LINUX Unplugged - Episode 60: Calm Before the Storm | LINUX Unplugged 60

Episode Date: October 1, 2014

Today’s show is full of robust discussion as your hosts discuss the recent criticism over our coverage of Ubuntu 14.10, the general reaction to Shellshock & the Netflixification of Photoshop on Chromebooks.Plus picking the best distro for getting a job, a little more XFCE chat & much more!

We talked a little bit on Tech Talk today, but we got a little bit of a different crowd here. Some of the same folks, too. Maybe I know Odyssey and Eric and Lionhead were here this morning. Maybe you guys have time to process this. What do you think about the news that there's going to be a special version of a project Photoshop streaming beta available to Chrome on Windows and Chromebooks? I just wouldn't put it past Adobe to user agent block it. So you think they'll detect you're coming from a standard Linux machine and say

Netflix 2.0 is what they're going to do? Yeah, pretty much. So we had Tivoization in the early days when binary blobs and what you could do with the GPL was really being struggled with and now we have Netflixation where it's technically possible to run something on a general Linux box.

Like these Android apps that we saw after a week or so people got working under Linux. So now you have the Netflixization, where it's, well, we could technically make it work, but we don't want to support it, so we just block it altogether. Instead of, which is really misrepresentative of the early era of computing, where it was have at it, you can make it work, but you're on your own, you have to support it yourself. Which I think all of us in this room would be totally comfortable doing if there was a way to make project Photoshop streaming beta, because that's its name, work on everyday Linux if you had Chrome. I think we would all take that sort of social contract that it's okay if it doesn't work perfectly under my distribution because I'm not using it in a supported environment. And you can see a real-world example of that today with Steam, right? Steam is technically supported on Ubuntu, but it's used across all of the distributions. And there's a social contract in place that sometimes when you hit a few problems that you might not hit under under ubuntu it's not necessarily anybody's fault but your own i imagine what they will do is they they

will use their same creative cloud streaming stuff and they will package that up into a chrome app with some drive like google drive so here's how it's working on the no it's kind of crazy josh and i don't know what kind of vm it is but the way that, and I have a link to 9to5Google that goes into details, the way it sounds like it's working is they're actually distributing a VM through Chrome, through a Chrome app, and Photoshop will run inside this VM. And as per those virtual limitations, there's no GPU acceleration, some of the more advanced effects won't work, and there's no access to the local file system.

So the only place you can save with this Photoshop project, Photoshop streaming beta, the only place you can save is to Google Drive. Yeah, that sounds awesome. Where do I sign up? You know, my mom's a graphic artist, and she'll have like three, four, five, six gigabyte PSD files sometimes that are just for this huge layout. So like saving that to Google Drive? I have to back up the marketing department's, you know, creative area. And it's just massive. Yeah, yeah.

I'd have the same thing when I was doing photography. I'd have like these huge PST files taking up tons of space. I'd be like, great, I'm running out of space because I'm doing photography. What gives? Yeah. Like, great, I'm running out of space because I'm doing photography. What gives? Yeah.

Well, I'm pretty sure this is aimed more at, you know, people who make low-quality gifts for Tumblr. No, it's aimed at education. In fact, they're only going to distribute it to education at first. Yeah, I think education means low-quality gifts for Tumblr. Well, I mean, let's be clear. This is obviously significant. This is going in the right step. Initially, we weren't here to begin

with. It wasn't there to begin with. Who knows? Maybe it'll come to Linux at some point. It sounds like an interesting way to distribute a really thick application like this. The thing is for education, you could also be talking about not just your standard public education. You could be talking about people who do this professionally for professionals, and they're not necessarily going to be needing to run Creative Cloud when you need actual hardware in front of you that's beefy enough to do these applications.

hardware in front of you that's beefy enough to do these applications. I agree. I agree. Okay. Late-breaking pre-show topic submitted by Popey in the IRC chat room. He brings our attention. You know, I love a good Kickstarter that's Linux-based. He brings our attention to Matchstick, the streaming stick built on Firefox OS. 2,668 backers, $61,000 towards a goal of $100,000 with 29 days to go.

So this looks like a Chrome stick. What are those called? The Chromecast. I'm going to play this. Let's see what we get. Matchstick. Fire up online content on your TV with Matchstick. Oh, yeah.

Why wouldn't I? Because it's Matchstick. with Matchstick. Oh, yeah. Why wouldn't I? Because it's Matchstick. The first HDMI streaming stick powered by Mozilla's Firefox OS. Use your phone, tablet, or laptop

to watch movies, listen to music, and play games right on your TV. Okay. No matter where you are. Powered by Mozilla's Firefox OS. And we need your help to bring it to market. Matchstick is open-sourced and fully adaptable, just like Firefox OS. We can't wait to see what you come up with.

Got an idea for a TV app? Join our developer network and make it happen. Help us build Matchstick and let's take back our favorite online content. Help us help you to watch whatever, whenever. All right. So I love the idea of an open source Chromecast. You see how big it is. And I also like the idea of just keeping my TV a dumb display and putting the smarts.

Help us deliver the ultimate. Maybe in my tablet or my smartphone. But guys, guys, guys, guys, isn't the critical flaw here? You've got to have the support for it baked into every single freaking app that would ever use this? No, because it supports the Chromecast protocol. Ah, there's the magic sauce. So it's – is the Chromecast protocol open or they reverse engineered it? It's like Meercast.

I don't know if it's open, but you can create apps that will stream to Chromecast. Awesome. That means it's like, because that is, that's great. That means like this thing is going to be like ready to go with a ton of stuff out of the box. And they've opened the designs up as well. Question. I already have a Chromecast. Why is this any more compelling than a Chromecast?

Well, it's probably going to let you do more stuff. Yeah. Well, there's that. And you could use it across multiple browsers. I'm not entirely sure if you could do that with Chromecast. Here's the fundamental difference that I think it does, and I'm reading the description right now, so I don't know, but it looks like it streams over your Wi-Fi from your device to the Firefox stick.

Which is contrary to the Chromecast. In the Chromecast, you initiate it from a remote session, and then it pushes that content to the Chromecast. And I actually don't like the Apple TV at all. But the one thing I like about AirPlay is that all stays on my LAN. about AirPlay is that all stays on my LAN. And I like that a lot more from just like, A, then there's nothing that registers and logs what it is I've streamed or initiated. That's one small part. But then, B, I feel like I can get a higher quality, more reliable stream if I'm doing

over my well-setup LAN at home that has gigabit networking and 802.11n throughout the house. So I have a better setup there. So I would prefer to stream it locally. Plus, some of the stuff I have is not stuff I'm going to have up in the cloud that I want to stream. So this… Well, the Chromecast has that ability as well. Yeah. Okay.

And I think, like, even with Plex, from what I understand, but it looks like the majority of it… Like, if I find something, for example, online and I send it to the Chromecast, it's not coming from my device. It's coming from whatever service has, like, YouTube or something like that. And that's right. That's no different from chromecast but if you want to play locally with with like stuff from plex and it comes straight from your own server over the network see that's well that's kind of what i was thinking about doing but now i'm thinking now i'm thinking maybe i'll wait for this and you can also stream the chrome not even your chrome browser screen but also like any, like my Nexus, I can stream it straight

to my Chromecast. Yeah, see, I got a Chromecast. I gave it to Matt, but I had a Chromecast and I was thinking about hooking it up to one of our HDMI capture ports here in the studio. And then whatever I sent to the Chromecast, I would be able to pull in on the switcher. I ended up buying three of them. I've got three Chromecasts. Really?

Because the kids love it. They've got, one of them's got an iPhone, one's got an Android tablet, and they stream stuff to the telly wherever they are. And if I want them to get out of the room, they go to another room and stream it to a different place. So are you backing Matchstick then? Are you going to try this? Yeah, I've already backed it.

Yeah, I think I might too. I think this is looking good. I like that they already have essentially the hardware designed, so they're there in that regard. It's a big device though, isn't it? Well, it's the first version. And it's behind the telly, so I don't really care. It's only slightly bigger than a Chromecast.

Yeah, it looks about the size of the Chromecast, isn't it? Well, that picture down the bottom with the satchel, that looks bloody massive. I'm looking for one where it looks really big. Oh, boy, it does look huge on the satchel. You're right. Oh, wow, that is huge. I mean, let's be honest. If this is going to be plugged into the back of your TV,

you're not exactly going to be noticing it. Yeah, but sometimes some TVs, like the HDMI ports, are really close together, and it's hard when you have a really thick... That's true. Well, they usually come with a tiny cable. Oh, yeah, an extender. Right, an extender, yeah.

And you can always pick one up off Amazon for super cheap or wherever you get your local wires. At least it's not like the one Microsoft is trying to pull. Yeah, so Popey, did you see what their target market price is once they hit production? $25. Yeah, okay, that's what I thought.

So you can get a two-pack. I think I'm going to back them for $34 because you can get a two-pack. I got the $24 developer unit because I'm going to back him for 34 bucks. Cause you can get a two pack. I got the, uh, 24 developer unit. Cause I want to get it working with Ubuntu. 20. You're going to get 24 of them. No,

they're $24. Oh, okay. Okay. I was like, you're really going to get it working with a bunch of like, Hey Popey, can you send me one then?

When you say Ubuntu, do you mean touch? Yeah. Ooh, that'd be cool. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show, I swear, is literally powered by flannel. My name is Chris. My name is Matt. Hey there, Matt. I just, I'm getting into the Pacific Northwest spirit today, so I'm rocking a new flannel shirt from Costco, and it's comfortable, Matt. It's super comfortable.

