LINUX Unplugged - Episode 7: Full SteamOS Ahead | LUP 7

Episode Date: September 25, 2013

Valve has announced SteamOS, and we have our analysis of how this will impact the Linux ecosystem at large, the challenge Valve faces, and the reasons Valve is the right company to pull this effort off.Plus the real reason for iTunes, re-thinking Google, and a lot more!

This is Linux Unplugged, Episode weekly Linux podcast that keeps checking the source of the Steam countdown page, hoping for hidden messages from Gabe. My name is Chris. My name is Chris. My name is Matt. Hey there, Matt. Welcome to Episode 7, buddy. Thanks. Fresh off of the birthday weekend, too. Nice, man.

Oh, no, it's been great. It's just been one big whirlwind of acting like a complete nut job. It's been awesome. You know what? I'm acting like a nut job tonight. I'm going carb crazy. I'm going to go. Right on.

I'm going to be gluten it up, man. So right now, I'm drinking a gluten-free hard apple cider. Because I got to keep the glutens down. Because tonight, we're going with a pasta with an Alfredo sauce. If I'm Rex for Tomorrow's Unfiltered, you know why. I got crazy. And I got to hook you up with some of the gluten-free recipes we got. My wife's got an entire monster cookbook for people that really like to eat.

Okay, good. It's none of this sissy stuff. It's like food. We'll have to share it. We'll trade notes. Yeah, good. It's none of this sissy stuff. It's like food. We'll have to share it. We'll trade notes. Yeah, totally, right? Yeah. Now, you know, coming up on this week's episode, we're going to, of course, of course, be talking

about SteamOS, which was just announced by Valve yesterday. We're in the calm between the storms. Tomorrow, another announcement comes. We'll be doing some speculation on what those announcements could be. But today, I thought we'd kind of take a snapshot of where we're at with the announcement of SteamOS. We'll do a little speculation, but really, we're going to talk about what this could mean for Linux. We're going to talk about what this means for gaming and really what this means for an open platform in general. I think we're going to have a great episode, plus we're going to bring in our mumble guys who are always thinking about this stuff, always debating.

A good roundtable in there. Great opinions and whatnot. I think it's going to be a really fun episode, Matt. Oh, I know it is. And plus, then after this, I'm going to go gluten crazy. Now, you know, so. All right, well, so why don't we start with a little follow-up, as is per tradition, before we get into the main show.

I wanted to read an email that came in from Jacob. Now, Jacob was referring to last week, we got kind of on the whole Android discussion, and we called it the Android problem, if you recall, Matt. I remember. Well, Jacob thought it was an amazingly eye-opening episode and another way to look at Google. He says, one thing to note, on iOS 7 Google Chrome now, he says maybe this has already been implemented on Android,

there is a feature they ask if you want to turn on which sends all of your internet traffic to some Google services for them to then compress it and send along to your phone. In light of recent events, i.e. Snowden, it would seem that they aren't just compressing all that data. Just something to think about. Great show, by the way. I just subscribed to the all shows feed. Constantly refreshing, waiting for the next show to come out. So, yeah, I'm of a mixed opinion.

So I talked about this a little bit yesterday on Coda Radio, Matt, but here's kind of where I'm at. I think you're going to appreciate the zen-ness of my sort of final position here. So one of the things that kind of got me all riled up was lack of updates, right? Google's bad original deals that sort of torpedoed the future update possibilities of a platform. Sure. And, you know, the way that some of the carriers can go crazy. But thankfully, there's alternative carriers now that kind of solve some of that problem. Where I'm at with Google now, it's like I just kind of treat Google like I treat my

Twitter stream. Not my at replies, but just the front page of Twitter. I just jump in. I just see what people are talking about, and then I jump out. I'm not one of those people who needs to read the whole Twitter feed, right? Yeah, I'm kind of the same way. I mean like with Twitter, I literally – I use it as my email forward. I just – I pay very little attention about what's going on there.

But I really do. I mean it's like I pay some attention to Facebook. I pay most of my attention to Google+. Twitter, not so much, which is ironic being it's Google. I try to read all my replies on Twitter. Yeah, I do. I will – yeah, I generally Google. I try to read all my replies on Twitter. Yeah, I do. I will. Yeah, I generally do.

