LINUX Unplugged - Episode 66: Firefox gets Unplugged | LUP 66

Episode Date: November 12, 2014

The crew took the Firefox challenge & we follow up, we reflect on 10 years of Firefox, their early Linux support & the growing competition from Webkit.Gnome raised money to defend it’s Trademark from Groupon, which has quickly raised the white flag. Is this instant groundswell of support the dawn of a new community attitude towards Gnome?Plus an exciting first live on the show, tons of great feedback & more!

Did you guys see the Amazon Echo? Yes, I did. I was going to mention that in Tech Talk today. You guys were talking about Google Voice and that. The Amazon Echo is really something, and there's been some really, really great parodies, and I want to play one of my favorite Amazon Echo parodies for you. It's pretty fantastic.

What are you doing, Derek? What is it? Is it for me? It's for everyone. Is it on? It's for everyone. Is it on? It's always on. Can it hear me right now? It can hear you from anywhere in the room.

I've put wrapping paper on your shopping list. So what day is it? Today is Thursday, November 13th. Eight minutes starting now. I can play music, answer questions, get the news and weather, create to-do lists, Alexa, and much more. Wow. Introducing Amazon Echo. She's listening.

I wonder why they didn't just call it Echo. Creepy. Yeah. Not. Yeah. Everyone's being harsh on it, but it's kind of interesting. Yeah, I thought I actually was kind of impressed. Like, it doesn't look like it has an like, an over-ambitious feature set.

No, well, it's pretty, pretty, I mean, so who doesn't want Jarvis, right? Everybody wants to be Tony Stark with Jarvis. Everybody wants the Enterprise computer in their house. Obviously, I want to be in my studio, and I want to say, you know, Alexia or computer or Jarvis or whatever, whatever it is, you know,

set the temperature in the other room to 75 degrees, turn the TV to this channel and, uh, you know, whatever. And by the time I walk out there, the TVs are ready to go and stuff like that. Obviously that would be amazing.

But this thing, what does this do? The Google now can't do. And it's always with you in every single room. Right. That's the thing though. It's not about that. It's about the,

being a device that does that. And I don't know of any. Because I went around and I looked. As soon as I saw it, I thought, I don't really want Amazon's thing. I'd rather have the Google one. But I looked around. It's like, wait a minute. There is none. It's really about my device.

It's a phenomenal software. Yeah, there is. It's called your phone. No! I understand where you're coming from. But there's no set-in house device that i can just sit down yeah that's anyone can use or a tablet well a tablet yeah but you know something you can plug in and use and kind of just have stand there as a little piece and apply it i've

got yeah i've got a couple of couple of questions the first is is this available in the US now, and has anyone got one? It is available, I believe. I'm not sure. Oh, no. It's only... They have a sign-up list. I don't feel like buying one, so I didn't even bother. Yeah, you have to go and sign up on the list, and then they'll let, I think it was a hundred people of, like, a hundred or so.

I can't remember. It's so funny. It's so scary. Has anyone in here got an Amazon Fire TV? Now, that I will probably be getting for the studio in a little while. I have a few friends who have told me they are pretty good, but I don't have one. They're not just pretty good. They're damn storming amazing. But I was going to say, one of the features on the Amazon TV is voice recognition,

and it makes it makes the google voice recognition look like amateur hour it is absolutely amazing how can that be because how can i don't know but it's so good it's not that difficult dude well no i mean think about what google does to get their voice recognition as good as it is right yeah no yeah and that's that's that's a hilarious catastrophe yeah that is a shame. If Amazon, where would Amazon, Amazon doesn't have millions of voice samples a day. Where is Amazon getting this from? Well, that's what allowed them to focus on actually better algorithms.

And that part alone is creepy because that means it's got to be the Fire tablets. Or no, maybe they're just licensing new ones. Maybe it's because so many people have the Fire phone. Maybe. But we've handed the remote around in the house between different people who've got different voice cadence, different sexes, and this thing just works every single time. It never misses a beat. It's absolutely brilliant.

Daredevil says he seems to know it, though. What is it, Daredevil? They have two things. Daredevil and Suzy seems to know it, though. What is it, Daredevil? So they have two things. First is they have actually very good machine learning algorithms, which they already use to know what you want to buy. And they've been investing and actually hiring on that department for a while.

It's in-house. And I'm not sure if it's totally in-house, but they hired people at least. And during this last year, they've been hiring a lot of people in this area, machine learning algorithms and natural language processing. Okay. And they also have another service they do with something like actually persons go in surveying something. I'm not sure on the specifics, but it's some sort of service

that is to get people to audit sites and things like that so i'm figuring that the process of getting some data from them shouldn't be too hard yeah uh actually to it is the problem with the actual natural language processing now isn't really getting samples anymore it's actually you know being able to have an algorithm that can understand them yeah go on sorry chris no go ahead well no i i was i was just going to say that the amazon voice recognition is is excellent and whilst amazon might might understand my buying habits and preferences because it's basically a narrow field of science fiction titles when i I hand a remote to my wife, who's into romantic comedies, it picks up and understands everything she's asking for just fine.

And, you know, I suppose in that sense, if they know maybe the context is movie titles, right, that really narrows the scope of what I was going to say. Well, it's not, you see, because it's movies, television, music, apps, and a whole load of other stuff. I'll tell you, the only trick that Amazon have missed, and this is the one thing about the Amazon Fire TV that really irritates,

is that they've walled off this brilliant feature of voice search from all of the other providers. Oh, so it doesn't go across the app? Exactly. So you can install Flex so you can install the app exactly so you can install plex and you can install netflix but when you go and ask it to go and search for the walking dead yeah it will only search amazon it won't go to any other places and that's that and that is just such a fail because you can see why amazon are doing it but they're doing it for all the wrong reasons oh of course they are but they're going to be very successful at it yeah but everything else about it is is is just brilliant it's it's um replaced our roku in the front room oh yeah i

think that's what i was thinking too is it might be our roku and and it's actually a half decent gaming machine as well as you know i'm not much of a gamer, so I'm probably not a good reference candidate here. But I play games on my Amazon Fire TV now. And as far as I'm concerned, it's the best thing I've ever had. So, Wimpy, once we get into the show a little bit, we've got a little something we're going to tell people about. Don't say anything. A little something something? Yeah.

All right. We'll do that a little bit in the show. A little something something. Yeah. All right. We'll do that a little bit in the show. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's loaded with protein and wishes a very grateful Happy Veterans Day to all the vets in the audience. My name is Chris. And my name is Matt. Hey there, Matt. Happy Veterans Day to all the vets, like we say. And Matt, happy Tuesday to yourself.

And happy Tuesday to yourself. And happy Tuesday to you as well. I know. I feel like such a slacker on this. This is like the day of the year that I feel like the biggest slacker ever. It doesn't matter how hard I work or how many hours. I feel like today I've been a slacker. So I went out, and to celebrate, I got one of those monster breakfasts where it's so much breakfast that you don't eat for pretty much until dinner and I'm still good. I got steak and eggs, Matt. Oh, nice. Oh, Matt.

Oh, it was a really, there's just Tuesdays have been good eat days I guess. So I'm ready to go. You know, hopefully. Hopefully we will avoid the flames in today's episode. We're going to follow up on the Firefox challenge, run through some of the experiences and challenges that I had.

We've got something really fun coming up towards the end of the show. And we're also going to discuss this whole Gnome versus Groupon over the trademark, where that's at right now, what Groupon's been saying, and how much damn money the Gnome Foundation has raised. A lot of stuff. Plus, we've got a ton of great feedback going on in today's episode. So I think probably the best thing to do is arm ourselves with knowledge.

That knowledge supplied directly thanks to cranial implants that are connected to Mumble. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Litigation. Greetings. Did you eat at that amazing place nearby the studio? Yeah. Ellie's? Yeah.