It's nice. And so that means I'm in a good mood for today's show because I'm in my comfort zone. So I thought today we'd warm up with a nice, delicious strip of bacon, a little whiskey and Coke, and we'd read some feedback. I also want to talk about the reaction

in the general public to the whole shell shock vulnerability. Maybe it's just getting a little out of hand, and I want to get everybody's opinion on that, so we'll pull that in. And then we've also got—I apologize. Matt, if it smells like burnt toast when you walked into the studio today, that's just my ass hair on fire. Oh, well, that's good to know. I'll tell you what, man. I don't know if you've been to the subreddit in the last couple of days. Woo!

Chris is under fire, Matt. He's under fire. Yeah. As soon as I see anything negative, I'm just like, I don't care. I'm under fire. So it's cool. It's cool. You know what? You know what? We're going to talk about it. We're going to talk about it. We'll talk to the people. That's why I want everybody to get their whiskey and bacon. That way we'll get to that in a little bit in the show. So we'll talk about it then. So everybody just prepare yourselves mentally for that with your whiskey and bacon. And first, to get us started, we'll take a little walk down feedback lane with our discussion around XFCE last week. And we got a couple of emails about the state of XFCE.

And Nick wrote in with a question looking towards the future. So we'll bring in the mumble room. Hey there, guys. We're going to get to our first email this week. And I want to see if you think that maybe XFCE is just waiting around for Wayland to make its move. Here's Nick's thought. He says, I wanted to weigh in on the discussion regarding the future of

XFCE. I toyed with the idea some time ago of maybe trying to pitch a port of XFCE to GTK3. But I eventually decided just to give up and move to elementary OS, which I'm fairly happy with. But my dream is to have a box-style window manager with modular

components for a panel, a menu, and a file manager, etc. But it needs to take advantage of Wayland to add subtle compositing effects and animations. Is it possible there are more XFCE fans out there who are waiting for the next generation of display managers

to land before we start a rewrite of the desktop. Just a thought, Nick. What do you think, Matt? First thing, if you're using the words compositing and XFCE in the same sentence, you're going the wrong direction. Now, I say this as someone that's done this. Now, I speak as a previous addict to such things. I used to do this. And so I'm not ripping on the guy at all.

I totally get the reasoning because you're thinking, oh, I could have the lightweight goodness and I could also have the composites. You know, just go known at that point, really. Well, that's kind of what I'm wondering. But I know we have a couple of XFCE users in the Mumble room.

Guys in there, anybody feeling like maybe XFCE should just hang tight for a couple of years, let Wayland settle in, let drivers get mature, let distros start shipping it by default, then XFCE needs to get off the pot? Is this maybe any XFCE you guys want to chime in on that?

Maybe that's what's going on. Maybe, no, no, no. Go ahead, Wimpy. Well, have you read the roadmap where they've outlined where they're going to be implementing GTK3? And that would obviously be their precursor to Wayland support. You sound, though, like you're doubtful. Well, it was originally on the agenda for 4.1.2, but it's now being bumped.

So they're going to stick with GTK2 for the next major revision, by the sounds of it. All right. So that kind of rules. any early Wayland adoption. Okay, so I see what you're saying. It's kind of like it keeps getting bumped a little bit, and so now you're starting to get skeptical. RottenCorp, I want to toss it to you. I think you're maybe our resident XFCE skeptic. What do you think about, Rotten, seriously, what do you think about the idea of maybe just not changing something for a little while and letting the Linux ecosystem sort of stabilize and then worrying about it. Is that really that ridiculous?

Well, if that's the case, then they've been having that same opinion for the past decade. And so that's not very practical. But if other people who are not part of the current team want to fork it and make a new one that's based on Wayland or something like that, when everything settles. That could be interesting. But the team that right now, their track record is they'll say that they're going to do something, never actually do it, push everything back, release things on average every two years, maybe two and a half years, and essentially make promises that never come to fruition. See, I feel like there's two planes to this debate.

There is the argument that you're making right there, Rodden, about failed expectations, the need to adapt to future changes of Linux, responding to user needs, stagnation, things like that. And then there's also the real-world use case where, I think I've said this story once before on there, but I worked at a school district, and when I was there, one of the IT guys had a Debian XFCE box running on like an old Dell something tower. And I left and came back like nine years later, I think it was, or eight years later. And that guy was still using Debian with XFCE on that same Dell.

And it works for him. And he actually, to him, that stagnation was the number one reason he chose that distribution and that desktop. That was the number one features for him. But you can have stability, and you can have updates still, and still keep the lightweight stuff. For example, having Mate on Debian or Ubuntu or whatever. Yeah, I think if he was going to build a box today,

he'd go Mate, or Mate, is what he would do. And I think that's, yeah. Okay, we've got one more thing on XFCE. Kajel writes in, Kajel writes in, and says, I don't see the XFCE future as grim as most of your Mumble users. He says, I dug around for five minutes on the XFCE form, jumped into the mailing list, and what I see tells a slightly different story. I don't think development commits for XFCE are actually shown in the public git until they're released. Hence, it looks like they really haven't done anything since 4.10.

And I don't know if that's true or not, but he says that XFCE4-PWM 1.4 was announced and released September 15th. It was patched just three days ago. Arch already has it in testing. Maybe the Debian could do their own testing and move from experimental to unstable. So he points out that there is current development happening and there are some distributions that have newer packages. And he points out that sometimes they don't commit to their public Git until it's in a release stage,

which seems kind of backwards. But he says there's also an interesting thread about 4.1.2 stabilization in the mailing list. So we'll have links to that if you guys want to check it out. He also wanted to chime in about XFCE moving to Qt. He says, why would they toss out 1.5 years of coding for version 4.1.2? What's that? Go ahead. No? Okay. He says, why would they toss out years of coding for version 4.1.2?

That's not going to happen at all, he thinks. He doesn't think they'll be moving to Qt, which was tossed around. And one last piece, he says, Matei has a modern replacement. Well, I tried it several times. I've always had issues. It's nice looking, but it doesn't feel mature at all. But he acknowledges that is a subjective opinion. So there you go, some Pro X FCE stuff. I thought about it after our episode last week. And

the thing that I really walked away from the conversation, I can't remember if I said this in the post show or not. But I realized after last week's show that, well, your mic keeps popping open. I realized after last week's show that I stopped installing XFCE about a year ago. And I was trying to think about why that was. And I think what I came down to is there's just a lot of really great lightweight alternatives, like LXQT now or Matei, that just have my interest more. And for me, it's just a personal taste thing. And I think a lot of times, you know, we have these crazy debates,

and we don't allow for personal opinion to be a perfectly legitimate deciding factor. And it goes across all things. It's not just us Linux users, right? Look at the Mac Windows, Android iOS debates like we never just leave room for personal preference and allow that to be a justifying reason. You can be an XFCE fan and enjoy XFCE in despite of all of its potential problems. And that's okay. Right? And it's not like you're spending a bunch of money. You know? I mean, maybe it's – the iOS and Android wars almost make more sense because there's hundreds of dollars on the line.

And this one is just free software you're picking from. So, yeah. It almost seems like people need to be right all the time. I don't know. It's like it's – I don't understand. I never understood that. It's like why – it's okay to have an opinion and your needs may differ from mine. That's always been my philosophy.

Go ahead, Lion. What were you going to chime in with? No, I just – since last Tuesday, I've installed Mate on every desktop I have. Really? I play with it, and I find that it does everything the XFCE way. Yeah, yeah. I can actually live with it. Yeah.

And not feel compromised. Right, right, yes. That's a great point about Mate, isn't it? Is that they've walked the line where it's the classic desktop UI, but they keep bringing little elements of modernization and the functionality is there. And so you can really just sit down and you have the classic environment with a few tweaks and touches here. I think, you know, we're going to get to Ubuntu 14.10 in a couple of minutes. Ubuntu 14.10 in a couple of minutes. And I think one of the things I'm looking forward to the most about Ubuntu 14.10 is,

and maybe Wimpy and Popey, I'm right in that by 14.10, when it ships, Ubuntu Mate at that point will be an official spin of Ubuntu, right? Is that true? Close, but not quite? Close, but not quite, yeah. Good enough for government work or what? Yeah, yeah. We're definitely going to release, have been releasing on the same schedule as the official Ubuntu flavors. I think we're going to miss being official for 14.10.

But the work has already started, and I think that we'll be official early in the 15.04 cycle. Okay, so i mean there will be a 1410 release that you can download and install and all that good stuff i'm looking forward to that and we're going to get into the ubuntu stuff in a bit but i i am i am honestly looking forward to that than i am the main ubuntu release and i'm also looking forward to the kubuntu spin more i and i think you know we're going to talk about it, so I don't want to spoil it, but that's somewhere where the more exciting stuff is happening in Ubuntu. And I just don't feel that way about an XFCE spin. I know Xubuntu's out there.

They do great work, but I'm not excited, you know? So it's just what I walked away with. And that's just, you know what? It's just my personal take on it. It could be there is somebody out there. There probably is people out there really excited about the next Xubuntu release, aside from the Xubuntu team course uh and so i just i wanted

to walk away from the xfce discussion and i think i don't think we really upset anybody but i just wanted to say like even if all the things aside you just don't like it or you do like it that's okay too and i think we should just work on accepting that a little bit and that we'll get into more of that in a minute but and and carry on with the positivity there about XFCE, if you are an XFCE fan, then install Xubuntu 14.04 and you can be running that OS for the next five years. Right, right. Very much.

Because 14.04 is not going to yang or change any of the underlying libraries or APIs. So that desktop is solid and good to go for the next five years. So if that's your thing, then that's the platform to go for. Right. Good point. Thank you, sir. Your DE won't update anyway, so perfect. Wow.

Wow. Those are fighting words. Yeah. I mean, I was trying to – you see how I had it all like kumbaya and hellfire. I was trying to get actual work done instead of caring about version numbers. All right. We don't need to get into a debate. I was trying to end the XFC discussion with warm fuzzies, okay?