Direct messages, I don't pay any attention. Well, it's harder to find these days. So that's how I'm going to treat Android. When an Android release comes out, and if it meets the conditions of a platform that I want, I'll make a precision strike. I'll grab that device, going in knowing that, hey, maybe I'm going to have update issues. Hey, maybe this is going to have stuff bundled along with it. And if I want to fix that, I have to take certain steps myself. You know, I feel like doing that sort of is like this, it's an acknowledgement of the limitations and then just kind of deciding, all right, well, it still has enough incentives that I'm going to go ahead and go forward with it. That's where I'm

at. For me, it's very app specific. When it comes to data, I'm naively ambivalent about the whole thing. I tend to just live with my head in the clouds and figure if they're going to want to know something badly about enough of me, they're going to figure something out. So I just don't get too excited about it. I mean it irritates me, but I try not to focus on it too much because it just depresses me, quite honestly. So I am conscientious about what I'm searching for or what I'm doing on my phone. Definitely so. Even the apps I install, I'm very conscientious about it.

But I would say for the most part, I'm pretty ambivalent about it. I don't think too much about it. Although I am having an app-specific problem that perhaps we'll talk about at the end of the show. But outside of that, no, I'm, you know, I'm okay with it. I still like it better than iPhone. Let's get to the app thing because I watched something happen over the weekend of the show okay but um outside of that no i'm you know i i'm okay with it i still like i still like it better than iphone let's get to the uh let's get to the app thing because i watched something happen over the weekend on the play store that i was pretty disappointed in that i

think is real low class of google and google play so i want to talk we'll talk about the end of the show if we have sure sure uh one more piece of follow-up to uh yesterday or i'm sorry um sunday's linux action show blackout worm on youtube uh responding to, remember we had the email where the guy was like, gosh, I could switch to Linux. It's just that I really need iTunes. Right. And we were like, what does anybody, quote, unquote, need iTunes for? Well, see, and I had to ask my wife because I haven't a clue. She's the iTunes diva in this house.

So I had to ask her. I was like, well, can't you do this over Wi-Fi? And she says, well, I think you could do something over iCloud. But she says, I honestly just connect disconnected to my... She just does the USB thing. Yeah, that's what my wife does too. She told me, well, it works. Why would I change it? See, that's what I thought the reason was. And I was like, okay, they just don't know about iCloud

and the fact that iTunes syncing is probably going to go away. Well, Blackout Worm wrote and he said, the only reason I would need iTunes on Linux is for streaming TV shows. And this is, he echoed a point that we heard from a few folks who said, I bought into the, you know, I'm a cord cutter and I bought into the buy and breaking bad or whatever on iTunes.

He says, Netflix and Amazon's library is peanuts compared to iTunes. iTunes has a lot of exclusives, meaning shows that aren't and will probably never be released on DVD or Blu-ray. As a Linux user, I really hate that there's little to no DRM support here. Can't get it working,

nor MP4s that I bought from my iPad. I really hate that there's little to no DRM support here. Can't get it working, nor MP4s that I bought from my iPad. I really wish that would change. As far as digital media goes, Linux is 10 years behind. Uh, no. It's just they're not included in these closed systems. Yeah, I wouldn't even go, but the whole 10 years behind thing, it's like it really just depends on how you go about getting your media. Well, and whose rules are you playing by?

Exactly. Are you playing by apple's rules well then yeah but of course they made that only work in itunes this this is almost where i almost can see i hate going down this route but but you know i talk about sometimes sometimes to me piracy the the piracy of content like tv shows to me, it almost feels like an act of civil disobedience in some sense because – Yeah, it does in a lot of ways. It's like these artificial limitations that prevent you from getting it. Because it's not actually affecting supply and demand.

It's not actually affecting a warehouse of goods. It's not tangible. There's not a tangible thing people can point to. So yeah, a lot of people – so that that argument is i think it's valid and the unfortunate part is about it is like when you when you pirate you eliminate this drm issue the blackout worm has right you eliminate this incompatibility like you just throw it on a plex server and then you have it on every device everywhere at any time and the whole all the problems are solved and there's like there's whole – and oftentimes it's higher resolution too, which is a whole other aspect to it. So it's like there's all these incentives and all these walled-off systems with DRM really to me just don't speak my language.

They don't speak a long-term solution to me. They're not very effective. Absolutely not. I don't think they're effective at all. They're not very effective. Absolutely not. I don't think they're effective at all. And I think that it really – it speaks to something when you can find that a pirating ecosystem is actually more pleasant and usable than the official ecosystems that are authorized. And I feel like as technology has changed so rapidly in the last five years, content that – like, for example, Blackout Worm has purchased, content that he bought on iTunes doesn't scale to his evolving needs in a changing technology platform environment.

However, content that he might have pirated, that's portable. That's free. That's true. It's going to move around however you want. It's just – it's so dumb the way the system works. It is. And I also want to point out that Angela was kind enough to point out that, yes, you can actually sync over Wi-Fi. So his problem of needing that USB connection is really not needed.

