a decline there? Or perhaps maybe there's a surge of new windows games coming out to where maybe there's not as many compelling new linux point uh the windows the windows penetration seems to be

fairly steady in january it was 94.56 it drops down slightly between february and july but then it's back to 94.59 slightly slightly above where it was in January. So since Linux has come out for Steam, Windows usage has actually gone up slightly. And so I would say that it's not so much a – I don't think the problem was with Linux at all. I think it's a lot of its availability of give me something compelling. Okay, for existing Linux games, do you have a math pack that's come out? Maybe there's something compelling to add on to my existing games. What new things are out there as an existing Steam user that's going to make me say, oh, hey, let me make that purchase? Maybe there are some games that are out there. Maybe there aren't. Maybe you're already into your game and you would like to expand on that existing experience. rule it out as a Linux thing because the Humble Bundle

is done really well. But then again, it's something different. And I think honestly, the success of that Humble Bundle was one of the things that brought Steam over. So, yeah, that's a good point. I'll ask the Mumble

room. I don't know if the guys in the OnAir channel have any, if anybody in here has any thoughts. If Linux users are just cheap, we've all – With software, I would say yes, but not with games. That's my big difference. Do you think it's maybe Windows users are willing – Linux users are willing to pay for certain things and not other things? Oh, yeah. Well, I mean I look at – like when I try and find something on OS X because I have to do this occasionally, it astounds me at the stupid software titles that are being – they're charging $20, $30.

Oh, yeah. I know, right? It's just like – and it's like you really think I'm going to do that? No. It's like I'm not going to give you my money. So I think that it's a lot of what you're used to. Linux users have an expectation that if they hunt hard enough, because the Ubuntu Software Center is not the end-all to be-all of software, if you hunt hard enough, a lot of times you can find a package that's compatible with your distro that's going to offer you a way to accomplish the

task you're trying to do. It may not be as glossy, it may not be as pretty, but a lot of times you can get it done. And you can get it done for free. So we got the mumble room open. We just heard Jack in the Box type in a little bit, but I'm curious, anybody in here, Josh or Madjo or

Miracode, we haven't heard from you or Wester's in here. We haven't heard from you guys. You guys think Linux users are cheap? Do you think it's something else? What is your explanation? Go ahead, Microcode. You first. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm

a few milliseconds closer than any of you living in Toronto. I think it's a mix of the fact that people are a little bit cheap. However, I think a lot of professional users also use the new systems and that may be

part of the issue where we have people who are generally busy filming and not having time really to play these games. Alright, so Josh, what do you think? Josh, is it Linux users are too busy? No, so

my opinion is, for instance, with the Ubuntu Software Center, those apps, like half of those apps are not integrated with the operating system. They're using like an old GTK library which library, for instance, GTK2, which, one, looks terrible, and two, the apps just suck. Like Jungle Distile, yeah. Right.

And then they're just charging an obscene amount. Well, it's $4 or $3. Is that an obscene amount? I mean, so the top, we had $4.99, $3, and $2.99. I think for apps that don't integrate with the OS that are outdated, or for instance, when I went on there the other day, I saw a Windows Phone 8 app in there, which is just like, I don't even know how that got through the review process, but it was in there.

Oh, so you're talking about applications rather than... I'm talking about applications rather than game. at the fault of the developers. With some, it's regarding their game optimization, but with some it's the drivers. We're getting there. I think it might be a couple of years, depending on Linux adoption. I think Valve's really pushing it. So I think we're going to see drivers improve a lot. But I just don't think we're quite

there yet with a lot of the games. And a lot of the AAA titles aren't even on Linux, so until then, I'm kind of like stuck on Windows. Yeah, that's true. We are still missing. Okay, well, so is it this? Oh, so Green in the chat room is mentioning System76.

And I would say they are a premium brand. They are a very high-quality device that delivers on what they say. And I feel like as a Linux user, I'm more picky about what I spend my money on. Like I'll buy Steam games if it's a good game. I'll, I would even, I've bought apps from the Ubuntu software center. Now I can't really use them, but I have, and I'll buy a Bonobo when they, when, you know, there's a good Linux laptop. So for me, is it, is it actually that Linux users maybe are just more discerning? That's yeah, I would, I would lean with that. I think that we, our expectations are,

we're not going to get, you know, the first bill of goods that you serve to us, we're not going to necessarily jump on board like we see with OS X and Windows, OS X especially. That's where I've really seen it the worst. So I think that's definitely a big piece of it. But as far as integration and all that, and as far as making an application center that doesn't suck,

I hate to beat the dead horse again, but I'm sorry, it's been done. And Ubuntu went backwards. Not only did they go and hire Lenspire developers that worked on CNR from Lenspire and actually integrated them into the Ubuntu software project, they then managed to make it suck harder. So it's like I don't know how that worked because Lenspire sucked. Don't get me wrong. I hated their model. Inspire sucked. Don't get me wrong. I hated their model. I didn't like a lot of what was going on there.

But that piece of it, before they decided to make it available to all the distributions, was the most seamless software experience I've ever seen. It was just apt. It wasn't anything wonderful. But I could do an entire aisle of software, go to another computer, log in, aisle, bam, done. It was very, very seamless. So the Ubuntu Software Center really lacks that seamless experience. Steam, however, is pretty close i think steam is probably closer than anything else out there for linux yeah so we're gonna see that so go ahead sorry go ahead go ahead um i just think going back to that question you asked are linux users cheap yeah um i don't think i don't think we are cheap i I think because we're power users, we're all power users, we want to find the best for us,

and we will look until we can't look anymore to find what we want. And then at the end of the search, if there's something that's not free, then we will end up buying it. Yeah. Okay. All right. All right. Well, I'm going to to move on i'm going to move us on yeah go ahead go ahead if you had you didn't get a chance to toss in so if you had a final closing thought go ahead so with ubuntu software center yes there are some issues performance is certainly one of them yeah um and one of the other issues is the minimum payment level

um is quite high so there are no 99 cent apps in Ubuntu software center because of the payment provider that Canonical uses to do the payments for apps in software center, which makes it less attractive for people making, you know, very small apps that could potentially get very high volume sales. Not everyone in every region can pay because, you know, certain restrictions with credit cards and certain ages makes it difficult. And they might not be able to use PayPal either. And there's also a significant hurdle to installing apps because you have to sign up for an Ubuntu single sign-on account. And that's seamless inside Software Center.

