LINUX Unplugged - Episode 59: Dead Desktop Walking | LUP 59

Episode Date: September 24, 2014

Debian moves to make Gnome the default desktop, is XFCE going the way of the Dodo bird? Our living debate will try to get to the bottom of the big elephant in the room.Plus Red Hat announces its refocusing on the very thing Canonical makes all its money from & why we may be on the precipice of a massive new competition between the two companies.

You know, we had a little pre-show topic I thought maybe we could bring up. Thanks to Rakudave, who gave us a TLDR and a translation in the Linux Action Show subreddit. A little update on the Limux situation. Remember that deputy mayor who was causing a ruckus? Well, the deputy mayor's main complaint has been revealed, and it kind of betrays his total lack of technical expertise. The deputy mayor's main complaint is there's no convenient way to access mails and appointments on mobile devices,

apparently confusing the Limux desktop with the current groupware solution, which is Colab Enterprise, which is still ongoing as opposed to the old system. They're still rolling it out, I guess. He then goes on to say that he doubts that the public sector can keep up to date with software that is years behind the latest version, ignoring the fact that they were switching from Windows XP. The only valid part of his objection seems to be that Limux is still based on Ubuntu 14.04 and KDE 3.5, but they already have an update scheduled for Q4 of this year to go to LibreOffice, Ubuntu LTS, and KDE 4.

So this guy, he wants to move off Limux because he's not happy with the mobile sync support. This is ridiculous. Before we start the show, this is kind of a big moment today. I thought maybe... Whoa! Whoa! Hello. Hello. There it is. Maybe do a Valve update.

Oh, there's a Valve update for you. So there's a few games out there in the world that are on people's, like, I can't switch to Linux until this game ships for Linux. Like, you know, like the, oh, as soon as this game's out there, I'm going to switch. You just wait and see. Well, one of those games is Counter-Strike Global Offensive. I just downloaded it. It's not even listed in the Steam store as supporting Linux.

Hey, look what they – hey, I just played that. Hey, look at that. I guess I could have just done that. I guess I could have just played that. So Steam – what, right? It's Global Offensive. Hello. Came out today for Linux.

I have no idea how to play, but I'm going to give it a go. I just thought maybe we'd do this real quick. Play or find a game. Operation Breakout. Okay. This should go fine, right, Matt? I shouldn't have any problems. Absolutely.

Absolutely. That's how I play most of my games. Right? There should be no problem here. So, okay, it's initializing the world. I haven't set any graphic settings Absolutely. That's how I play most of my games. There should be no problem here. It's initializing the world. I haven't set any graphic settings yet. This is the first time I think. I'm watching now so I can be more of help. There you go. I don't even know what I'm doing.

I guess it's casual. You saw me play Half-Life 2. That was painful. Alright, here we go. Hopefully I don't get swatted. Spankage. A message of the day. What kind of message of the day is that? I'm going to be a terrorist.

That sounds like me. It's a little laggy. There we go. It's coming in now. Terrorist win. Terrorist win. I have no idea what I'm doing. There we go.

Oh. Now that I'm in. Oh, wow. Oh! Now that I'm in... Oh, wow. You know how you know you're a terrorist? Because you're wearing a hoodie. Yeah, right? Well, now that I'm in it, it's smooth and looking clean. Oh, yeah.

Oh, this looks good. I'll be checking this out, actually. Because I'm kind of a Counter-Strike guy, so this is pretty cool. Oh, this is pretty sweet. This is pretty sweet. Yeah, I'm totally a terrorist. I was big into Soldier of Fortune too back in the day. I was like my de facto

I spent hours doing that. I'm going to come up with a backstory. Here's my backstory, Matt, okay? I'm a radicalized homegrown lone wolf terrorist, radicalized via Instagram propaganda and I have

a car full of pressure cookers and this gun and my hoodie. The NSA can hear you. Oh, crap. Oh, no. I'm just living out a fantasy, that's all. Hold on. I didn't get this hoodie for nothing. He is in a virtual training camp right now.

That could be bad. Yeah, exactly. You know what? I'm being radicalized right now and I'm recording it. Anyway, so there it is. It's legit. Playing for the wrong side. I think this is my new first-person shooter for Linux.

I think this is it. I think we just discovered Chris's new first-person shooter. Oh, jeez. I was just totally murderated. Alright, good enough. How much is that game? It's like $14, I think. That's reasonable.

It doesn't have the penguin listed on the Steam store yet, but as you probably just saw it does actually and pro tip a lot of times if you add something to your wish list and then it goes on sale you'll get an email you know that's always nice yeah i do have a lot on my wish list yeah i always do that because i always try i always forget what game i was looking at yesterday so i was like crap what was it yeah my big my biggest thing is i have trouble justifying to my wife that I spent money on a video game. Yeah, that is a good one. That's a good challenge. Oh, you're not doing it right.

You've got to say, oh, hey, look what I was gifted with. Steam has those gift things. Or turn it into your work and then say it's a business thing. I've got to do this. Yeah, there we go. I'm not advocating lying. I'm just saying you can kind of bend the truth a little bit. That's all we're saying.

It's a birthday gift to myself. It's fine. Whatever, you know. Just call it a Whatever. Your PayPal account is wife don't know money. Yeah. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's powered by a broken USB 3.0

connector. My name is Chris. And my name is Matt. I tell you what, Matt, these USB 3.0 connectors were designed to fail. I think it's like this giant punk on the entire consumers from the industry because I have this Zalman drive right here. It's got junked up. Eric, on the pre-show, was talking about his drive got broken. I think, Matt, maybe we have stumbled upon the greatest conspiracy in all of computing.

What do you think? I think it's actually time for us to remove the tinfoil hats and realize the tech industry is out to screw us over. And they do it one plug at a time, Matt. That's right. I just hate it when I break a device. All right, so coming up on today's show, are Canonical and Red Hat about to go at it

like we've never seen before? Red Hat today announced they are pivoting the direction of the company and refocusing on the cloud. But of course, that's what Mark Shuttleworth has been saying for years. In fact, if you look over Mark Shuttleworth's blog, he talks more about Ubuntu in the cloud than he does about Ubuntu on a phone. So with both of these companies going at the cloud market, specifically OpenStack, where Canonical currently has a major lead, you've got to wonder what that's going to lead to. So we'll look at some recent statements and including a new announcement from Canonical today about a partnership with Oracle to extend their presence in OpenStack and what Red Hat just made a big announcement about.

So we'll get to that. Plus, we're also going to talk about Debian's recent switch back to GNOME 3. But really, we'll do more of a meta conversation about what it might mean for the state of XFCE. One of Matt's favorite desktops, is it a dead man walking? We're going to talk about that today, too. A lot of stuff, Matt, so we'll start with our feedback. That's kind of tradition.

Sounds good. You know, what we do here on The Unplugged Show. And can you believe that we are almost episode 60? I don't think we missed a bit. Already? Yeah, I know. Wow. I don't think we missed a single episode, too,

which is awesome. Awesome. Okay, Matt, our first email comes in, and this one's kind of funny. It was a follow-up. It comes from AR. He says, Matt, our first email comes in and this one's kind of funny. It was a follow-up. It comes from AR. It says, wow, I've seen and smelt the future of broadcasting. Hey guys, I've been watching the Linux Action Show for well over a year and a half now. It starts my week with some great Linux content, allows me to deal with the MS corporate world I'm immersed in. I just wanted to share with you a surreal experience I had on Monday

watching the show. I was working on my emails whilst watching your latest episode on Security Onion. And unknown to me, my wife had returned from shopping and was preparing some food in the kitchen. Halfway through your Security Onion section, the smell of cooking onions started to waft into my home office, which had just added an additional dimension to the whole Security Onion experience. It's like 3D glasses, but way better. Smell-O-Vision is the way forward. Keep up the great work. Highlight of my week.

Regards, AR. How great is that? That is so awesome. I love Smell-O-Vision. How great is it that we're doing security onion? And first of all, cooked onions are delicious. And second of all, the smell of cooked onions is delicious. And third of all, it goes perfect with the show.

He also says he ordered himself a dark blue Lass jacket. That's awesome. Nice. So thanks, AR, for the story. In fact, maybe I'll, you know what, I didn't put this in the show notes, but maybe I will mention. We are doing a fundraiser to cover our costs to go over to Ohio Linux Fest and bring you coverage from Ohio Linux Fest. And you can help us do that, cover those costs, by going to teespring.com slash jbjacket. Linux Fest. And you can help us do that, cover those costs, by going to teespring.com slash jbjacket.