So Angela corrected that. That's good to know. But I also understand that pirating is not really a great option, and it's not necessarily an option that a lot of people want to do. Well, and a lot of people can take more of a looser... I've been known to... We have what we call mom flicks,

and that's my mother-in-law who has approximately 15,000 DVDs, and I'm probably low-balling that. So anything I want, I can rip. You know what I mean? It's a problem solved for me. So it works out pretty well from that. So I have that option as well. And if it's not available to me, then I probably don't need it that badly.

I agree, Matt. That was perfect. I really think also we just kind of need to put our big boy pants on and be like, fine, you don't want to sell me your content? I'm not going to buy it. I mean, we're willing to make that stance for open sourcing versus closed software. You know, Photoshop, you don't want to make your software available for my platform? I'm not going to buy it. I was able to do that with everything except Dexter and Breaking Bad. I had to have that.

That's fair. that's fair that's fair i guess you know there is always that sort of uh cultural um experience right like i i am absolutely star trek you know there's right doesn't matter i would i would their hoops i would jump through and have jumped through for star trek i mean i have bought all that crap on blu-ray or or or convinced family members to get it for me for the holidays. Exactly. That's where it's at. Yep, that's where it's at. Like, get me Star Trek. You could do no wrong.

Well, and to be honest with you, this is, again, another advantage to physical media in the sense that it's easily backupable, breakable. And then I throw it into an MKV file, and I'm good to go. I encode it with x264 and it sits on my on my server um and it also is a higher resolution because it's from blu-ray that's right and and then i use plex to manage the the sampling so if i'm watching it on my htc1 plex manages the downscaling for me and you don't have to worry about it it's great it just works really really well and there's such great uh blu-ray uh ripping software out there for Linux. It's like a no-brainer.

Yeah, we did an episode a while back on LAS on backing up that stuff. The thing that I'm really loving these days is MakeMKV. I just think that's – Oh, yeah. That's where I've been. I mean, Handbrake's great. Don't get me wrong, but I don't need all that. I just need it simple.

Yeah, yeah. Ickmeyer, or he told me how to say it, but I can't help but say Ick. He lives in Washington, too. We just outed him. Sorry to do that on the air, Ick. Anyways, he suggests that we need a JBPlex app. If anybody out there wants to make us a JBPlex plugin, that would be awesome.

Ickmeyer, sorry. And Linux Newbie said, did I mean H.264 and not X? No, I mean H.264 is, everybody knows what H.264 and not X. No, I mean, so, I mean, H264 is, everybody knows what H264 is. H264 is an open source re-implementation of it, and it is so much better. Like, and this is coming from somebody who initially on H264 was very skeptical. I'm very skeptical on WebM and VP8.

I'm hopeful for VP9. I've also been a doubter on Theora. Well, Theora has been garbage as long as I can remember. It's adorable, but it's just garbage. It's just not a serious solution for distribution of media. And I think that's one of the reasons why it struggled to take off. And so, but one of the things, and I was initially a skeptic of x264. Oh, it's just a, you know, it's a ripoff.

It's a clone. It's always going to be in catch-up mode. Well, I was totally wrong about that. H.264 stagnates for the most part because of the mass amount of interest that are involved with it. And H.264 has managed to maintain compatibility as needed. I mean, you do have to watch yourself. But everything about it is better.

The picture it delivers is superior to H.264. It's open-source code. That's superior. That's awesome. And the encoding times are better because it's more efficient at taking advantage of multi-core you know my bonobo it will light up all four real cores and all four virtual cores it's completely maxed out as it rips through video using ffmpeg um it's really great so that's really awesome well and i and if memory serves me it's been a while since I've tried it, VORBIS, for the audio stuff, I don't recall that being bad. No, no, VORBIS is fine.

VORBIS was great for audio, but it was the video where we always had the, it was muddy or it was choppy or sloppy. VORBIS just suffers from that not better enough than MP3. Well, it's the same to me. All right, well, uh we got we got some steam stuff i mean this is oh yeah we knew we talked about on linux action show on sunday we said monday they're going to announce this i was watching the countdown it happened while we were recording coda radio so my my my immediate as the uh as the page went live reactions were captured

in coda radio and it's funny and i don't necessarily think this was – I don't think this now, but at the time my first reaction was, oh, this is a huge slap in the face to Ubuntu. Right. That was my first immediate reaction was, oh, Canonical thinks – or Valve doesn't trust that Canonical is going to deliver on the desktop. They don't think they can hitch their boat to that – their cart to that wagon or to that horse. Well, you know, I think it's like the old saying go goes uh you know trust but verify and i think that's kind of what they did um i think they said oh yeah no we're totally hip to you guys but in in addition to being hip to you guys and being down with what you're doing we're gonna

go ahead and do this project over here just in case you know well and like so many people like to do they're we believe they're going to base steam always off of ubuntu but before we get to all of that matt i want to thank our first sponsor this week ting.com ting matt mobile that makes sense yes sir mobile that makes sense because ting has no early termination fees no contracts yet no contracts yes that's right no contracts and you only pay for what you use in fact let's just start with this this week one of the things I love about Ting is their rates. They break out your rates by minutes, text message, and megabytes, and they bill you at the end of the month for whatever bucket you fall into. So if you don't use your voice very much, but you use a lot of data like I do, well, then you end up paying an extremely reasonable rate.

