LINUX Unplugged - Episode 43: Mint 17: Fresh or Stagnant? | LUP 43
Episode Date: June 4, 2014We’ll take a look at the new features of Linux Mint 17, and discuss the new Cinnamon release. Then we’ll debate if distro derivatives are a bad thing.Plus: Is Red Hat too over controlling of Gnome...? Candidates for the Gnome Foundation’s board think so, we’ll discuss.
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This is Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that has that fresh, minty flavor.
My name is Chris.
My name is Matt.
Hey, Matt.
So we're going to talk about Linux Mint 17
today. It was a release that came out over the weekend and it's an interesting release because
this one is the version that will be supported until 2016 and technically will continue to get
updates until 2019. Wow. Yeah so that's a huge like they're going to base and continue to push
like all new versions of Linux Mint until 2016 off this platform.
This is maybe the biggest release they've ever had.
I don't know.
I don't know if that's maybe overstated.
It might not be, actually.
It feels that way.
I think that's a safe bet.
Yeah, and so I've had it running here.
I've also been trying out Cinnamon on some of my Arch boxes, and the Mumble Rooms got it installed, so we'll talk with those guys about it. And then also, if we have time after that, and I think we probably
will,
Matt wrote up an article on Datamation
about,
essentially asking, are Ubuntu
derivatives possibly a bad thing?
And Aaron Saigo on Google
Plus today asked the question,
what has Mint accomplished
in terms of furthering
desktop adoption and things like that.
And the two questions are kind of being raised at the same time.
Both are valid points, and I think we'll have a conversation on that.
And then last but not least, developers have been complaining about something that I hold dearly on the desktop,
and that's OpenGL.
And I feel like this is one of those cases where sometimes developers just complain and complain and complain,
and they jump on a bandwagon where they're not fully informed on a topic,
and then it just turns into a giant circle jerk.
And right now, OpenGL is in the crosshairs of apparently every developer out there.
So if we have time, we'll get to that towards the end of the show.
But Matt, I want to start with some feedback.
We've got something kind of neat going on.
This is more of an FYI heads up for folks in the Jupyter Broadcasting community.
If you're going to Southeast Linux Fest, we have a thread in the Linux Action Show subreddit where we'd like you to check in.
Our crew is going to be down there, Q5Sys and Noah and some others.
I don't know who all is going officially.
I think Blaster might be going too and a few others.
Nice.
And they'll be taking interviews and getting clips for Jupyter Broadcasting shows at Southeast Linux Fest.
So if you're going to go and want to meet up with the guys and say hi, go over to the LinuxActionShow.reddit.com subreddit and check in in the Southeast Linux Fest 2014 sign-in sheet.
That way they can kind of coordinate.
That's how they're kind of getting everything put together.
So that should be fun.
I kind of wish I was going.
We won't be making it to that one ourselves.
put together. So that should be fun. I kind of wish I was going. We won't be making it to that one
ourselves. Matt and I,
we had a good time at LinuxFest,
but we can only go to so many in a year.
So true.
Okay, Matt, so speaking of
LinuxFest,
Jared writes in about Texas LinuxFest. He says,
Hey Chris and Matt, I'll soon be attending my first LinuxFest
right here in Austin. After watching
your coverage up north, I decided to look for one
near me. I'm new to the Linux fun,
and I want to have the most enjoyable time possible while I go.
My brother and father will be along for the ride,
as I've come from a long line of thinkers.
Please check out the link if you have some time
and let me know of any recommendations on talks.
Additionally, I just started watching a few months ago,
and I'm hooked on the Jupyter Broadcasting program.
I mean, this network is a real treat.
Thank you.
And he said he's got his 4-year-old daughter on Edubuntu for her first machine, and it totally rocks.
So let's go take a look over at TexasLinuxFest.org.
And they have it in slash content slash event dash schedule.
And I'm looking at this right now.
This looks like a pretty good lineup.
They've got Wellware and Red Hat and Golden Frog and HP and Linux Foundation as sponsors.
Yeah.
I don't know, man.
The graphical ZFS tools would be one for my interest.
And also Linux shaping the future of network file systems
would also be one that I would find to be pretty interesting.
Looks like a pretty solid lineup.
OpenStack for beginners might be good
if you've heard a lot about OpenStack
but you don't know where it is, what it is.
This is one of the things that Fests are great for.
You can go in and sit in on talk that you might not have originally gone to.
But since you're there and it's got a good time, you can always get up and leave.
But I have done that a few times where I'm like, I think I might be kind of interested in this, but I'm not sure.
And I'll go sit in and it's always been a good experience.
So go through that list and check it out. And if you're going to be at Texas Linux Fest, say hi to Jared, a fellow Linux Unplugged listener.
We got a few people that wrote in about Manjaro again, defending it.
We talked about Manjaro last week and a little bit the week before.
And I got to say, hats off to pretty much everybody who wrote in some really well-stated, well-reasoned
emails defending Manjaro
and why it works for them. Sam wrote in one of them.
It's a bit long, but
I'll go through some of it. He says, hey Chris and Matt,
just a quick response to the conversation about Manjaro
in Unplugged 42.
I use and enjoy Manjaro on all of my
laptops, and I've installed it for new
Linux users. I think that the benefits of Manjaro's
delayed release scheme have recently been proven with
the release of Cinnamon 2.2.
And see, the reason why I wanted to read this one is because, Sam, I specifically called
out, can anybody tell me a use case where these delayed packages have actually saved
anybody any trouble?
He says, both Arch and Manjaro update their versions of the UPower package to a new version
that changed its API from the typical OSS fashion.
A consequence of that is a lot of Cinnamon's features relating to power management stopped working.
It was an easy fix for Arch packagers, and it took a long time to get Cinnamon 2.2 in a usable place.
Oh, I'm sorry, it wasn't an easy fix.
During almost a month, Cinnamon 2.2 under Arch was in a really rough shape.
Manjaro, on the other hand, pushed Cinnamon 2.2 and the new UPower package into its unstable branch
and later to its testing repos, where testers did find lots of issues,
and even worked with Arch packagers who were quite helpful at fixing them.
But Manjaro users on the stable branch never had to suffer through that.
Even more significantly, at the time, there was no problem with NDM,
the default Manjaro display manager.
There was a problem that made it completely stop working again.
Manjaro unstable branch users saw the bugs, and stable users of Manjaro were never affected.
As major security patches, Manjaro occasionally releases out-of-band, off-package updates if security issue is big enough to warrant it.
So please be kind to Manjaro.
It's providing a great service to its users.
What a great response, Sam.
What do you think?
I think that really nails it because, I mean, most of my most of my computers are actually, you know, are Arch-based.