Right. And the fundamental issue, there's a lack of content. inside um software center right and the fundamental issue there's a lack of content you know when you don't have you know enough content when there isn't the sea of applications that you get on android and on ios where you can just page down and page down and page down and keep going okay you'll find some dross in there but there'll be an awful lot of stuff in there for you to choose from you'll almost certainly find it and until we've got that vast amount of content it's very difficult to get realistic sales figures. So is AppGrid going to solve some of this problem? Is Ubuntu's new software center

redesign going to be sort of a reset on some of this? Yes, to some degree. And part of it is that we haven't jumped the chasm yet. We're still, as Chris says we're we're geeks the people who are using linux and ubuntu even now are mostly geeks and so they're looking for geek tools and they're happy with you know w get and you know downloading downloading an rpm and using alien to turn it into a dev or you know that kind of stuff whereas whereas normal people we haven't got to them yet you know the mums and dads and the and then the kids we haven't got to them yet you know the mums and dads and the and then the kids we haven't got to them so it's very difficult to um to say that this is like normal behavior it's normal for us but it's not normal for them right and and ideally yeah this will all be fixed with

14.04 and 14.10 with click packages and in dash purchases so you'll be able to just um scroll down through the dash see an app and just click on it and install it. So you'll be able to just scroll down through the dash, see an app, and just click on it and install it. You won't have to go off to a store to go and find it. I've always wondered if that would be coming to the dash. That makes a lot of sense that that would be in the dash because the dash has the ability to suggest and recommend apps in the software center.

Exactly. And then the dash becomes useful. Yeah, you can kind of see the pieces of it are there. So, cool. I'm going to link to a little article here that's talking about getting an upgrade on 1304 and takes a little look at it. I know it's something that Canonical is working on. So, I'm hopeful that – what I come back to is I hope it does come down to, it's like it's the challenges to payment, it's the challenges to creating an account,

it's the price issue, it's the inventory issue, and it's also the volume issue. And so it's not any one particular thing, so it's not fair to say, well, Linux users are cheap. That might be a component of it. I would say they're more picky. There's also,

we haven't had a decent unified SDK across all the platforms. And now we're building one that works on phones, tablets, TVs, desktops, you know, everything. So effectively a developer can write their app, sell it for 99 cents, and it will run on all those form factors. Ideally, that should bring more people in.

I don't know. We'll have to wait and see. Come back in a year and right yeah it's fixed yeah and and uh i think you know it's it's definitely if it doesn't cause if it if it if it doesn't result in that it's at least the right move to make and it uh it seems to only be setting up for success who knows if it'll bring success but it's at least positioning uh in the right direction so let's hope so i I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful as well. So we declare it, Linux users not necessarily cheap,

and to stay tuned. And, you know, honestly, I think what you see there in the Steam stats actually being reflected is initial excitement and then sort of people getting, like you guys are all saying, getting back to work. But what it does show you is when all the Linux users are really excited to go in for some reason, maybe it's some new release or some update,

you can get up to 2% of Steam on Linux. Now, maybe your sustained average run rate is 1%, but on Peaks, if you can get up to 2%, that at least means the audience is there for Steam. And it could be different members of that 2% are in there at different times. At any given time, their concurrent rate is only 1%. That's true. No, that's actually a good point.

I still think they could really do wonders if they could find a way to get people to come back and say, hey, I've got the games I'm really excited about. That's not going to change. I'm not necessarily looking for new ones. Get me something that's going to enhance my existing game experience. That's why I like that natural selection too so much because that just feels like a triple A. People send me in bit messages saying, turn down your texture quality. It won't crash as much on you, which always hurts, right? like existing game experience. That's why I like that natural selection too so much. Cause that just feels like a triple a I turned, people were sending me in bit messages saying, turn down your texture quality.

It won't crash as much on you, which always hurts. Right. Cause on the bonobo, I first thing I do, I go into everything, crank, crank, everything.

It's out of principle. Yeah, exactly. I just wanted to kick a topic around with you. It's not too related to Linux, but it happened today. And you got to wonder, you look at Ubuntu touch,

you look at Firefox OS. So I'm'm gonna ask you matt unity sync i gotta talk about unity sync before we go on our second sponsor this week what is unity sync we'll find out for yourself go to derwiz.com slash unity sync but i'll give you a hint since you're asking me unity sync is a centralized service that synchronizes data between different types of directories now i don't mean like a directory on your hard drive i'm talking real enterprise grade directories actor directories zimbra directories. Now, I don't mean like a directory on your hard drive. I'm talking real enterprise grade directories, actor directories, Zimbra directories, OpenLDAP, Comnigate Pro, Oracle Internet Directory, Sun One, iPlanet. Yeah, it'll do iPlanet group-wise. Yeah,

enough people actually asked. They implemented group-wise support. It'll also do Microsoft SQL Access, Oracle Sidebase, MySQL, Postgres, SQLite, LDEF, CFV files. Here's what you can do. You can move either the entire directory or just attributes of the directory seamlessly between the different directories and all from the Unity Sync service that runs on either a Windows box or a Linux box and doesn't require its own database. Unity Sync allows you to solve this problem that has plagued it for centuries since we have had online databases it has struggled with this i know i know i i know i know your plight friends i know your plights and here's the good news no scripting or programming is required all of unity syncs