Oh, gosh. I love that place. It's? Yeah, Ellie's. Yeah. Oh, gosh, I love that place. It's so good. It's so good. And, like, all the people there, I'm like, I'm the only guy. I don't know everybody's name. It's like cheers up in that joint. Yeah.

Only it's breakfast food. Yeah, it's great. It's really weird. Yeah. All right, so let's start with some follow-up emails. Just a quick one. I'll leave the details in the show notes. follow-up emails. Just a quick one. I'll leave the details in the show notes. But Ben

wrote in with sort of one of the best write-ups on how to fix the NVIDIA vSync issue that we were seeing or that we had an email about last week. We had a few solutions. Ben had one where you just toss an export line into your.pro file and then that

will take care of it. And he says, I love the show. I just wanted to chime in on the game vSync issues that David from Alabama was experiencing in Linux Unplugged 65. Basically, he fixed his V-Sync issues by forcing the Unity compositor to V-Sync for him. And he's looking for a way to do the same in GNOME. This is not the way to go. Every time someone suggests using Compton

or turning off Unity Rects full screen or using another way to force the compositor during games, I scream in frustration. You're losing out on a ton of performance, and you're increasing input latency in games, which makes playing Twitch games like Counter-Strike Global Offensive darn near impossible. So he's got a command in there you can put in there

that should take care of it. If you're out there having some tearing issues on your NVIDIA games, yeah, so thank you, Ben. We had a bunch of good responses, too. Now, Noah, you're in here on your quote-unquote cheap podcasting Linux rig right now, right? I am. Okay, well, I think we'll start this. I'll toss this question to you, and then we'll get everybody's input.

But here's our first sort of like we're putting it actually in the show coverage of USB headphones on Linux. We get this question all the time. We talk about it on the pre-show, live stream, all the time in the Mumble room. But now we're going to get it right here. Wiggle Waffles writes in and says, Hi all, I'm absolutely horrible. I've had a horrible time troubleshooting tech issues with my mom's C720 running Ubuntu GNOME 14.04. See, now we're doing it over the phone, and she needs a USB headset to make Skype calls while traveling.

Searching the web for Linux-compatible headphones has proved totally useless. And, of course, manufacturers don't include any such info in their product descriptions. Matt mentioned some arcane sound controller name on last regarding this issue, but I have no idea what headphones they were or what type of controller headphones even have in them. So any help would be appreciated. I'm looking for something low-cost and basic for Skype calling, so no high-end suggestions. Oh, I see his point. He says he goes on to say that there's also always that one hardware feature that doesn't seem to work,

which is frustrating for him, that has no Linux equivalent. The only success in this area, though, is he moved his dad to a Linux machine with email web and nothing work, which is frustrating for him, that has no Linux equivalent. The only success in this area, though, is he moved his dad to a Linux machine with email web and nothing else, and it works for him. So I suppose it depends on the use. So now he's in a spot where he hasn't been able to success. I think he needs to work on his Google foo, because there are some threads out there for good headsets.

Matt, what are you wearing right now? Do you know? It's a Pelotronix. I never pronounce this right, but a Pelot Platronics, I think is what it is. I have other mics set up to the other computer, but on this one specifically. Now, I have a headset that I got at Goodwill for $3 that will work. I'll send him. I mean, hell, it's not hard to find.

If it's USB and it goes on your ears, it works. Yeah, that's why he's having a hard time. That's the big secret is it pretty much works. All right. Colonel Linux, you've got your cheap rig there. Can you tell us a little bit about your setup and what kind of Linux, if any, compatibility issues you ran into? Right. So my experience is the same.

Essentially, almost every USB audio interface I've used recently works. There was one exception. That was quite a while ago. Plantronics works really, really well. In fact, that's what's used in the spaceship. So obviously they know something or two about making headsets. But I've also found that Logitech, like the H390, for example, they're like $20. Best Buy, Office Max carries them. Amazon, of course, has them.

Amazon Prime. And then my latest thing, because this question keeps coming up, is I want decent audio quality. What was the cheapest I could put together a system that is totally Linux compatible? So you take it out of the box, you plug it in, no configuration, no compiling drivers, no downloading anything. I just wanted to work out of the box. How cheap could I do that? And now, mind you, this is not meant for putting in your bag and traveling, right? This would be if you want to get a little bit better audio quality than you get from a USB headset. But I was able to whittle it down to just under $200.

And I have another microphone on order that's going to come in, and I'm going to see if I can get it down to about $150. But I think for $200, and I'm talking on it right now, I think this sounds really good. It gets you a USB interface. It gets you a mixer. It gets you a microphone, a headphones, and a microphone stand. That's a full Linux audio podcasting rig, which I think we should do a full segment on, to be honest.

Yeah. We should. But Wimpy, you sound pretty good today, and you're on a new headset, right? What did you get? I am. Well, I asked the question last week, because I had a massive audio fail last week. So everyone gave me some advice, and I away and and and did a bit of research so uh this week i bought myself logitech h800 headset and it's not the cheapest and i'll explain

why i used it first of all in terms of linux support it's a wireless headset and mic all built in with some buttons on the side for volume control and muting and track skipping and stuff like that. Ooh, wireless is pretty nice. And all those media keys work. So it's wireless. It has a USB plug that you put in your USB. That shows up on your machine, and you just go. So you're using Bluetooth?

It's both. So it has two buttons on the headset, one to use the USB dongle, which is how I'm using it now, plugged into my Linux workstation to do mumble. And then you just go into your mixer and just say what your mic is and what your headsets are and all that works. But it also has Bluetooth. So you switch the headset to Bluetooth mode and then you compare it with your tablet and your phone. So this device now does all of my audio needs. So you can use it for your computer or to listen to a podcast from a phone or music or something like that.

Exactly. Oh, that is sweet. So if I'm sitting downstairs and I want to watch a bit of BSG on my tablet, I just put the headset on, pair it with the tablet, and off I go. So what do you do for the mic? What's the mic using? The mic's built in. It's built into the headset. It's a pull-down integrated mic. Okay. Wow. That is really cool. So it's Logitech

H800. H800, yeah. And there's slightly cheaper models as well, but I quite like this one because of the versatility. We've been able to use it with multiple devices. How do you charge it? It's a micro USB charger. And so when you plug the receiver in, it just shows up to Linux as a USB sound card? It does. Sweet. Nice recommendation. Good find, Wimpy. Okay. This is something I think about a lot. And we're going to get into this discussion around Firefox and Chrome. Firefox and Chrome. And, you know, one of the things I've noticed a lot in my switch for the week is when something doesn't work right. You know, there's a lot of different suggestions

that come at come at a person. And I feel like there's a lot of parallels between when we have people switch to Linux and things don't go right for them and how we respond to that. And how when I switched to Firefox, and things didn't go right, and how how we respond to that and how when I switched to Firefox and things didn't go right and how people have responded to that. I see a lot of parallels there. So I've been thinking a lot about how what I've just gone through reflects how we handle newcomers to Linux. And this first email or this next email that we're going to get to

sort of follows that theme that we're going to be talking about later today. So Mount Agent, I think is how you say it, Rodent or Mount Tangent, I'm not sure. It says, on Sunday's show, Chris and Matt were reminiscing about the good old days of Compiz and how the desktop cube and rad flame effects were pretty good at starting conversations and getting people to try out Linux.

I'm wondering what features are beloved OSs you found to be the most persuasive to new Linux users. They were. Talking about mine would largely be about Mac users looking at Linux, since I work primarily with that user base. I'll second the desktop effects thing. As an ongoing on-and-off-again KDE user, I also find that KDE's incredible level of customization cuts both ways with this. For some, it's a major draw. For others, it's intimidating. Mac users seem to have really enjoyed Cairo Dock, again with the flame effects. Before iOS 7 and 8, the ability to plug in iOS devices and read

external storage was a big hit for them, too. Oh, and hilariously for Mac users, snapping the tiles of the windows, you know, when you snap a window to the edges, they love that. I still can't understand why Apple doesn't do that in Mac OS. So he says, what other shiny features of Linux, be it a desktop environment or otherwise,

do you show folks to start them down the road to switching to Linux? Multiple desktops. Multiple desktops is a great one. Of course, Windows 10 is getting that finally. And Mac OS has Spaces. Yeah, but it's nowhere near as good as, like, I run Cinnamon. I mean, I have 10 desktops.