I think my bill right now is around $14. It's incredible. And since it's the way they base this is you can have multiple devices on one account with a pooled amount of minutes, you just pay that $6. There's a flat $6 for the line. Bam, you've got a line. Then from that point on, you only pay for what you use. So if that device sits on your desk for a month, you don't have to worry about the gadget guilt of not using it. And Ting is making a lot of great new improvements.

LTE lit up all over the place. They have a goal of 200 million people covered by LTE coverage by the end of 2013. They just turned on 34 new cities, tons of new coverage in Texas, and they just got the Moto X. This is probably the Android phone to have now, which, my HTC One is an air shot. You don't want to make it jealous, Chris. I know, I know, Matt, but this HTC One is looking really, really good. But if you're still considering something else, maybe something of the larger variety, like, oh, I don't know, the new Note 3. Well, good news, because Ting has announced that the Note 3 will be hitting Ting.

And now, Matt, you know, you know, when you have a big screen like that, this thing's going to sport a 5.7-inch screen. You ready for this? Three gigabytes of RAM and a 13-megapixel camera. Let me put this in perspective. My main desktop computer, not the one I'm on now, which has more RAM, but my main desktop has two gigabytes of RAM.

I want to really let that sink in for folks. I think when you have a... People, if you haven't tried it on a large-screen device, when you're taking a picture on something like the Note, the screen is so big, you get such a good idea of what that picture is going to turn out like and the framing of it.

So, you know, man, Note 3 coming out. They just rolled out the Moto X. And the good news is, and it doesn't stop there, the LG G2, the high-end Android smartphone that packs useful features

and a unique design with a 1080p 5.2-inch screen, 2.3-inch, or I'm sorry, 2.3 gigahertz quad-core processor and a unique design with a 1080p 5.2-inch screen, 2.3-inch, or I'm sorry, 2.3 gigahertz quad-core processor, and a 3,000 milliamp battery. They're going to have the G2 coming out on the Ting network as well. Unbelievable. That's also got Android 4.2. It's got a tri-band LTE antenna in that thing.

And they've also got some new refurbished feature phones. If you want something real straightforward, You'll see those in early October. Get something for the family. And I have a real quick, super quick plug that I want to do for Ting that I experienced and I talked about on the show last week. And that was where I went a little bit over on my data. Not a lot, just a little bit. And I'm thinking, okay, I'm probably going to get rolled into the next plan, no big deal. I'm going to roll into the next bucket rather.

Okay, that's fine. Guess what happens? I get an email saying, hey, you went a little over. We're going to eat that cost, and we're not going to charge you extra for it. That's awesome, isn't it? What's up with that, right? They're awesome. Yeah, they're awesome.

And now they have an early termination fee relief program, so if you're canceling a contract at your current provider, Ting will help you take the sting out of that. You just go get your phone, port your number, then submit your ETF claim, and they'll take up to $75 off your ETF. That's a great deal. They've also announced that they'll be rolling out a new LTE hotspot, the Zing Mobile Hotspot, MiFi 5000 LTE. Now, you combine the Ting fantastic rates with an LTE hotspot and the fact that you only pay for what you use.

So if you don't use it very much for a month or so, no big deal. That's a killer deal. That's incredible. So go to linux.ting.com. Linux.ting.com will take $25 off your first device or if you want to bring your own device, well, guess what? $25 off your first month. Since the average Ting bill is like $21, it might mean your first month is free. And then later on, if you decide you want to get the Moto X

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That's just so great. That is so awesome. So go to linux.ting.com and thanks to Ting for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. Big thank you. So there I was, the end of Coder Radio and Valve has to go and make a big announcement, Matt.

The thing that struck me in this announcement, just like did not see it coming and to your credit you totally called it at the 36-minute mark in the Linux Action Show last week. I'm going to play a clip. Steambox, and I think, you know, I look at what the OUYA did. We've covered it a lot on Coder Radio.

I look at what a lot of these other companies are doing. I think Valve's the one that has the right approach, and the fact they'd be powered by Linux makes me ecstatic. Screw you, Xbox. Screw you, Xbox. Screw you, Xbox. I'm getting the Steam box. You know, the more I think about it, the more I'm thinking, keep going back to what he said about the whole embracing the PC culture and the fact that you can expand on it. It's open and so on and so forth. What if the box is essentially a gaming thin client for your existing computer?