I mean, essentially it's just Arch.
However, the machine I call you each week when we do Linux Unplugged is a Manjaro machine because, quite honestly, I don't want to roll the dice with Skype every week.
I don't need to, you know, or not just Skype, but any of the back-end stuff as well. I don't need to have an audio library update and potentially have a bug that I didn't catch when I was combing through various files and updates and whatnot.
Well said.
So, you know, I like to keep one machine very, very segmented, you know, to where it's like group updates, nice and clean.
And then everything else I just let roll on Arch.
It's great.
Yeah, very well said.
great. Yeah, very well said. Now, speaking of bugs, I know we are actually currently suffering from a little bug in Arch that's affecting some of us. Willie, did you have
an update about that Xcursor bug? Yeah, actually. No, right now I'm not actually
locked into my Arch box. I just rolled it back for the mint thing. Okay. But this is a perfect
example of where they have the opportunity to fix something that
affects the rest of Arch. So Matt, you kind of were playing on the pre-show. You were discovering,
we were talking, hey, I just did updates on Arch. Chrome isn't launching for me. VLC
isn't launching for me. You saw a suggestion in the chat room about a certain package,
and you rolled back what, and it did solve the problem? Yeah, I actually rolled back LibX cursor
from dash two to dash 1, rather
than reading off the entire version
number. And surprisingly, instantly,
no reboot needed. Everything worked. Everything
was fine. And so, you know, being
able to do so, you know, of course, any
Arch-based distro makes rolling back really easy.
But, I'm pretty sure this
probably won't happen on Manjaro.
Right. And this is a good example. So, if you're
on Arch today, and you're having problems with your Chromium launching
or your VLC crashing on you or whatever is crashing,
your SM player has done it to faint in our Mumble room.
I actually had files lock up.
I don't know if it was related.
It might be.
It was making everything difficult to use there for a few minutes.
I was pretty frustrated.
Hey, Matt, before we jump into the Mint 17 discussion, maybe actually, well, no, we'll start with Mint 17 before we get to the derivative things.
I want to mention today, episode two of Tech Talk Today was out.
I announced it last week on Linux Unplugged.
Second episode's out today and I took a few shots at
Apple for essentially blatantly
ripping off GNOME
and GNOME client-side directions. I don't know if you've seen
the new OS X theme, Matt,
but it looks exactly like my GNOME box.
I purposely avoid as much news
as possible, but that did leak into my
gates and I laughed
and made some comments on it for sure.
Safari looks identical to Gnome Web
it's just
a little uglier but it's almost identical
like it's got those Mac OS X
color buttons that I'm not a big fan of
and other than that it looks like Gnome Web
and Xcode looks like a Gnome app
and the Maps app looks like a Gnome app
so I went off on it on episode 2
of Tech Talk Today which by the way
Tech Talk Today is on the air.
So check it out over at jupiterbroadcasting.com.
Okay, well, before we get into Mint, I want to thank our first sponsor this week, and that is Ting.
Go over to linux.ting.com.
Linux.ting.com will take $25 off your first device.
If you've already got a device that works on the Ting network, check out their BYOD page because they're going to give you a $25 credit.
And if you're like me, that'll pay for your first month of service.
Linux.ting.com.
Now, why Ting?
Because it's mobile that makes sense.
No contract.
No early termination fee.
Let that sink in for a second.
And you only pay for what you use.
It's a flat $6 plus whatever taxes are applicable.
And then your usage.
Your messages, your minutes, and your megabytes.
Ting just adds them up at the end of the month to whatever bucket
you fall into. Baller, that's what you pay!
You're not paying into like a $120
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How does that even break down?
How do they even decide what to charge you for that?
Whereas Ting is just flat rate and it's all listed out right on their
website. And they have so many great
devices now.
So many great devices.
But if you go to linux.ting.com, go check out the Nexus 5.
$350 shipped from Ting.
This is such a great Android phone.
This is the Android phone where if you're like somebody,
either you want one of the fanciest phones out there right now,
this is still a great phone.
But I actually think if you bought this phone,
this would be a phone that would last you for several years. And I was talking
with Fate earlier today, and we were talking like one of the reasons I bought it and one of the
reasons he's going to be buying the Nexus 5 is this is also the phone that all of our favorite
alternative mobile operating systems are starting to target. There's essentially,
if you've heard of that operating system, there's either an image or about to be an image for the Nexus 5.
And why not pair that with a great network who respects you as a customer?
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Go check them out.
They've got no-hold customer service, an incredible dashboard to manage your account.
And when you only pay for what you use, the value is incredible.
You might pay a little more up front for that Nexus 5, although I don't think so.
I mean, that's just what Nexus 5s go for.
But you get the example. You might pay a little bit up front for that Nexus 5, although I don't think so. I mean, that's just what Nexus 5s go for. But you get the example.
You might pay a little bit more up front for a phone.
But because you're not subsidizing that cost over two years, it's such a great value.
And Rotten Corpse in our mumble room would save almost $4,000 by switching his two lines over.
So as you add more lines, because again, like, so if, you know, if Matt, you got like, you say you got the nephew on the Ting plan over there.
Well, that's just $6 a month.
That's all it's going to cost, and then whatever he uses.
And if he's mostly a texter, that's going to be dirt cheap for you.
Or if he's on Wi-Fi a lot.
And he's using the Wi-Fi a lot, absolutely.
And a great part of it is that if he gets twitchy and needs to be schooled, hey, you know what?
I can go to the control panel.
That's right.
I can pull things down a little bit.
You got the dashboard hammer.
That's right.
Linux.Ting.com. and a big thanks to Ting for sponsoring
Linux Unplugged.
I love my Ting phone.
Alright, so I've got Mint 17
installed here. I went the Cinnamon route
and I gotta say, I think Cinnamon's
looking really good. The new Cinnamon's pretty awesome.
I'll run down a couple of new features
and then we'll talk about it. So starting with Linux Mint
17, we mentioned this on the Linux Action Show,
big updates to the update manager.
It still holds kernel updates back.
I'll get to that in a little bit.
But it makes it really clear if you're a little twitchy about what you're updating,
Mint's kind of there to hold your hand.
So that's good.
The other thing that I thought was pretty nice is they've really taken MDM,
which the rest of the community has just kind of abandoned,
and they've made it a really nice MDM, which the rest of the community has just kind of abandoned, and they've made it a really nice display manager.
Multi-monitor support, animated backgrounds using HTML,
high DPI support all have been added to MDM.
Lots of language support.
Their new welcome screen, which we talked about in the last,
they've really kind of made the system settings more refined.
The graphical interface for system settings was refined,
and settings now look more consistent.