Wow. All hockey. Wow. And I'm, I have 10 desktops. Wow. All hockey. Wow. And I'm, you know, blocked. Zerok, what do you show them in GNOME that really seems to grab their attention? If somebody is watching me use my machine and I'm using GNOME 3, the first thing they notice is when I mouse over to the top left hot corner and everything kind of backs out and I get a nice, everything gets out of my way, that kind of thing. The activities overview?

Right. They get all, that kind of thing. The activities overview? Right. They get all over that stuff. Are you talking about like showing all of your desktops or like what? Yeah, well, no, when you go to activities overview, all the windows you have open. Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, that is actually really cool. Yeah, that's a good one.

That's a good one. I also, you know what one I find really sweet for Mac users, which is just hilarious that the Mac doesn't have this. I love that we're talking. I know. It's just like when you click the clock in Mac OS, it doesn't drop down a calendar. Like, this is 2014. How do you not?

So anyways, so on GNOME, you know, when I drop down the calendar on GNOME, like I always show them like, yeah, and it syncs with my own cloud server and puts all my appointments in there. So that's something that the GNOME's got going for it that's pretty nice. For the shiny features too, it depends on who your audience is, right? Because different people find different things to be shiny. Some people find the ability to boot off of a

USB Live thumb drive and recover your system a shiny feature. Some people think that's not. Also the desktop cube. Yeah, you could always turn it back on. Just go back to Gnomeics, baby. Go back to Gnomeics, show them the cube. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, so if you have any ideas, leave us some feedback on what the shiny thing is. Go put Compass back on your rig. Or if you've got Unity, go turn on the Compass settings manager and turn on the fire. Or if you're running Plasma, it's native in KadeWin. Yeah, very true. Yeah, true. All right. RA writes in with our last email today.

It says, hey, JB, with Fedora 21, when it does finally come out in December, probably, you guys should review it. I know you will, but there's just so much great stuff in there. GNOME 3.14, SystemD, DNF, ButterFS, Wayland, and all of the new core apps. And there's some extra dev tools in there too. I was able to set up my C and C++ and Java environments with just five clicks and everything is butter smooth.

So this is the first time I've got a gnome running under Wayland actually, and it's quite good. All the apps I have run nicely, probably though with ex-Wayland. Now that I think of it, I would love to be in the Mumble Room when you guys review it. Would that be possible?

Yes, so stay tuned. We will, when Fedora 21 comes out, have a review, and we will probably do the whole comprehensive thing where we start the review in Linux Action Show, and we're planning to do some pretty solid follow-up in that following week's Unplugged. The Mumble Room's open, so, Ari, you would always be welcome to join us.

They let me in here. Yeah, from time to time at least. Haven't kicked you yet. All right, so I want to talk about the Firefox Switch. I think that's something we should probably get to. Plus, it's also the 10-year anniversary of Firefox. Before we get to that, though, I'd like to thank DigitalOcean. They're our first sponsor this week.

Head over to DigitalOcean.com right now and use our promo code unplugged November when you check out to get a $10 credit. Now, DigitalOcean is only $5 a month for their droplets. So that's going to get you a droplet for two months for free to try them out. Now, why would you go over to DigitalOcean? My friends, I will tell you, because they rock. It's simple cloud hosting, and they're dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way to spin up a cloud server. I got an email today from Jason who got started in 33 seconds, but they say on average probably could go in about 55 seconds or so, and pricing plans start at $5 per month. Their pricing structure is very logical. It incrementally goes up. You get all of the more of the things. It's very clearly laid out. They even have hourly pricing if you just

need to do some testing, but for $5, you're going to get 512 megabytes of RAM, a 20 gigabyte SSD, one CPU, and a terabyte of transfer connected to tier one bandwidth at some of the world's most amazing data centers. You can see some of the awesome pictures on their Instagram feed. I'm super jelly. It's one thing I really miss about working in IT is the really awesome data centers. And they have locations in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, and London, multiple data centers. You can do private networking. It's really sophisticated stuff. And they manage it all with this dashboard. It is amazing. The dashboard is super intuitive. The control panel is one of these things that I wish I could just take it and make it my idea, because I would just take this alone and make

this the product, and I would become super rich. That's how incredible my idea. Because I would just take this alone and make this the product and I would become super rich. That's how incredible it is. And this is just part of DigitalOcean. And they wrap up all of these great features, like the ability to do one-click application deployments. Or if perhaps you want to do something like DNS management or a backup or a one-click install of GitLab, you can do all of that right from the dashboard. It's super slick. And when you're over there, use our promo code, unplugNovember, to get a $10 credit and try it out for a couple of months for free.

And DigitalOcean is also looking for folks to write tutorials. They'll pay up to $200. So if there's something you're an expert on, go write a tutorial for them, and you might get paid. They have editors that will work with you. In fact, they even have an open editor position right now for those tutorials. So you might be able to get a job over at DigitalOcean too if you want to edit some tutorials.

That would be pretty cool. So go over to DigitalOcean.com and use the promo code UNPLUGNOVEMBER when you check out. Try them out. It's pretty great. I've got cray-cray droplets. I've got so many droplets now that Rikai has got droplets on my account. Rikai's got droplets now. How cool is that, right?

And he's doing, you better watch out, though, because I think he might be using it to develop Skynet. So you probably want to get on his good side. DigitalOcean.com. Use the promo code UNPLUGGEDNOVEMBER when you check out, and a huge thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. Okay, so let's start off by saying happy 10th anniversary to Firefox, right? Version 1.0 came out 10 years ago.

They had a big old ad. Didn't they have a – am I right? They bought a big ad in the New York Times or something? I think so, yeah, if I remember correctly. It is pretty cool. And as part of that, they've released a new developer version of the browser, Aurora. They've taken the Aurora name, and now it's sort of like it's a development release with a bunch of tools and a new theme. I downloaded and tried it out last night.

They also introduced a new feature in Firefox called Forget. So instead of having to go into an entire private session, you can just forget the last hour or 24 hours or whatever, five minutes of your browsing session. It's kind of neat. They're also launching Project Polaris, a privacy

initiative, and to kick that off, they're starting with a massive boost to the Tor relay network to give Tor more capacity. And they're pledging to make security management simpler and more straightforward in Firefox. So a pretty cool 10th anniversary for Firefox. So last week, well, I don't remember exactly even how it went down. the pre-show we were like somehow it came up that I run Chrome Chromium I should say I don't actually run Chrome because it's just a little bit more of a pain in the ass to get on Arch

so I run Chromium and I like it a lot as far as a browser goes it has issues I think it's too resource intensive and I'm also not a huge fan of some of the ways that Google seems to use it to push an agenda. This is super nitpicky. But like today, on all my computers, I fired up Chrome for the first time in a week.

And it's kind of like a welcome back. It's like all my computers are spamming me to donate to Ebola. Now, it's a good cause, but my browser should not be used as a platform for Google to deliver me messages like that. And I'm not super comfortable with that kind of thing. And that's happening in Chromium. And the other thing about it is I don't like the IE factor that Chrome is starting to enjoy. You're seeing new services that launch that require Chrome. I think we probably, at least all of us have seen that at least once.

Google's own inbox product that they just launched only works in Chrome. So these are some of the reasons. I also am a big fan of the Mozilla Foundation. I like that they push forward an open web platform. And I think that they're, you know, as far as their interests are more in line with end users' interests than Google's probably are. So I'm a fan of Firefox all around. I have used Firefox literally since the day the project was born. I remember

before there was a Firefox. I remember after Firefox. I'm really a big fan of Firefox. I don't think you gave it enough of a chance. I'm just kidding. I'm telling you. I remember when 1.0 shipped. I clearly remember the day. Me too, man. Me too.