Now you guys are getting into it again. I mean, on the plus side, there should be at least one release of XFCE in the next five years, hopefully. Yeah, and that's fine. There you go. Who needs more than that? Not me. All right. So before we move on any further, because we do have some more

follow-up to get into, and actually a classic computer debate. There's a few debates that I think we could retry it a few times, and it changes all the time. I'm really curious to hear what Matt and the Mumble Room do, but first, I want to mention Linux Academy, our first sponsor of the Linux

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told you it's really a way for you to go do self-paced training with an amazing dashboard. And you can pick from seven plus Linux distributions, and they'll automatically adjust the courseware to match the distribution you've chosen. And they're rolling out new features. They've got videos, they got audio comprehensive study guides, you can download and listen to or watch offline, or while you're commuting. I've heard people use them as podcasts. And they're always adding new courseware constantly. They're really hustling on all that. They recently introduced learning plans that let you select your daily availability and then they'll automatically adjust the courseware. And they'll also give you lessons and quizzes and give you status updates as you go along. This is really an awesome way too for myself to kind of stay informed on new

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A lot of great opportunities for you guys. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. Okay, just a couple bits of email before we get into kind of our big topic, or one of our big topics of the day. So Craig writes in with a classic debate. Dearest Matt and Chris in Mumble Room, I'm a Linux user

slash enthusiast and aspiring Linux sysadmin. I'm a long-time listener of LAS, well, under a year, and a first-time emailer. I understand what Hibernate, Suspend, and Shutdown all do. So he's got the, I understand what hibernate, suspend, and shutdown all do. So he's got the basics. I'm just curious, though. Which one is the best for a healthy Linux system?

I've read that hibernation is bad in some regards. I'm not really sure why. I just kind of looked at that and thought, well, if I've been suspending, maybe I should be shutting down instead. What do you guys think? What does the Mumba Room think? Are you worried about cron jobs not executing and cleaning your system up or your package cache not updating automatically? Do you leave your system running on all the time? Do you sleep it when you're not using? Do you shut it

down? Matt, what is your computer hygiene approach? For me, I tend to leave most of the time I leave stuff on. If there's like a lightning storm or I'm like changing out a UPS or something, then I might actually turn things off. But for the most part, I just leave everything on. I do too, especially in the studio where I've definitely noticed when I shut stuff down, I always have problems. For example, I put the screen to sleep on the Bonobo before I left the studio earlier today. And when I got back, the capture system was no longer working because it detected the screen went blank, and so it shut off the HDMI capture port, and I had to reboot

everything to get stuff working, where if I just left it all on, it would be working when I got back. I keep my server running, but that's because it's running in SSD and shuts down its external hard drive when it needs to. Yep, that helps. So, I leave it running. I'll probably update it, like, maybe once a week

just to make sure the security updates are good to go. But other than that, it just stays running and I don't have to worry about it. I've never considered that about Chrome jobs or cleaning up or anything. I just suspend the device and wake it up when I want to use it. Yeah, yeah. I definitely do some of my laptops that way. It depends for me. The desktops I leave on 24-7.

The laptops i sleep yeah i sleep my laptop as well if i'm not around i just close the lid and it sleeps yeah and i never hibernate ever well it's just these days there's too much you have too much ram so you have to have a huge hibernation file sitting around and when you got an ssd that's expensive it's faster i just for me i just end up shutting it off because I boot it up and 10 seconds later, my computer's up and running and already opening programs automatically. Yeah, that doesn't work for me

because my Chrome has got like 1,000 tabs open and it takes ages to reload them after I reboot. So I just suspend and wake it up. It's fine. My wife has that same problem. But for me, of the too many tabs open, but for me, it just becomes I'm just accessing my laptop so often that if I had to start it up and shut it down constantly, that's all I would do all day. Yeah.

All right. Josh was saying that, you know, spins up in 10 seconds anyway, so if you just shut it down, yeah, it's not a problem, especially if we're running Linux. If we're running Windows and it decides, oh, I need to install this update, then you're going to have a little bit of time to wait. And so that's the point where suspend comes in handy a whole lot more. Stevie K in the chat room says that he just suspends to save his power bill, you know, just to save on power. Wimpy, you were going to make a mention about ZRAM, right?

Yeah, so I've switched to ZRAM for all of my systems. I've done away with swap and therefore have no hibernate capability on my laptops anymore because without swap partition, you can't hibernate unless you install some of those user space tools. So, but ZRAM works really well. And if you've got SSDs,

it's a nice way to give yourself some relief if your system's under memory pressure. Very nice. So there's our take on if we hibernate, sleep, or shut down. It seems like it's a little bit of a mix, but I'm hearing a lot of leave-ons, especially for desktops. Very interesting. I also leave the Bonobo running 24-7 because it's in the studio. Bonobo's a beast, man.

And the nice thing about Bonobo is it's well-ventilated. All right, so I want to move into the topic that was sparked after Sunday's coverage of Ubuntu 14.10. And before we get into that, so in the Linux Action Show subreddit and in the email, there are a lot of people that apparently decided that I am very biased against Ubuntu. And one of the reasons decided was that I skipped over talking Unity's touch support when we were talking about GNOME 3.14. I just want to clear the ground right now, just quickly mention that was not me sliding Unity at all. That was just me focusing on GNOME 3.14 because we were covering GNOME 3.14.

We were not covering what Unity can do. We were covering what GNOME can do. So I just didn't mention it. It doesn't mean I was intentionally, because I don't like it, leaving it out. It was because I was talking about GNOME and what GNOME was adding and what wayland was adding so uh but there is more contention over our coverage of ubuntu 1410 itself uh it's probably you know people you know what matt people hate crickets i think is what it is people just hate cricket i think it is yeah i think the crickets may have been something to

kind of set folks off yeah it's just too much i think think. Should have been a bomb going off. People love that. People love explosions. A lot of it boils down to a misunderstanding of... I think a lot of people attributed it to arch-fanboyism on my part, and that I was such an arch-fanboy that I was putting Ubuntu down because of it. And I think a lot of it was probably coming from people who haven't watched the shows for a long time. And I think a lot of it was probably coming from people who haven't watched the shows for a long time. Because I think, you know, people sometimes what happens is people see that I'm pro something. You know, I was very pro Ubuntu, very pro Unity or the desktop for a long time.

I still think it's a good desktop. And so because I was pro something for a long time, it is to them illogical that I would now say something that is not pro. Because, you know, once you like something, you're supposed to like it forever. But I think people who watch me know that my opinions change over time based on results and the way things go. I'll give you a great example. I think you could go back in time and you could clearly see episodes where I was slamming on Fedora, pretty handily slamming on Fedora for maybe the entire review. Now my position on Fedora has changed quite a bit

as they sort of are addressing some of these problems. I would say I still approach Fedora with some tepidation and some level of skepticism, but I am impressed with the changes they're making. I'm impressed with their project leader. Obviously we've had him on the show twice in a few weeks. And of course, the second time wasn't really about Fedora. So it was funny because in that very episode,

people say, well, Chris is such an Arch fanboy. They were completely negating the fact that we had like a 25-minute interview with the lead of the Fedora project. My point is it's not a bias towards Arch that influences my reporting on Ubuntu. I don't have any distribution bias at all. That would be ridiculous. The reason I go with Arch is because it does everything I need it to do, and it doesn't feel like a distribution. It doesn't have politics. It doesn't have councils. It doesn't have advisory boards. It just is. And you don't have to worry about the politics and the people. It just it

feels just like a meta layer on top of Linux. That's why I like Arch. Just I could just as easily switch to Fedora next when they've got that rolling. I could see that happening in, you know, the next year or so. I don't have allegiance to any one particular distribution. I do have a bias, though. And that bias is a bias towards winning. People who are doing it right. People who are producing results. People who are coming through on what they say they will do.

And as a company, any project, doesn't have to be Ubuntu, as any project slides in one direction or the other, my coverage of that project will reflect that slide. So if they say, now I'm sorry, Poby, but let's just say there were supposed to be two phones already in the marketplace. Let's just say Mir was already supposed to ship. Let's say that Ubuntu 14.10 is the most boring Linux desktop release we've ever seen from the most important distro maker out there. Let's accept all of these things as genuine facts, unfortunate facts, but let's just accept those things. Me reporting on that does not mean I have an Ubuntu agenda where I want to

tear Ubuntu down. It's me reporting on the state of Ubuntu, one of the more important distributions in the market. It's not coming from an arch influence. It's coming from following these things and maybe a little disappointment. Does that make sense? Like, Matt, can you fill in, am I missing any gaps here? I think you pretty much hit it. I mean, it's, you know, it's basically different. It really boils down to different strokes for different folks. I think it's just where it is at the end of the day. And for you, you have a specific set of expectations that one distro or another may or may not be meeting. And that could, of course, i think what i'm i think what i'm trying to get to is it feels like the conversation i don't know if poisoned is the right word or derailed but um derailed right yeah this latching on to oh well he's just saying

that because he's a fan boy or chris is too biased by arch to cover it. Just me saying that out loud sounds ridiculous and childish. I would, the concept that I would have some sort of allegiance to some Linux distribution that would influence my coverage of it is ridiculous. What I will do is identify a Linux distribution that does something interesting. And if they're doing that something better than everybody else is, I might suggest those other distributions try to adopt some of those things, but that doesn't make them invalid. I've used every distribution out there. I also don't report much on Mandriva, do I? That doesn't mean I have an anti-Mandriva bias. It just means they're not really moving the needle much these

days, so they don't really work their way up into the coverage very often. Well, I think it's also worth mentioning, someone will undoubtedly point out, okay, then why does it appear that we, quote-unquote, rip on Ubuntu but not on Mandriva? And my response to that would be simply because we have a set of expectations for this particular distro, one that we've had a lot of great experiences with, and we just simply want to see certain things addressed, and that's not happening. I'm speaking for myself. with and we just simply want to see certain things addressed and that's not happening. I'm speaking for myself. Ubuntu's relevance in the marketplace makes it more likely to receive criticism and it also makes it more likely to receive praise and hype.