We have a six-day run left of a limited time fall or maybe spring, depending where you're at in the world. Linux Action Show Jacket's a zip-up jacket with a hoodie, so it'll be just right for the weather. And we've sold 87 towards our goal of 100. Now, at 100, we break even and we unlock all of the sales. Anything above $100 will greatly help our cost, and we're also donating a dollar to the Ella and Madison Fund, which are some family friends who recently went through a tragedy. You can read more about that at teespring.com slash jbjacket. Right now we have blue, black, and dark gray. Keep checking.

There might be an additional color showing up soon. No word on that yet. Yes, teespring.com slash jbjacket. Go get yourself a Linux action shooter. You can rock the support for the show. If you're at Ohio Linux Fest, you will know who you are. You'll be like, oh, yeah, it's the last viewer. Awesome.

And if you're not, you can still remotely be there with us in spirit, wearing your jacket, rocking it places. I've been wanting the jacket for a long time, but we were waiting for Teespring to get this right. They got a great set of materials. They've done a couple runs of these now, and the timing is perfect. got a great set of materials. They've done a couple runs of these now, and the timing is perfect. And, you know, we had to keep it a super short run. Six days is all that's left because we want to get them shipped out in time for Ohio Linux Fest, which is going to be epic. Like I mentioned on Sunday, my wife Angela will be joining us, co-host of the Faux Show. Well, host of the Faux Show. I'm the co-host. And she's going to go down

there and say hi to folks and shake hands and we'll go around and do interviews and all that kind of stuff. And I'm going to try to get her a jacket too. I mean, that seems only fair. That seems like maybe.

Maybe I should do that. I think so. Yeah. I think she'll probably take care of that. Teespring.com slash JBjacket if you want to help us get out to Ohio

and rock some Linux action show swag. All right. One quick thing I was going to mention about that too is when they're coming to the fest, it's like, what better way to recognize viewers

than to see them in the jacket? I know, right? And other fellow viewers, too. So, like, there'll be a sense of community at the fest because you'll recognize, oh, that's safe territory over there. I can go talk to that person. Exactly. They're a human.

They're a human. That's it. Gordon writes in on the alternative to PFSense topic. You know, and I want to mention, too, in the Linux Action Show, I said, hey, I'd love to get your take on different firewalls. I've gotten a ton of really good answers. I'm not going to necessarily cover which ones have been recommended. I'm going to wait and summarize all of that. So a lot of them's in there.

But Gordon managed to touch on the topic that I wanted to kick around with you guys. He says, hi, Chris and Matt. Further, to your plea for alternatives to PFSense, I ran a Linux-based firewall in our enterprise for years from IPCOP to Smoothwall, even Firewall Builder to just straight-up IP tables. The grow-your-own options

became troublesome to administer and the Linux firewall distros several years ago all seemed to go to a commercial model with community versions lacking in features or maybe even no updates.

I think your request for a Linux-based box is a bit misguided. You need to find the right application for the job, irrespective of the hardware or OS it is sitting on. You shouldn't need to go tweaking at the command line with every function that's available in the GUI and with validated sense checking. In fact, tweaking on the command line in a firewall distribution could potentially compromise the security of the firewall and cause problems with upgrades.

To that end, does it matter if it's running Linux or BSD if you never interact directly with the OS? So long as it's open, stop searching for the holy grail when you have found it in PFSense. We have numerous support staff who don't do Linux command line stuff, so a GUI was imperative.

Switch to PFSense at version 1.21 and are currently running version 2.15 in 30 offices dotted around the world. It has every feature I need and runs on a very modest hardware. We run with HA Failover a pair of eight NIC boxes to each site on a modest, fanless, Atom SSD-based hardware. Keep up the great work, Gordon. So, I wanted to ask you guys, what do you think about Gordon's take here? Gordon's take is use the right tool for the job. And if in that case, it's a BSD box, then you should just buckle

down and use BSD. And here's where I come at it from. It seems like this is something that Linux should be very good at, but it's just we haven't found the right combination yet of it. And it seems like as the host of the Linux Action Show, I should try to use something that is Linux-based. So, but then I'm up against the realities that I have a corporate firewall that I need to set up, and I have certain features that I need, and I have restraints like I need to have people who are not Linux admins administer it. So what do we, Matt, what do you think I do in this case? So from my perspective, you know, at first when he said, you know, use the right tool for the job, I was like, oh, that's the easy way out. But then I'm thinking about it and it's like, you know,

if it's truly something that you're going to just be front facing, you're not going to be tweaking or having to do a lot of massaging at any technical level. I can see where he's coming from on that. That's fair. If you just want something you plug, play, and forget about, okay, because there are tools that we may use in the studio that may not necessarily be the most Linux-specific in the world. I mean, that's life. The camera may not run Linux.

I mean, there's a lot of things that may, you know, the air conditioner, whatever. There are certain tools we use that may not fall under that philosophy. If that's one of those tools, I don't necessarily see that as a huge issue. It doesn't mean you can't explore the Linux options, but at the end of the day, if they're not meeting the need, then hey, use what you've got to use. So, Wimpy, you went through the same evaluation. You ended up going PFSense? Yeah, yeah, for work. We tested just about every firewall distribution going regardless of of whether it was Linux or BSD based.

And PFSense is head and shoulders better than anything else that's out there that isn't a commercial proprietary offering. Heavens, all right. What's your take? Well, this time I do agree with you. This time, PFSense at this moment would most likely be the better firewall, but I think it's bullshit that our Linux environment doesn't give us a firewall just as kick-ass as PFSense. Or more so. And we're good at calling them all off. Good at calling them out and saying, come on, guys, we can do this.

Why the hell are we going to wait for the PFSense guys to kick our ass all over the street? So, Webby Wizard, you want to wait for the PFSense guys to kick our asshole over the street? So, Webby Wizard, you want to make the case for IPFire. I'm not sure if it's an equivalent to PFSense, but I'd like to hear your take on it. So, it isn't an equivalent to PFSense in everything that it does, but it does do quite a bit.

And if you are willing to go and set up the couple rules that you might need to set up that are a little bit extravagant, then you can do almost anything else. Like the GUI has been changing extreme, like it's changed again. It's changed the last three revisions and it keeps on changing

and there's more and more features there. So it's on the way. It's just, it takes a while. Mostly because a lot of the people that develop it are in German. So it takes a while for things to get pushed to English and other languages, but it's working that way. And Colonel Linux, do you think that the Linux community has been friend-zoned?

Because we know that there's high-end enterprise equipment that runs Linux that does this. Yeah, I don't know if it's a friend-zone so much as just that there's clearly, there's a market in the very high end, right? And when I say that, I'm thinking of Cumulus Networks. You know, we interviewed them and clearly that's replacing the very, very high end thing. And I mean, if you have $15,000, then you can get a Linux distro that supports, that's very open, mind you, that you could do your routing stuff and firewall stuff on. Right. But I think probably the reason is, is because there hasn't been a real need. I don't,

you know, you were just talking about essential or maybe the other gentleman was, was mentioning, you know, we look at these things like appliances. So if they're doing what we expect them to do, we don't really care what the underlying OS is. And it's not that Linux is incapable of it. It's just that I don't know that there's been a huge demand. And of course, you know, you know, we do, you know, a lot of this stuff all time, and we've gone with Microtech. Right. Because that's – essentially, it runs Linux on the underside. I can do all the administration from Linux, and as long as I'm not required to use Windows tools, I don't care.

And those probably make pretty good, like, just firewalls for setting up rules and filtering and things like that, how do they do in terms of adding more advanced features like bandwidth monitoring, QoS, VPNs? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, we have, you know, so in the hospitality industry, that's huge, right? They want the if when the front, you know, you have the router set up and then there has to be two, essentially two networks. One is the administrative network that runs the front desk and then one's the guest network. But you don't want any one guest taking too much bandwidth. And if all the guests cumulatively, uh, are trying to consume a lot of bandwidth, you need to reign them in if the front

desk needs to get some administrative tasks done. Um, so you, I mean, yeah, you can set all that stuff up. And actually one of the viewers of the show, uh, after you, uh, after you ran after when, when I sent you one in and you talked about it, he actually emailed me and said, I have five hotels or four hotels, and I need them all connected with essentially like a VPN. I want to be able to get to all the computers. I want to put one router at each hotel, and then I want them all connected so that, you know, essentially with a VPN. And he did that. So, yeah, they can do very advanced things. I haven't found anything that I could have done in a Cisco environment that I couldn't do with Microtech, but the same is

probably true for PFSense. Well, and the nice thing about the Microtech, right, is it comes with a hardware solution. So you can get, right, you can get like a, almost it looks like a switch, but it's running the whole OS. Well, and that's what drew me away from PFSense originally was if you want the rack, they sell hardware units, but if you want the rack unit you're looking at like 1400 bucks with with microtech they have they have one u rack unit starting at 99 so yeah i was that just made more sense for us yeah yeah really yeah so like the rb201 or whatever is that right yeah yep and uh so this would be a linux firewall that i could drop in and uh it comes with uh like i assume like i could turn one of these ports into like a mirrored port if i wanted to is that a possibility yeah there are five ports you

configure them however you want by default it will come with port one set up as a wan port and two three four and five set up as a bridge switch but you can you can break those back out and and uh and yeah do configure it however you want. I know you sent me one. I just need to set it up because I need to – what I really – the final decision factor for me would be the UI. Do you think that one you sent me is powerful enough to do what we do here at the studio? Absolutely.