And it was a really big deal because it took a very long time, it felt like, to get there. At least back then it felt like. And it was a huge, it was a huge, huge deal. Yeah. Totally different. Yeah, and this is really, it was a big deal. And this was really before people talked online like in like social, in like a social way. Like there was message forms and

BBSs and there was discussion forums, but there wasn't like, we don't have this instant buzz about things like we have today where the Gnome Foundation can raise a ton of money in 24 hours. We don't have that level of connectivity, but even back then we were all buzzing about Firefox 1.0.

It was a huge deal. The alternatives were like Mosaic, Netscape, and yeah. And it was like a horribly ugly GTK application back then, too. Super ugly, really bad. But you know what? Rocked it. Loved it. It was the best browser ever. It really was. It was so much better than Internet Explorer for a long time. But at some point, yeah, I know, but at some point, I'm just kidding, I switched over to Chrome, you know, just to try it out, I guess, and I found myself pretty happy, and I found extensions that worked really well for me. On the pre-show, though, people were like,

Chris, why are you using Chrome? You should switch over to Firefox. And everybody ganged up on me, and I finally caved right as the show started and said, all right, I'll try Firefox out for a week. And a few other folks joined me on the challenge, and we have some of them on the show here today. And, in fact, we also heard from just people in the audience that were taking the challenge. Now, whom in the chat room, Matt, managed to go out

and collect the moments that throughout the whole week I've been using Firefox? And throughout the whole week, different moments on air, my browser has crashed on me and left me stranded in the middle of a show whom was polite enough to go out and collect

some of those for us so I'll start with probably the one that was the most egregious we're paying the bills we're about to watch Kyra's app pick and Firefox crashes on us

here's the clip that I get from the ladies who just want to hear my voice oh yeah let's find out here we go no you cannot speak to Kira Longfield no I don't need that I get from the ladies who just want to hear my voice. Oh, yeah. Let's find out. Here we go. No, you cannot speak to Kira Longfield.

No, I don't need duct cleaning. I'm Kyra, and this is Ting's app of the week. Uh-oh. Hold on, Matt. Hold on. Firefox crashed. The app was so awesome. No, it's not Kyra's fault. It's totally Firefox crashing on me.

Hold on. Let's play it again. Go, Kyra, go. All right. Okay, all right. So there was crash number one. Here was crash number two in the same episode. And he launched a user-friendly system based on Arch.

And I want to play a little bit of his Kickstarter video from that effort so that way for some of you who might... Oh, Firefox is killing me. Really? Seriously? Firefox is killing me. Now, theoretically, it should be number one. Oh, man. So the Firefox crash is right there as I'm trying to seek in the video.

Again, you might notice a theme here. It was another Flash video. Now, I actually haven't seen the rest of these clips yet. I don't remember these, but here was another example of Firefox crashing on air. Hey, Firefox. How do you people use Firefox? Look at how it's rendering my Google Plus page. It's great as long as you're not doing anything with Google.

Oh, yeah, that's right. That's when it totally misrendered the Google Plus page when I was trying to talk about System76. All right, so then finally somebody catches me. I show my extensions. I have a lot of extensions, but I do... Oh, my God. Dude, how does your browser even run? Fuck my thing.

Fudge. Fucking far, far, far. But here's the thing. Wow. All right. So I did have a lot of extensions. Just a couple. Just a couple.

But yeah. So they also crashed during Tech Talk Today on me a couple of times. So it's been a pretty rough week. Not only was stability an issue, but also just the same extension selection wasn't really available. Now, does that mean Firefox is horrible? I don't think so, but I don't know. Like, a lot of people said, oh, Chris, it's your extensions, or Chris, it's this or that. And I was, you know, going through it, I just thought to myself, well, doesn't it, at the end of the day, really matter how the

browser handles a catastrophe? Like, if an extension craps the bed well bad on that extension but even worse on the browser for totally dumping out right because that's what not that's not what chrome does right so i i i don't know i i so i don't want to get too far into it first i want to ask poppy poppy i know you've been working with it for a week you're still in the firefox challenge mode right now how you doing? Are you going to stick with it for another week? So to be fair, it's worth noting that we've been shipping Firefox since Ubuntu 4.10, which was 10 years ago. And we shipped Firefox 0.99 in our first release of Ubuntu. And it's been the default browser

for every single release of Ubuntu since then. Okay. However, I have flip-flopped between various browsers for years, and I think we came to a mutual decision last week to both try a week of Firefox because we've both been using Chromium or Chrome mostly. Yeah, I mean, I have everything installed, even Midori from time to time I use that

for like a Gmail login or something. Right. And I've always had Firefox installed. I've never uninstalled it. I'm not one of those people who are zealous and will like remove any apps that I don't use by default. So I've been using Chromium. And there's a couple of things that I liked about Chromium and chrome that i've been using so i switched to firefox a week ago and actually

whilst i've been bitching and moaning the two things that have annoyed me most was the fact that it slowed down dramatically and ate all my cpus and all my ram and i i'm on a laptop with an i7 cpu and 16 gig of ram and it ate it all up um with and i wasn't i i only have two extensions installed and i at the time when it ate all my ram i i had like half a dozen tabs open so i'm not normally in Chrome or Chromium, I will have 50, 60, maybe 100 tabs open. And if it starts eating my CPU, I'll be like, okay, I'm being a bit of a dick with my browser now. And I'll close some of the tabs. Or Chromium will do that for me and it will start killing off tabs when it has a bad day. Did you have any crashing?

Fair enough. Did you have any crashing? Firefox did you have any firefox yeah uh nothing like you had i had a couple of occasions this week where my entire laptop rebooted um and i've not had that for some time but i can't pin that on firefox i think it's actually intel video driver problem, and I have filed that, and that's an upstream bug. Right. But the problems I've had is more slowness and eating all my resources. However, I think it's mostly down to the fact that I tend to leave my laptop running. I rarely restart the browser. I just shut the lid, suspend it, wake it up, and carry on.

And I think on my system, Firefox doesn't like being left running for a very long period of time, like days. All right. So, Wimpy, I know you kind of had a similar path. What did you do exactly? Were you a Chromium user that tried Firefox for a while or vice versa? The other way around. So, actually, I adopted Chrome really early on, so very early on in sort of the alpha beta stage in around 2008. And that was because it had a really nifty JavaScript JIT compiler at the time, which we needed to test some prototype code on for work.

So for work, I worked with aircraft and aircraft data, and we wanted to plot thousands of samples of aircraft data in a browser and you simply couldn't do that back then and suddenly chrome turned up and it changed the game yeah so ever since then i've been using chrome because i started using it and i went through the growing pains and i sort of stuck with it but about a year ago i noticed chrome rendering popular websites in strange ways so i started started using Firefox and then I just switched back to Firefox. So I've been using Firefox exclusively for about 12 months. And to be honest with you, other than the rendering problems that I'd had with Chrome previously, I couldn't really tell anything between the two browsers. But I thought I'd take a closer look

as you were doing this this week and i've had a chat with poppy in the week and running firefox and chrome side by side what i definitely notice is chrome is significantly faster than firefox and i didn't believe poppy when he was telling me these subjective metrics about how much faster it was so i went off and I did it properly. I know right I'm a big fat liar. Well I just I'm just skeptical by nature I suppose but I went away and did some tests and whilst you do these browser benchmarks that kind of mean something if you actually run the two browsers side by side you can see the difference and it was when i could see the difference in the rendering time and the smoothness and the transition and it it was quicker and i just felt like i was in better control of the browser right and i also feel like the ui responds faster like tabs open and close faster like it's not struggling to to open that tab up if there's something else going on in the browser

where exactly sometimes i feel like firefox is struggling with that and if there's something else going on in the browser. Exactly. Sometimes I feel like Firefox is struggling with that, and there's only one or two worker threads. Yeah. Well, you know, Chrome and Chromium have some tricks that they play that make it look faster than it really is. I think so, yeah. But that's fine. I don't care if they're tricks.