I mean, there's two sides to that coin. Absolutely. Higher expectations. And so like in the chat room is pointing out, why do we dog on Mir and not we? Well, actually, I don't really think we dog on Mir. In fact, if you trace the history of our show back, when Mir was announced, we were some of the biggest defenders of, hey, let him try it. Give him space and let him do something. And we took so much shit for that.

I dressed up in a monkey suit. Exactly. I brought the monkey suit. We were there saying, let him give him a shot. And the thing is, it's not that we don't want them to still have a shot. It's just the fundamental fact is we're still waiting. That was a long time ago. That's fine. These things take time.

But results, at the end of the day, are what we have to report on. That's what we have here to talk about. That's what the discussion is about. That's the reality. And so when OMG Ubuntu is in bold and italic, saying there's no new features, not even a new wallpaper, what is the Linux Action Show supposed to say? What dick am I supposed to suck to make all of you happy? Because there is no dick I can find. Holy shit.

Pretty much. Right? I mean, seriously. Yeah. Holy shit. Pretty much. Right? I mean, seriously.

Yeah. I mean, so we are working right now on a different approach to our Ubuntu reviews that I think it was producer Eric's idea, and I think it's a really solid idea that will make our Ubuntu 14.10 reviews extremely interesting. But it is requiring a completely reformulation of the way we approach a Linux distribution because we have to find something to talk about to talk about it. Otherwise, we just wouldn't review it. And that doesn't seem like a good option either. I have covered this distribution for a long time, and I've never been at a point where I've literally had no idea what to say other than bad things. So we're working on a new formula to come up, give the re-spin some attention, and really kind of have a nice comprehensive look at it. I'm pretty happy with where we're going with it, but it's required a

total adjustment of our approach because of the situation we now find ourselves in. And I feel like, you know, there's a lot of energy being put in by our community. There's about five threads in the Linux Action Show subreddit right now, if you count threads that have also devolved into this topic. So there's two or three primary threads and one or two that have devolved into this topic. Currently live in the Linux Action Show subreddit, claiming that we are so far off base with Ubuntu 14.10 because of our biases and et cetera, et cetera. There's no way for me to tell you this. There's no anti-Ubuntu agenda here. There's no arch bias here. There is a bias towards winning. There is

some Linux elitism because we've been Linux users for a very long time and we start to know when something smells like shit and we start to know when something's winning and we call it like it is. I will grant you those things, bias towards winning and an elitism that isn't arch elitism, it's just a Linux user elitism. It's's just there because honestly after you see enough of this crap you start to tell people to get off your lawn it's not a function of being against Ubuntu it's just calling a spade a spade or whatever the saying is I don't even know it's just that's what that's where we're at right now and I want to address this because I'm seeing there's a lot of energy being put into this so here's a great and there's some great posts I mean like a lot of energy being put into this. So here's a great, and there's some great posts. I mean, like a lot of thought is being put into this stuff,

but it's kind of, it's kind of misguided in the sense that the trouble is we, we will continue to say if something's bad, we will, I believe it is our responsibility. If something isn't going right, we cannot sit here on this show. It is the number one watch Linux media.

I cannot sit on that show and say something is great when it's not great. It is our responsibility in any way we can to help these things move along in the right direction. If that's just our voice that's just echoing the thought of some users, that's fine. If other projects watch this stuff and go, hmm, maybe we should rethink this. That's great. It doesn't really matter. But we have to be genuine to what we believe. And you have to understand that it's not about us going after Shuttleworth or making Popey cry or anything like that.

Because at the end of the day, if you watch the show long enough, you will know that if they start producing results, if in 2015 we start seeing several great phone models come out, and it's kind of great, and down the road, Unity 8's got its bugs worked out and it's great. We will be beyond elated to cover that on the show. I love covering stuff that rocks under Linux. That's why the word action is in the Linux Action Show. We like covering the stuff that kicks the most ass every single week in Linux and open source. I will be the happiest person. Trust me. Nobody will be happier than Chris because it'll be great content for the Linux Action Show when they have something that we all

love. Go ahead, Popey. You got your mic open. You might as well go. So there's a few things. I didn't know about your review because I was away at a conference over the weekend. Oh, that's fine. And then someone pointed it out to me, and so I watched it a bit earlier on. And there's a few things that struck me. One was that you kind of missed the fact that we've been saying all through this release that the focus is on phone. We've said it over and over again. It's not lost on me. It's not lost on me.

It's not lost on me. It's pretty apparent. Right. But you've waited until beta release before you decide to review it and then say it sucks because of what we've been saying all along, which is that we're not focused on the desktops. This is specifically

why I aired those concerns when we were talking about the beta release because I want to put all that out on the table and I don't want it to influence the review. It's out there now. Now it's not going to be part of the review. See, what I was essentially doing was taking that and extracting that bit of what would have been in the review and putting it in that news bit. And now when the review comes, we have a – that's not a review. Don't – us covering something – and I'm picking on you about this because we get this all the time. Us covering a news item is not us reviewing something in the show.

And it's a common misconception. You made out like – you specifically said that we make a big song and dance about it, which we didn't. We've mailed a mailing list saying the beta is out. OMG posts an article about it. That doesn't mean we've made a song and dance about 1410. We haven mailed a mailing list saying the beta is out. OMG posted an article about it. That doesn't mean we've made a song and dance about 1410. We haven't made a song and dance about 1410 because we're not focused on it. No, I think Matt's point there was that there used to be a song and dance. No, you specifically said about there being a song and dance. Anyway, that was one thing

was, you know, why bring it up when, you know, we keep saying this is not a big release. It's not the first big release that's not been – that's not had major stuff in it. Because it's more unusual for the in-between LTSs to be so boring. It's more often, you know, the LTS is about the refinement and the polish and then the big experimentation happens in the.10 release. And that's always the one that's – Well, really, 6.10 didn't change much. 12.10 didn't change a lot, but 12.10 had the shopping lens,

so everybody had something to talk about. Right, well, I think a lot of interesting things happened in the 10 releases, and shopping lens is obviously the big one. But those were both post-LTS releases. Right, that's my point. They didn't have... Yeah, and they didn't have

tremendously huge game-changing things in. Are you going back to 6.10? I mean, that's... Well, that was the first one that came to mind okay because the ones in the middle of the ones the ones after that had unity and obviously that's a massive yeah exactly talk about i mean so here's the other thing is there's it's not just ubuntu you're you know not a lot has changed in ubuntu but then there's kubuntu lubuntu zubuntu ubuntu studio myth that's so that's i agree that's where the interesting stuff is happening distro right well oh now now But then there's Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Zubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, Mythbunty, Ubuntu Studio. I agree. That's where the interesting stuff is happening.

It's just one distro. It's one flavor of the distro. Oh, now they're just one flavors. Now when that's the only place where the innovation is happening, now Ubuntu is just one of the many flavors. But of course when all the innovation is happening – It's always been one of the many flavors. Now, of course. Of course it always – yeah, it's just one of – it's the main dog.

And the point is, is all the innovation, all the excitement is happening in all of the other flavors, which worked great for a lot of – I wouldn't say there was a lot of excitement going on in any of the others either. Oh, ouch. To be honest. There's some of them in here, dude. Look at the Matei. Kubuntu's got Plasma 5 preview, dude. That's great.

That's huge. That's not in the archive for the release. That's a preview ISO, isn't it? In the same way that Unity 8 Next is a preview ISO. Also, the Mate project isn't officially in a Ubuntu flavor. It seems like there's a common thread here. Which is one that I didn't list. My point is...

Possibly because it's not an official flavor. So you don't think it's a problem that all of the interesting things are happening in all of the distros based off you? I didn't say that. I said there are other distros, there are other flavors of Ubuntu, and there are interesting things going on there. You only focused on Ubuntu. You didn't mention any of the others. Because what I was talking about- That's the point I was making.

Those others were going to- again, this wasn't a full review. This is an announcement of the Ubuntu 14.10 beta. Right. When in fact, Ubuntu doesn't participate in the alphas and betas as much as all the others do. So it would be more interesting to talk about all the others on this particular release. Oh, I like how you're telling... Okay.

Oh, okay. Right. So, Popey, you don't... No, is that not fair to say that these guys are all participating and building up to a beta release so it would be good to talk about them? You don't see the justification you're doing here? You don't see how by... You don't see the deferment that's happening by saying, well, yeah, of course, nothing's happening in Ubuntu. But don't pay attention to main Ubuntu.

Don't pay attention to the most important distribution. Don't put attention to the one that has all the people officially working for Canonical on. Pay attention to all the ones based off of us. Pay attention to these guys over here. This is a total change. I'm just saying that these others are just as important as Ubuntu. That's not true at all. That's not true at important as Ubuntu. That's not true at all. That's not true at all.

And you know that's not true at all. That is not true. They are very important, but they are not as important as Ubuntu. I don't believe that they're not as important as Ubuntu at all. Oh, come on. Come on. No, I don't. We have an archive that has a variety of desktops and more than there are flavors.

You know, there's lots of other desktops in the archive that are important. In fact, Marte is now in the archive as well. And they're all important. None of them are. I love all my children. Exactly. I know years ago KDE felt themselves as the blue-headed stepchild. And that was frustrating because we put a lot of work into war with them.

To be far, they are the blue-headed stepchild. I'm just going to put that out there. I'm not a fan. So I think, you know, wait. You're entitled to your opinion, of course. But it's not an opinion. I mean, yes, my opinion that it is, where the opinion comes in is in my disappointment. But the fact of the matter is there really is nothing to talk about.

Right. Okay. But you could argue that that's the same thing with every LTS. This isn't an LTS release. No, the same package with every – every time there's something that they release right after an LTS, it always happens. It's just more refinement to the LTS. Not always. No, that's kind of my point.