Because if you think about it, it sounds dumb at first. But if you stop and think about it, it's like, okay, I've got my Steam box. Okay, wow, you know, I really want to upgrade that hardware. Yeah. But if you have a box that doesn't care and it's pulling it in front – I'm not saying that's what it is. I'm just saying it's a possibility. I would – You called it, Matt.

You totally called it. That's one of the key features of SteamOS. Yes, that's right, ladies and gentlemen. SteamOS. So this was the teaser last year. We shipped a software feature called Big Picture. A user interface, interface and gentlemen. SteamOS. So this was the teaser last year. We shipped a software feature called Big Picture, a user interface, interface, interface, tailored for televisions and gamepads, gamepads, gamepads. This year, we're working on even more ways to connect the dots,

dots, dots, dots for customers who want Steam in the living room. Soon, we'll be adding your design process so you can help us shape the future. Now, here's what we've got. SteamOS, so far, what we know is going to be a platform by Valve that they're going to offer out for free for people to deploy on their hardware. They can make Steam boxes. We don't know for sure yet, but we believe that Steam and Valve will announce a reference platform that you should follow. It'll be NVIDIA-based. It'll probably be of a mid-range spec. And it'll be running SteamOS.

SteamOS primarily is going to be based off Ubuntu. It has, of course, a Valve spin on it. There's already repos up online. There have been for a while. We actually covered them like five weeks ago in the Linux Action Show. There's been repos that you could connect to. They have been building them out, and they've been calling it Home Test, which has been obviously short for people who have SteamOS installed at home and are getting updates. This has been around since April. So this is all something they've been building, of course. They've been working with NVIDIA a lot.

They've been working with the different parties on getting a debugger built for Linux. And I love those things because that's going to ensure not that it just exists, but it exists and it works really, really well. Right. So we've been seeing Valve very subtly, very intelligently move towards the living room. One of the things that is, I think, of particular interest is 40% of all games on Steam feature some sort of – and by the way, I mean Linux games – 40% of all Linux games on Steam support some level of controller support.

So that amounts to 72 games in total that are available for Linux right now have controller support. So that amounts to 72 games of the total that are available for Linux right now have controller support. However, when Big Picture Mode was launched last September, 23.7% of games available on Steam were listed with full or partial controller support. That was 382 games total on Steam. Of games that have launched on Steam

since Big Picture has been launched, about 48.4% of all the games have featured or have full feature or partial feature for controller support. Raising the total population of games on Steam to nearly 30%, or 617 games in total now on Steam have controller support. So they've been working on this for a while, right, as a part of that critical infrastructure piece. Then they announced, you know, we're going to also announce some AAA titles. Nice. We assume those will have controller support.

And they say, oh, and hey, don't worry. If you've got a Steam library full of stuff, but it's on Windows, we're going to stream that for you. Oh, and by the way, don't forget, we've also just enabled family sharing. See, and that's something I've got to hit you up on. I've got to borrow some of those games. I know, right? Yeah. I've got a 16-year-. I've got to borrow some of those games. I know, right?

Yeah. I've got a 16-year-old over here, Warren. Games will be needed, I'll tell you. But I'm excited for this because now I'm seeing it from his eyes and seeing it from a whole new perspective of the sense of discovery. And it's just so exciting to see this happen. So my prediction is here that we're going to have ourselves maybe – I don't think so, but maybe a hardware preorder tomorrow. I don't think so, though. I think we're just going to see a reference design.

But I think we're going to see some sort of maybe potential partnership announced with NVIDIA. To me, it seems logical that the streaming technology they're talking about is the NVIDIA Shield technology. I think so. I think you nailed it. I think you called that one. I would completely agree with that. That's just making sense. It ensures that two, three years, five years down the road, whatever it may be, there aren't going to be any conflicts or issues because the partnership is already in place.

They have an equal interest in keeping that stuff on par. So this is, to me, there are so many interesting aspects to talk about this from. What's it going to mean for Linux? What's it going to mean for other distros like Arch and OpenSUSE and Fedora? What's it going to mean for developers? I mean, there's so many different angles we can talk about, but before we move

off from the launch day announcement and what was announced, I want to open it up to the Mumble room and say, guys, is there any aspect of the announcement or something that came out in the news that was particularly noteworthy to you? Anything around with what you hope to see tomorrow announced?