Well, the one I sent you is the same one that is kind of the stock one we put in the hotels. The only difference between that one and the ones we put in hotels is that one's in a, in a little plastic white box and the ones we install are in a rack box, but it has the same processor, same memory. They're so tiny. They,

that's, that's a good thing. Yeah. And here's the thing. If, if you install, and I, I,

I strongly suspect you'll never be able to, to, to, to saturate the, that bus. But if you were to saturate that bus. But if you were to saturate it and fill it up, the nice thing is when you go to the next model, you can take your config and drop it into the next one because it's the same interface and the same OS.

Right. That's right. These are running router OS, right? Yes. This is all coming back to me now. And if I was going to go to altaspeedstore.com, I would get this page is not available. But maybe that's where I could. Yeah, we're going to fix that. But that's where I would probably order something like altaspeedstore.com. I would get this page. It's not available. But maybe that's where I could. Yeah, we're going to fix that.

But that's where I would probably order something like this. Yeah. Huh. Very cool. All right. And of course, if you decided you wanted a bigger one or a rack one, you let me know and one will show up. Well, if you say the one you sent me is going to be able to hold the load, then I might

just go that route because I've been really stuck with this. And will the one that you sent me also, it has all the same features. It'll do a mirrored port and all that. Oh, that is so cool. No, I think you just, well, we'll see. We'll see if that solves. I've also gotten a couple of really good recommendations for a server. And a couple of them have been brought up in the chat room.

But there's a couple that people have sent in that I've heard about now that I didn't know of before I asked. And I'm really appreciative of some of the suggestions i've gotten so i've already gotten some great ones so i'm definitely going to look at those too uh wimpy did you have an experience with the microtech routers yeah so i've probably mentioned before that i'm connected to the internet via shortwave radio and that's all running using uh microtech um routers uh this end uh and then power over ethernet up the side of the house to an antenna and then a microtech radio dish that beams across beams across the countryside to a microtech system on the other side and using and using qos and so i guess you like them i'm i've gotoS profiled for the Mumble server so it doesn't get all patchy

and crappy. So they work really well. They're nice devices. It's like every time we bring something up you manage to surprise me with something. That's great. So there's a good endorsement right there. Alright. So we've got two more emails to get to. One's actually more of a

PSA and then one is maybe we've got a great mumble room today. So maybe this is something you guys can help somebody solve. It's kind of in the networking category. But first I want to mention Ting. Linux.ting.com is where you go. That will get you a $25 credit off your first month of Ting service if you've got a Ting-compatible phone. They have a BYOD page.

However, if you're going to get a new phone like I did when I switched to Ting, well, then they can give you $25 off your phone. So I've done it. I've taken advantage of both offerings, and I can tell you that either way, it's a great deal because that's just the beginning, and it's already in tremendous value. Once you get your phone or you bring your phone over, then you have an incredible service with no BS because there's no contract. There's no early termination fee, so they're not trying to get you that way. And you only pay for what you actually use. Ting just takes your minutes, your messages, your megabytes, and they just add them up. So for three lines right now, in fact, I will log into my account while I talk about this.

For three lines right now, I am paying somewhere around $35 for an HTC One, a Nexus 5, and an iPhone 5 all on one Ting account. And what's awesome is I can go in and drill down and see which phone's using my bandwidth. I can set alerts individually for each line if I want to. I can also do things like manage the voicemail, the caller ID, name the phones, things like that. So here, I'm pulling up my Ting account right now. So my current bill is $45. For three phones, $45. And you can see right now where our minutes and usage is at. It's really straightforward. They use this fuel gauge system. So you get a quick snapshot and get a great idea. Now that's based on my average, which is really cool. So Ting gives me my projected numbers as

well as my current numbers. So there's no hiding of information. It's just boom right there. This is where you're at three lines. It's so great and so easy to manage. And they're always doing really cool stuff too. Like they just posted, we often talk about how Ting loves to do app picks. We've gotten so many more recently. They've had different staff members. Like Andrew just picked his top six apps and posted them to the Ting blog. So when you go to linux.ting.com, also check out their blog because even if you're not a Ting customer, you can take advantage of some of these great app recommendations they have over on the blog.

So check out the Ting blog when you go to linux.ting.com as well because that's just one of many posts. They've been doing a whole series of these app picks, and they really do pick great ones. They work really hard on those. Ting also has no hold customer service. So if you get stuck or you move family over or you're part of a small business, you've got staff that has a problem, you're not going to have anybody wasting time. They just call 1-855-TING-FTW and a real human answers the phone between 8am and 8pm business hours. Easy peasy, right? So for me, I've never actually taken advantage of that as awesome as it is because they also have an incredible online help system with a very active community. Like,

seriously, like how many cell phone providers, you know, like, hey, so I'm trying to get Ubuntu touch working on my Nexus 5 and I'm having problems sending picture messages. Oh, well, you can't do that. Oh, okay. Somebody else has tried this? Yeah, I just tried that. That is great. Thank you. Just even the back and forth. Or yeah, do this. Or add this MMS server address or whatever it was. I never had to do any

of that kind of stuff. I've actually had other problems with Sailfish OS. Actually, Ubuntu Touch hasn't been a problem at all. But on Sailfish OS, I was able to go in there. I was able to find somebody else using Sailfish OS on Ting. And Ting just allows the open conversations. And they watch that and they go, boy, you know, sometimes they've extracted stuff from that and said, you know, the community's really interested

in this. Let's roll this out. And they've done that. It's really awesome. There's so many great things to check out. So start by going to linux.ting.com. Try out their savings calculator. Put your actual usage in there. I didn't see how much you'd save. Oh, yeah, and they're also on Reddit, too. Put your actual usage in there. I didn't see how much you'd save. Oh, yeah, and they're also on Reddit, too. They're really savvy about that.

There's a reddit.com slash r slash ting you can check out as well. That's pretty neat as well. Linux.ting.com. And a big thanks to Ting for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. Ting, you're so awesome. You're so awesome. Can you believe that? Three lines.

Three lines. And I got to tell you, one of the people, one of those lines is talking all the time. They're talking all the time. Not me. It's not me, but somebody is. No, no. Linux.ting.com. A big thanks to Ting. All right.

So let's see if we can help somebody with an interesting networking conundrum. And really what that means is let's help somebody avoid their IT department. So Eric writes in, A-R-I-C, Eric? He says, hey guys, I'm running into an issue at work and I'm hoping that you might be able to help me with this. My laptop is running Mint 17. The ethernet jack on my laptop connects to our corporate network. Ultimately, that means my internet activity also goes through the corporate network, which means I hit their filter, they block out lots of things and resources I need. So what I do is I connect my Wi-Fi to a wireless network that just bypasses all the filtering and I can get out. Now, of course, that's always how it works. People always find a way.

I know in Windows, you can order the network interfaces so Wi-Fi would be above your local area connection, meaning your traffic would go out that first and then go out the LAN connection if it couldn't find what it needs. The only way I have found to do that in Linux is to hard set static routes. Do you know of any way in Linux to set your Wi-Fi adapter as the default adapter so I can stop disabling my LAN connection? Because that's sort of the route he started taking. Between last Linux Unplugged and TechSnap, you guys pretty much fill up my morning and

evening commutes. Looking forward to the next show, Eric. So I was going to say default routes until he said I don't want to do routes. Anybody in the mumble room have a suggestion of a way he could manage this? Is there any apps? Does network manager allow you to sort the preference order? Because I'm always usually just on one connection, so I don't think I've run into this very much. Anybody have any suggestions?

Wow. None's coming to my mind. We've got like 25 people in this mumble room and nobody's any suggestions? Wow. None's coming to my mind. We've got like 25 people in this mumble room and nobody's got any of these. Wow. If a network manager can't take care of it then it's like, what do you do? Because one thing about Linux Mint, especially the Cinnamon version, is it relies

on network manager. Network manager is a dependency. I have a suggestion. Would you just use a VPN? Hmm. Or a proxy. be the VPN. Or proxy. Yeah, VPN. Yeah, I just pipe all my stuff through a shuttle, or SS Shuttle. Yeah, I suppose a VPN would do that.