10-10, 12-10, 14.10, it's the same. You just listed all the ones where they rolled out major changes to the Unity Dash, including search and privacy features. The ones you just named where there was massive changes. No, the 10.10 was the GNOME 2. 12.10 was slight changes with adding Amazon Search to it. That's not a slight change. That's a slight change with adding Amazon Search to it. That's not a slight change. That's not a slight change.

That's a huge change. As far as functionality, it's the same. I mean, it's basically... All right, I don't want to argue version numbers. You add Amazon Search to the dashboard, that's a big change. There's a lot to talk about.

When you're in LTS, just being in LTS, that's something to talk about. Okay? You guys... We're getting down into the weeds of what versions of Ubuntu have what features. The important part is, what I want to walk you from is, A, that wasn't a review. Okay? We're going to do something different for the actual review where we'll take a look at the

spin. So don't consider that like our final opinion on Ubuntu 14.10. However, we are at an interesting point in Ubuntu's history right now. We're kind of in the thick of it. And we are documenting what happens while they are making this huge, huge, huge transition. This is what happens right now. We don't know, and we're not casting what's going to happen. We're not projecting what's going to happen. But what we do know is right now, what we get, so what we will get in the long run is potentially a competitive mobile operating system that has some great features that could tie in really nicely with desktops and offer Power Linux users a great experience.

But what we have today is not a great experience for Linux Power users today. And that's what we're documenting. The fact that- Because we released 12.10, doesn't make 12.04 instantly, sorry, 14.10, doesn't make 12.04 instantly obsolete. Actually, I think that's the interesting thing about 14.10 is in a lot of ways, it doesn't change 14.04's relevance at all. You add a few PPAs to 14.04, you don't even have to change anything, right? Right. And we do hardware enablement kernels and XOR backports to the LTS release. So, yeah, you could consider 14.10 to be not exciting, not that much going on. So, fine, that's happened in the past.

We're focused on other stuff, and we'll come back to desktop next release. I kind of feel like, I mean, so why am I getting beat up on for saying that i don't know i i that's i was quite surprised myself that people reacted so badly i my only point was that you only focused on ubuntu and didn't focus on the others that was a little sleight of hand because i plan to focus more on the respins later and i figured i'd get that criticism out of the way so that way wasn't in the review it's all sort of pre-setting up the review it's me kind of

so like so some of this was was format formatting for the show for the arc of the story here like I didn't talk about Unity's multi-touch support because we had just talked about that and I was talking about Gnome so people took that as me sliding Unity and then when we got to the Ubuntu 14.10 discussion I didn't really talk about the remixes and the reflavors because that's what we're going to focus on in the review because what the hell else can we focus on? And I don't want to just spend the whole review criticizing all of the mistakes

and retrashing the software center like we often do. So we got it out right there in the news segment. Now it's done. Now it's sort of like it's setting up the narrative for the review, setting up the expectations, setting up the state of things. I'll tell you what. I'm really looking forward to this review.

This sounds awesome. And then we deliver. Well, we'll see. I mean, maybe not. We'll see. But, you know, so I guess people kind of jump down like our throats for a lot lately whenever we kind of bring up the topic of Ubuntu. And it sort of feels like there's an expectation that we really should only talk about the good stuff. And I could agree there could be more good stuff we talk about.

Yeah, but we get grief for that too, though. Yeah, exactly. Well, that was the thing. We used to get a ton of grief about that. But this week it was particularly strong. So I don't know if we've helped. I don't know if we've made any sense in any of this. But I definitely want to tamp down. I find it insulting. I find it personally insulting to be called an Arch fanboy because it implies that I am so simple minded that my preference for one distribution over another would somehow like infect how I think about everything in my life.

There was one other thing. Oh, yeah, go ahead. I forgot to mention the GNOME release schedule, meaning that we don't have the latest and greatest GNOME in our releases anymore. Yeah, okay, that's a good one, yeah. Which, you know, that's kind of sad, and it's a bit frustrating that we can't sync those things up. It would be nice if we could, but, you know, our six-month releases have been like that for 10

years. And when we had GNOME as a desktop, I think we made exceptions and would pull it in at the last minute. But now GNOME isn't our default desktop. So should we bust a gut to get GNOME in there for the final release when it isn't even our default desktop? I agree. And the fact that there is a pretty good PPA system in place where you can grab gnome in there for the final release when it isn't even our default desktop i agree i think and the fact that there is a pretty good ppa system in place where you can grab the the reason why and i don't think i said this in the show but the reason why i would love to see it just as a personal preference is a would definitely make ubuntu feel much more like a contender for me to use as my daily driver but there's there's ubuntu gnome edition uh but also it just kind

of seems like maybe while unity isn't seeing a lot of stuff, while we're just going, you know, just small bug fixes here and there, wouldn't it be really cool if there was a, you know, a very fresh being worked on desktop available to me to choose from? And that would be GNOME 3.14. And to be honest with you, I honestly think a lot of Linux users are going to install Fedora 21 because it'll be one of the first distros that does GNOME 3.14 out of the box. And they will install it just for that reason alone.

And so if it would just be a nice feather in Ubuntu 14.10's cap, if it could be like a great way to get GNOME 3.14 right out of the box. That's why I kind of brought it up because I think that would be a great combo while Unity is kind of on the shelf. But I understand, you know, release schedules and whatnot. That's just how it goes. and the PPA solved that. That's fine. Chatroom mentions maybe it's not what we're talking, but maybe it's how it's brought up. I think maybe that's potentially true,

but at the end of the day, you have to understand that we have to provide some level of entertainment too, so there has to be something to engage people. There has to be something that makes people really feel passionate and want to engage with us because sometimes if

you just keep it really dry and boring, people get bored and they tune out. So sometimes if it's presented in a certain way that you find offensive, consider that maybe it's being presented in a certain way to grab attention. Well, and for the love of God, people, stop being so friggin' sensitive. I mean, that's my big thing

first and foremost i recommend ubuntu to everybody i do and i rip on them hard because i've high expectations everyone i know that recently switched to linux is using ubuntu and i will continue to do so because it's a good distro i will also continue to rip on it because i care i'll throw this in for you chris. Today I installed Fedora 21, Fedora 20, and Antegos. Good on you. What possessed you to do such a thing? You'll find out later. Oh, okay.

Okay. So I don't know. I don't know if we're going to ever resolve this because it's such a fundamental. I understand you guys are really passionate about some of these projects. Some of you don't just contribute your voice but you also contribute your time and your code and I don't want to discourage anybody from volunteering on

any open source project they're into and I hope you will maybe consider, just stick with us for a little bit and consider that our opinions are not, I think it's a benefit to be somebody who constantly re-evaluates the way they think about things and

their opinions of things. And you can see over time those will transition. There's a lot of things over the history of Linux Action Show where we came down pretty hard on something and as those things were addressed our, I mean, GNOME is another one. GNOME 3. Oh yeah. Right? I mean, and the reason was is at. Gnome 3. Oh, yeah.

Right? And the reason was is at first Gnome 3 was no good. It just was no good. And it has gotten a lot better. And now our tone, our coverage of Gnome has changed to reflect that. It's just kind of natural if you think about it. It's not that weird. It's not a fanboy thing. It's just actions speak louder than words.

And here's a tip for folks that want to bring up a legitimate point. If they want to bring up legitimate concerns like I have a concern with blank and they want to address that concern directly, that's a conversation like what we did here today. If they're on Reddit and they're all like, oh, they're just ranting and raving. If they're not bringing up specifics, it's noise. I don't care. If they bring up specifics, it's they're just ranting and raving. If they're not bringing up specifics, it's noise. I don't care. If they bring up specifics, it's a conversation. That's your differentiator. If they're not having a conversation, don't waste your time with them.

If they want to talk about specifics like we did today, that's awesome because that's progress. That's just my view. I agree. And yeah, I hope that we'll find a good way to tackle Ubuntu 14.10. And it's going to be interesting, too, to see how the reviews go because a lot of people are going to have to reformulate the way they review a distribution. And I think some will do it successfully and others won't. So we'll see how that works out.

Yeah. I think we just tackle one thing at a time. A concern point. Let's tackle that. Let's have the conversation. Move on to the next concern point. And that's all we've got to do. I like points. I think you've got to think yourself lucky

that this release is a nice, calm, relaxed, not too much changing going on. In the next couple of releases, you're going to start seeing Unity 8, Nia, Converge Desktop, new apps everywhere, Qt and everything. So yeah.

I think a cauldron, if we will. Yeah, I think it could be like, we could be literally this time in a year or so, it'd be like, gosh, remember when we were complaining about it being boring? Gosh, I think boring back right now. You're going to have to have extra shows to cover all the crap that we're throwing. Special edition.

Special edition. Well, I provide support for a lot of Ubuntu desktops, so this stuff matters to me, you know, certainly. Yeah. Yeah, maybe it'll be a new market, Matt. Speaking of a new market, Ting's trying to make the mobile industry a brand new market. Let me tell you about Ting.com. Go to linux.ting.com.

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Try out that savings calculator. Put in what you actually pay for right now. So the minute plan and the megabytes that you have to prepay for and the messages you have to prepay for, plug all that in. But just plug in your usage, not what you are paying for, just what you actually use. See, that's the entire difference with Ting. It's what you actually use. You're not buying the prepaid stuff. The extra minutes in case you use them. Oh, I might go over 4 gigs, so I better get the 6 gig plan. That's ridiculous.

And you go into that savings calculator and it'll show you how much you could really save. You could be like Rotten Corpse in our chat room. I think he was going to save like $2,500 over two years. He could get himself a new laptop every two years by switching to Ting. Linux.ting.com. They've got a great dashboard. No hold customer service, too, which is quite awesome.