I'll leave that to you guys. No, buddy? I was surprised by the of being able to use your Windows games on Linux, which people do leave their computers

running in an office while they're in the living room so hey right you're gonna have to have a machine running it's occupied to do that streaming because theoretically the streaming processing will take place on the windows pc but it's always a land so it's not like what OnLive was trying to do so much. This is true. I guess I'm just looking for if it has really good updating features because I know a lot of people don't want to deal with updates, especially on Linux. Right. Yeah, they'd have to have their own system-wide updater that sort of took care of Steam updates, system updates, game updates. And I think, you know, we've had – I'll leave it up to the folks in the Mumble room. But we've had folks in the Mumble room who have connected to some Steam repos, pulled down some packages, and seen that there is their own, like, Valve updater in the repo.

And it doesn't necessarily sound like it has to be on ubuntu 1204 either could potentially work on 1304 um that no that could be interesting although that's going to be an interesting release you know yeah i don't know yeah all right well so here's where i think we should take this chat and i think this is something first thing i think i want to talk about is um so envision i think we're going to envision something like an XBMC almost style distro based on Ubuntu 12.04. It boots up right in the Steam Big Picture mode. And we've seen that Ubuntu has been Valve's focus since they started Steam for Linux. They already have a repository for it.

I think this will be just something they'll make available to folks. And I think that they'll say we recommend these specs. We recommend this hardware, but you can do more video, you can do more CPU. But what I want to ask you, Matt, is what do you think this means for OpenSUSE? What do you think this means for Arch? Honestly, nothing, because I think they cater to different groups of people. I think they cater to people with different goal sets and different interests. There's always that, do we need to worry about some sort of evil division or whatnot? different interests. There's always that do we need to worry about some sort of evil division

or whatnot. Michael Dominic suggested that perhaps they're going to Androidify only to be Steamify. It's going to be, maybe they're going to use their own display manager. Maybe they'll use Mir. Maybe they'll use they're going to kind of

over time become their own integrated solution, a customized separate kind of Linux? Oh, I think so. I think, you know, just like, you know, as you said, Androidify, I think, you know, you look at Android, and then you'll also look at the fact that other operating systems are actually finding their way into the world. Firefox, for example, things like that. So going back to the SteamOS, I think, will that affect other distros?

No, I don't. I think that there's enough non-specific interest to that space that everything will remain strong as it is. Now, that means that I do predict a lot of the sky is falling from news outlets and folks on blogs and whatnot. Everybody's going to be freaking out, oh my god, Ubuntu and Steam and all these guys are just big poo-poo heads and they're ruining everything. And we're going to hear lots of that nonsense like we always do.

But it's not going to happen. You know, so I'll play a little bit of this clip. I'll go back to something we played on Sunday. On the other hand, PC gaming seems to have been immune to this. Actually, let me back up because we actually didn't play this part. And PC sort of doubled down on that rather than going that the way they that they should have responded is very much to uh key off and that was a very seductive uh so one of the things opportunity i'll let him play this so one of the things gabe talked about

in his keynote is that locking down the ecosystem integrating in the stream light it has actually led to less innovation which has led to the decline of the industry. Interesting point. So he may not lock it down. It is very much to key off of the strength of the openness of the systems we had and sort of double down on that rather than going the other way. So jumping forward, what are we looking at now? We're looking at steady year-over-year unit declines in PC sales.

So I think, you know, I'm filling in and connecting a lot of dots for him that could lead me to be very disappointed down the road. But to me it sounds like one of the things that's turned them on about linux is the fact that it is this sort of it's the it's the internet of operating systems in the sense that it's this open common connected platform that anybody can put their goods on and sell and and i think what if if valve is successful here valve will take the term linux and take the general public thinking around linux to oh that scares consumers and it's too hard so we're not going to brand linux like google doesn't brown brand uh the chromecast as the linux chromecast they just it's chromecast right because like we talked about last week linux is scary exactly it is scary

no i think it'll be interesting to see what they do i do believe that at some level they may end up using something like mirror they may end up using something that would arguably be quote unquote you know locked down in the sense that it's not as widely popular as something like wayland or whatnot but that doesn't but that doesn't mean that they won't go and take this and uh make this to where you can run it the way you want it. You can take their OS and run it on any darn thing you please. I believe they'll make that possible. And they may even just go do that through APIs and whatnot.

I don't know. And if they're successful, if they're successful at doing this, then they'll go from Linux is scary to Linux is the platform where there isn't a special interest controlling it and I can sell my stuff. And it'll have to be something snappier than that. It'll be Linux is the internet of platforms or something ridiculous like cloud or vlog or whatever, or tweet. But it'll be like, I think we could actually go from to Linux is this place

where people are going to go to sell their goods potentially. We'll see. I don't know. But I think it could at least help with the image of Linux quite a bit. One thing I've learned watching Steam over a period of time, as well as watching other games in general, there are two industries in technology that define media formats and that define direction, porn and gaming. Right now, gaming is going with Linux. All we got to do now is get porn on board and it's good.