These are tricks that fool my eyes. Exactly, yeah. It's not just what you see. When I ran the various browser benchmarks chrome you know on my system was was beating firefox two times over every time really was that from a startup or no running so there's sorry there's a yes so from startup go to the same benchmark site run the the benchmark, and post the results. So the conditions were the same.

Okay, gotcha. So here's a couple other things, just anecdotal, just my experiences. So day one, it didn't go super great. Firefox Sync, for some reason, just go figure, right, didn't actually sync. I had a new install, set up the browser uh logged into firefox sync on the browser the night before went about did some web reading probably used the browser for about an hour closed it came back moved my lap brought my bonobo to the studio opened it up launched firefox like around 8 30 then went on air around 9 so uh and then i go to

start the show and realize that none of my bookmarks had synced none of my extensions yeah and that was a little like oh man day man, day one I got burned by sync. But I was able to – but then, so to fix it, I had to delete my profile and then create a new profile and then set up sync again. Same account, then sync just worked. Not a huge deal. But what I walked away from is when I would run into issues – so a couple of things would happen. People would – well, actually, I guess I have a clip of it here.

I'm going to play this clip from last. It might be a little ranty, but I'm going to play it from the heat of the moment, and I'll see if this covers what I was just about to say. Oh, you need to be able to copy that as HTML? Just install. So how the conversation literally started was, Chris, just install an extension

to have it have the same features as Chrome. You need that thing that Chrome can do? Just install. So the conversation starts is, Chris, just install an extension. And now the conversation is, Chris, you got too many extensions. What do you expect to happen? So I can't use the browser because I don't have an extension. And then once I have too many extensions, now the problem is I've got too many extensions.

And it's literally gone from Tuesday to Chris, install an extension. And literally, people are so determined that I install extensions that they literally, between Tuesday and today, developed extensions for me. Created extensions. I've installed those extensions. They're great. They make ads. But now it's Chris, you've got too many extensions. Now, on the other side of that, chrome is a big bloated turd biscuit i mean it's like it literally it just starts processes to piss me off i hate

chrome i hate it with a passion i want to light it on fire and burn it you know i don't like chrome i don't like it i i literally i found i use a little bit of midoriya you know i use some other browsers and but generally for like just casual i'm doing random stuff on the internet i use firefox because it's great for me. All right. So I got to install GST. So what I found was I found people were super willing to constantly volunteer things I should do. Like a lot of go into your About config and change this, enable hardware acceleration, disable hardware acceleration, install this extension.

Oh, yeah, that extension that you needed, well, that only goes in the status bar. Well the status bar doesn't actually exist anymore, so now you have to install an extension that brings back the status bar, and then once you bring back the status bar, you can customize the status bar and take the button out of the status bar and move it up to the menu bar and then uninstall that extension. And then go install this extension so that way, it's like it was ongoing, and then when I started having

stability issues, which were clearly related to the Adobe Flash plugin. Not related to the other extensions, clearly related to the Adobe Flash plugin, not related to the other extensions, clearly related to the Adobe Flash plugin. But immediately it's, well, you have too many extensions. You need to do this. You're doing this wrong. And it sort of immediately went hostile. And what I started thinking about was people that are switching to Linux,

they have these problems in a much broader context with all kinds of little pain points when they switch over to Linux. And I also see the same kind of, well, what do you mean it's not working for you? Well, then you're doing it wrong. And I got emails where people critiqued my technical literacy because it's not that Firefox was having issues. It's not that it wasn't properly handling when the flash plugin crashed or whatever was happening. What the problem was is I wasn't technically literate to use the browser and I didn't care enough about open source. I probably got nearly 100 comments to that regard, and it's ridiculous.

Not only is it ridiculous, it's antithetical to everything that I used to know about bots. Anyways, I want people just to consider it. I think what we have to get better at, and I know this is maybe a soapbox of mine, but I think what we have to get better at is acknowledging that everything has strengths and attributes to it. Like, I started this segment talking about what I like about Firefox, the history I have with it, and why the Mozilla Foundation is great. I also use Firefox on every computer I have, but my primary get-work-done browser has to remain, in my opinion, Chrome. And I think the bigger problem here is, is that what we are really beginning to see is the division that Mozilla is actually up against, which is not Firefox versus Internet Explorer or Firefox versus Chrome. It is Firefox versus every single other WebKit browser on the

market because application developers are writing WebKit first. They're not necessarily even writing Chrome first. They're writing WebKit first. Then they might specifically maybe write Chrome first. And that's what Firefox's real challenge is at their 10-year mark going forward now is their lunch is getting eaten by WebKit. WebKit is the winning team right now. And Firefox needs to have an answer to that.

And I understand electrolysis is a thing that's coming that's going to make Firefox super more amazing and it's not going to crash as much. But honestly, to me, it feels too late and it makes me sad a little bit. It doesn't mean it's going away. It doesn't mean it's a bad browser. It doesn't mean it's not going to get way more awesome.

It doesn't mean that the Mozilla Foundation isn't incredible. It doesn't mean you're a bad person for wanting to use Firefox and I'm a bad person for wanting to use Chromium, though. To be fair to Google, they're actually removing the WebKit-centric stuff because they don't want people to do that. So that's why Blink has removed all of the WebKit CSS commands and stuff that are specific to WebKit. Really?

Because people were doing that and breaking stuff in Opera and Firefox at the time, and Google didn't want to create breakage. They wanted standardization. Of course. So Blink has that stuff gone. Very good. By the way, I looked into – actually, Rikai hooked me up with the info. But I read through the info on Chromium versus Chrome, and it seems like Wikipedia maybe

has one of the best breakdowns. There are several. Google even has their own wiki page on it. But Wikipedia – so here's a couple of things. So, by the way, I'm a Chromium user. Chromium is an open source project. It's BSD licensed. There's other components that have different licensing.

It's got a lot of little asterisks at the end of that. But it – so that was the other thing is people were kind of jumping on me for using another open source project. But either way, there is a couple of things that chromium does not have that i think people should consider if they were going to try uh the print subsystem apparently is different in the final chrome version in chromium it'll hand it'll hand it off to your operating system but in chrome they're using like the entire google print subsystem which ties in with the google cloud print and all of that uh of course no acc built so it's going to have to rely on your operating system codecs. The tracking is opt-in in Chromium versus opt-on, I guess, in regular Chrome.

I might have that wrong, but it's definitely opt-in in Chromium. And no auto-update features, so you're going to have to rely on your package manager, which I prefer to have my package manager do that anyway, so that's fine with me. And, of course, the integrated Flash. Sorry, what's that? No auto-update? Google Chromium doesn't use the Google updater. It uses your operating system's package manager.

Like it should. Okay. And no built-in Flash. So no AAC, no built-in Flash, no Google updater, and no Google Cloud Print. So from the Ubuntu point of view, those are both the same. They both come as Debian packages from an archive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One comes from the Ubuntu archive, one comes from a Debian, a Google archive somewhere.

It doesn't have the multimedia extension either. Oh, that's a good point. Yes, that's a good one. And also, it's being pointed out that no remote desktop either, which is a great point there, Delvin. Yeah, go ahead. Chris, the reason you're getting hate for using Chromium is because you keep accidentally calling it Chrome. Well, I kind of use both. So I kind of interchange them depending, you know.

I mean I primarily use Chromium on the majority because it's a little bit quicker to install on an Archbox. Yeah, and people tend to get a little bit funny about, you know, whenever I've said I'm using Chromium, the question that always follows is, do you mean Chrome? Or if I say I'm using Chrome, they ask, do you mean Chromium? It's like, no, I'm 42. I've managed to differentiate between Chrome and Chromium. If I'm talking about Chrome, I'll say Chromium.