Settings are better categorized and separated into subsections, which make a lot
of sense. I was able to flow through it really easy. I also have worked on Cinnamon's snapping
functionality, which Cinnamon right now has one of the best snapping systems out of any desktop
environment. Now, they admit that they are a bit challenging, so they cleaned up the Hot Corners UI,
which I have used a little bit, and I think it's really well done.
So again, where Cinnamon has taken a power user feature, wrapped a pretty good UI in it, and not made it overly complicated for basic users.
The Hot Corner module is also less confusing now, and it's more easier to find than before.
That allowed them to disable top left hot corners by default, which had screwed a lot of people up.
So now you can go in and just turn it right on.
Hot Corners by default, which had screwed a lot of people up,
so now you can go in there and just turn it right on.
And last but not least, you can now shade windows just by scrolling them with your scroll wheel on the title bar,
which is always important.
And they have better integration with GNOME,
so if you have GNOME on the same system,
your system settings won't be bumping heads
and conflicting with each other like they had in the past.
Linux Mint 17, in summary, features Cinnamon 2.2,
MDM 1.6, Linux Kernel 3.13, and it's all based on Ubuntu 14.04. Linux Mint 17 will receive
security updates until 2019. Until 2016, future version of Linux Mint will be based on the same
package base as 17 is. So that's a huge one, in my opinion. And until 2016, the development team
won't start working on a new base and will be fully focused on this as the base. So that's a huge one, in my opinion. And until 2016, the development team won't start
working on a new base and will be fully focused on this as the base. I don't know of any other
Linux distribution that really does it quite like this at this point. Matt, why don't we start
there? What do you think of them saying, you know, we're going to be releasing future versions,
but all of the main base packages are essentially going to stay relatively the same.
Is that a good idea?
I think for what they're trying to do and who they're trying to go after, yes, but with an asterisk.
The asterisk I would put on that is for people that are going straight across from, like, say,
the more bleeding edge Ubuntu specifically to where it's not an LTS release,
they may not find it so awesome.
But I think for casual users that are used to upgrading their Windows install
every 10 years or whatever it is, I think it's fine.
I think it's an interesting approach.
And if nothing else, even if you're not a fan of it,
you've got to admit that it does differentiate them from other alternatives.
So PCWiz, you consider yourself a power user,
but you also like this static base, don't you?
I like not having to worry about my system.
I like code.
I like my system to stay the same.
I don't want to have to worry about updating my system
or wake up one day and VLC won't start or whatever.
Bromium.
Yeah.
Just needs to work for me.
Okay, Rod and Corpse, tell me, it's all about the implementation?
What do you mean?
Well, there's two potentially massive problems with Mint sticking to an LTS.
The first is the package management.
They said they're going to stick to one package base,
but are they going to update the actual applications,
or is it just the core structure that's being stuck?
They've never addressed that. Right, and like when 14.0.1 or 14.0.1 and 0.2.3 and et cetera, et cetera come out, will they match that?
Will they follow that or will they stay at 14.0?
They'd more than likely match that in the sense of like the kernel and the structure, but 14.04 Ubuntu doesn't update applications either.
So that's the problem.
They'd have to do it themselves.
And they haven't mentioned whether they're going to do that or not.
Well, I assume they're going to do user land applications like Firefox and Chrome and VLC,
right?
Well, I mean, the massive packages that Ubuntu does, then they'll bring those in. But like
packages that are just open source apps like MyApp or Htop or TMux or something like that that's widely used but not super popular.
So if you have – if they have a system that would compensate for that, that would be great, but they haven't mentioned whether they do or not.
And the other bigger problem is potentially – Cinnamon is built, and they release it two months before Mint ever comes out because the Arch
users are going to beat on it
and make sure that it's good and then they
kind of get like a
I don't know, not a sneaky but an easier
way to test their stuff. The problem
with it is that the core
system of any LTS is going to
stay on one version of GTK and maybe
update a little bit but not a massive version.
And this is 3.10, right?
Right. So if Cinnamon is stuck on a particular GTK base,
then the next time it's updated,
it might break in Arch and stuff
like that because Arch will always be up to date
in GTK. Well, and it's not just Arch. Eventually
it will be Fedora. It'll be all the other
distributions too. Right, everybody.
Yeah, so how will that?
Wimpy, do you have any insights on that?
A little. I spoke to Clem
about all of this some months
ago when he first sort of fielded
the idea, but specifically
around GTK.
For example, today I've just
built and installed Unity
on Arch to do some
benchmarking,
and that's using GTK 3.12,
and I'm not sure what version Unity,
or rather the Ubuntu desktop is targeting at the moment,
but I think it's either 3.10 or 3.8,
but surprisingly 3.12 with a few patches works really well.
It looks a bit odd in places like other desktops that are moving to the common
versions of gtk3 but it's it's not it's not awful and i think one of the reasons why clem is choosing
to put a line in the sand here is so that he can just target a stable base so that all of those
little features you've just mentioned that are nice evolutions
and improvements are what the mint team can focus on rather than having to deal with regressions
now heaven's revenge uh points out this is already becoming a problem with elementary os can you
elaborate well only by third party instances most people or most articles always complain that elementary os's
base is an lts release and it diverges from the cutting edge or the leading ubuntu release 1204
at that yeah 1204 and there's a lot of incompatibilities and why pantheon won't work
on almost anything else because it's based on the
lts releases so long ago yeah i mean and a lot could change we see within a few years the entire
technological landscape can change and especially in the open source world where things like gdk
get updated and a lot of you know quote-unquote breaking changes happen all the time is it really a good idea to
have like say a gdk based well say linux mint would be based on gdk 3.10 and someone decides
to do some gdk application development on linux mint 17 and then they want to deploy it to, say, Ubuntu 14.10 at that point, or 15.04 or whatever,
there's going to be substantial breakages between those GTK versions.
I mean, there would be a problem with just using Ubuntu in the first place with the Unity compatibility with Cinnamon,
because they use different versions of GTK.
with Cinnamon because they use different versions of GTK.
The thing about Elementary, though, is that they have only been around for two years,
so they've only technically released one time.
Mint's not doing what Elementary does.
They release once every two years every LTS,
whereas Mint plans to use an LTS base to release consistently.
So if they consistently update the necessary packages, there shouldn't be a problem. Wimpy, do you think we're worrying about nothing when it comes to GTK changes? Well, yeah, I think the whole point of what Mint is setting out to do here is to pick
an LTS release which has a GTK version, and they will target that GTK version for the next four
years. So they don't care about the gtk changes that are happening
when i when i discussed this with clem he did make the point that yes you know the the arch
users and the cinnamon um uh package maintainers for arch may well find regressions and issues
and the mint team will address those as as it's brought to their attention as they have done
you know for some time now but it isn't their primary focus.