So in Windows, you can set your network device preference order, right? I think that's what they call it. You can set your device order. There's got to be a way to do it in Network Manager. VPN or hmm. Yeah, I can't really think of another way. I mean, there must be. Well, if anybody in the audience, there might be somebody screaming at their

headphones right now or monitor saying, I know a way. Go over to the linuxactionshow.reddit.com and find Linux Unplugged in the feedback thread and drop a note in there if you would. What he could do is use a different client all together and it's he's like wicked or something right so this web browser it goes here yeah that might work and so yeah that might be a way to do it or the other thing I was thinking is a VM right and have the VM attached to just the Wi-Fi and then just do all your browsing in the VM and that also kind of gives

you an extra layer of protection from somebody snooping through your machine and looking at your history. Yeah, that's easy to do in a virtual box. Very easy. Yeah, right. Or even VMware Player or anything. So that could be another way to go, but I don't know. I don't know. Alright, so then we just have a little PSA that Producer Eric wanted to pass along to the troops out there.

There has been a security vulnerability discovered in Apt. The Google security team discovered a buffer overflow vulnerability in the HTTP transport code in apt-get. An attacker is able to do a man-in-the-middle on an HTTP request, so you could essentially snag somebody's apt-get request. Wow. It can also trigger a binary buffer overflow, leading to a crash on the HTTP apt method binary or potentially an arbitrary code execution.

Two regressions have been fixed in an update that is out for Wheezy. You can go get it. I assume this probably also affects Ubuntu. I don't know if it's been patched over there. This has been known for a little bit, and I meant to cover it on Sunday, but it totally skipped my mind. But I know we have a bunch of Debian users out there, so go get your updates, guys, because that one's a particularly nasty one.

Yeah, the big thing is that anything based on Debian is going to be affected by this easily. Right. So as long as whatever distribution you've got patched it or what have you, then you're probably safe. Yeah, we did have an email regarding SystemD, and I have one more email to read. I don't want to just get all of our shows marred down in system D discussion. So I've just kept it to one email. And this one came in from system developer. And he says,

Hello, Chris, Matt and the chair. And I just wanted to comment a bit on the whole system D thing from a perspective of a low end, or I'm sorry, a low level programmer. If no one takes anything else from this email, please at least understand that modern software does not work the Unix way for technical reasons. Let's be realistic. System V init was a bunch of shell scripts that had very little in them to accommodate in terms of security, maintainability on a large scale.

Testability and integration as well. The reason system V stores log files in binary format for example is for efficiency reasons when communicating between its different components. Not to make it impossible for you as the user to read them. In fact, it's very easy to get your logs in text form. Another thing is, the reason system deintegrates some of the stuff that we were previously separate, had set as separate programs, is it can integrate better with them, i.e. communicating between shell scripts. He says, when was the last time you saw a really

good shell script of any complexity whatsoever? Yeah, I can't remember one either. Another thing is that exploiting concurrency and parallelism using shell scripts is practically impossible. I'm not even talking about having a nice API, etc., etc., which SystemDuty also has. Let's not forget, Unix was built in an age where the Internet was simply not a thing, and so security concerns were often tossed aside. It was built in an age of archaic hardware that certainly wasn't a quad-six or eight-core beast,

and it was built in an age when deploying your own personal VPS in 55 seconds wasn't possible. It certainly is disgusting to hear all the trash talk from the BSD guys, who until recently used an archaic compiler, still use code from 1992, and use an init system that is a bunch of shell scripts. Go on, develop something systemd-competitive, and then talk. Let the code speak for itself. Some big words.

Yeah, and I wanted to read that last part again where he says, go on and develop something systemd-competitive and then talk. In light of our conversation on Sunday's Linux Action Show about uselessd or us less D, I wasn't super happy with, I got all caught up in their attitude about it because I really hate the, I hate the, we never needed this attitude about it because it seems so uninformed. And I get really upset when people come with a technical argument that to me doesn't hold up, but yet it still manages for some reason to gain traction in a technical crowd. Exactly.

That's very frustrating for me. And that's what I was getting worked up about on Sunday. I don't mind the idea of useless D or useless D. I think bring the competition. I think it's a little bit of shit competition. Bring the competition. I think it's a little bit of shit competition. It's based on a super old version of SystemD, which is majorly disappointing,

which already there makes it feel a little uncompetitive. And I think it's a little bit of shit at the language they're using. So I'm not super stoked about that. But I do like the idea of a compatible competitive product that could at least offer some folks an alternative to systemd while still maintaining some compatibility with systemd so i'm all up for that um and i i i wish i don't know i just wish they could have gone about it differently and i wish i didn't react so strongly on sunday i guess well i think part of the problem is that with any technical argument and this isn't just linux this is just technology in general it's, this is good enough for me. If you can't figure it out

or if you can't make it work, you're an idiot or you're an a-hole or you're whatever. And I see that amongst all platforms, all technologies. I see it from mechanics. I see it from people in the medical field. I see it across all things.

I've seen it from painters. It's funny because we dig ourselves in here. Go to a cooking class painters. It's funny because we dig ourselves in here. Go to a cooking class sometime. Yeah, good point. It's unbelievable. So, I mean, I think we as human beings need to get off our high horse, realize we're not as special as everybody told us we were. And sometimes things that work for us may not, wait for it, work for everybody. Dang, yeah.

That's kind of my thing. Wimpy, I wanted to let you go first in the mumble room because i know you kind of had the first responses what are your thoughts on on this all yeah pretty much the same as yours really uh it's all a bit disappointing that the only thing that i kind of agree it's more positive than some of these negative responses in that something's being created as a result of it so I do get frustrated when you hear people complaining and moaning about things, but then they don't move on to something better or something that suits them better or find an alternative. They just troll the community and whine and moan.

So useless-dy or useless-dy, whatever it is, at least they've created something which is positive, but I'm not a fan of the language and the way that they've presented it. Yeah, it's very trollish in and of itself. Poby, are you present here? Are you here today? Because I'd like to get your take. So you've watched this from the Ubuntu side of the fence, where things have come out, and then there's unending agony over it for months and months and months at a time,

and it feels like it'll never go away. You're sitting back here watching this, running a desktop probably powered by Upstart right now. What are your thoughts on all of this? Lol. I don't care. Honestly, I don't care. It's plumbing, and I don't particularly care about plumbing. I care more about the upper level of the stack.

And I like the fact that, you know, a system may start faster with system D or it may be more reliable or it may be that people are able to build better startup scripts and shutdown scripts. That all sounds amazing. But it doesn't sound particularly interesting to me. And I find it tiresome that this is still going on. Yeah, yeah. And I think this has also been part of my reaction,

is that I'm honestly surprised that people care this much still. No, actually, I think this cannot be resolved. Some people butthead so hard that they will never agree. Because you think this goes down to fundamental lines? Yeah, they've already decided that they don't like it and they're not going to accept it. There's no way we can actually convince them otherwise

because they are stuck in a rut. They will not move. They're zombified or petrified. They cannot progress. But I think, fair enough to say, there could be people on both sides of the debate. There's people who will not move away from System D as the future, too. So it's not just one camp over the

other. It just seems to be like Matt's saying. People are just not... We have to agree to disagree. But also, isn't System D the future, actually? I mean, ever since Debian adopted it, I mean, like, how are you going to get away from it? Right, yeah.

I've had the same argument where people argue about mixers. It's like, oh, I use a KitchenAid. It's like, oh, you sell out. You don't use the hand mixer. Yeah, or the barbecues. You get that in barbecues a lot, too. Oh, barbecues, big time. Propane, charcoal.

These guys have fistfights over this stuff. It's like, where does it end? You know, it's like, great. My name is Hank Hill, and we sell propane and propane accessories. Hold on. Wimpy's got some math here. What do you have here, Wimpy? What are you linking to?

Because it got blocked by the sensor in the chat room. It was a presentation that was given earlier in the year, and one of the slides simply read, the amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it. And I just think that's where we are with this system. Absolutely. Wow. Wow. Okay.

That's awesome. All right. So the debate itself is not over. Our coverage itself is not over. I'm just trying to, I honestly want to give it some air. I don't know. We'll see. I mean, honestly, we are subject to the whims of what happens

and what develops. But for right now, I think the best thing is to let it get some air, let everybody kind of think about it, and then we'll address it again down the road. We'll see if that actually – that's my intent. We'll see if that actually happens. I don't know. I'm trying. I honestly am trying. All right.