If I'm talking about Chromium, I'll say Chromium. But sometimes you want to talk about both together because collectively Chrome and Chromium are very similar code bases. I find it, yeah, to be pretty similar but to me what this was really

revealing to was just how friggin' important the web browsers become in my workflow. Not only do I use it to show most of the visuals in all of our shows, but the research and the, the pipeline of a lot of our media management and all of it, it's just browser based now. Uh, it's,

uh, thankfully, like I, I felt like at the end of this, if Chrome or Chromium went away tomorrow, like I, I would be okay. I would make do,

especially since the community was pretty awesome. And like, there was a couple of user extensions that were uh you know use grease monkey and then add a user script to that and they wrote a couple of those for me to do markdown stuff and it actually so i mean there would be ways around it uh so the thing i've learned about this is that there are people who are exceedingly passionate about firefox yes and they want me to have a good experience on firefox so rather than dismiss this whole experiment and go back to using chromium as i did i'm going to stick with firefox i've removed flash from my system so i'm doing everything i can to avoid flash based websites

or flash streaming video which means your your website, actually, Chris, you need to provide an easy way for me to be able to watch the live stream without flash, right? That's on you, okay? But aside from that. Why don't you just grab the RTSP? RTSP. RTSP.

Yeah. Okay, I'll do that. I'll try that instead. Yeah, because there's not really an embeddable open source live stream solution. No, no, I don't mind not having an embeddable thing. Do you have MPV? I'd like a URL somewhere that I could paste into. I actually used a nice tool that one of the other guys in the mumble mentioned earlier called Live Streamer.

Yes. But that didn't find any embeddable streams to watch from your page. Grab the RTMP link or RTSP. I don't remember which one it is. Okay, I'll try that. And then if you have MPV or a VLC, but MPV is really great. You just do MPV and then the URL and it'll fire up. You know what we should do is

like a short, like we have jblive.fm for the audio stream. I should do something like that for the That would be a great idea. Because then you can just tell people to go to it. I'll think about it. Yeah, that's a good idea. Yeah, because that is a problem. And we get that comment all the time. And of course, the whole website is all HTML5 video

except for the live stream. And it's really, you can thank HLS and H264 for that. It's kind of like... Sickeningly enough, Flash is one of the best assemblers of HLS video on the market, as disgusting as that is. And you can throw it on a new iphone 6 or a nexus 5 and they will struggle to do as well of a job as flash can

do for whatever reason alan could could talk to you all day about it but it really comes down to the fact that the standards we use for video streaming right now super suck uh but we've just kind of moved fed moved ahead with there's also a juber broadcasting xbmc add-on that you could use yeah and if you watch on a Roku, there's a Juber Broadcasting app and the live stream's on that. And I could watch on my tablet or something else like that.

That's not a problem. So I'm going to try and stick with Firefox, and I'm going to take advice from various people in the Mumble channel who've suggested ways in which I can debug the issues and make sure that I follow them upstream and ensure the experience is better for everyone else as well. Yeah. So my thoughts would be like, I would go the no flash route for sure. But I can't because

of some of the media management I have for JB. But I was thinking, I've tried running in terminal and stuff like that to get some output, but I didn't really get anything very beneficial. But my thought was to experiment around a little bit more because i i know exactly what conditions caused it to crash because i could repeat it over and over again see if i can get it to do it and then maybe as a 10th birthday present to firefox i'll send off a few bug reports over the weekend you're such a nice man right see if maybe we can get some charity that's right hey happy birthday guys here's some bugs alright so we got to talk about boy

oh my gosh we've really got to get going because we have some really exciting stuff to talk about Wimpy's going to share something awesome and we've also you know what I don't think the gnome groupon thing will take too long but we've got to talk about it just real quick but before we do that I want to thank Ting go over to linux.ting.com right now everybody

linux.ting.com that'll, everybody. Linux.Ting.com. That'll take $25 off your first Ting device. Or if you have a Ting-compatible device, they'll give you $25 credit. Linux.Ting.com. You don't know what Ting is? What is the matter with you? Ting is mobile that makes sense. No contracts, no early termination fees.

You only pay for what you use. It's a flat $6 for your line. And then whatever your usage is, that's what you pay. You want another phone? It's $6. You want another phone? You could be a baller like me. I've got three phones and I'm up here and I'm paying like 45 bucks. But then when I go out and I show the ladies all my phones, they're like, that's so impressive with all your phones. Why do you have so many phones? And I tell them I have Ting. Linux.ting.com. Go check them out. No hold customer service. Yeah, that's another perk.

You don't have to wait for a human. You just call them up and they answer. You don't have a phone tree. You don't have to leave a voicemail. You don't have to know some sort of secret zero smashing sequence to get to an operator. They just answer the phone. If you call them between 8 a.m. or 8 p.m. on the East Coast, it's great. And then they match it all up with a fantastic dashboard

and an awesome online community. But this week, I want to do something a little different. You know, in LAS, we'll often do an app pick video. But, you know, app pick, schmat picks. This is Linux Unplugged. Let's go deep into the development world. They have a video up of talking with Kerry, the behind-the-scenes interview with their lead web developer.

And I want to play a little bit of it because I'm playing it in Chromium. My name is Carrie and I am the interface developer at Ting. My role at Ting is to develop and maintain any customer-facing side of our website, including WordPress and Facebook.

Usually we'll start with a discussion. Product management will come over or ask us if what they want is feasible or how much time it'll take. And I will give them an answer. It'll take 10 minutes or it'll take six years. Sometimes it will take six years. And they go off on their own and come up with the designs. And then they finally, when they give them to me, I set to work on making them a reality.

Earlier this year, we went responsive with our design. What this means is that when users browse our website on a smaller screen, like a phone or an iPod, they're going to see a different design than if they see it on a big screen like a desktop. We're making sure that users get the best possible experience on all device sizes. It feels really good to be able to be part of something that even our senior citizens can browse comfortably. Because, I mean, a lot of senior citizens aren't that comfortable with the Internet. And then we get comments from them saying, thanks for making it so easy. And that is a really rewarding part of this job. Linux.ting.com.

Go over there and start saving right now. They also have a savings calculator. I've been not quite yet, but I am nearing the two-year mark. It is approaching, and the final savings will be over $2,000 for me. So why not get started right now? Linux.ting.com.

And a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged show. Okay, guys. Let's do a brief update because maybe the real story might actually develop by the time Linux Action Show comes around. But you probably saw the headline today. The GNOME Foundation is attempting to raise some funds to help defend GNOME's trademark against Groupon. Yeah, Groupon, the coupon company. They have raised $68,000 as of, well, pretty much this morning. 68? 68,000 bucks?

Groupon has also, yeah, yeah, yeah. And Groupon's already responded saying, hey, dog, look, we're sorry. We don't want to use anybody's name. And after additional conversations with the open service community and the Gnome Foundation, we've decided to abandon our pending trademark application for Gnome. We've chosen a new name for our product going forward. So Gnome was this retail box thing that they were going to – so you could go buy coupons. Kind of a neat idea for Groupon.

But, Pope, you and I were talking about this on the Tech Talk pre-show today or actually during the show. Am I missing any details at this point or is that kind of the summary of where we're at? No, that seems to be it. It's all over. Let's start bashing System D again. Yeah, we're back to the beginning. Exactly, yeah. Okay.

War is over. But it was fascinating to see the troops mobilize last night. So before I went to bed or something, I saw a tweet. And then by the time I got up, the Google Pluses and the tweets and the sub subreddit every subreddit had it in there like it was full on fire this morning really when you say troops you know on a day like today where we're remembering real sacrifice the real people have done you are taking my own point i made earlier and using it against me you are a jerk sir you are a jerk i sir. You are a jerk. I would not pull those tricks. Yes, I know. And that's kind of my point. Again,

we were just, we were ready to go to war. We were ready to go to war. And they raised a ton of money. I even, I threw in 55 bucks. I was like, well, alright. I'm really surprised it's as low as that. I really thought they'd have double that. So what happens with the money now?