Their primary focus is going to be revving the Cinnamon desktop environment and bringing
new features and improvements to what is a stable underlying platform.
Well, and I could see if there's a transition taking place between traditional Unity desktop
and the new Unity 8 desktop,
and maybe that's not whatever.
Maybe some people won't like some of the new apps or whatever it is, and Mint could come
along and say, look, we've been here for years.
We're super rock solid, and we've just been polishing and polishing and polishing the
Cinnamon desktop.
I mean, they could be in a really, really good position.
And plus, like the chat room's pointing out, it's not like Clem can't reevaluate plans
if things don't go swimmingly two years down the road.
He can look at his outline and go, well, you know what?
Maybe it's time to reevaluate.
Or maybe the Linux Mint Debian edition, because that continues on.
Maybe that gets to a point where that's particularly interesting.
Riley, I wanted to let you get your point in about Mir.
How do you think that plays in?
Yes, because a lot of people a while back were worried about what's going to happen when 1410 and 1504 goes MIR.
So what is all the other dishes based off of what the Bootsy are going to do?
Maybe that's what Clem's thing is.
You know what I'm going to do?
I'm going to sit down for a couple of years.
Because a lot of people thought they should stick with Debian and do that way.
And it's focused on that.
But this keeps the user base up.
So there's just two downsides that I see that I think are primarily worrying.
Number one, I still believe the number one users of the Linux desktop
are of a technical variety.
So package currentness is important to what I believe to be
the vast majority of actual people who use Linux on the desktop. There's probably lots of people, there's probably a
great percentage of people who drone-lessly use their machine and don't even realize what
operating system it's running. But people who are actively engaged and want the latest and
greatest, I believe represent the majority of the Linux desktop. So I don't know if Mint's
going to be appealing to those people, but there is always that the people who don't care,
there is always people from that really technical crowd who move themselves into
that group as life gets busy or for whatever reason. So you can still satisfy that niche,
and that user base is always growing as new users come in. So I'm not saying it's a failed strategy,
but I'm just saying it probably won't appeal to overly advanced Linux users.
The other thing I'm worried about is it seems like the long-term success of Cinnamon would
be dependent on the adoption of Cinnamon in other Linux distributions.
Now, maybe that's crazy to me, but it seems like if you don't have a relevant desktop that at least has a large enough user size, application developers will never be compelled to make their applications integrate with your desktop.
desktop, where if you can have KDE, GNOME, and Unity, and these guys are managing to suck out most of the air in the room, that's what's going to have the developers' customization attention,
and they have limited time. So they're only going to spend their time on the desktops
that will really net them the most rewards. And I don't see how Cinnamon can achieve that status
unless Cinnamon works on lots of distributions. Am I wrong?
Well, I mean, Cinnamon technically has the extension-based system
for GNOME, so most of the stuff
that's in the GNOME extensions could be
pretty much easily ported to Cinnamon.
There's already been about
40 that have been ported, and they work
perfectly fine.
To that point, what doesn't work?
Go ahead, Noah, and then Dave,
go ahead.
Well, my question was, what doesn't work in Cinnamon that works on, for example, GNOME?
Well, nothing, I mean, everything's fine today.
But as the GTK desktops move forward, and I mean, not that Cinnamon won't be moving forward,
but if it stays pinned to one version of GTK, eventually you won't,
it just won't be worth the effort to run it on anything but Mint.
It might be possible, but it just won't be worth it.
Sure.
There's extensions that, for example, Gpaste,
that the GNOME extension would not work in Cinnamon,
but it was ported to Cinnamon, so that works now.
Oh, so Dave, go ahead.
You were kind of going to challenge the general base
that I was making the argument from, right?
Yes.
You said that Linux is still used by a more technical audience,
people who want package currentness,
and people who are technically inclined to invest in their desktop. But I've been finding that that
may not be true. I mean, I went on a trip a couple of weeks ago, and I saw that a lot of people knew
what Linux was. And a lot of people had seen Linux desktops. People who don't know anything about computers,
but they knew what Linux was.
And they were really impressed.
They had seen this before.
And there are a lot of people that...
It's easy to install Linux now.
They use Linux. They know Linux.
And so I don't think Cinnamon and Mint together
are targeting the Arch users or the hardcore Linux users.
I think they're targeting Ubuntu's place in the desktop Linux world
because Linux now has a place there.
I mean, I'm in India and people know this.
People know that there is something called Linux
and it has these issues and whatnot, but it works.
And people have asked me, my sister, who's a dentist,
asked me if she sister, who's a dentist,
asked me if she could install Linux.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I mean, the world is different now,
and I think Cinnamon is trying to make a place in this world by targeting a stable, reliable desktop
for people who can install an OS,
but not do much beyond that.
Well, and Wimpy, you've noticed at your local Lug
that a lot of folks there are using Linux
and it's out-of-date versions at that?
Yeah, I was really, really surprised by this.
So at the last Lug Meet,
which is predominantly populated by silver surfers, let's say,
who are finding Linux as an alternative to Windows,
mostly because they've heard that it doesn't have the virus problem.
But they just want something to install that works,
that means they can read their email, that they can get on the web,
and most importantly, that they can play Solitaire,
because that seemed to be the preserve of what they were up to.
The versions of the Linux distributions they were running,
I was kind of amazed.
Three or four of them were running a version of Mint,
and I don't know what the Mint code name was,
but it was the one that was derived from Ubuntu Karmic.
So this is getting on for a five-year-old Ubuntu distribution,
and they're perfectly fine with it.
Well, they installed it, and it's got all of the stuff they need, and it works.
And I can't get my head around that they're satisfied with this.
It works. It's like a TV in a sense.
The TV turns on, and the channels come on.
It doesn't matter if it doesn't have a Netflix app built in.
Exactly.
And they were talking about upgrading on what version they were going to move to next.
And I was explaining, well, Mint 17 is just around the corner.
Oh, no, no, no, there's this Mint 13, and that's the long-term support release version,
and I think that's the one I'm going to use.
And I'm like, but that's two years old, and they just don't care.
It doesn't resonate.
Right, and Popey, I know you want to look into the crystal ball
and talk a little bit about future desktops. Go ahead.
Well, it just seems to me that the whole rationale
for some of these desktops existing,
like Cinnamon and Mate,
is there was a movement some time ago
that a lot of the technical users
and existing Linux desktop users
didn't like the way the desktop was going.
They didn't like GNOME Shell. They didn't like the way the desktop was going. They didn't like GNOME Shell.
They didn't like Unity.
They may not have liked KDE 4 as well.
And it seems that I know Mark, as Mark Shelterworth has said before,
that, you know, we tried the GNOME 2 way.