Before we get into one of our first big topics this week, I want to thank DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean rocks. Simple cloud hosting dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way for you to spin up a cloud server. In fact, now I'm not going to put words in your mouth. I don't want to set expectations upon you and make you think I'm going to judge you, but you might be able to go create a cloud server in less than about, oh, I don't know, 35 seconds. We'll see what you can do. Most users get a cloud server spun up in about 55 seconds, and pricing plans start at only $5 per month for 512 megabytes of RAM, a 20 gigabyte SSD, one CPU, and a terabyte of transfer.

A terabyte. You know I get a terabyte, which is awesome, which means one of the number one reasons I have my BitTorrent sync server up on a droplet instead of anywhere else is because I know that I have a terabyte I can burn in BitTorrent sync before I even need to care. And DigitalOcean's pricing structure is so simple that if I wanted to bump up to the next bandwidth level, I could do it. It's really crazy great. And part of that is because their control panel. Their control panel is so simple and intuitive. And power users can replicate that control panel on a much larger scale using their API. It's pretty great because you're already seeing a bunch of apps come out from the community to manage your droplets. And of course, DigitalOcean has data center locations

in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, and London. Go check them out. That interface is so awesome. And really, their support is fantastic as well. I've gotten a number of really great stories from you out in the audience who've had some really good experiences. When you go over to DigitalOcean.com, you can get a $10 credit. You can try out a droplet for two months for absolutely free. When you use the promo code, UnpluggedSeptember, all one word, lowercase. UnpluggedSeptember will give you a $10 credit. Try out the $5 rig. Get it for two months. Or go fancy.

And one of the cool things you can do over DigitalOcean is you can sort of pre-charge the funding on your account if you want. So this is a really nice way to just go in there, toss that in, and get a $10 credit and run it for as long as you need it. Because you can also use their hourly pricing, which is super cool. DigitalOcean.com, promo code UnplugSeptember when you check out.

And a huge thank you to DigitalOcean for rocking so hard and their support of Linux Unplugged. Love it. I'm a droplet fiend. It's cool, Matt. It's cool. I admit it. I have a droplet problem. Oh, I keep popping them up. It's like the way I go through Cokes in studio is like me with droplets.

I'm just like bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, you know, telling you. Okay, cool. I like that. That's a good analogy I can understand. All right, so let's talk about how Red Hat is going to take a machete knife to the throat of Canonical. I mean, no, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I just like to make I'm kidding. But I'm kidding. I just like to make it sound more dramatic than it really is.

In fact, if anything, I'm not so sure that is going to be the case, but Red Hat CEO announces that they're going to shift to focus on cloud computing. Surprise, surprise, gasp, surprise. We've got several articles in the show notes that cover the announcement. But if you didn't hear, this is sort of Red Hat's logic. They say this is from their blog.

The competition is fierce and companies will spend and will have several choices for their cloud needs. But the prize is the chance to establish open source as the default for the next era and to position Red Hat as the provider for choice for enterprises and the entire cloud infrastructure. To get there, Red Hat will focus on three key offerings. Its CloudForms management platform, its OpenShift platform as a service, and OpenStack. However, its JBoss middleware and storage solutions

will also play a role in helping Red Hat deliver as much infrastructure as it can. Red Hat's new cloud focus doesn't mean it will pay less attention to Linux. It just, it realizes its greatest challenge lies ahead in the data center itself. So that's a little dramatic, but that's essentially what they're saying. And they say they have excellent reasons for seeing it this way. With the rollout of Azure,

you have Amazon's EC2, which a lot of these that will run Red Hat in some places. It's a big market. It's a huge market, and it seems to be a big profit center. And my question to you, Matt, is were they not focused on the cloud before? And did they not get the idea of OpenStack and hosting and all of this? This sounds like it's just sort of reaffirming what they've already been doing but just putting a new marketing spin on it. I think you hit it with the latter part. I mean – and they're probably not even doing that on purpose, but they're kind of – they're trying to remind people, hey, we're still doing this stuff. You should check it out.

I mean at the end of the day, I think they're feeling the heat from the competition, whether it be Ubuntu or others. And I think they're trying to say, hey, we're still a thing. We're still wanting to grow. We're still a billion-dollar company. Come take a look at us. Come see what we're still a thing. We're still wanting to grow. We're still a billion-dollar company. Come take a look at us. Come see what we're doing. But I do feel like that if they're not careful, they could end up treading water, and it does feel like that they could potentially here probably 2015, 2016 end up at that point.

Just call it a hunch. All right, Daredevil, and you think it's anything more than a marketing strategy? I think it's a marketing strategy, and they are trying to bring attention and setting a playing field for them to present the new tools that they've been working on that have barely been talked about. Here's what I wonder, though. But is it that, or is it acknowledging, hey, we missed the OpenStack boat a little bit, and now we're kind of going to make good on that. And we're saying publicly that that area where Canonical is kicking our ass in the server infrastructure, we're going to go for that now. That's essentially, isn't that what they're saying? Is this is a public statement to say, bring it on.

I think it's preparing ground more than anything else because they have tools that they've been developing and they've been working on for a while. They're trying to bring them on, but if you just bring them on, there's no reason for you to be paying attention or to care about Red Hat. So they need to start making statements so people start looking at them, and then suddenly they can see the tools that they're talking about and say, oh, this is why I go to Red Hat. All right, Eric, what do you think?

Well, let's not forget, they are the number one Linux provider in the world. And let's not also forget they have competition in the form of Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. I'm thinking Microsoft in particular, because, I mean, Sasha Nadella, he used to be the head of their cloud infrastructure division. Right, right, right.

And so Microsoft is making that a big focus. Yeah. I think Red Hat's basically reacting to that, and they're like, well, we've got to get in on this too, otherwise we're going to miss the boat entirely. Well, and to that point, like when you spin up an Azure server, are you getting Red Hat Enterprise Linux? Is that running on a Windows box? Is Red Hat Enterprise critical to that infrastructure,

or is it simply a feature of that infrastructure, and does that sort of, you know, scare Red Hat a little bit? And, you know, also, like you said, Satya Nadella came from the Azure side, and that seems like Microsoft's only legitimate future expansion. So, of course, that's going to be competitive. And on EC2, Ubuntu, I believe, is the preferred distro that runs over there. I'm not sure if that's true or not, but I think it's... Pretty much the preferred distro on every cloud platform. Right, exactly. And this is a huge problem for Red Hat. Yeah, they're playing catch-up. It's plain and simple. And today, I don't know, to me, I'm just reading tea leaves here, folks, but today, Canonical announced that Oracle and Canonical

will collaborate on supporting Oracle Linux on Ubuntu-powered infrastructures and vice versa. So this is sort of them saying, we're going to work together to collaborate on supporting Oracle Linux on Ubuntu-powered infrastructures and vice versa. So this is sort of them saying, we're going to work together to collaborate on making a common OpenStack infrastructure where you'll know you'll have cooperation with either Oracle or Canonical to run their various Linux size. Yeah, that means Oracle Linux is still a thing, of course. But Oracle said in a blog post, it's important for us to provide choice and interoperability around OpenStack, i.e. something else besides Red Hat. Oracle and Canonical are committed to supplying interoperability by supporting Oracle Linux on Ubuntu OpenStack. Our goal is to continue to provide customers with the best-in-class products and solutions and great customer experience, i.e. we're going to team up to help continue to push Red Hat out.

from experience, i.e., we're going to team up to help continue to push Red Hat out. It's funny, when you hear companies talk about interoperability, often what they mean is we'll allow you to run something else on our platform, and that's it, full stop. So Microsoft interoperability for Azure means you can run Ubuntu Linux on Azure. And for Red Hat, that means you could run CentOS on Red Hat. Whereas with the Oracle deal, it's bidirectional. You can run Ubuntu on Oracle, you can run Oracle on Ubuntu. I guess what I'm not clear on is how has Red Hat screwed this up? I don't think they have. They couldn't have.

They have a file system called Ceph. It's a distributed file system that's pretty much built for OpenStack usage or the other Apache clustering file system that's pretty much built for OpenStack usage or the other Apache clustering file system that they have to use in those cloud environments because normal file systems don't work. They have their own file system built for it, and that's what everyone uses, and it's just XFS

based, of course. Here's my question. Is Oracle Linux still based on Rails? Yeah, that's the funny thing. Yeah, they're poisoning the well, which they're drawing from, yes. You know when conferences and all that stuff happen? For the block layer, all the storage stuff, I always hear that Red Hat is still the biggest. It has no competition in the server space.

But I guess they're kind of worried about the cloud market. I think they're dominating a lot of large on-premises installations and a lot of large hosting, a lot of large co-host stuff. But I think where they're not dominating is this infrastructure on demand. I'm going to go spin up something in a few seconds and deploy it to thousands of endpoints. I don't think they're as competitive there, and they are definitely building tools. They need to sound more sexy again.