It goes to making GNOME better. Yeah, they already said that it's going to go to GNOME. Anything that's left over, and since all of it's left over, all of it goes to GNOME. I think that's worthy. Yeah. Well, that's great because I know they've had some financial troubles,

right? Isn't that a thing? Oh yeah, they ended last year in the red. Well, I guess they just got a little revenue boost then. But I'm glad. I think it's also what it really demonstrates legitimately is the serious brand loyalty. I don't know if that's the right term to call it. But people came to Nome's defense in mass. And people, I think things have changed around, turned around for Gnome.

I think the public opinion is turning on Gnome because people really, really seem to come out in defense of it. And we're ready to fight Groupon and calling them names. And Groupon really responded. So not only did they have their official blog post, but their senior lead engineer, I think that's actually his title senior senior lead engineer uh went to his blog uh trying to explain that you know it was a misunderstanding that they had been in communication with the gnome foundation and that you know they're willing to be flexible like they they really scrambled i'm not really familiar with comments from the from the gnome side saying we've been in conversation with them for months and it's only today so kind of justifying the whole public hatred of uh of groupon and people deleting their groupon accounts i'm not convinced i'm not

convinced that it was entirely down to the reddit army and uh the various armies leaving comments everywhere that got this done but i'm sure it was a contributing factor yeah i'd i'd like to think that groupon got a telephone call from karen sandler where she implied she was going to put the smack down on them in no uncertain terms and they realized what they are up against or maybe the people at groupon grew a pair and realized that actually they were being dicks and what they really needed to do was just not do the thing that they were doing. Didn't someone who works at Groupon used to be someone who worked at Gnome? Oh, now this is a good rumor.

Brian Cameron. Or even more interesting, maybe, is using this as a way to show that they now have a new product. Marketing. Everyone kind of knows that they now have a new product. Marketing. Everyone kind of knows that they have a point-of-sale system. You think that, boy. All the truthers are out there. Huh, yeah, I would say that's a pretty obscure marketing strategy. It would work, though.

Like, everyone now knows what they have and might actually check it out. Yeah, and I'm actually thinking it's kind of a good idea, because I don't want to go sign up at Groupon, but if they had a kiosk where I don't want to go sign up at Groupon, but if they had a kiosk where I could just do a one-time transaction, well, maybe I might do that. I mean, I'm a cheapskate after all. They might even look at – people might even look at the Named Desktop environment now as well. Holy smokes.

Maybe they were in on it from the first time. It's a false flag trademark dispute operation promotion i know right we gotta you boy if we're not careful we're gonna have to uh bust out the uh conspiracy bacon on this on this edition of yeah that's funny because that's exactly what blue phoenix was saying in the chat room a little bit ago um that there was it did smell a little bacon-y to him and i i don't think so i don't think they'd be that dishonest no i don't think so. I don't think they'd be that dishonest. No, I don't think so either. If they're not though, it's kind of you need to question

if they're in conversation in months, why do you add applications? Because lawyers do stuff without being told. Yeah, I could see that or maybe the negotiations weren't necessarily going the known project's direction

so they went public to show their serious commitment. I mean, there could be all kinds of scenarios. Who knows? Okay. You guys are lovely and just a huge good faith. Yeah, I suppose. All right. I can't hold it any longer.

We've got to talk about something super exciting. Really, really happy. But really quickly, we want to thank Linux Academy. I've got a note from Anthony, who is one of the guys that runs Linux Academy. And he said that they've gotten a ton of new signups from the Linux Unplugged audience. And the feedback's been unanimously awesome. And when I went to Ohio Linux Fest, shook a lot of hands from folks that are taking courses at Linux Academy, and they've been really impressed. And they say one of the things that's kind of hard to understand about Linux Academy is you really grok how great it is

and how it really is a solution tailored for Linux users by Linux users. And that is so key because there's a lot of online learning resources. And you really see the difference. If you're trying to go for something in this space, something about Linux or AWS or OpenStack and DevOps and Android development. They've really nailed this, right? Because that's what these guys do. That's their area and they can really get it right. They are these users. They're sysadmins, Linux users, developers and educators that came together to create Linux Academy. You can go over to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged and get our

special 33% discount on your quarter. It's a great service. And once you sign up, you get access to all of the courseware. You get the downloadable comprehensive study guides. You get to take those online or offline. You can do the learning plans where you can say,

I have just this amount of time available. Plug it in there. They'll generate you a learning courseware on that with reminders about quizzes, checkups. When you log in, you choose your course, and it lays it all out for you. It maps it all out, and it's super easy to manage. They have a good active community that can keep you going when you're having a low moment, and they have live streams where you can ask questions to the educators.

Their labs spin up on demand when the courseware requires it, and they're adding new courses every single week. They've got a whole bunch more they just put out. And that's why you want to just keep going there all the time, because you can keep going back and learn something new, see what scratches that itch, bring yourself a little bit further in something you've been working on. I use it, honestly, just to see if some of the same old technologies that used to be a problem for me still are a problem, to see if I have maybe a new peak, peaked in a new interest, something I want to build for JB. There's all kinds of things. We,

they also have group plans so we can have folks in the Jupiter broadcasting community that work here that have to do something. Maybe we have them go over there and they can log in under the group course. It's all part of one set under one organization. It's really neat. They're adding stuff too. You got to go check it out. Cause I,

I can't say what it is, but I've been given a little hint and it just really, it really underscores that this is a product that's made by Linux users, for Linux users, and when you're trying to learn some of these things, that is the differential that really closes the gap. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Go check

them out. PHP, Android Development, Ruby, Python, Linux, DevOps, AWS with scenario based training. They got it all. rsync even. You need to go learn how to do your backups with rsync. They got a course on that. I'm telling you, it's worth checking them out. They got it all. rSync even. You need to go learn how to do your backups with rSync. They got a course on that. I'm telling you, it's worth checking them out.

LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. So I was noticing on Google+, that, Wimpy, you posted that you guys are getting a little attention over in Germany in one of their newspapers. Or I'm sorry, it's a magazine, isn't it? That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Congratulations. Congratulations. Yeah, thank you for that.

So there's a quarterly Linux publication in Germany called Linux Welt. I think that's how it's pronounced. It's got a circulation of about 50,000 to 60,000. And they're including DVDs. Yeah, and they have DVD cover discs. And for the 2015-01 edition, which I think is out next week, Ubuntu Mate is the feature story and the cover disc. That is so cool. And so that's not just the announcement, though. You've been working on a little something. We talked about it kind of recently. And so I know you're getting near. I'm teasing it off a lot, Wimpy. What process are we about to go through right now?

Right. Okay. So everyone probably knows that's listening to this, that Ubuntu Mate 14.10 was released a couple of weeks ago. And we've been preparing an Ubuntu Mate 14.04 release. And I'm actually ready to go through the keystrokes to release it live now so we're going to release the latest version which is based on 1404 right here that's right let's do it right here on air so this is fun so i've got my terminated sessions open and i've logged into my two digital ocean build servers this is where i prepare the iso images i've already prepared the images and i'm going to run the release scripts and the release scripts build the webc torrents actually make the isos from the squash fs add the assets from the official ubuntu cd releases and then

i'll sync them to my distribution servers so we we'll do that now. So off we go. Right, so that's the power of DigitalOcean. That's just shunted six gigabytes of data. Really? Wow. We'll now just edit the release flag on the article. Now we'll run the deploy script. edit the release flag on the article. Now we'll run the deploy script.

This is so exciting. I know, right? I know. This is actually the geekiest thing I think we've ever done on the show, and I love it. So the deploy script basically takes all the markdown that the site is generated from and turns it into HTML. So that's done. So now I go to my CDN and I pre-fetch all of those images into the CDN. And that's done.