We tried the two-panel traditional Linux desktop, and it didn't work.
And for our market, which is mass adoption, everyone buying it in stores.
And so that's part of the reason why we forged ahead with a different desktop.
And GNOME have got their own desktop, and KDE are working with their new user interface.
their new user interface. And it's funny that, you know, you've mentioned that the Apple announcement at WWDC reflects some of the changes that Gnome Shell have done. It seems that there's
a, in the future, there's these desktops that are moving forward, and then there's the ones that are
holding back. And the ones that are holding back are servicing a requirement from RefuseNixicks people who just flat out don't like that
new interface which is fine but they're never ever going to get mass market adoption if you're
sitting there with something that looks like solaris from 19 whatever i can see that i mean
definitely one of the things that gives me a little bit of a chub is the fact that my GNOME 3 desktop looks like it's from the future.
I used to...
Sorry, I used to... KDE looks fine.
With the proper icon themes and everything, KDE looks fine.
You just have to tweak it a bit.
Oh, yeah, for sure.
What were you going to say?
No?
I was just going to say I was a CDE developer at Sun Microsystems
in the late 1990s so alan i hate you
myself and uh wimpy we're in the same linux user group so i know i know this group of people and
the silver surfers are you know semi-technical and they're the they're the main people who are
still in the linux user group yeah they're the people who are contributing to the mailing list
and going along because everyone else has moved on and they've got desktops that work
and they don't have to futz around with libfoo and, you know,
some SO file in a directory somewhere that doesn't match
so I can't run my desktop.
That stuff is just the past.
Let's move forward.
That's kind of how, I mean, I respect like, I guess,
I'm of two minds because I've worked with so many just basic staff who really the use of the computer is part of the job requirement, but it's not what they're there to do.
And so, you know, you start changing UI on them and to them it seems it doesn't even seem like annoying.
It just seems literally unneeded.
And it's frustrating for them because like, well, this is for them, it's a hammer.
It's a hammer with a lot more buttons. And why change the hammer if I'm just nailing the same
nail every day? And so I understand where there is room for cinnamon and things like that.
Rod and Corbis, why don't you take us out? And you said there might be a way for power users to
stay on mint and the same mint base, but keep their packages up to date. Lay it on us.
and the same mint base, but keep their packages up to date.
Lay it on us.
Right.
Well, I was saying, because as a package or a project manager,
there's a lot of, you have to deal with a lot of packaging for different distros.
And one of the easiest things to do is to build a PPA
so you have support for anything based on Ubuntu.
And with a PPA, you can keep up to date.
And the only problem with a PPA is that when, as soon as a Ubuntu release And with a PPA, you can keep up to date. And the only problem with a PPA
is that as soon as a Ubuntu release
is no longer being supported,
the PPAs are killed by Launchpad itself.
But for the LTS,
as long as they're being supported,
you can just continuously get updates and updates.
So if Mint did some kind of PPA management solution for their packages, they could just do that instead of having to have a completely separate repo.
Well, they do have a PPA manager built into their software sources management.
It's pretty good.
I don't mean the user-managed.
Oh, okay.
The project themselves, the team of Mint, managed what is – like they could go in and see this PPA is trusted.
This is an official PPA from the project.
They're good to use that.
We can put it in our default repo.
Have you guys ever noticed – and I'm pretty sure I have not downloaded Chrome from the Google website in a very long time.
I always just get Chromium from the package manager.
just get Chromium from the package manager.
But on Ubuntu, if you download Chrome from the Google website, doesn't it
add a repo to your sources list
to get future Chrome updates through the app system?
Right.
But also, Firefox and
Chromium have an exception
to the package update
system in Ubuntu, so they're always up to date.
Unlike some other
random application that doesn't get updated,
they have exceptions.
Why don't more packages do that, though?
Why don't they all do that? When I download Handbrake...
It's overhead. Someone has to actually
update those packages and test them.
Well, that's true. Yes.
Are you volunteering? Well, I'm asking them to get
somebody to volunteer.
The problem is there's people who
would happily, as a project
manager, I would happily update my app to be continuously recognized as an up-to-date feature.
But I have to wait until Ubuntu has the time to do it for one of the maintainers, and my testing is not enough.
I think it's wasted effort.
Well, that's what he thinks.
So I want to pause right here, and then let's talk about the whole derivatives thing,
because that kind of dovetails well with our mint discussion.
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Okay, Matt, you had a piece that you wrote for Datamation,
and you said are Ubuntu derivatives a bad idea you wrote for Datamation, and you said,
are Ubuntu derivatives a bad idea? That's the headline, and it starts out with, when most
people think of Ubuntu derivatives, they usually categorize them into Ubuntu with a different
desktop environment than Unity category. However, according to Ubuntu, they refer to Ubuntu-based
distros with different desktop environments as derivatives, as well as distros using their own tools, apps, goals, and customizations.
I think that's a great point.
In fact, later on, you mentioned that a lot of times Mint users will go seek help in Ubuntu forms, and the Ubuntu forms isn't necessarily very receptive to that.
So did you kind of make the argument here that maybe derivatives aren't a good recommendation for new users?
Did you kind of make the argument here that maybe derivatives aren't a good recommendation for new users?
I think it's very case-by-case, and probably the best use-case scenario I have for something is if you have someone that's, let's say they're a Windows XP user and they're looking to make the switch.
They're very set in their ways.
They don't give a flying rip about what's bleeding edge.
They want their launcher where their launcher is supposed to be.
They want their Firefox, and they want to get it done.
That's probably a Linux Mint person.
However, if you have a Windows 7 user who is fluent in all desktops, been using Windows forever, doesn't really care about how the desktop looks, wants something a little more
bleeding edge, a little more robust, I guess you might say, Ubuntu is probably a better option
simply because of better compatibility, a bigger user base, and they're able to drill down a little deeper.
That is really my underpinnings of it is that if you're looking at PPAs,
Mint isn't always going to be your best experience.
I've based that on my own experience and based that on my own research.
So on G+, this morning, like literally like at 4 a.m. in the morning,
Aaron Saigo posted on G+, in the comment threads of one of his posts,
he said that he does feel like sometimes these derivatives sometimes are good in some cases.
And in some cases, what they actually do is dilute the talent pool and reduce our focus as a community
and slow us down as a whole from moving forward.
And I wonder, too, if maybe derivatives aren't a bit like that.
If people, instead of working on the derivatives,
were working on the main upstream distribution,
would that not have made that upstream distribution that much better?
I think it depends on the viewpoint.
I think from a developer's viewpoint, I agree with him.
I think from an end user's viewpoint, I completely disagree.