They need to sound more sexy again. They need to be like, we're Ubuntu awesome. Yeah, Canonical does have a kind of, we sound good. So it's good to have us, and it is a selling point, Ubuntu awesome. Yeah, Canonical does have a kind of, we sound good. So it's good to have us. And it is a selling point, Ubuntu ability. I would argue that Red Hat isn't the right match for the demands of that type of use case. And the reason I say that is, it's just a fact of the matter. In my opinion, and the only reason I say this is because I've literally set up hundreds of them, but it is significantly less work to spin up an Ubuntu LTS server than it is a Red Hat server when you're doing certain tasks.

And that's if you use Task Cell, and that's if you're more comfortable with apt than RPM. I grant you those things. But if you accept those conditions, it is faster to set up an Ubuntu LTS system. That plays into this. That is a factor. Because I can tell you, here at the Jupiter Broadcasting Studios, I don't particularly have one bias or the other,

but when we need to spin up a VPS, I sure as shit don't spin up a CentOS one, I spin up an Ubuntu LTS one every single time. Oh yeah, that's not really where the benefit of Red Hat comes in. Where the benefit of Red Hat comes in is their support. You can sue them, and they give you custom patches for kernels that if you have a bug in your company, and only you're ever having that problem, they'll give you a specific custom kernel patch

for your problem to make you be operational. They'll work with hardware providers, and they supply amazing enterprise tools, but I don't think any of those strengths necessarily play into infrastructure on demand as much not that they're not a player there and not that they're not making changes with fedora server and fedora cloud all that's granted but i'm just saying that the current conditions on the ground is if you know there's there's just certain things stacked against the way you do things on red hat i think well i think it's admirable that they have the skills to be

able to deliver a custom kernel patch for some weird esoteric hardware that they're running. In the cloud, that doesn't matter. That doesn't matter in the cloud. It's the same virtual machine. It's a QEMU. It's the same piece of hardware that every Linux distro is running under.

The patches for one vendor will be provided by Microsoft. the patches for one vendor will be provided by Microsoft. The patches for another vendor will be provided by someone else, Amazon or OpenStack or whoever. And while I think that's an admirable thing they have, I don't think it benefits them in the cloud. Good point. All right. So I want to give some other folks a chance to jump in here. Skyler, you say you kind of have an opinion on what Red Hat's core problem is?

jump in here uh skyler uh you say you kind of have an opinion on what red hat's core problem is well it seems to me that at least when the younger people think of the lingerie linux linux people think of red hat we think of this old the first program something that everyone uses on the server but it's not new it's not popular it's just this it's this company that started when Linux first existed and now it's here you know it's just it exists it's an incumbent forever yeah and it doesn't have that sort of appeal that I think a lot of people started playing with Ubuntu

on the cloud because that's what they played with on their desktop and it kind of so it's the new hotness well it was just it was what they were playing with at the time when this came around yeah oh I think when I think of RHEL when I think of you know Red Hat I think corporate So it's the new hotness. Well, it was what they were playing with at the time when this came around. When I think of Red Hat, I think corporate. I mean, I think Heaven's Revenge hit the nail right on the head.

Yeah, sure, they'll come out with a crazy kernel patch for whatever esoteric hardware you have. If you're a company and you have a support card, blah, blah, blah, I could never get into Red Hat by virtue of that fact. Yeah, Red Hat's not for the common man. It's kind of where you have, you know, your balls are in a vice, and you're going to get your job fired unless you can actually get this fixed.

That should be part of a new commercial for them. Are your balls in a vice? Balls in a vice. All right, so Silver Axe, I wanted to give you a chance to respond to. It's about needing to spin up these on-demand servers. You think maybe it's more about what runs those servers? That was your go. No?

Okay. All right. Well, then I'll move to the next one. Webby, I want to give you a chance to chime in, too, because I know you pinged me. Go ahead. Yeah. It was just a lot of the times, especially when you're dealing with management, you're going and you're looking at them and you're saying, you're trying to say, oh, we should

go for this Ubuntu cloud thing and this is going to help us do this or that and you know it's very hard to sell them on something when you just sold them on a bunch of red hat boxes a couple months ago and you're like well what's the difference here yeah and it's like so when you can already say by the way red hat is asking and we that we have this extra platform on top of this and it's just this little extra platform Okay, alright, Wimpy do you want any closing thoughts on this topic before we run? When Ubuntu started out it was squarely aimed at the desktop market and although it had server operating systems

bug number one was all about Microsoft and I think that was fairly squarely aimed at the desktop and what happened with Ubuntu's rise in popularity is it attracted developers and administrators and people got familiar with Ubuntu on the desktop and the skills that they learned were then transferable to the server environment. And I think this is one of the reasons why you see Ubuntu being so dominant now in the VPS and server space, because there's now a generation of developers who've grown up with Ubuntu, who've got the skills, and that is their go-to platform.

And if you look at Red Hat, this isn't just about the cloud, because the other thing they're talking about is Fedora Next and their desktop and making it a developer friendly thing and i think it's the fedora next desktop and this refocusing on cloud right it's those two things together that they're actually trying to go after canonical with because they need to catch up on developer mindshare well i i think it's all good i mean i don't i don't know if it's fair to say it's all canonical, but I think a lot of the restructuring is because of that. And I think this big press release is a response to them. And I don't know if it's too late.

Maybe not. But it seems like these kinds of things, these types of technologies, they come in waves. And if you miss the wave, then your best bet is to just try to catch the next wave. And I think cheap on-demand servers hit around the same time that people were really starting to experiment with Ubuntu on the desktop. And they just happened to nail that timing. It's a part of the component. And then Canonical was smart enough to recognize that and respond. And not to Red Hat's discredit, because Red Hat continued to

go off and make billions doing their thing, right? And now they've really locked that down. Now I think they're looking back and going, you know, we might have had a little bit of a blind spot, and now we're going to try to address that. And I think that's completely respectable and exactly what you would expect them to do and exactly what they should do. The question is, can they actually truly really pull it off now? Or is it too late? It'll be glacial in terms of like the rate of change and adoption. But I mean, yeah, of course they can pull it off. You think?

They have the money. Yeah. Well, and they can stick with it for a long, long time. Exactly. Yeah, that will be interesting to see. And we'll follow to see what happens. Because I think this is going to be an interesting little rift because these are – this is some serious legitimate competition we're going to start seeing go down here. And it doesn't have anything to do with phones.

It doesn't have anything to do with tablets. It's straight up what makes great infrastructure, what makes great support. And I believe it can bring out the best in these companies. So as observers, I think we're going to be in for quite a show. So we'll see what happens. We've got one more thing I want to get into, and that is the sad state of XFCE and what the Debian project has done about it. But before we do that, I want to thank Linux Academy.

In fact, I'd love to have you head over to Linux Academy right now. In fact, if you go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged, you'll get the 33% discount. And let me tell you, Linux Academy has just rolled out a ton of upgrades. And if you're a Linux Academy subscriber, you get them automatically. And if you haven't been one yet, well, then go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged and sign up. So Linux Academy is a great resource. If you want to learn the backend infrastructure of Linux,

if you want to learn certain things like the software stack, like perhaps maybe Apache, PHP, and MySQL, or rsync and things like that, or OpenStack even. Or if you want to go down even lower to the networking and stuff like that, Linux Academy can accommodate all of that. They have step-by-step video courses. They have downloadable comprehensive study guides. They have seven plus Linux distributions you can choose from, and then they'll automatically adjust the course where they have on-demand service. So as the course requires it, they'll spin up a virtual server or an AWS instance in the background for you. And they've just rolled out a ton of new things. But I think I'm going to talk about learning plans today. Because if you're busy,

like I am, this is particularly appealing. And it's super, super smart. And it's such a great way where I can continue to put that carrot in front of me to push myself forward, to learn more, to better myself, but not get burned out and frustrated because I'm too busy. They're called learning plans. It's something that Linux Academy has rolled out to all subscribers. Learning plans allow the user to select their daily availability. And based on that availability, a study plan is automatically created. Learning plans will give you the lessons, the quizzes, and the virtual labs that are due on each day. And I'll even send you an email reminder if you need it to remind you what's due for that day. And based on the availability that you set, it will even give you a projected completion date of the course

with extra time included for studying. I think Learning Plans is awesome. And they've got some great ones for CentOS. So we're talking about Red Hat, OpenStack. We've been talking about that today. They have 14 upcoming courses throughout the remainder of the year too. And I'll tell you more about those as they get closer. Their dashboard lets you pick up right where you left off, gives you estimations of time on each part. They have a community that can be there for support when you need it. And they're doing live sessions with the educators more and more so you can ask questions directly to them. It's a group of Linux users and educators who got together and said, we can serve the Linux community better. And now they're doing it. They've created something for Linux users and it's awesome. LinuxAcademy.com

slash unplugged. Go check them out. They just got better than ever, too. And a big thanks to Linux Academy for their great support of Linux Unplugged. I think it's a really good resource. You guys can check it out. Even if you're a pro, go refresh your skill set. I think you'll be pretty impressed with the little details you can fill in.