attribute management is handled by an easy to learn template system requiring no programming experience however there is a little python under the hood, or not Python, Perl, that you can get in there and do some Perl scripting if you want to do some massaging. These templates are great. You can make sure data is exactly what you expect. Look, when Susie in HR updates her application because somebody changed their last name, you need to get that reflected in whatever the IT database has pointed out for the global directory for your entire company. You want to look like one unified organization with different data stores. UnitySync solves that for you by bringing all these things together and letting you control. Plus, UnitySync's easy to use web interface,

lets you do dry runs, lets you get reports, lets you just check on the status of things. It's really quite easy and quite simple to set up, but yet extremely powerful. Clocking in at just under five megabytes, this enterprise-grade software, friends, and of course it runs on Linux, is used by some really big names, including, oh, the Canadian Department of National Defense. Yeah, yeah, those guys. Yeah, yeah. You've heard of them? What about General Dynamics? Yeah, General Dynamics. They're a customer of UnitySync, and they use UnitySync to move data between their different directories. Oh, the MLB, Washington Nationals as well. MLB Major League Baseball, HQ, also uses Unity Sync. You baseball

fans, FYI on that one. You're welcome. Go over to derwiz.com and check out Unity Sync. Just go to derwiz.com slash Unity Sync. And when you decide you want to grab it, you know, just to try it out, you can get a free trial. If you use the code Linux, it'll extend it to a full 30 day trial. So you get an extra extended trial. Plus your first year of maintenance is going to be absolutely free. So once you pull that trigger, you're going to be taken care of for a year. And that's a really great deal. So go to derwiz.com slash UnitySync, check it out and be impressed. I know it's going to solve your problems. I have struggled with this myself. And if you're out there with this kind of problem, UnitySync is going to make you the IT hero. So thanks to Derwiz for sponsoring Linux Unplugged.

So I'm going to ask you, Matt. Microsoft today announcing they're buying the Nokia phone division for $7.2 billion. This is coming from, well, everywhere on the Internet. Steven Elop will be stepping down as Nokia's CEO, and he'll be heading up Nokia's devices and services division, which is actually going to just become part of Microsoft. And Nokia will now focus on their Nokia Now brand, which is their mapping stuff,

and their Nokia network services stuff, which I guess they've had some good traction in lately. And the 30,000 employees of Nokia will be joining Microsoft. And Microsoft will be taking the Apple route and the Nexus route of developing their hardware more closely, sort of like the Moto X or the iPhone. Right, right. Well, yeah, they're following Google suit. I mean, that's exactly what they're doing. So what do you think this means for, so it's already a very locked down market.

I mean, you got your incumbents, Android, iOS, and BlackBerry and Microsoft in there. And we were already saying, like, gosh, this doesn't seem like it's very practical for somebody like Ubuntu Touch or Firefox OS to break in. Is Microsoft becoming a phone maker? Is this a big deal? Is this going to lock it down completely or is this a big deal? Is this going to lock it down completely or is this a total irrelevant move? Well, here's the problem is that first of all, like let's go to like the Firefox phones, for example. They've mastered grassroots. They obviously have got it nailed.

I think they totally nailed that one. So that's something – they can go to like eBay or something totally obscure and still get the sales happening. Microsoft is under the amusing delusion that they're still relevant in this space, and it just cracks me up, especially as the CEO is retiring. Anyway, so – cough, cough. Yeah, right. Anyway, so the whole point of it is that just because you go and buy a company like Nokia, who back in the 90s were really awesome, and they still maintain decent numbers out of the United States. I'm sure there's still people that use those phones over the borders. But honestly, I don't really see that as being a real relevant, exciting thing because the

Firefox phone comes out or the Ubuntu phone comes out. It's something completely unique and different that we haven't tried before, where with the Windows phone, we already tried it. We weren't real impressed with it. completely unique and different that we haven't tried before where with the windows phone we already tried it we weren't real impressed with it so now we want more of it it doesn't really jive i get you know what i mean let me give you a devil's advocate here so okay i'll play devil's advocate um i'm the i'm in the enterprise i'm a business i'm a let's say i'm a hospital i've got a lot of windows applications but one of the things you can't argue is Surface RT is kind of a snore, right? It's crap.

But Nokia, on the other hand, makes fantastic hardware. And if I had a Nokia-made Surface RT or Surface x86 or whatever, and I'm a doctor's office, I'm a hospital, I've got all this stuff already on the Windows platform, I can these devices i can have them cooperate with my file formats i can have them access my windows file servers and join the domain potentially and all this kind of stuff i can have group policy applied to them etc maybe not in rt but on the x86 version um could it be that what microsoft is going to do is sort of lock down this sector of the market where it's a personal device, but it's a business device first, and it needs to get some work done, and it needs to be compatible, and maybe this is what they're going to do is create a hardware platform that is all of these disenfranchised Windows 8 corporations who are refusing to go to Windows 8 eventually are going to have to pick something.

They're either going to have to go to 8 or 9, whatever it is at the time they make their leap. They're going to have to switch to Linux. They're going to have to switch to the Mac. What if Microsoft came to them and said, well, look, a ton of your staff members are coming in with iPads and Android devices, and this is driving your IT crazy,

and you guys can't standardize on this. But they obviously need this functionality. It's great for meetings. It's great for taking inventory, et cetera, et cetera, blah, blah, blah. So here guys can't standardize on this. But they obviously need this functionality. It's great for meetings. It's great for taking inventory, etc. So here's what we're going to do. We're Microsoft. We now own this hardware company. We're going to work directly with them to make a Windows product. And this is what you can move to.

You can have Windows on the desktop. You can have Windows on the server. And now you can have Windows on the mobile client device. And we create all of it. I think that that's the right idea, but here's why they won't do it. I mean, they should. And that would be if you were working for them, they'd actually be doing well because you're right.