So a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. Okay, Matt, moving right along. I just got a quick topic I wanted to toss to you first, Matt, because you've been around a while. And then we'll toss it to the folks in the Mumble room. And it starts with an email we got from Anon. And it kind of got me thinking and i wanted to bounce it around from you guys and see what you think he says the bash bug shell shock i almost called it heartbreak shell shock blown totally out of proportion in regards

to the structure without direct terminal access apart from slack code and cgi scripts and maybe php that's why this is way overblown it takes an exploit to run an exploit with a script injection. In my humble opinion, it would need an exploit to run Shellshock. I'm not sure it embedded stuff, but it doesn't seem like a big deal to me. Media is playing it way over. There's a culture of cyber threats now that is taking this stuff, giving it fancy names, logos, websites. Everybody's freaking out about it. It's on Good Morning America.

It's on CBS Morning News. Matt, is it legitimate? Are we finally seeing people get worried and motivated to fix security problems? Or is this just the industry overreacting, creating jobs? I don't think it's the industry overreacting. I do think that you will find that with folks that are not in the know, that they're looking at these types of situations. And they generally happen on a kind of a plateau or like a mountain type situation to where we'll reach our peak of, oh my God, it's Y2K. And then after that's over with, we'll have all these extra food stocks and we'll be living on beans for the next 10 years.

Oh my gosh. I have some friends that did that. Oh yeah. So did I. So did I. Oh my gosh.. So, you know, I think it's one of those things. Now, I think the bigger problem that we have to remember is that most people outside of security and IT will only care as long as the news cycle cares. Once the news cycle is done, they're done. And then the IT and security people are left picking up the pieces, shaking their heads, going, God, people are idiots. And I think that's really where we're at. Wimpy, you said you had something brilliant from your local press there? Yeah. So I was sent an email over the weekend from a colleague of mine from a newspaper that they were reading.

And they were like, oh, my goodness, are we safe? And I thought I'd just read two paragraphs from this coverage. Okay. So it starts, government databases, home computers, and global websites are at risk from a security flaw found in hundreds of millions of devices. The next paragraph is called shell shock. It could allow criminal gangs to take control of computers, and this is the bullshit, smartphones and tablets. It means credit card details, passwords and sensitive data

are at risk of being stolen. Oh my goodness. This article goes on and on and on. And it talks about computers and the web and blah, blah, blah. And do you know what? They mention Linux once. Hmm. So I say that's a yes.

It has been overblown. But is that a bad thing? Well, it is because this is what the likes of my mom and my dad read, and they suddenly think that all of their things are at risk. It creates a techno-fear culture. Exactly. And then there's the people who are calling Bash the bug. Yes.

And it's like, how do I uninstall Bash from my OS X machine? Right, right, yeah. Gosh, that is when the worst. And machines. Right, right, yeah. Oh, gosh, that is when the worst... You know, when... And this, I'll call him out, is by Ben Spencer of the Daily Mail,

and he's apparently their science reporter. Oh, science! Yeah, and the thing is, is that these sorts of articles, you know they're bullshit when they refer to... So their headline is Cyber Loophole Discovered, and he refers to cyber security experts. Well, as soon as you put cyber in front of

security, your article has got no credibility whatsoever. Cyber loophole alert. Warning is computer security flaws puts millions at risk of exposure to criminals. That's a good one. Yeah. Oh, I'm going to save this one. Oh, I love, I love, I love the

fear porn. This is some good fear porn right here. Oh, and here he is tweeting examples of a vulnerable Mac. Oh, I love the fear porn. This is some good fear porn right here. Oh, and here he is tweeting examples of a vulnerable Mac. Oh, gee. Oh, it's a good time. Can we just be censored from the planet, please? I just want him out of there. No kidding. Get him out of here.

Well, go ahead. Well, I was just going to follow up saying, you know, whilst there is some concern over this, and there are some ways that this could be exploited, but it's certainly not on smartphones and tablets. You know, it might be on some aged QMail server that you're running mail filtering rules with a bash script, for example, or it might be on some aged CGI server that you're, you know, passing to, you know a bash back end or something but

this is this is not quite the apocalypse that it's been drawn out to be i'm so glad that blaster is also just as annoyed by the term cyber oh i'm so sick of it i'm so sick of cyber uh it's just yeah who is it the uh fbi guy who oh right my gosh. Yeah. That was the worst. That was really the fear. People who have no computer skills, no technical expertise at all can sit here and pump up the fear about this stuff. They just jump on it. They glom onto these situations and they just

scare everybody. It is yeah, I don't know. It's just a lot of unintentional FUD is what it is. Very much so. All right, guys. Well, so I had a couple other things I wanted to touch on.

I think I wanted to read this post that Andrew, I'm not sure, I'm not going to give this, Andrew A., I'll just say, and just get your take on this, and then we'll move on from the bash bug thing. But he said, Dear Clueless Assholes, stop bashing bash and gnu yeah that's how it starts it says right there on the screen it says this is a defense of the most prolific and dedicated public servant that has

graced the world in my lifetime one man has added hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars to value in the global economy this man has worked tirelessly for the benefit of everyone around him. It is impossible to name a publicly traded company that has not somehow benefited from his contributions, and many have benefited to the tune of billions. In return for the countless billions of wealth the people have made from the fruits of his labor, he was rewarded with poverty and ridicule. the people have made from the fruits of his labor, he was rewarded with poverty and ridicule.

Now that the world is done taking from him, they're heading for the next step, which is vilifying him as incompetent. I speak of Richard Stallman. Well, first of all, we are the world. We are the children. Let's get that out of the way. Secondly, my God, what a god what a okay secondly you know

i agreed with everything until you went into the financial end of it that's a personal choice in my opinion he says by bashing by bashing bash we are slamming stallman and gnu what do you think rotten corpse uh i think that um they're giving they're giving us uh stallman way too much credit for what they've actually done. Right. The project has done a ton, but RMS himself just kind of organized it. Well, I mean now more so than ever, yes. Right. Advocates for it, and he helps a lot of things get done.

But as far as most of the stuff he does is is um you know he he does documentation which is important he does translation helping which is important yeah i mean i don't even i don't even see discussion of the bash shell vulnerability really an indictment of richard stallman at all um he's not long he's not the current maintainer of it i don't really i don't even see doesn't make it in the first place i don't even see the straw man victim that's what this is we need a straw man victim and that's that's all of it okay so i wasn't sure because i don't even see this. He didn't even make it in the first place. We need a straw man victim. That's what this is. We need a straw man victim, and that's all of it. Okay. So I wasn't sure because I wasn't – I guess why I'm – okay.

But I want to bring this to the human element of it for a second, and we have to acknowledge that these open source projects that we talk about, like OpenSSL and Bash, sometime come down to one, two, three people, human beings that are working on this, and then this stuff becomes worldwide news. Could you imagine if some open source project that you poked away at over the years all of a sudden was the attention of the entire world, and they were saying such horrible things about it? I'd be scared. Oh, yeah.

No, I can definitely see that being a thing, which is something that Stallman does very well. He is able to get onto various news outlets, and believe me, they're going to be more than willing to have him, especially considering his history. And he's a very good diplomatic figure that can state the case and actually have a great podium to preach things that are important to him, which I'm willing to argue that his views are more important than the FUD about Bash. I will bet money on that. Yeah, you know, that is a really, RMS is really good at going on anywhere that'll have him and really kind of making his case regardless of the agenda of the host and things like that. So there it is.

Yeah. Yeah. You know what? We don't need to fight for RMS. He is totally capable of defending himself. That's a great point. All right. And logically defending himself on every front he gets.

I am giddy as a schoolgirl. The last thing I want to touch on today. I can't believe I waited until the end of the show because I am so freaking excited. First though, I want to tell you about something else I'm extremely excited about. That's the awesome folks over at DigitalOcean. Our last sponsor for Linux Unplugged today. DigitalOcean.com has got a great

offer for you that it's the end of September already, which, yeah, that blows my face off too. I don't even know how that happened. And like the last month, my son started school. We're working on some new secret projects in the background and September just flew by. You hear that?

That's September flying off into the wind. But you know what I still see when I look at that? Oh, there it goes, there it goes. Unplug September. Unplugged September. Unplugged September. You can still use that to get a $10 credit over at DigitalOcean. Let's rock support for September on Linux Unplugged over at DigitalOcean.com. So what is DigitalOcean? I'll tell you what DigitalOcean is. It's a simple cloud hosting provider dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way to spin up a cloud server. You can probably get started in less than 55 seconds and pricing plans start at only $5 per month.

That'll get you 512 megabytes of RAM, a 20 gigabyte SSD, one CPU, and a terabyte of transfer connected to tier one bandwidth. DigitalOcean has data centers. In fact, go check out their Instagram. They have some data center porn that they posted that is awesome. They have data center locations in

New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, and London. Brand new one there in London York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, and London. Brand new one there in London. IPv6. Core OS. It's so fancy. I'm going to put one over there just so I can say I have a server in London. Yeah, that makes me feel fancy. Don't judge. They also have an amazing interface with an intuitive control panel. And you can replicate that control panel on a larger scale with DigitalOcean's straightforward API. And that Ubuntu OS that I hear some of you like, guess what? They have a notification applet thingy for your Ubuntu.

I forget what it's called. But you can get one of those little applet thingies for Ubuntu. Is it Ubuntu? Ubuntu. Ubuntu. Ubuntu. Anyways, they got an applet that just uses that DigitalOcean API, and you can manage your droplets right from your Ubuntu? Ubuntu. Ubuntu. Ubuntu. Anyways, they got an app that just uses that DigitalOcean API, and you can manage your droplets right from your Ubuntu desktop.

It probably works in other districts too. I don't know. I only use Ubuntu, so I've never tried anything else. But you can go to DigitalOcean.com, use the promo code UNPLUGSEPTEMBER to get a $10 credit, try out the $5 rig for two months, and trust me, because of that 20 gigabyte SSD, your IO density is insane on these things, and you can get a ton of machine for $5 per month. It is nuts.