Okay, so today our, was it today or recently, really recently, Debian announced that they're going to switch back to GNOME after what was it? Guys, what was it, 10 months ago they said they were going to switch to XFCE, or was it even less than that? I think it was 10 or 11. Okay. This is hilarious.

So not too surprising, right? I mean, so here's what they said. According to a Debian developer who is performing this change, the main reasons for Debian switching back to GNOME from XFCE are accessibility options in GNOME and system deintegration. So I think that's pretty interesting. It's exactly what I wanted to see. Derek Devlin, do you think the Debian users are going to respond well to this? Do you think this is good feedback, that this is something people are going to like? Yes, and they have the Debian contest, which they use heavily to decide what is default on a Debian installation. So as a Debian user, I am actually pretty happy with it.

Well, okay, but Wimpy, why not Matei? Well, during the evaluation that took place, Matei scored very highly on the evaluation score sheet. Woo-hoo! In fact, coming in just behind Gnome, and in fact scoring higher in one area because Marte can support SystemD or ConsoleKit, which of course on Debian, SystemD isn't a hard requirement. Right, right, right. So was it just because it was too new? What was sort of the reason?

Or did GNOME just win out in votes? I think GNOME has got a larger group of maintainers behind it, and there's more momentum behind that project in Debian at the moment. Marte is still very fresh. Those packages have only just arrived in the last sort of four or five months or so. So the team's quite small. Just to dovetail on that, XFCE has hardly any development currently going on. Yeah, let me pick up from that point.

And I want to toss this to Rotten Corpse. Isn't this really what we are seeing here? Is the people, the deadman community realizing that XFCE is a dead man walking rotten? Rotten, thank you. Dogs are barking. Is the deadman community realizing that XFCE is a dead man walking rotten? Rotten, thank you. Dogs are barking. Oh. All right.

Well, Eric, I'll let you take that. Then what do you think, Eric? Is this a sign that people are waking up and saying, geez, maybe – I mean, let's look at XFCE. What's their – hey, what's XFCE's whaling plan? There is none. Oh. What's XFCE's system D plans? There is none. Oh. What's XFCE's SystemD plans? There are none.

Oh. Right? I mean, mad respect from XFCE, right? Mad respect. No, look. I've had low-end systems that XFCE has given me the option of feeling like I have a real boy desktop on a low-end system, and I have mad respect for that. But at the end of the day, Mate is here. It's updated.

It's integrating new features. It has about the same resource requirements as XFCE. I'm looking at XFCE, and I'm thinking, so long, and thanks for all the fish. Yeah. I'm kidding. To me, XFCE just doesn't cut it in functionality. Mate, or Mate, it's built on all of Gnome 2. Gnome 2 was in Debian stable for what?

14, 15 years beforehand? And so it's based on a really solid base, kind of like how X4 was built on the X3 code base. They got a solid base. Okay, all right. So, Wizard, are you going to come to XFC's defense here? So, I'm not going to come directly to his defense, but you really should take it easy on them.

They are a bunch of university students that are working on this. There's no people that are hired, or there's no XFC huge team where they have funding every single year for it. Right, and it's especially unfair comparing them to the Metatum, who's rolling, right? I mean, I believe they have, what, 25 developers who each make about a million a year working for them? Exactly. Well, think of it as an international cabaret artist of billionaires.

I mean, obviously, this is always a problem whenever you criticize open source. At the end of the day, it's guys and gals working on code in their free time a lot of the times. And like I said, I have massive respect for XFCE. In fact, it was a go-to desktop for me for a long time. But at the same time, you know, as users, we also have to say enough is enough. KDE started that way and GNOME started off just as small. GNOME 2 and X, or KDE 2 and 3.whatever.

If, you know, time comes and they should die or better things actually win out, then so be it. I totally agree with that, but, like, by the same token, like, XFCE always seems to, you know, when things actually really need to be done, they seem to actually really do them. When I need to do something, I start

off flush box, man. What does that mean? What does that mean? When something needs to be done, they do it. They've released five times in 10 years. Yeah, but I mean, like, but it's, you know, it still runs. It's still stable. Because they've changed nothing. I don't know.

I can comment on that. I don't know if I would go with stable. Wimpy, yeah, just take that. Can I say something, please? All right, yes. Go ahead, Fred. Let Fred get in. Let Fred get in.

He's been waiting. Sorry, Fred. Okay, thanks. So, first of all, if you look at their Git repository, you have about a whole bunch of commits in the past seven days. So they're still all over a bunch of modules. Yeah, but what you need to do is then discount all the translations and then look at the actual activity. Well, that's awesome. I mean, translations are still work

that has to be done. They are, but by comparison, there's work that needs to be done on things like uPower support, which hasn't been done. Right. And as Rotten alluded to, there hasn't been a staple release for over two and a half years.

So there's some real bit rotting in 4.10. But the more important thing... That's not necessarily a bad thing. the more important thing a bad thing so they are no it's a bad thing it happens every time it's okay it's okay just give them time they are they are they they are underpowered i'm in the same time same campus and by the way uh kde and gnome yeah they have like great systemd plans and they have great Wayland plans and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah all day long.

Yeah, good plans. By the way, we're going to watch KDE and GNOME crash 100 times a day on Wayland until things get better. Absolutely. There is some truth in that. XTE is going to come later and they're going to look

at the lessons learned. They're not going to come later, and they're going to look at the lessons learned. They're not going to make the same mistakes. And they're going to take their time preparing it. But don't you feel like if there was any distribution in the world that understood that logic, it would be Debian? Because that's like Debian to a T. And yet even for Debian, XFCE is too slow. Free BSD as well. Or free BSD, yeah?

Or the BSDs in general. Also, I would like to point out that XFCE is like way, way, it's much more of a community project than GNOME as an example. GNOME and SystemD

by the way. Right, right. Yeah, it's a very good point. But that still doesn't take into effect the fact that every single release is never systemd by the way right right yes very good point and i think that still doesn't it's taking into effect the fact that every single release is never more under a year from the last release and most of the time they take even more than that that one time they took three years and now they're almost at three years and the fact that they even said they were going to release 412 which is the one that isn't out yet they're're going to release that in January of 2013, and they massively missed that goal. They missed every single goal they ever make.

Okay, just use your desktop, and why do you have to care about releases? Just use the applications. That's what it's there for. Why do you care so much about the desktop? Well, if I'm building a project that requires GTK3 and then they don't allow you to have GTK3 and then there's a bunch of people asking for an older version or for an older toolkit that no one's using anymore or should use but XFCE completely depended on, that's an issue. Yeah. That's the wrong radical changes to underlying system components.

This is just bad design from other people. It's not their fault. Alright, let's take a pause here because I think we're kind of getting in the weeds and I want to give Wimpy a chance to chime in on a couple more issues and then we'll loop back. So go ahead, Wimpy. I'd just like to answer Fred there about, you know, why does it matter? Why do they need a new release?

And if the underlying libraries and components weren't changing, you wouldn't need to make a new release of xfce 410 because it's a stable desktop but the fact is the underlying technologies are changing and they haven't had a stable release that keeps up with those changes which means that now they're at a place where they can't support the underlying technologies and for example there was um a upower uh 0.99.1 transition proposed for ubuntu 14.10 and that was effectively vetoed by the zubuntu team because there's not sufficient support in

xfce for that so it's been deferred until the next cycle and we went through similar growing pains uh in arch linux with xfce wait has that been deferred only because of XFCE? Everyone else has plus one day except XFCE. Yeah, go and read it. Yeah, the last few comments. Yeah, that's awful. And it potentially introduces a blocker on name three. I absolutely agree.

They are underpowered, and the underlying system components keep changing for my taste too quickly that it's becoming really annoying but okay they are underpowered and i absolutely agree with you they sometimes have to keep up yeah they're not keeping up that with with the pace but still i mean i'm sorry today gnome 3 the great GNOME 3 that everybody is praising right now, just froze. It just froze out of nowhere. Like the applications were still working, but the shell just stopped rendering.