Everybody is going to be using Linux. And I wonder too if Valve isn't sort of like the – like you're right. Like maybe it's gaming comes here first and not first. And then other industries join along. But yeah, there's those two defining industries that really historically define everything. I mean they literally take direction of media. They take direction of technology, even DRM. Yeah, you know what?

Weird, but it's true. Porn is going to have a hard time in app stores. I actually have something. Yeah, go ahead. have something yeah go ahead well i i just think if if uh valve does get successful at uh boasting steam and having stem steam on linux i think most people's opinion will be like linux is for gaming because valve made it very successful you know what i mean yeah it could it could change like, it could change the whole perception around it, couldn't it? Because it makes Linux more appealing to, say, the younger crowd because the younger crowd obviously wants to have really awesome games

and really awesome graphics at the same time. Right. Well, and I think Valve is in a... Okay, so I guess here's the question is uh so valve has a lot of clout steam's a great platform uh i went and uh i wikipedia'd out the numbers here uh here you go here's a here's a little bit of uh uh here's some math for you steam um we'll start it this way uh xbox live has 46 million active users as of february 2013 okay xbox live 46 million playstation network if you combine all of the playstation consoles with all of like the vita

handhelds and all the handhelds they've sold playstation network is 100 million active users that's quite a bit but steam actually has a very respectable 60 million active users. Wow. So if you get 60 million active users, you've got some leverage there to incentivize game makers. And you could do it across the entire store. So you could say, all right, big AAA developer, if you're willing to make the game for our Steam box, we'll give you a higher cut of your sales across the entire Steam store. Valve has some room here to lean on developers to create something for Linux. I think that's the key right there.

I think if they say, look, you're already on these other platforms, you make the needed modifications to come to us, we're going to give you a bigger piece of the pie, and oh, by the way, this is essentially a brand new market because they're opening up in the living room. Big deal. It's a big deal. No doubt they have excellent pull against developers because they have a huge base to work off of.

And a huge customer base with a good history of willing to buy products. You combine that with their pushing forward on a lot of the fundamental aspects of Linux support. So they've been sort of changing that image already with making the game performance faster, delivering their own games to Linux. Steam, with a lot of the back-end features of Steam, I mean, the elephant in the room is this is all commercial, this is all DRM.

But the plus sides for Linux to me seem to be really quite obvious in this scenario. I mean, this is huge. This would be huge for Linux. Because it sounds like in everything we're reading and everything we can infer is this thing is going to follow pretty closely to mainline Linux. And I think what you'd end up having, for better or for worse, is a quote-unquote official standard for what Steam compatibility needs to look like. And it's not like the standard in the sense that we went to a board and a board came up with a consensus that all distros will follow. But what it is is that every distro that wants to make a Steam game work

can look at how it works on the Steam OS and then do whatever kind of silly hack they have to do to make it work on Arch or OpenSUSE. Just like, you know, I mean, we get pipe... I mean, hell, man, we can watch Silverlight DRM'd Netflix videos now on Linux. The Linux community is amazing at making things work under their distro that are not designed for their distro. So as long as we have a model to follow, which the SteamOS will be this quote-unquote game standard base that we'll follow. This will be the Steam base that we all follow now.

And we can make whatever they get working there. We can replicate it on different environments. Yeah, go ahead. working there we can replicate it on different environments yeah yeah but but chris i kind of feel like that it's then also very important that in the upcoming announcements there is going to be a steam box because without a reference implementation of the hardware like a real reference implementation it might not really take off as much as we hope and then it's all been all for nothing i agree i think if you know i think, so here's the problem. So say they do a Google route and they make a Nexus device, right?

Right. Well, who the hell is going to order anything but the Steam Valve box? No, I mean, that sucks all the air out of the room. So, what they really need is to work with companies like Newegg and have, like, the Newegg Steam box. And we could have, like, a Linux Action Show Steam box. And then

I agree that you need... I hope that System76 might do something like that because the only other device we have seen is the Piston and that thing costs $1,000 and that's just too much. Well isn't that the interesting thing is a company like System76 could

take a Steambox and make one. But would anybody buy one if Valve made one? Could they make it cheap enough is really the hard thing to come up with. Yeah, I don't know. Because Sony and Microsoft sort of have this economy of scale where they can make things cheap and then

they can charge for licensing and games and they can charge for Xbox Live and whatnot. But what does Valve really have? Maybe a cut of the action? Maybe a cut of the action? What if Valve in their hardware. Maybe a cut of the action? What if Valve gave, so if System76 or somebody else, you know,

whoever makes one, do they give Valve, they give them a cut. Hey, you get 10%, 20% of the purchase of every game. Maybe. Go ahead. Okay, with regard to that,