So I think because from an end user's point of view,
they want to be able to have
choice. Maybe they want to go with a KDE desktop. In that case, you would actually go with a
derivative, not a customization. A customization would be like an elementary OS or Linux Mint.
With an actual derivative, you're looking at like XBoon2, LBoon2, KBoon2, whatever it may be.
That way, you're getting that true Ubuntu base, a much more pure Ubuntu base without all the extra stuff put over the top of it.
So, Rotten, do you think people show up first as a contributor to a distro and then get put off and go start their own?
I wouldn't say always, but there's a lot of people I've talked to that I asked them why they'd made their derivative of whatever base it was. And they said it was too hard to get the people who were in
charge to pay attention to their contributions and then to test them and get them applied.
For Ubuntu, for example, it's very hard to put any kind of community contribution to any core
systems. Like if somebody wanted to fork the USC and then make it better and improve it in
any way they can, it's pretty much going to be ignored.
Dave, I think I agree with you too. It's sort of hard to pin down what exactly is
a re-spin versus a derivative or even a distro, right?
Exactly. See, Ron Cobbs and I have this conversation often and
when you say it's a different distro, like for example
say elementary or ping guy, is it's a different distro, like, for example, say, Elementary or Pingai,
is it actually a different distro?
Is there a very...
I'm asking, is there a core difference between the libraries they use,
or is it just Ubuntu with a different desktop?
Because that's not true for Mint.
Mint and Cinnamon work very well on a machine where Ubuntu wouldn't.
But I think if I put Elementor on a machine and Ubuntu on a machine, there wouldn't be too much of a difference,
except maybe in the Pantheon, in how many resources the Pantheon desktop uses.
So we need to say that, okay, this is a derivative, and this is just Ubuntu with a reskin.
There's a difference between the two, is what I'm saying. Popey, I want to pick on you, because I'm sure coming from the Ubuntu with a reskin. There's a difference between the two.
Popey, I want to pick on you because I'm sure coming from the Ubuntu side of things,
you guys must see this come up quite a bit.
Folks are running a derivative of Ubuntu and they come to get support.
Is it a problem?
Do you think it's maybe, and I know you're not speaking on behalf of Ubuntu or Canonical,
but do you think maybe it's detracted resources from the upstream project,
in this case Ubuntu or somethingical, but do you think maybe it's detracted resources from the upstream project, in this case, Ubuntu or something like that?
It's tricky.
Because, I mean, Ubuntu itself is a Debian derivative, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
And we're very grateful for the base that Debian have given us to build upon.
And just to pick up a tiny nitpick, the Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and so on are flavors.
So we consider those blessed derivatives.
They're called flavors. A derivative is something that is separate from Ubuntu.
And you can usually recognize that by the fact that the packages that they come pre-installed with don't come from the Ubuntu archive.
So, for example, Mint has its own repository
with their desktop in it, whereas
Lubuntu, everything that ships
on the ISO image came from the Ubuntu
archive. I don't want to get
stuck in the weeds, but let me ask you this.
The reason why that's important
is because the people who work on those
flavors work together. They work
together for a common goal, even though they're working on
separate desktops.
So you've got the Kubuntu guys
who are working on their KDE desktop,
and Ubuntu working on the LXDE desktop,
but they're contributing to the commons in the archive.
I see, so they're like using Launchpad.
Gotcha, gotcha.
And PPAs all over the place.
So there's some collaboration happening
between the projects,
and notes being passed back and forth
and things like that.
Yeah, and they collaborate that there yeah and they
collaborate in team meetings and so on but there there is a certainly i would agree that sometimes
you do get people who come along and say i would like to contribute in this way and the project
whatever it might be and in this case yeah okay it might be able to might say well actually we
don't need that contribution that bit's done we'd like if you could to contribute in this other way and they say well no and walk away and that that has manifested itself
in in derivatives appearing and then dying and other derivatives appearing and then dying so
yeah there is a there is a there is a problem that people want to contribute in their own way um and you know their contribution may not be wanted or
their country their their eagerness to contribute might be wanted but not in the way that they think
they can contribute if that makes sense but don't you think i mean then we'll go back to the main
topic but don't you think man if ubuntu touch it takes off and a lot of people like it isn't this
going to be like so such a bigger problem with that
because there's so many crazy phones
and different carriers and manufacturers?
There could be derivative after derivative
after derivative of Ubuntu Touch, right?
I'm not sure that would happen.
I mean, it's entirely possible for someone to take the code
because it's free software
and you could fork it and create your own phone OS.
But is anyone going to run it?
Why would you run random?
Let's say there's a Mint Touch, for example.
Why would you run Mint Touch?
If you've got to look at the motivation for why Mint existed,
it's in large part, as I said earlier, the Refuseniks who don't like Unity and so on.
So if Mint wanted to make a touch device,
an OS for touch devices,
they're going to have to create a UI
that fits on a five-inch device.
I don't know if it's the Usenix
or if it was maybe theming in Codex originally.
I mean, it might have been drivers in Codex.
So ironically, the early adherence
to strict free software policies might have actually been what was the original spark for Mint in some ways.
Right, and I can't remember the last time I had to even bother about codecs.
Yeah, that used to be a thing.
It's a known issue.
Yeah, it used to be a thing. It's not a thing anymore.
Yeah, remember those days, old man?
I remember that.
Seven years ago.
Wimpy, you wanted to touch on the Android when it comes to forking.
Well, yeah, only with what Popey was just saying about who would fork Ubuntu Touch.
Oh, sure.
We just have to look at all of the OEMs that have effectively forked or customized Android with their own skins, themes, UI enhancements.
I mean, just about everyone releases with their own take
on the Android user interface.
So why would Canonical think that the OEMs aren't going to do that again?
Yeah, we'll be forking in OEMs.
That's why all of our mobile carriers just suck for updating Android.
They are its own fork.
It's very difficult for anyone to contribute to Android,
anyone outside of Google to contribute to Android.
So whereas we've got people from all around the world contributing to Ubuntu.
It's very open.
Everything's free software.
It's not like Android where they throw it over the wall
when there's a release.
Ours is ongoing all the time.
So certainly it's a lot easier for OEMs to get involved.
Also, sometimes some of the Android forking, like I would say probably Amazon's case is also a competitive fork.
They don't want Google to be in control because of the size of Google and Google's already existing monopoly base, which is not really.
In fact, that's sort of canonical advantage. We're not Google, but we can still pull this off.
And that's sort of like that's not a lot of other people are going to answer that. So, all right, but getting back to
the derivative things, moving us back, I kind of, here's the way I look at derivatives, is to me,
it seems like cars, like bicycles, like cell phone cases, there's not one answer for one person in
most cases. And so the reason why derivatives come up is because, you know, like for me,
let's look at enter gross.