The value has never been where it's at right now. All backed by Linux and KVM with great data centers all over the world. DigitalOcean.com. Unplug September when you check out to get that $10 credit. And a huge thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring. Linux unplugged. You guys rock. I got so many droplets. I'm like the droplet king. That's what people call me now, Matt. credit and a huge thank you to Digital Ocean for sponsoring. Linux unplugged, you guys. Rock!

I got so many droplets, I'm like the Droplet King. That's what people call me now, man. They just go, hey, Droplet King, what's up? And I'm like, oh, you know, spinning up droplets, how I roll. Dropping the lits. Dropping the lits. Dropping the lits, man. All right, we got to do a valve update.

I don't know why I can't help myself. I'm a child on the inside, but I am so, so, so, so freaking excited to announce that Borderlands 2, one of the best first-person shooters of all time, is now, as of today, available on Steam for Linux. It has a RPG-like where you can upgrade your guns. There's so many different types of guns. You can modify them. It has a whole skill tree system to it. But at the end of the day, it's also an amazing first-person cooperative shooter.

And it has this great cel-shaded look to it. I played it, I think, on the console when it first came out. I think. It might have been Borderlands 1 I played on the console. I can it, I think, on the console when it first came out. I think. It might have been Borderlands 1 I played on the console. I can't remember, but I love the Borderlands series so hard. And there's a Borderlands prequel coming to Linux soon, too. And this is just the icing on the cake because, I don't know how long, but as of today, it's on sale for 75% off.

It's normally like $20. Right now it's $5. Great deal. This is a great game that just hit Linux. When we talked about Steam coming to Linux, this is one of the games I wanted to get here. This is huge. We are seeing

some amazing games come to Linux this week, and we'll have some more in Linux Action Show, but I don't know how long that deal's going on, so I wanted to get the word out right now. You guys can go out there and pick it up for a great price. And we'll have some more in Linux Action Show, but I don't know how long that deal's going on, so I wanted to get the word out right now. You guys can go out there and pick it up for a great price. And remember, we got some questions into the show. It's around about 40 hours the deal goes still on.

Oh, okay, 40 hours. Perfect. So for people getting the download, they'll be able to grab it too. The prequel is officially confirmed to be coming to Linux the same day as the Windows version 2. So go out there and play it, because when the prequel comes, day one Linux support for the new Borderlands, which is awesome, which makes me want to get the current one even more. Now here's

the thing. You have to buy it from your Linux box, okay? Don't buy it from the web. Don't buy it from a Windows machine to play on Linux. Please try to buy it from your Linux box, so that way it's registered as a Linux purchase. If you've already bought it ahead of time for Windows, like you already own it, like that's happened to me for a bunch If you've already bought it ahead of time for Windows, like you already own it,

like that's happened to me for a bunch of games that I just bought ahead of time during sales, you have to play it for a couple of weeks under Linux before it's counted as a Linux play. So keep that in mind when you're buying Steam games. The only reason we mention this is because I think sometimes I have, and so I'm assuming maybe some of you have out there, I've pre-bought a few games that I knew were going to come to Linux and I got them on sale and unfortunately when I did that I just put another check mark in the windows column and I feel really bad about that now so if you're like me and you want to you want to actually make sure you can demonstrate your

support for Linux you do have to buy it under Linux uh go ahead Colonel you had a question about Linux Steam sales there was a huge uh I'll just say discussion for lack of a more polite term in the mumble room, like two nights ago. Um, do you know with any certainty if the sale is tracked by steam on which OS it's purchased on? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. How sure are you? Like, can you give, can you cite a source for that? Or is that just your belief? I believe the original clarification came from a developer AMA on Reddit. Okay. And the way it works is it's whatever OS is purchased under, and then after that, what supersedes that is whatever OS is played under for a two-week period.

Right. That was my understanding, and that's what I articulated in the mumble room, and then insert three hours of nonstop arguing. Now, here's where the complexity comes in. There is a bit of a wrinkle to that. So you take a company like Aspire, who ported over... What game did they just port over that was really good?

Wasteland 2? Can't remember. No, it wasn't Wasteland 2. Witcher 2? Civ 5. They did the Civ 5 port. Great example. So they don't even get money unless you buy that under Linux.

So if you buy Civ 5 under Windows and then play it under Linux for two weeks, it'll get counted eventually as a Linux player after two weeks of time. But they will never get the revenue for it. And this is on Steam? This is on Steam. So if a company is contracted like Aspire. Which does great work. To port a game. They only get paid when you specifically buy the Linux version.

After it's been released by them in the Steam store. And that is exactly why. That's exactly why I'm holding off on Civilization Beyond Earth. Because I'm waiting for them to land it for Linux. Because they're going to be the porters of it. Yeah. So this this is i used to pre-purchase too when the sales were good and now i've stopped doing that and so but thankfully like borderlands 2 came out on sale 75 off so i'm like all right all right it was good waiting so i i and i know a lot of us care about showing support for linux i mean you know that's why we buy a lot of things we buy and and and have a lot

of the sponsors we sponsor, or have sponsor us because they are Linux-based themselves and they promote Linux. And so it's important to me, so I wanted to pass that along to you. So it's like a little Steam pro tip, I guess. Plus you can go get Borderlands.

Chris, did you see the Valve collection is on offer as well? Yes, I already have that. That's about 19 hours left to go. That's a really great deal too, all the really good Valve games. So as a Steam newbie, I picked up 23 games for 18 quid. Yeah, it is a good time.

Oh, look, you know what? You can pre-purchase the pre-sequel right now, and I think it will count as a Linux purchase. Because they have it. See, the way you can tell is if they have the little penguin by the add to cart, then you know if you buy it under Linux, it will be counted as a Linux purchase. And they already have that up for the pre-sequel.

The pre-sequel, that's fine. That Valve collection has about another 19 hours left on it before it goes back up to the regular price of $99. It's 75% off. Yeah, I'm looking for it. I'm wondering why they don't have a banner for it right now because it's a really great deal. It was really hard to find.

I had to do a search for it, actually, off of Google. I did as well. I couldn't find it through the Steam store. The Valve Complete Pack. Yeah, it's $24 right now. And I will link to this in the show notes, too, so that way you guys don't have to go search for it like I did. Yeah, it's close to $150 worth of games for $24. You can't beat it. No.

You get the Portal series. You get Left 4 Dead. You get the Team Fortresses. You get your Counter-Strikes. Your Half-Lives. all the Half-Lives. Yeah. Yeah, between CSGO and Borderlands 2, I don't know if I'm going to be able to get any work done anymore under Linux. How much do I have to pay to get it all open? Oh, wait. So, by the way, minimum requirements for Borderlands 2 on your Linux box,

Minimum requirements for Borderlands 2 on your Linux box, you're going to need an Intel Core 2 Quad or AMD Phenom X4, 2.4 gigahertz, 4 gigs of RAM, 13 gigabytes of hard drive space, and this is actually not bad, a GeForce 20, I'm sorry, a GeForce 260 minimum video. I think the cell shading gives you a lot there. So here's an interesting note they put on the Linux requirements. They say, your machine doesn't meet the above specs. Doesn't mean your configuration won't run Borderlands 2. Nice.

Yeah, essentially the way they put it is, you know what? It looks like Aspire ported Borderlands 2 as well. Because it says, if you have any problems with Linux, please report to the Linux port. Please report them to Aspire. Well, now I'm even more happy that it was an Aspire port. It's a direct port instead of a box. Yeah, exactly. Instead of whatever that wrapper thing was.

Wine or whatever you think. Yeah, yeah. And also a little plug for Linux underscore gaming. That's a good subreddit where you can get news. Linux underscore gaming. Not a great name, but good subreddit. All right. Well, that will bring us to the end of today's episode of Linux Unplugged.

Join us on Sunday for a new's episode of Linux Unplugged. Join us on Sunday for a new episode of the Linux Action Show. We do that at 10 a.m. if you'd like to join us there. Of course, we do this show on Tuesdays starting at 2 p.m. Pacific. I don't know what time that is where you're at, but you can go to jupyterbroadcasting.com slash calendar and our robots will automatically

convert it to your time. So that's pretty handy. And don't forget, we love your feedback. It's a huge part of our show. Go over to jupyterbroadcasting.com, click the contact link, and then choose unplugged from the dropdown. You can also go to linuxactionshow.reddit.com. That's our subreddit. Feedback is appreciated there. As you can tell, we pay attention to it and we try to cover it in the shows. It's also just a great way to get Linux news throughout the week. And then while you're there, vote things up or down. Give us an idea of what you like to see covered

and maybe leave a comment and we often sort of incorporate your insights into our coverage. We have an extremely intelligent audience and we find your insights very valuable. They are a great resource for our show. LinuxActionShow.reddit.com Alright, Matt, well have a

great week, man. Yeah, you too. And I will see you on Sunday. We should have bacon again. Excellent. I know, right? And I just put some Coca-Cola in the fridge, so it'll be nice and cold for you. Much appreciated. No problem. Alright, everyone, well thank you for joining us this week. Go over to twitter.com slash chrislas to follow me. That's where you'll find announcements about live shows. I also have links to Matt's social profiles, like Matt's on G+, quite often. You can go find him over there, Matt Hartley.

We'll have links to that in the show notes. And don't forget that subreddit. Go over there. LinuxActionShow.reddit.com. Make a difference. If you want to see us cover more Ubuntu stuff, submit it there. If you want to see us cover less Ubuntu stuff, let us know. We'll take it all over there, including the feedback. It really is a huge part. This show

is a community show, so it's a huge part of what we do. Alright everyone, well thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. We'll see you right back here next Tuesday. Bye. They're fools. Oh, there we go. They're fools. Yeah, I'm going to do it after the show. I am buying it right now. You know, I'm going to go buy it right now, too. What the hell? We'll all buy it together. It's $5.