And now I purge the blog index from my cloud flaring. And that just makes sure that the updates go through and i think we're done so you do the web witness to an operating system being released live so you push the whole website and everything in that yeah there you go so if you go to ubuntu marty.org slash blog the article that you'll see now is the release notes and the article so i'll go to martin.org slash download uh yes that that should read our i think because there's uh there's two yeah uh two bits in there you know what wimpy you just earned yourself very nice sir very nice thank you very much thank you very much

good work amazing so now i would i would So I would just like to rattle off this. There's a few people I'd like to say thank you to. Some bloke called Alan Pope. Simon Sweers, who's one of the Marte developers who worked really hard on fixing the accessibility stuff. Mike Gabriel, who's a Debian developer. He helped an awful lot in this release. Gerard Alders, who provided one of the new backdrop images. Some bloke called Michael Tunnell, or Tunnell, I don't know how you pronounce your name,

but Rotten Corpse, he's one of the guys here. He did the new icon theme. Luke Velvich, Kendall Clark, Kyle Breward, and Rob White, who represent various distributions that are focused towards the blind or partially sighted, who helped fix all of the all of the screen reading stuff wow great you guys and and one of the things that's interesting is you were mentioning before it's based on ubuntu 1404 but yet it actually has some maybe what you might call improvements or feature enhancements over the one based on 1410 right indeed so um

rotten corpses tweaked the theme for us, which looks nicer. We've got a new wallpaper. We've fixed the multicast DNS. We've fixed policy kit privileges. The big feature items are we've added indicator support. So now you can add indicators into the Marte desktop, and they sit side-by-side with traditional tray applets as well. Wow. Yeah. that's a win

yeah you like that do you i like that a lot actually okay i'm just impressed with how fast that blog post went now now what you need to be impressed with is how fast we just pushed 18 gigabytes of data around the internet yeah yeah as well yeah and that's and that's all down to digital ocean you said you you said it would take about five minutes uh it took about yeah two minutes it was yeah i was i was hedging it on me yeah but bungling it and having to redo bits um a couple of other bits we've added is um the the mint menu i forked as the mate menu which is available in this release because lots of people are after that. And I've actually done that for the X2Go guys, because they want a menu where they can disable logout and suspend features because of remote workstations. That doesn't make sense.

I've also thought the Mint Desktop Utility has made Tweak or Marte Tweak to just access some of the behind the scenes bits and pieces. And then what else have we done? Accessibility. That's where we spent a lot of time fixing up accessibility. Oh yeah. Oh, this is a good one. We've ditched totem as the default media player and placed it with VLC.

Nice. Very nice. We ran a, we ran a community poll for that and that was unanimously voted for. So we've made that change. So I think, Eric, you've got kind of probably a popular question. Yeah. Since it's based on 14.04, is this going to be basically an LTS as far as you can do it? Yes. So we obviously don't have to maintain the base OS.

The Popey can probably tell you more about what goes on with that. But in terms of the PPA, because this is an unofficial release this is you know built outside of canonical's infrastructure so there's no official support there but in terms of the marta desktop i'll be supporting that through the ppa that's embedded into this uh build and for the duration of the lts. So all five years, right? Yeah, yeah. And for anyone that's running 14.10 already, they will have seen some of these features automatically turning up

in the updates of their Ubuntu 14.10 releases. Oh, man, that is smooth. I've got to give you a major tip of the hat. What's the long-term goal here? I mean, this is obviously going to start developing a pretty passionate following i think i mean i'm i'm already thinking this is the distro of choice for the studio production machines uh that'd be good i just you know to me it just seems like a slam dunk i'm gonna i'm gonna give this a download and try it out uh what's but what's

the long term because it's you know i, this could become a pretty big job. It could become a big job. So the short term is for 1504 now, we want to get it as an official flavor. So all of that drama of me releasing just then, I don't have to do. Somewhere there are monkeys in Canonical's infrastructure doing it automatically. That's handy. So that's the plan, yeah. I've met with some of the Debian developers a couple of weeks ago,

and they've agreed to work to the same timeframe that Ubuntu's working to for 1504. So we're not going to introduce Marte 1.10 in 1504. We're going to do the Marte 1.10 development work in Debian Experimental and then bring that through in the subsequent release later in the year. But initially, let's get official. Following on from that, we've got some serious interest from some large organizations who want to use Ubuntu Marte with the X2Go remote terminal services platform. So the desire to get this into Ubuntu and have it as an official flavor is a request

from some third parties who want to see this happen. Well, I think you've got the basis here for a distribution that's going to get a lot of loyal followers. And the timing's pretty good, I think, too. It's obviously serving a niche. It's so funny, too. For some reason, basing this on 14.04 feels really right, like a really smart long-term play. And so it just, from end to end, just seems like it's firing on all cylinders. So congratulations, you guys, and to everybody

who's worked super hard on it. Thanks very much. And it's been well-tested by my mom and my wife as well, so you can be rest assured it works. That's so awesome. Now there's some QA for you, I gotta say. All right, well, very good. I just want a couple of notes. We're still looking for

Your Runs Linux. You guys send them in throughout the week, and I appreciate that. If you have a runs Linux, it's even more awesome. It's either your own thing, it could be, or something you find. you think might be great for either Linux Unplugged or Linux Action Show, submit them to our subreddit at linuxactionshow.reddit.com. And don't forget you can join us live, jblive.tv. We do this here on 2 p.m. on a Tuesday. Go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar to get that converted to your local time zone. And I'll have links to the Matei stuff in the show notes, so go grab that. Also links to the have links to the Mate stuff in the show notes, so go grab that. Also links to the

GNOME versus Groupon stuff in the show notes. And a full breakout of the differences between Chrome and Chromium. So if you were a little confused by our conversation about that, because I know some of you are kind of coming into this and saying, wait, there's a difference? Yes, there is a difference. And instead of just sitting here and rattling

through all of them, I broke it all out in the show notes for you. So you can check that out. And I would be interested to know if anybody has decided to take a Chromium challenge. I heard from like two people besides also Wimpy now. So, Wimpy, you're the third person that took a Chromium challenge. And you are the third person that's sticking with Chromium. So I wonder if anybody else tried it and if it didn't go well for you and what problems you ran into. Send us an email and maybe

we'll do a follow-up on that next week. Could be kind of interesting, maybe. You know what? I admit, maybe I just am a wild man with the browser. Alright, Matt, well that's going to wrap us up. Now, I'm going to, I'll tell you off-air my super secret plans for Linux Action Show. Nice, okay.

Oh, Matt, it's big. It's real big. So we'll talk about that in a little bit. So tune in on JBLive.tv Sunday. Also, right after the Linux Action Show on Sunday on the live stream, Faux Show 200. We might have something going on. So you can show up live for that if you'd like.

Faux Show 200, right after Linux Action Show on Sunday. Don't forget, we want your feedback. It's a huge part of our show. Go over to jupyterbroadcasting.com slash contact, or click the contact link and choose Unplugged from the drop-down. All right, everybody. Thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. We'll see you right back here next Tuesday. Thank you. All right, everybody, jbtitles.com.

Let's pick our title and get out of here. So, Popey, are you doing anything for the Ubuntu Summit that starts in a couple of days? You going to get a haircut? Oh, my God. I am solidly busy for the next three days. So we won't be hearing you for a while. I need to have a shave. Popey is going to be AFK.

Might have a shower as well. Actually, interestingly, the lunch break, in inverted commas, is at 5 o'clock, my time, which is the time when you do Tech Talk Today. Oh, no kidding. So you're not – no, I mean, really, don't tease. Don't tease. No, I'm not. That's pretty good. And what's crazy is you don't have to go anywhere.

I'll be busy making burritos. Yeah, you're going to have to stay. You know what? If you wanted to stop by and you had a little burrito in your mouth i i would take it poppy with burrito in the mouth is better than no poppy but wow together and have a beer at some point to celebrate this yeah yeah congratulations all those beers we drank at odd cat which just clearly weren't enough well that was the investment wow though that's pretty neat uh yeah i've just about dried out so yeah i think we should

yeah you know