I personally prefer installing enter gross rather than regular arch,
even though at the end I accomplish the same task essentially.
But for me, I prefer going that route because it saves me essentially two days
overall of setup as I would slowly poke away at installing packages.
And I don't know if you would consider Antegoros a derivative, but I'm damn happy it's there.
And, you know, I'll tell you a little behind-the-scenes thing is Chase and I are, you know, getting
ready to shoot some of his first episodes of How to Linux, and there's just been this
discussion about what distribution does he go with.
And we've been kicking around a lot of stuff.
We're going to make our announcement of the distribution he picked in the first episode,
and it has not been an easy process.
It has not been an easy process at all.
And should he go in Mint came up several times,
and we would start at a conversation thread where we'd start at one place
and we'd end up again at Mint.
And I thought that was particularly interesting. And I think that kind of got this
derivatives thing churning in the back of my head because we kept coming
up with scenarios where maybe Mint would be more preferable for Chase.
And I'm not going to say if we chose Mint in the end, but to me it does
it did illustrate that when you are genuinely switching somebody over to
a new desktop operating system, Mint does offer a few nice things.
And I think in some ways it's sort of showing Ubuntu, hey, if you did it like this, it might be a little bit better.
Like it's not quite competition.
It's like, hey, here's another way to think about deploying this.
And in some ways having that to look over their shoulder and go, oh, that's how these guys are doing it.
Maybe we'll, like the PPA management.
Wouldn't that be great if one day we just saw something like that kind of show up in a future version of Ubuntu?
Wouldn't that be nice?
The Mint updater too.
Yeah.
And maybe that code would just come from the Mint repos.
Wouldn't that be nice?
And so I could see how there is a solid argument for derivatives.
I do think they do create a bit of a support issue. But if you look at the industry as a whole, really in most cases, there's lots of different
derivatives of PCs. There's lots of different derivatives of Android handhelds and monitors
and peripherals. I mean, we just live in a world full of derivatives. And I think it's just
something that is just the nature of this beast. And it seems to be the nature of open source,
for better or for worse. I think it could be one of our biggest strengths and maybe one of
our biggest weaknesses too, though, because of the time loss. Well, and one thing I wanted to
touch on just to, and I'm not trying to split hairs with this by any stretch, but I think it's
important to mention, we were talking a little bit about derivatives versus customizations.
My information is based on the derivative team wiki from Ubuntu,
and according to them, it's a customization.
It's a derivative customization, more accurately.
So that's where the differentiation comes from.
And then reverting back to what you were talking about
as to whether or not you want to go with just another desktop
or whether you want to actually go a Mint direction or an elementary direction,
I think it really comes down to the tools that are offered by each option and which
set of tools is going to work best for you.
Yeah.
And I think, too, you can't undersell the old way of doing things paradigm.
You know, when you give a Windows user a computer with Linux, one of the first things they decide
to do is, well, I need to go install some of my favorite apps.
And they go down, they go to their websites, they look for the downloaders.
And there's a whole process that they have to become accustomed to.
And I don't know.
I've been using Suniman now for just over a week.
And I think I've kind of been really enjoying it.
I like that it, I honestly like how familiar and fast that old, I don't want to call it a start menu,
but that start menu and taskbar interface is.
I don't want Popey to yell at me, but honestly, sometimes I go back and then I realize,
oh, geez, when I needed to get data from this window to that window,
gosh, this just made it so much easier to have these right here
and not have to zoom out to a full overview of my entire desktop or switch virtual desktops.
I'm just saying,
even though using GNOME for a long time
and using Unity for a long time, when I sat down
and got in traditional UI, I kind of went,
oh yeah, there were some nice things about
this. And then it starts to feel a little old after a while.
Chris, do you know who you sound like?
You sound like the daughter in
Jurassic Park
that's gone back to a system
that they know and they recognize and they love
This is a Unix system, I recognize this
I know this
Yeah, I know this
It's also very easy to theme
Cinnamon Eye Community or
Yes
Yeah, it's fun
There's several menus you can get
Okay, you know what, I had one more topic
I wanted to cover before we get
and this one's about Gnome and this one just caught my eye because it turns out the Gnome Foundation Okay, you know what? I had one more topic I wanted to cover before we get,
and this one's about GNOME,
and this one just caught my eye because it turns out the GNOME Foundation board elections are going on,
and there's a candidate that has caught my attention.
I want to see what you guys think.
So here's the headline.
A candidate vying to become one of the directors of the GNOME Foundation
has raised issues of Red Hat's domination of development
of the GNOME desktop project, claiming that for the last several years, this is a direct quote, Red Hat wants slash needs have trumped what anyone else wants slash needs, including the larger user base of GNOME.
This is Emily, and I think you pronounced her last name.
Goiner?
I'm not quite sure.
Goiner? I'm not quite sure. This was in an email thread where she was declaring her candidacy,
voting for the voting for this board of directors with its 11 people. There's eight posts that are open. It's ongoing and will continue until June 8th. And then they will declare the elections on
June 10th. And there's a couple of choice quotes from this in her candidacy statement. She wrote,
it is my opinion that Nome has strode too far towards a corporate-driven project and away from its community-led roots.
As of now, GNOME is, in my opinion, too beholden to a small handful of large corporations and forces which forces the project to ignore large swaths of users' preferences to them.
The end result being that GNOME has lost a tremendous portion of respect
and goodwill in the wire-free software community.
As a member of the GNOME Board of Directors,
I will actively work against this tide
and towards the more open, community-driven project
that GNOME once was and I hope will be again.
I have been a long-time user of GNOME since the 1.x days
and an active contributor for the last two years.
Now, how about that? she goes on to say yes you are part of the community but you are being paid by a large corporation to work on it and as a result you are beholden to them as least as much
to the rest of the community red hat is not the only thing that matters in the gnome world or it
shouldn't be but for the last several years, Red Hat's wants and needs
have trumped what anyone else wants or needs,
including the larger user base of GNOME,
which is what I believe has driven it to fracture
into so many desktops over the last four years.
We need to make sure that the people who aren't working for Red Hat have a say.
Make sure that people who aren't being paid to work on free software have a voice.
Sure, those of us who are not currently paid to speak up on mailing lists,
those of us who are not currently paid do speak up on mailing lists,
but we're mostly ignored.
This was driven so much of the community apart.
This is the problem.
Wow.
I completely agree.
Actually, that was really well said.
She's got my vote.
So, I mean, is Gnome being...
She's got the street cred and everything.
Is Gnome being ran into the ground by the Red Hat?
Why would Red Hat do that?
Is that really what's going on?
I would say that happens with most projects.
Yeah.