I was about to buy it, but then I realized I already have it. Guys, it needs so much to play with. I have 1,200 hours in the game. Whoa. Holy crap. Wow. I don't even have that much on Sim 5. We should do like a pre-show, last pre-show, Borderlands 2 thing.

That'd be fun. I forgot to mention it, but there's also like a bunch of DLC you can buy for another $5. Oh, the pre-sequel is $60 right now. Holy crap. Oh, I think I'll just wait. Yeah, I'm going to wait for a sale on that one. Yeah, I think I'll just wait for a sale. I mean, I want to, yeah. I can show my Linux support when they release it,

just as much as I can show it during the pre-order for probably less money. All right, jbtitles.com. Got to pick a title, everybody. jbtitles.com. Let's go. So I had a question for everybody, if you don't mind. Go, man. I mind.

We do mind. Well, I've been racking my head around something. You know, I love all Linux distributions. But when it comes to being marketable in the workplace, I'm trying to figure out which one to specialize in. So maybe I can get some input from you guys and give me reasons why as well. Good question.

What are you trying to do in the industry? I don't know, be employable? How's this for an answer, Eric? On the server side, I've worked exclusively with... No, I take that back. I've worked almost exclusively with Red Hat, and I've seen one Debian server. And on the desktop side, the two choices that business will allow me to install are Ubuntu and OpenSUSE. And I would say that my experience working with servers, I've only seen Debian and Ubuntu servers and never seen a Red Hat or CentOS server.

So there's some balance there for you. And my experience has been a lot of places that have Red Hat servers often kind of wish they had Debian or Ubuntu servers. Oh! That's true, though. I'm actually not kidding. That's actually legitimately true. Now, the difference is I've probably seen it depends, Eric. So

on-premise, I see a lot more Red Hat or CentOS. Actually, I see a lot more CentOS. I've seen a lot. But in hosted environments in the cloud or brand-new infrastructures, like they're building a server for the first time, like an internal LAMP server or something like that, it's really often Ubuntu.

Interesting. So maybe it's a good idea to be specializing in both ecosystems then? If you know CentOS and Ubuntu. I think we'll make that more difficult, really. I'd say look at your region, because the region and area that you want to work in, and see which type of company. The size of the company and the structure they have often impacts the software they use, and as a result, in the area that you want to work on, you focus on that. It doesn't matter. You can actually come and ask what kind of software they use, and as a result, in the area that you want to work on, you focus on that. It doesn't matter. You can actually come and ask what kind of software they use.

If you're a sales guy, you will get this information because people are willing to talk about the cool stuff they have in-house. Okay, so here's what I'm thinking. Here's what I'm getting from you guys. It's a good thing then to have the know-how from both the Ubuntu families, which would cover Debian as well, and from CentOS, which would cover Red Hat as well. Yeah, I think that's two really good ones to focus on for employability skills, yeah. And here's another thought, food for thought, Eric and Chris,

you tell me if this has been your experience as well. Very rarely, at least in big organizations, have I ever gone to work where they just say, have at it us here's this most times there's a senior admin on staff that says we want these very specific things done and then they essentially describe to you would dictate to you what it is so it's not like you walk into to us i mean every once in a while it happens but usually you don't walk into a site and they're like we have problem xyz and we need you to craft a solution usually they're dictating something. So, okay. Let's talk about titles for a second, then we'll go back.

So I like A Storm is Brewing, Calm Before the Storm, and Who Do I Have to Blow? But we probably shouldn't go with that as a title. I don't know. It would get quick. Yeah, that's true. That was a great one by Dave there. Calm Before the Storm is pretty good. A Storm is Brewing is also pretty good.

Popey Runs Chris. Yeah. I think Calm Before the Storm is actually apt and accurate. It is. Did somebody say apt? Oh. Oh. Let's apt-get Odyssey Westra's title suggestion.

Ouch. Sweet. It hurt just saying it. Go, Mr. Westra. Yeah, Eric. It's going back to the – there's a lot of different ways to look at distributions and how – what makes them relevant. You know, like what agenda can they push forward could be one way to look at it. What is the most employable? That's another way to look at it. Which has the most faces staring at the screen if I want to develop an app?

That's another way to look at it. Which one gives me the best satisfaction? That's another way to look at it. Which one gives me the best satisfaction? That's another way to look at it. And everybody's coming at it from different perspectives. I'd say if employability is the thing, the region he wants to work or needs to work in is the key.

That's his limitation. Yeah, and there's some areas where SUSE Enterprise Server is the top dog. And that's typically like Europe and whatnot. And over here, it seems like this continent really likes Red Hat. That's at least why I'm being ganged. And that might be because Red Hat is based in North Carolina.

Here's a really super crazy ass, don't bet your life on it, rough rule of thumb to follow. If it's a product driven by developers, and that's the area you're going to go into, like small businesses where somebody created something and they formed a business around it, they're going to be using Ubuntu. If it's an established business where they've been around for a long time, maybe they've been calling it the MIS department

since the 80s, they're going to be running Red Hat. So whatever you're targeting, depending on which ones you're targeting, that would be a really kind of crazy-ass loose, rough rule of thumb to follow. Here's another crazy-ass loose rule of thumb to follow. If you judge them and they have character, they'll be running redhead. If you judge them and they don't have character, they'll be running abundant.

I see. I see. Okay. If they don't have scrupulous morals. There's a truckload of companies out there without any scruples. Here's where I'm kind of at with that. I want to simultaneously target both because I want to be as employable as possible to anybody. I'm running on... You guys thought Chase's unemployment situation was bad?

Mine's way worse. I know. This is just more... Do we have a website to track your employment? Not yet. Not yet. A little dot info. Well, like I said, just give a pass by on the companies.

Make a list of the companies of your area. If that's the area you want to work in and it's in your region, that's how you're going to be able to see what you need to focus first because you want to try your chances nearby i assume and don't forget that some some companies will let you work from home uh yeah for example the one i work at and we hire people who are we often hire people who have a track record of community contributions. So you can build up quite a portfolio on GitHub rather than having a CV that's based on experience from companies. If your personal contributions to projects are significant enough, that can be enough of a CV. I agree.

In fact, I've always, you know i it's really a mistake to hire somebody based on what distribution they know what you really want to know is how adept are they at linux and how fast can they adapt because truth be told distros change a shit ton over five six years and so like one distro will have zen for a couple of years and then that distro even though it's a huge enterprise distro in the next release will will switch to KVM. And then the next release will switch to SystemD. And then the next release will totally integrate Docker containers and reformat. It's

always changing, right? And so to get too locked into which distro is kind of like, it's sort of like this accidental getting locked into how Linux is today. Really, it's more about what you already do, staying informed, following the trends, seeing the new technologies,

how do those adapt to workloads, how would I integrate those, and maybe today you're going to deploy that package using YUM, but in two years, when you're sitting at a Red Hat Enterprise Linux box, you're going to be using DNF, right? And it doesn't really matter. It changes anyways.

I get what you're saying at the same time. That's a very difficult metric to codify. Right yeah well that's i was about to say uh you're probably better off uh to do something to show people that you are worth uh for them to be trained uh then uh training training yourself to be to get hired by some specific company because that just may not work out. Yeah, well, here's one thing I've noticed. And lately I was just kind of trolling some stuff, well, not really trolling, but going through some stuff on LinkedIn.

And I did come across a job posting for somebody, and they basically said they wanted like four years of CentOS experience specifically. I was like, what? Okay. It's Linux. If I could pass along two pieces of advice that have gotten me through some really rough points in time, it's one, who you know. Be where the people that you want to be hired from are. Conventions, anything you can do to be in their face.

I've gotten work with people. One company comes to mind specifically dating years back that I'm still with to this day that happened because I asked a question. I got in the guy's face. I asked two questions. Within a month's time, I had actually developed a contract with this company. Get in their face.

The guy's interview just so happens that you know the popular Linux podcast. Hold on. Let Colonel Linux go because he's hiring guys to work on Linux all the time. Oh, yeah. There you go. There you go. Well, I was just going to say when we were at Self Q5, the guy we interviewed for Arch

Assault, not Arch Assault. He was doing the other booth. He was doing the Scepter, the thin PC. He got his job the year before at Self because he walked up to the booth and said, this is really cool. What are you guys doing here? And the guy gave him a job right on the spot. Well, so I guess, so when you're looking, you know, so you're hiring some guy who's going to cover for you

when you're going to things like Self or you're going to OSCON or you're going to Ohio Linux Fest. How do you know that guy you're going to hire is going to be able to handle a Linux problem when it comes up? What test can you give him? And the reason why I ask that is because maybe Eric could take that and reverse engineer it and kind of figure out, you know, what to expect. So what do you, like, what do you look for, Noah? Well, we, so I won't personally, just because the community of small word spreads fast, I can't take a chance on, on, on measuring that metric wrong. I won't, I won't let somebody work out unless, go on their own, unless they've been with me for six or seven weeks. And they come around, and then we go through and go over all the stuff that we do.

And then after that, I let them run solo. But places like – what was the – we did an interview at LinuxFest Northwest, and that's exactly what they do. They have a test that – I can't remember the name. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, I do, but I don't remember the name either. Go back and look at the Northwest episode, Eric, because there was a group there that essentially what you do is you go to their site and you can take their tests, and then they send those to potential.

And so an employer goes out and they say, I'm looking for somebody that knows RHEL 6. Then this company will say, here are the people that have successfully completed a test with 80% or higher in RHEL 6. That might be a thought too. I'll take a look at that. I'll take a look at the show. That's very cool, but one thing you also want to watch out for is the worst thing you can

ever do is be that guy that is, like, you could be the best, the most certified RHEL 6 expert, and then they ask you to use RHEL 7, and you're like, well, I'm not certified for that. Right. Never be that guy. Yeah. Textbook smart, but can't problem solve your way out of a paper bag.

Are you talking about Cisco guys? Yeah. Yes, I am talking about Cisco guys.