That's exactly where they need to be. They need to be an enterprise and they need to make things seamless for the end user as well as sane for the IT people. Look, Matt, I got a good piece of malware and I need to get that across your entire organization as fast as possible. Exactly, right. Well, yeah. No, I mean, they can still lock it down at some level, I'm sure.

But it's Windows, so you're still going to always have that as an issue. But besides that, I think that, yes, if they stuck with the IT market or stuck with the enterprise market and really continued to master what – that's where they do well, that would be fine. But that's not what's going to happen. What we're going to see is we're going to see another commercial with dancing idiots and flapping tablets, and they're going to try for consumer again. That's the problem. You see, if they stuck with what you're talking about, that would actually make a lot of sense. But they won't do that exclusively. They'll dabble in that, but the consumer market is sexy.

They want to be kind of the Apple folks. And when they get a new CEO in there, I think that's what's going to happen. I think that they're going to be like, well, we need to be more relevant in the consumer market because that's really where growth is because the enterprise market, they tend to kind of lock down in segments and blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, stagnate.

Yeah, I mean, I've seen banks still using Windows 2000. Oh, yeah, it's bad. So, you know, they know that. So they want growth. I'll ask, okay, mumble chat room, anybody in here that wants to chime in, what do you think?

Is Microsoft buying up Nokia bad for the free and open mobile operating systems? I'm thinking specifically Firefox OS, Ubuntu Touch, because I kind of saw them as having potential inroads to the enterprise, especially Ubuntu Touch with convergence. I think that could be big in enterprise. But if Microsoft comes along and they've got Nokia hardware, they've got the Windows desktop, they've got the Windows mobile crap. It's all crap, but enterprises will buy it anyways. It's standardized, that's why. Is this sort of

closing the door of opportunity for these up-and-coming mobile operating systems? Mumble Room, I ask you. Not. I hope not. But as Mr. Mango also on the chat room mentioned, Nokia owns a lot of patents and I think that Microsoft is going to use those patents to hurt Firefox and all the other operating systems. Oh, that's a great point.

Nokia still owns a large segment of their IP. The difference is Microsoft has a 10-year reciprocal license with Nokia regarding those. So I believe Nokia still owns a lot of its patent portfolio. So some of it, like the Qualicom stuff goes to Microsoft. The other stuff, Microsoft has a 10-year license, I believe,

with the option at some point, at any point, to make it a perpetual license. Right. So, regarding Nokia getting bought out for the most part by Microsoft, it shouldn't come to anyone by surprise. Back in Build 2012 and reiterated in 2013, Microsoft clearly stated that they're pushing

more towards becoming a devices and services company. Because they've done so well so far. Yeah, right. Well, apparently Surface Pro is doing all right. It's just the Surface RT that's been a complete flop, and everyone knows why. Yeah, that's true. But Nokia is a very established brand, and if they could bring that level of hardware to Microsoft's other products, we might see a bit more success. I don't know, and I guess time will tell.

Yeah, I think the patent thing is going to be the scary thing to watch. I totally agree with you guys. The patents are still owned by Nokia, and Microsoft just have a cross-license to use them. That doesn't mean they get an opportunity to use them in court against other people.

The Qualicom stuff will be owned by Microsoft, and there's a lot of cellular stuff in that Qualicom portfolio. Right, but they don't own Qualicom license. They just are allowed to leverage the current deal that Nokia has with Qualicom. Yeah, right. So they probably couldn't sue over that.

They can't pull the trigger on it. Yeah, okay. Good point, good point. What I find interesting is that Nokia have let Microsoft use the name Nokia on their products, and Nokia can't make smartphones under this agreement until 2015, in which case they are allowed to make smartphones. And the announcement said that their award-winning design team manufacturing and assembly facilities around the world that Microsoft are absorbing. But it doesn't actually mention engineering, software development, and research. Right. In fact, I believe Nokia's lead engineer – or, I mean, lead designer just announced he's leaving Nokia to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities, it was. Yeah, and that could be a good move for Yola or

Mozilla may go around hiring or Canonical. That would be interesting if they snapped him up. Like Jerem's saying, man, am I glad QT is out of Nokia now, right? QT has been saved. Now, what do you guys think about

the elephant in the room is, so Steven Elop, former Microsoft employee, goes to Nokia. Everyone has always said he's a Trojan horse. Now he's going to step down as CEO, and he's going to become head of devices and services, which is getting absorbed by Microsoft. Julie Larson Green, who had just gotten promoted in this whole reshuffle, she got moved way up to the top and was reporting right to Balmer,

now reports to Elop, and Elop reports to Balmer. Now reports to ELOP, and ELOP reports to Balmer. So do you think ELOP is our next CEO of Microsoft? Yes. I would say he's either that or he's going to be our big Chaney. I totally do. I'm sorry.

I mean, just looking at this picture, you've got to have someone that's... No. You've got to have a nice figurehead in there. And I think they learned their lesson from Balmer that he's just not really the consumers just aren't really buying it you got elop pulling the strings of some i got him pulling the strings i think he's the brand of the operation for sure but i don't think he's the front man i think he's behind the scenes yeah yeah maybe i mean almost anybody be an upgrade from balmer though right

oh my gosh don't get me started man yeah so uh heaven's revenge just joined us heaven before we move off on this topic did you want to chime in with any thoughts well bomber might have kept them as a if you can hear me all right yeah we can we might have kept them as they uh devices or a personal computer company because i don't think they're going to try to stay as a PC company for very much longer. Not at all. I think we're seeing them advance more towards, you know, promoting Windows Azure, which is already a $1 billion business.