Why does Red Hat care about a desktop?
Well, they have a corporate desktop
that they make a good amount of money on.
You know, a lot of times of times when you see people using Linux
in Hollywood production,
those are sitting on top of Red Hat desktops.
So it's a potential issue, right?
If a company gets involved to the point
where their needs come before users,
and some would argue it's a real issue,
but in the open source community,
as long as all their code is open source,
that you can fork.
And I don't think forks are a bad thing
because in any project, when you get too many developers working on the same
thing they have different ideas about what you should do so having she argues that having gnome
fracture into i'm guessing she means cinnamon is a bad bad thing but i don't think it's a bad thing
they're they're trying to accomplish two different goals that meets two different types of people's
needs and quite frankly love it or hate it gnome does something that none of the other desktops really do a way of doing things
that they just don't accomplish and there is a set of users like myself that really enjoys it so
to say that they're screwing the pooch on this one just seems a little arrogant like i mean
leave some room for some creativity if they're really trying to brandish their corporate might
at this issue then that's when you start arguing about it but not until then
and we wouldn't have gnome shell if it wasn't for a large part of the efforts done by gnome
developers that are backed monetarily by companies like red hat true exactly and that's i that's what
i was going to point out as well is that if before we harp on Red Hat too much for saying, well, their interests come before the users, they're also contributing a lot billions of dollars into funding Linux kernel development.
We're not talking about, you know, Microsoft sticking its greedy hands in somewhere and
screwing with the UI.
Wimpy, you wanted to point out, though, that it's not just Cinnamon that she's probably
referring to, right?
No, there's a number of candidates in these known foundation elections that have got similar
sort of messages in their manifestos.
And a common theme is talking about potentially unifying the traditional desktops.
So Marte's been thrown in there along with Cinnamon.
And to some extent, XFCE also gets mentioned as well.
And one of the candidates is talking about using gnome 3 as sort
of the the skunk works the let's go crazy with the design ideas um throw it all at the wall and see
what sticks and whilst everyone's over there um experimenting with new design philosophies
then have a something more stable and traditional for the corporate and enterprise market.
And this is really what the discussion's about,
is what's the desktop that you're going to put in front of enterprise customers going to be?
What are they expecting?
And I think that the last time around when they put the classic extensions into GNOME 3 for RHEL.
It was kind of a vote of no confidence in the new and shiny, everything that's been done in GNOME 3 in terms of the enterprise market.
Well, Willie, what do you think?
Do you think the fact that Apple just pretty wholesalely ripped off GNOME 3's design might give a little extra credibility to those pushing the GNOME design forward?
I mean, it's not the most used desktop for no reason people like it and if people like it is it really that
bad well i i don't know if i don't know if i agree that apple copying the design validates it
but i think it does give them those designers another quiver as these right as these elections
are coming up and there's this hey let's integrate more traditional functionality back into GNOME.
Right as all of that's reaching a peak, boom, Apple drops Yosemite on everybody's face and they're ripping GNOME off.
And it, to me, seems like a signal that that is probably a good UI design direction.
At least another shop that is well known for its design aesthetics thinks so.
And I think that is at least a quiver in their cap or whatever you call it.
And I think to them it sort of came just at the right time.
I think it's just an unfair representation of the break from 2 to 3.
And then everybody in 3 is so much better.
No Shell 3.8 was getting so much better.
And then now with 3.12, it's quite awesome.
But people are still with the stigma of when it broke the first time.
Yeah, it kind of feels like it.
Same with Unity.
Yeah, exactly.
It feels like it's the Unity thing all over again.
Like you wronged them once, and there's no going back from that.
Well, the weird thing is basically every DE has done that.
Like KDE, for example, when it switched to 4, so many people hated it.
I feel like they've recovered from that.
And now everybody loves it.
Yeah, but they very carefully manage that over time.
And Unity, I feel like that same amount of time now has passed, and Unity hasn't fully recovered from the public perception.
I'm not saying whether it's right or not, but the perception of it.
fully recovered from, the public perception.
I'm not saying whether it's right or not, but the perception of it.
I think they should, if they could figure out a way to make the extensions universal,
to not break between updates, then Unity or GNOME 3 would be the best desktop hands down. Well, there's still a design phase right now.
So as soon as they have that – the global aspect is – they're changing so much between every version that that global aspect can't really work yet.
But when they get the foundation solid to where they want it to be, their goal is to have those global. about having some sort of plan of introducing some sort of compatibility layers
for extension developers and widening it to a wider developer community.
It just seems to be shame our monetary backers
and the people that pay us money to work on this desktop environment.
Is it weird that I kind of feel like the manifesto was more like a politician style? out that that is a real thing, though. I just am not totally sure if it's a bad thing, if it is a
real thing, and how bad it is. It does feel like maybe it's a little bit of a politician spin,
too. I mean, hey, politicians got a spin. That's their job. It's something I'll be watching,
so they'll announce the elections on June 10th. It would be interesting, A, if the elections
happen and some of these folks calling for, let's call it a more conservative desktop,
do get elected.
Will GNOME change, or will it continue on its current course?
And depending on what we see, that might be the long answer to this question, is Red Hat really behind what the GNOME desktop is doing?
Because if nothing really changes and things continue on, even though these folks get elected, then it probably would indicate that Red Hat is really the ones pulling the strings.
So we'll just have to watch and see what happens, right, Matt? Like everything
else. I think so. I think so. And I mean, if you actually have like a Star Wars moment where,
you know, the democracy falls to a sound of applause or something, then I might be more
concerned about it. Yeah. But I think at this point, it's too early to tell. I think at this
point, we're basically armchair quarterbacking what we don't really know. I think there's some
strong candidates that are going for it,
and we'll just have to wait and see.
Absolutely.
And that music means it's time for us to go right there, Matt.
I think we'll put a feather in our cap right there.
Oh, boy.
Oh, boy, listen to that.
It's getting us out of here fast.
It's like the Oscars.
It's like, hey, guys, get off the stage.
It's time for you to go.
Go.
Get out of here.
All right, well, listen, we want you to show up on Sunday.
We've got a great Linux action show planned.
We've got another interview lined up, so show up on our chat room so you can ask questions live.
And don't forget the Linux Unplugged show itself is live on a Tuesday at 2 p.m. Pacific over at jblive.tv.
Go over to jupyterbroadcasting.com slash calendar to get that converted in your local time zone.
And don't forget to go grab yourself a little tech talk today where I dug into that whole Apple ripping off the gnome, guys.
Hey, Matt, have a great week.
I'll see you on Sunday, okay?
Alright, see you then. Alright, everyone, thanks so much
for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged.
See you right back here next Tuesday. Thank you.