And I had to switch to TTY and, you know, kill GNnome Shell and then restart it again and so on. And XFC has never done anything like that to me. Yeah, that I agree. I'm sorry. You have to value that. That's been my experience. About a dollar for a time Gnome broke. Yeah, all right.

Well, I want to – you know what? I think Popey's right. I mean we can sit here and we can bitch, but one of the things we always talk about is we do have the advantage of actually helping. And I guess if XFC is so important to people, then they should put their money where their mouth is and either contribute financially or contribute time-wise or even contribute just to promote the project. And maybe it has a shot. It seems like there's enough people here that give a crap that if people acted on that and maybe helped the project out, it could push through these challenges. It seems like right now XFCE is on the ropes, but it's not out. And there's still a legitimate use case for it and people who care about it. But there's also undeniably legitimate problems that could start – actually, you know what?

Popey and Wimpy gave us a great example. It has already affected wider things in the Linux system. So obviously, these are things that need to be taken care of. But I honestly, see, the way I look at it, and I believe this is the overriding thing that we are facing, is there are other alternatives out there that are just simply here today and working. here today and working. And I would point to Mate, and I would also point to the classic mode of GNOME, which will give you,

if you don't have the hardware restrictions, a lot of that classical desktop feel from GNOME 2, and that solves the high-end issue. And Mate is solving the people that either want something even more classical or resource-constrained. And those are two ends that XFCE is now going to have its lunch eaten from, and they are not only not keeping up to date with the needs of their end users,

but they're also now lacking competitively. And we've all had the problem where icons rearrange in the top bar in XFCE when something happens, or our dual displays don't work correctly for some reason. We've all had these problems in XFCE, and they're kind of getting to the point where it's getting a little old. But what I'm walking away from this conversation is people give a hell of a lot more of a crap about it

than I thought they did, and I think we should try to turn that around and actually make some positive action from it. Yeah, if people want it, they need to step up, man up, or woman up, and help out. You know what, Wimpy, you're absolutely right. Bring up, there's another bit of pressure on XFC, isn't there?

Yeah, LXQT. Right. Yeah, absolutely. That's really solid. There you go. Yeah, that's another big, yeah, that's another thing. And I think, frankly, that's going to start putting pressure on some of you as well. I mean, you know, if they can't fund their stuff, that's, I don't, you know, hey, first of all, if your funding model sucks, that sucks to be you.

I'm sorry. I don't know if it is that. I think it's just a matter of time and dedicated resources. Or whatever the issue is. I mean I'll just move to another desktop. I mean I don't care, but I will tell you right now that, I mean, I have a gaming box that, while it's nothing to write home about, it does the job. But for me, it's always been such a waste of effort to run a bloated desktop what's the point what's the point why why would i yeah why would i i'd rather put that ram into my game or something right yeah maybe i'm just no i hear that yeah

i definitely hear that that's why i just get wow ridiculous amounts of i'm i'm i'm sat here like spider-man on my unity machine and i'm seeing all these people talking about spider-man spider-man memes yeah exactly and i'm seeing all these options that people have i mean there are so many options and that's you know this whole choice thing that you know we've we've often talked about yeah there's the the bleeding edge unity and and gnome shell and and then this new contender lxqt and there's still you know with 2014 and there's still loads of choice out there for people to pick something else you know if a project does wither and die well so be it and you know move on to something else ain't it grand

ain't it grand and yet we still bitch about it yeah that's right yeah say one more thing. Yeah. Just there is this new trend. So I think at the beginning of the show, you said something about, you know, how system D parallelizes startup and all this stuff. And I was talking today with a colleague about that. And it seems like fancy, like lately, fancy seems to trump correctness. And I absolutely hate that

so XFCE is kind of the tried and true and working well and everybody else is still trying out stuff like a lot of people have had horrible experiences with KDE 5 and it keeps crashing

and so on, they just didn't take their time XFCE guys are underpowered and they take their time. They're not going to make a release if they don't think it's ready. And this trumps everything else for me. It's very easy to be tried and true when you don't change the core content of your system for 11 years. It is really easy to be tried and true at that point. Well, but that is something that does appeal to some

people. All right, Rotten's got a horror story that we'll save for the post-show because I think that's going to be interesting. I feel like we've covered it and I think I said my piece about it and what I would like to say is, you know, try out if you are struggling with XFCE, try out

other options and if it works for you, then just be happy with it. But for me, I with XFCE, try out other options. And if it works for you, then just be happy with it. But for me, I think XFCE, I think I don't even realize it. I didn't even realize it, but I think I stopped installing it about a year ago. And mostly that's because there's just other options now. And it just depends on the distro I'm installing. And I'll either go with Mate or LXQT. And I kind of call it good. So I hope that's not the future.

There's one other desktop out there as well that's slowly coming to Linux, and that's the Lumina desktop from the BSDs. Right, from PCBSD. Yeah, another QT desktop. Yeah, and very XFCE-like. I tried it out. Give me the file manager,

and we don't need Lumina anymore. That's true. The file manager is super sweet, the way it integrates ZFS snapshots. That's really cool. Yeah, that's the thing that it'll bring to everyone else. BSD Now did an interview, or actually like a walkthrough of the Lumina desktop. So you go and look

at the BSD Now back catalog because Chris Moore, creator of PCBSD and co-host of BSD Now, it's his brother that's making the desktop. So he just sat down with his brother and they did a screencast and they recorded a bunch of stuff. So if you're curious about the Lumia desktop, they've got, I think, two episodes on it now. So you can check that out.

All right, that'll... By the way, I'd like to advocate one more thing for XFC. Please, everybody, try the multiple file renamer from Thunar, the file manager. Yeah, Thunar is awesome, actually. I always used the Renamer for... I downloaded a lot of things with large playlists. That Renamer was so very helpful.

Wait a minute. What are you doing there? All right, well, we'll get Rotten Corpse's story in the post-show, but Matt, that's going to wrap us up for today. Man, we covered a lot of ground in this episode. Holy smokes! No kidding.

I wonder if I will have a resolution to my firewall conundrum in Sunday's Linux Action Show. You never know, Matt. It could happen. But I'll see you on Sunday, and I hope you have a great rest of your weekend. Happy post-birthday. Oh, yeah, thanks.

We're like sandwiched right in between it, like you had your birthday in between LAS and Linux Unplugged. Super low-key, had a great time. Good, I'm glad to hear it. Well, happy birthday, and I'll see you on Sunday, Matt. See you then. All right, everyone. Well, thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. Don't forget, we do this show on Tuesdays over at jblive.tv, jupyterbroadcasting.com

slash calendar. We'll have that in your local time zone. You can also go to jupyterbroadcasting.com slash contact to send us your feedback. That's a huge part of our show. And the subreddit, linuxactionshow.reddit.com, an awesome place to go. We'll have a feedback thread. You can give us ideas if you want. You know,

maybe you got an XFCE rant. Post it over there. We'll give it a read. All right, everyone. Thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. See you right back here

next Tuesday. All right. we're out. Okay, Rodden, why don't you share with us your horror story that happened? Because I know you got all fired up about XFCE and you were just waiting to rip into them. And I didn't want to put that in the main show because I feel like I didn't want to be a bash on XFCE, but you obviously ran into something that got you all fired up. I don't know. You had a good go. Did I?

A little bit. Oh, I didn't mean to. I didn't.. You had a good go. Did I? A little bit. Oh, I didn't mean to. You've been walking. Wow. Oh, well, okay. I didn't actually think I was being that mean. A year ago. I was definitely going to be mean because it essentially crashed my hard drive.

Now, how can that be? How can it crash your hard drive? You would think it's not a big deal, and I wouldn't have expected it to happen. That's why I didn't bother doing what I normally would have. I basically loaded up a live USB of Xubuntu, and then I mounted my main hard drive for my laptop. And then I forgot to unmount it before I turned off my computer. Any other system I have ever done that in, nothing happens.

But with XFCE or Xubuntu specifically, it crashed the hard drive completely. It was unmountable. I had to just completely rescue it. No way. How can that be XFCE's fault though? It sounds like a bad library somewhere. That's why I put it in the chat room. That's why I said it was

Zubuntu's fault because it was Zubuntu's fault. Yeah, those bastards. You know what? To me, it sounds like a rogue library. You had a Cardassian in your klingon mix or something i don't know i i even did it with ubuntu and labuntu before i tried this ubuntu because i was just playing with some de's and stuff and none of them had a problem the only one that had a problem was ubuntu so it's it's not an exosynthetic specific thing but it is definitely an Ubuntu-specific thing. No, I don't doubt that.

It sounds like maybe that particular flavor had some sort of rogueness inside of it somewhere that maybe said, you know what, screw you. Did you happen to download that ISO from FreeBSD.org? No.