We see them bringing Office over to multiple platforms, which, lol, good luck. I think, I think what you're, I don't think they're going to drop it, right? I think they're going to canonical focus a little bit on mobile. They're going to kind of make that shift where mobile is the priority, but desktop is an important client operating system that also interacts with some of the same cloud services that mobile does. I'm not saying this is a good idea, but what I'm saying is I think they see the consumer devices as just as critical to the success as their enterprise devices because what what balmer released balmer i believe has um has felt like he's learned from apple is if you

get the consumers to buy the gadgets they'll bring it to the enterprise and so you kind of it's like it's like you it's like a front you got to have you got to have a stake in the consumer space and you got a stake in the enterprise space because the two merge together and meet. So I think he's thinking – I mean I would assume Microsoft always sees Windows as key to that overall strategy. But, right, it's no longer going to be a Windows company, right? I mean Windows is going to be part of that company. But it's just like Canonical is no longer the Ubuntu desktop company, right? Exactly.

Exactly. Yeah, no, I see them just – and with their heavy focus on going into basically a hardware mindset. Someone said, well, they do hardware well. I mean remember the Xbox, and that's true. But from my memory, that division was left alone enough to where they were able to be successful. It was very fragmented. The other departments in Microsoft, it's kind of hit and miss really, and I think Windows is probably the one that's really taken the biggest hit so I don't know this whole reorganization thing where

Ballmer ends up you know he leaves who comes in all this sort of stuff at the end of the day what you're left with is they need to make a decision as to who the hell they're marketing their product to I don't care if they're selling pears or bananas or what it doesn't make any difference who's their market and they can't seem to get their brain around that you brought up a great point that

they start with the enterprise and then you know or they start as consumers bringing in the enterprise or even vice versa in microsoft's honestly they apple was always strongest in consumer microsoft was always strongest in enterprise they need to figure out a way to keep it in the enterprise and if they can get it down trickle down to the consumer great but start anything to do with consumers just going to backfire one of the things that they said that was interesting is that they put out this PowerPoint presentation that All Things Deep posted up on their website

and I don't know who this presentation was for, but Microsoft has got to have a PowerPoint for everything. So in the PowerPoint presentation for this acquisition, they mentioned that right now Microsoft makes $10 on average per Windows phone device.

Now, it's funny because I think they make more than that on an Android device. However, once they own Nokia, they project they will actually generate $40 per device. So it's interesting to see as a licensee. licensee. And they talk about how they say it used to be common knowledge that the best way to have a successful platform was to license it and become the standard. But now we've learned that now the market has changed and the best solution is an integrated approach of hardware and software and services. We're going to do it all, try to be the one, I'll answer all. And the problem with this is it's very against the whole Linux Unix philosophy where you have a lot of tools that work together that do one thing really well. And I want to go back to when the iPhone just launched and Android just launched.

Amazon didn't have their own mobile device. Google was totally cool with integrating with everybody. Apple didn't want to have to own absolutely everything and have an iCloud service and all this garbage. So I could use Amazon for my MP3s. I could use Google for my search. It was this really nice, you know, now everybody has to own the whole stack, right? Everything has to be an integrated, custom-built solution that's custom-tailored to you. I'm just getting so sick of it. But I think there's a market for it.

My wife certainly is a market for it. She wants iEverything because she likes all that. She doesn't want to get an app. She just wants it to work. I think your wife would probably agree with that. That's kind of her thing. So there are people that definitely want that for sure. Yeah, and it's interesting too because I think we're moving – oh, sorry, Miracode.

I think we're moving towards a world that maybe not all users realize we're moving because when angela made the switch to android for a little while she was like wait wait wait what do you mean i need to put all of my photos and music up on the server i don't i want them here on my hard drive i don't want them up on the server why would i why would i want to use my data to listen to my music that i already own like why am i paying for it twice in her mind and you got to figure a lot of people are smarter than we give them credit for. Like sometimes people can just see the common sense of a situation and say, wait a minute, wait a minute. I got to buy this track and then I got to pay for the storage and I got to pay for the data to stream it instead of just having it sync over to my machine for

my hard drive. For her, what was the killer for Android was that it was too dependent on Google services. She wanted to have everything local. She wanted to be able to just plug in a USB cord to her computer, click a sync button, everything is copied from her hard drive to the device. There's also a strong network effect with these platforms. My daughter has been saving up her money to buy herself an iPod. She wanted an iPod Touch. And I said, well, how about a nexus 4 because it's you know

ridiculously cheap and it can do everything and she was like yeah okay and then when she thought about it a bit more the reason she didn't want an xs4 and she wanted an ipod touch was because all of her friends in her class use facetime yeah and that would lock her out and she wouldn't be able to talk to her friends so there's a strong network effect that once you know half the kids in the class have an ipod or an iphone that's it the rest of them are guaranteed to get one system thing isn't it if you've got apple's ecosystem you're tied into it the people at work they don't want to move over to android because they're tied into itunes everything's into itunes where the same happens with google you could you get tied it tied into google with all of those services that

ship on on a on an android device these days you can get very tied into you know the play store and you bought all your purchases in the play store you've got all your email in gmail it's it's a hard hard thing to switch away from. Yeah, I agree with that. I think iMessage is tearing my household apart. Yeah, I agree. I think, Miracle, you might make the same point, and so is Alex Bell in the chat room,

is iMessage gets a lot of crap, but I think it's the most understated feature, and FaceTime as well, although it kind of sucks that FaceTime is being relayed now. But iMessage, and the thing about iMessage is different than Hangouts because Android has this now with Hangouts. In some ways, it's superior because it can be opened up to groups. It's easy to throw Hangouts on any computer that has Chrome. So Hangouts are superior in every single way except I'm a paranoid bastard and I know that everything I say is being stored indefinitely by google and available immediately by a homeland security note and if i say something to like you know and it's just

stupid things but like it's like if i say to my wife oh yeah i'll go upstairs and i'll beat the children and i'm she knows i'm joking right because i would never do that but that's in a text message now that is logged on a google server forever that is being indexed by the National Security Agency potentially. And it could never come up. What's to say that Apple, the biggest consumer company around, isn't also storing everything? It is. You never know, especially with Apple and especially in a closed source environment. You never know.

source environment. You never know. Now, their docs illustrate what happens is the Apple servers essentially are involved for the initial handshake. So if Matt was an iPhone user, and I was an iPhone user, and I sent Matt an iMessage, and that initial iMessage is coordinated by the iCloud service, whatever you want to call it, their push service. Once the two devices link, cloud service, whatever you want to call it, their push service. Once the two devices link, there is a key generated on each handset that is then exchanged, and they then communicate directly to each other from that point forward. Maybe that's just because the Apple ecosystem has been directly tied into the business world, so they've had to develop that kind of encryption. I think what it is...

Maybe when it happens to Android, they'll update it or they'll have to update it to be able to enter into that ecosystem. I think it goes... I think it's deeper than that by an order of magnitude.

What I think it is is Google is inherently an internet-connected company. Everything is orchestrated through the cloud. Everything is synced through the cloud. Like in Google, you don't sync your calendar, right? Google Calendar is the master source of the calendar

you can push and subscribe. But Apple was a company that existed before there was an internet. So what Apple does, like here's another, Apple is local land first, and they don't have any reason to be internet first. For example, AirPlay. When you AirPlay something from an iOS device to an Apple TV,

that is a direct IP connection from the iOS device to the Apple TV. But when you use Chromecast, that sends a notification message up to the cloud. The cloud then orchestrates the connection from the YouTube video down to the Chromecast, initiates the play, and then the commands from your handset are sent up to the cloud, and the cloud server sends the commands down to the Chromecast, initiates the play, and then the commands from your handset are sent up to the cloud server, and the cloud server sends the commands down to the Chromecast. Potentially, each one has its advantages for sure,

but one is inherently more private because... I've lost connection completely. I can't hear you. One is inherently more private because it never has to leave your LAN. And the fact that iMessage and FaceTime can in some capacities work like that, and the fact that it enables free text messaging and that they support pictures and messages is a huge advantage to that platform.

That's all. So that is a lock-in that we don't even talk about when we talk about Ubuntu Touch or Firefox. We talk about apps, but we don't even talk about all of these services like video stores and music stores and these messaging services, Hangouts or iMessages, that are sort of becoming indispensable for some people. Sure. I think both Google and Apple are inherently evil. I just think they do evil differently. Exactly, exactly.

I know we get some flack for the Ubuntu Software Center, but if you buy stuff from the Software Center, they're just a bunch of PPAs, and you can just log into Launchpad and get those packages back out and port them across to another Linux distro if you like. It's not so easy on either iOS or Android. Yeah, good point. regarding whether the move by Microsoft and Nokia is going to affect Ubuntu Phone and such, is those systems, like Canonical and Mozilla and Yola, they don't care if you use Amazon for your books and Google Music for your music. They don't care.

It's just to create this wonderful OS that everything can kind of just coexist on, and I think that's kind of like the point we need to get back to, you know, regarding these new kind of, I guess you could say, indie OSs. Well, I think it also helps define their market. That's their market. For people that want to select and choose those

individual services, folks like us that care about that sort of thing, that's attractive. Yeah, no, I think that's great great because it definitely defines that market for folks. Yeah, so my solution for this is this was kind of the final straw that made me roll my own XMPP server. Because I just wanted to, all of this NSA stuff has made me just, it's not that I'm worried about being monitored, it just, it makes, it crosses my mind now. Like I think about it.

Like, I was doing a whole bunch of reading about Syria recently, and then I got down a path, so there's been protests outside of John Kerry's house. Well, I haven't seen that on the news. So I wanted to see pictures of it. So now I realize I'm searching for, like, Syria locations on Google Maps. I'm searching for chemical weapons. I'm searching for John Kerry's house. I mean, maybe nothing happens.

But the fact that I have to worry about it makes me uncomfortable. And so I just like, you know what? I'm going to go to XMPP. I'm going to chat with my wife on our own private chat server. So that way, I never have to worry about it at all. It never even crosses my mind. It's not a distraction anymore. And I like that peace of mind. And I like the idea that Yala or Ubuntu Touch or Firefox OS is more about the phone

getting something on there, but not necessarily locking you into any particular service. That, to me as a customer, might be their biggest advantage, that they don't have that ecosystem. I completely agree with that. And I think the way I've always looked at privacy long before all this stuff with privacy concerns really came about is I always looked at privacy as a very simple analogy in that absolutely I can, if I choose to, stand in front of my window and get undressed and hop into the shower. And if someone sees me, it's really no big deal. Please don't. But I feel more comfortable if no one has to subject their eyes to that, and I just pull the blinds. And that's kind of where I see this taking privacy back into our own hands thing.

It's that – it's just – for me, it's out of principle. It's just like it's none of their damn business, period. It doesn't matter why. It's just none of their damn business. It's just my perspective. I just keep it simple. All right. So while we got the mumble line open, I wanted to toss something around in the chat room.

I'll watch you too so something i get an email about once a day is hey the captcha isn't working on the jupiter colony well the jupiter colony is the form not you know jupiter colony is kind of what we is is an overall branching title that we have for a lot of things but the jupiter colony form specifically the php bb bulletin board that we have up at jupiter broadcasting.com slash forum is retired um it's in sort of read only mode we're not allowing new account creations there's still activity there partially because i don't know so the main reason is i don't have the time to take care of that anymore and it just it's

something that just needs attention from time to time and i don't have it uh so i thought well okay social networks have kind of replaces but then not everybody wants to have a social network account uh reddit kind of replaces but not everybody wants to have a social network account. Reddit kind of replaces, but not everybody wants to have a Reddit account. So we have a great G+, Jupiter Colony community. I really would like to have seen everything move from the forums to that, but so many people said, I don't want to use G+. So what, in this day and age, so there's apparently some forums that a community still wants to organize on and discuss, a subset of the community but they don't want to create accounts on some other

services, servers or anything like that what do you use or maybe are forums just dead is it just maybe time we just say goodbye forums, you're in rate only mode stop trying to make accounts everybody I mean I kind of have but people are still trying to do it, still trying to sign up, still trying to engage in conversation in there.

We've been promoting, in Ubuntu, we've been promoting Discourse, which is made by the same people who make Stack Exchange, Jeff Atwood. And it's brilliant. We've stood up UbuntuDiscourse.org, and it's a really lovely way to have discussion. It looks a bit like a forum and a bit like Stack Exchange. It's got the best bits of Stack Exchange and the best bits of forums. What's the management like? So, like, what's the upkeep? Is it hosted?

It's been thinking about it for a while. So we run it on, I think we run it on HP Cloud, but, you know, you can run it on anything. It runs on Linux. We've written a Juju charm for it so we can stand up an instance anywhere at any time. And we have the upstream developers contribute on our discourse when our users have problems.

This I like. Yeah, I agree. I think this is an appropriate approach. And you don't have to sign up. It uses OpenID or whatever. So you can sign in with some other single sign-on. That is pretty cool. That's a good recommendation.

It's attractive. So is this actually hosted? Could we host our own copy? Yes. Okay. It's open source. It's something I've been thinking about for quite a while, Chris, because I'm one of those people that try to sign up.

I'm actually a PHP developer, and I was going to send you an email, actually, and ask if you wanted something built, but it's funny that you've spoken about it now. Yeah, yeah. I know I get emails about it a lot, so I know it's kind of a topic of that. I just don't really have a great forum to address it. a forum to address it. I do like this discourse thing. But I guess my the fundamental question I have is, is it still needed today? I mean, between all the social networks, the IRC, a mumble server, TeamSpeak servers, the subreddits, do we really need a forum, too? I've sworn off forums ever since the change of the last Jupiter Colony forum change.

I've sworn through forums ever since. Dude, that was like six years ago. Never have I gone on another forum since. Well, I was thinking of maybe doing something similar to maybe have a forum, but with the social networking aspect built in, kind of with our own custom accounts on the Jupiter colony. So how would that work?

We would have to find some software to run it on or have somebody develop it. Well, since discourse is open source, why don't we just extend that? I think that's something we should look into right there. I like that. I think that's the smartest approach.

All right. Well, thanks, guys. Sounds good. Thanks, guys. So I'm going to mute the channel just for a little bit as we get to a couple of emails, then we've got to run because we're running long. I don't – you know, it is a hard thing to get to these emails, Matt, but we've got some good ones. We've got some good ones, and I think this one came in – I think this one might have been on.

We've got some bit messages, too. And it was from B via bit message. Chris and matt great job last unplugged we're going with linux unplugged now uh thanks to you clowns i will never ever get through my podcast back catalog not only do i have another jb podcast on my list but you've turned me on to star trek podcast so now i get around 130 podcasts in my current queue i guess i have to tell my boss that it's your fault. On the subject of mail servers, I've been running one for years. I started out running Colab on a Spark station back in the day. That box died about 10 years ago, so I began running Zimbra on a P4 rack mount I had in the basement.

He likes Zimbra quite a bit. He says, I was getting email from my public mail servers and collecting them locally. However, since ISP had enough force, I i had to push the isp had to push the force server use but i'm gonna jump ahead here uh he says that uh he says that he now that he's got now these really now the nsa shenanigans have happened that he's doubled down on this in light of all of that and he's gonna he's gonna set it up for real again and maybe this time include nauseous alerts and things like that for when it goes offline. Sounds pretty snazzy. I know, I agree.

So, all right, so I want to read just a couple more. I'm going to make it quick because I promised, Matt, I promised we would do it, so I cannot go back on my promise. Here we go. We did make that claim. Juris, Linux Handhelds, hello, Chris and Matt. Can you share your opinion on Linux Handhelds in the open market at the moment? Like, for example, the open Pandora, also I have the new GW.

I want to know what we thought about Linux on handheld consoles. Matt, do you have any thoughts on that? Honestly, I can't speak intelligently to it because I haven't really subjected myself to it extensively. I think that actually is kind of an answer. It's kind of like... I want to i'm interested i'm open-minded i got this gcw zero but it's kind of like uh you'll be really great what would make this gcw perfect is like if good old games were just like boom that's our console

of choice and we're just gonna put it talking right yes right right because you can run dos box on this thing so if you got dos box goingBox going on this, you could run a ton of good old games, and if good old games could make a package and just be like, pow! I really think then you'd really have something, because the thing is, is these little handheld consoles, like the Open Pandora and the GCW Zero

are really cool, they're open, they're really neat, each one of them does something unique and interesting, but, at the end of the day they're really going up against smartphones now you know a few you know five six years ago that maybe not have been the case but now they really are going up against smartphones so it's really they got to stand out in some way so i'm i'm hopeful in the gcw but we'll see that would be cool i love the idea with good old games because that really solves the ecosystem problem

for that particular thing yeah they just got to see the light. I am a big GOG fan. But, you know, just like we've kind of seen them not really get the whole Linux thing. Right. Well, we'll see. Chicken or the egg. Chicken or the egg. Exactly.

So John writes in, he says, I've been using Play on Linux for some time now. And the most part, I had moderate success. What are your thoughts or experiences using any of these, and which has worked best for you? I'd love to see some information on the subject. Well, boy, for myself, as a rule, I think Wine is a fine project where developers have put in a lot of work and done wonderful things. As a usage thing, I won't use Wine. I will play in traffic on the freeway before using it just because it's not really my, it's just not my style. I try to put my feet down and stick in a native environment if at all possible.

I almost, in some cases, would prefer to just do full-on virtualization. True. That said, and this I think goes back to, as a Linux user, when I see something of value, I buy it. And since the mid-2000s, I don't know when, I mean for a very long time, I have bought every release of Crossover Office. I have a current version as of today. And I'm not a huge – I play on Linux. I've had really hit and miss success with. But Crossover, if they say it works in that so in crossover you first of all

you get a really nice wrapper around wine you do it sets up bottles real nice so each each thing you want to get running under wine it has its own self-contained configuration you can you can load stuff into it or you can have everything isolated you can have different versions so i can have an xp bottle a 2000 bottle and a vista bottle or whatever. And that's how I do Star Trek Online. And to their credit, once Crossover said, yeah, we're going to support Star Trek Online, it has worked solidly. And a lot of things are like that. And sometimes their list is a little lackluster.

Like it's like Office 2010 is the latest version. But I found it to be accurate. That's one thing I will give them props for is that if they say it works, it works. Yeah, exactly. That'll give them props. They've expanded a community supported section now so they've got uh ones that users can submit that have been sort of vetted it's nice it's still not great though i mean like for example star trek online takes 10 minutes to launch once it launches it's okay but for some reason under crossover wine it takes 10 minutes sure uh i know that so i just accept it and it works fine on it's fine uh but you know i i'm i'm with matt i it's it's my it's my last resort exactly and and one

other thing i thought they did well is at least they used to do uh bounties so where there were you could actually uh chip in to help make this more compatible i don't remember if they still do that or not now, but there used to be, you could actually throw money in that direction to say, I want this particular game or particular app to run. I don't know. I haven't tried that for a long time,

but yeah, they had a voting system. I think that's still around. A couple of quick things I just wanted to mention. This is like pissing in the wind here, but if anybody out there has access to a computer around them, it has iTunes, a Linux unplug,

just hit the new and noteworthy section of iTunes. If you give us a rating and a comment, that helps Discovery. It keeps us kind of in the charts for a while. Once we're up there, it helps. And the reason why I mention that is because if we stay up there for a few days, we'll probably have a few new thousand people, several thousand people find the show. And that's a great thing for Linux and for the network in general. So I know it can be challenging for some of you Linux users out there to get access to iTunes.

But if it happens, somehow, we would appreciate a vote. Oh, absolutely. And that's another thing you can use Wine for. While you're not going to be able to do a lot with it, you can probably get an older version of iTunes. Brossover has like an installer script for that. Yeah. Yeah, it does. Okay, so I think that was all the emails.

Now, I was kicking around an idea before the show. Okay. We don't have to do it. You have final call on this, Matt. All right. A lot of the pre-shows on Unplugged have been Star Trek heavy. Talk a lot of Star Trek on the live show. Unplugged, we're recording Tuesdays at 2 p.m. Pacific over at jblive.tv,

which is 9 p.m. UTC, I believe. Join us over at jblive.tv if you can do it. What do you think, Matt, of watching Star Trek Deep Space Nine episode one before next week's Unplugged? And then at the last 10 minutes or so of Unplugged, we'll sort of

wrap up all of our topics and we'll talk about that first episode. It might just be for just like a minute or two or something. Oh, absolutely. No, I'm totally fine with that. Shoot me an email reminder. The DS9 challenge. You want to do the DS9 challenge? Okay.

And that's one, actually my favorite out of the entire, I actually prefer that over TNG in a lot of ways. So yeah, I've watched the hell out of it. So that's not a problem. I was really not sure what direction to go. TNG, I leaned heavily. TOS, I definitely had to consider. I mean, it's the original the reason i'm not doing toss is uh there's already a really great podcast out there that's talking about toss uh mission log i mentioned them before and uh i don't want to step

on their thing and that's their whole show uh and but i i need to i need to bring ds9 back into my life as a star trek fan i go through these cycles of Star Trek re-ingestation where I reprocess and re-watch and re-understand and I am now at that point with Deep Space Nine and I need to do it in order so I'm in for this the long haul as long as the audience and you are so if you guys can stick with it every single week I'm up for another episode I have I can somehow manage to watch one episode of Deep Space Nine on Netflix between now and next week I I can make that happen. You can make that commitment, right? Yeah, I can do it. I can do it.

And, you know, I don't know if you remember, but it's a good episode. You got like some Borg Cube action in there. You got Jean-Luc in there. Right. It's a very, and it's really setting the pace for that first season. Yeah. So we'll see how it goes. We'll see how you guys respond to that.

And I know I said I'd give you some more of my thoughts on the GCWw zero but honestly i just haven't had much time to play with it since last uh i did play with a little more and i'm kind of waiting to see my wife really likes it she thought it was really awesome she thought it was like she said i think her words were like it looks like a much more modern ds or something she said it looks really good uh so i'm gonna see how my kids react to it too because they haven't really done a lot of controller stuff. So maybe in the next week or so, we'll do a little chat about the GCW Zero. Sounds good. All right.

So I'm going to bring us to a close, then. If you want to email the show, you can do that. Just email linuxactionshow at jupiterbroadcasting.com. We'll be watching that. Also, you can submit things to our subreddit over at linuxactionshow.reddit.com. And that's probably your best out of all of your resources. That's probably the best way to get something in front of us. You can always hang out in our IRC room, too, of course, and join us there and chat with us.

And don't forget to join us live and subscribe and download. And if you're near an iTunes machine, we could use the help a little bit there, too. Absolutely. All right, Matt, well, have a great week. I'll see you on Sunday. Sounds good. See you then. Alright everyone, well thank you so much for tuning this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. We'll see you right back here next Tuesday. you