if it is that Steam bless one particular vendor over another, then you would have people who don't know about Linux, don't know about companies like System76 and so forth, that will eventually have to go to these companies to get their stuff. I think you might have a couple of quote-unquote blessed vendors, but it's going to be an ISO you can download, I think. Yeah, I'm sure it will be. It just because it's it's as much coverage as possible i mean as far as getting back to the steam box itself one thing that we really need to remember too is that if you're married um you generally have to consider what i like to call uh front room real estate yeah and there's uh there's others you have certain consoles that are that have been blessed to be there they serve their purpose but to add

another console and then to have to argue well we're now we're going to need a bigger cabinet, or well, we're going to have to rearrange that. As silly as it may seem, that does come up. It would here anyway. So size and proportion. And I think the question would be asked, does it play Netflix? Does it play Netflix? Yeah, seriously. No, that's a legitimate question. Does it play

either games and or content that your spouse is into? On the page, it states that they are talking to content providers. It's vague, though. It's vague. That could be a YouTube app for all we know. Right. Oh, gosh. Yeah, no kidding. And, Will, just to kind of answer your question about hardware costs, I mean, you've got the Linux kernel,

so it's pretty much adaptable to anything. Well, it's adaptable, but you still have to have something that runs the games well. And so it's kind of hard for them to vet it. It's not like the Xbox to anything. Well, it's adaptable, but you still have to have something that runs the games well. And so it's kind of hard for them to vet it. It's not like the Xbox where you have this fixed platform, and so all the software vendors sort of have a target hardware spec when they're designing the games. This thing needs to be very powerful to accommodate almost any game stole by Steam. So that's a little bit more important.

The streaming kind of alleviates some of that. In fact, that gives them some flexibility, right? I also think that because Valve was working with, like with NVIDIA about drivers and stuff like that, I do think they also need to work with AMD, but that's just my opinion. Oh, I'm sure they will. I'm sure they will. I think they would have more or less standard specs that will work with any game. And seeing that they have certain vendors who would be blessed, like, for example, they're working with NVIDIA,

and seeing that they have certain vendors who'd be blessed, like, for example, they're working with NVIDIA, people would tend to work towards getting NVIDIA drivers working with their games and continue on that path. I think that Valve just needs to really focus and make sure they get this on the dot, is to have driver implementation, correct? Yeah. And because Valve has been doing business with NVIDIA,

they might already have a deal for a chip they can put in their box for a very good price. They might. I think price is crucial because they need to meet the price point of the PS4 and the Xbox One in order to get that console market share to get it really going and soon. And if they do that, then the developers will come to them to make the money i don't think that will be hard i think the way this has to work out and i mean the

way i'd like to see it work out is if valve could make a box where you know if i just fall ass backwards into buying a steam box i land on this thing like give me something for just the the most simple basic consumer to go purchase maybe it's advertised in the Steam store itself. Maybe I could even buy it through Steam. But then make it available for anyone to build one. And the reason I think that is because like I was pitching this to an Xbox fan. And like I think the question they would ask is, well, what controller can I use? And my answer would be like, well, Valve has a really great controller they spent a lot of time coming up with, but actually any controller that works with Linux you can use.

If you want to use the 360 controller, you can. You want to use the PS4 controller, go for it. And so I think, you know, they need like the one-click purchase box that just comes with everything. That's the one you get at Christmas. That's the one that, you know, a real average user gets. But then later they could start building their own the next time they get one or they could swap out the controller for their favorite console controller. And I think if they can walk that line, I agree

with the Mumble Room. If they don't really have something in 2014 for me to buy, well then they better work really damn close with a few OEMs to have something. And it better be like, it better feel just like buying one from Valve. They just need a... Go ahead.

The controller point's a good one, but one controller I'd like to see is just the standard keyboard and mouse. Because for me personally, I'm an RTS fan, and I can't get that on a console. I think that's going to have to. I think they'd have to probably hard-code it not to work. Yeah, and that's the beauty of it being Linux, is that that's going to have to. I mean, I think they'd have to probably hard code it not to work. Yeah, and that's the beauty of it being Linux is that that's something they should embrace, that you can use a keyboard and mouse. You can use your preferred controller. And I think at the end of the day, that's great. Which would be my preferred controller.

Yeah. Yeah. That's going to be one of the major curb appeals right there. It is, yeah. Because I was talking to my nephew about this he's 16 he's like well can i use can i use my can i use the controller that i use on my existing console i said probably he said well i'm on board you know he was good he already has steam games he's good so what do you guys think about this streaming capability is this a band-aid

or is this like a long-term okay here's the way i see it. It could be, A, a bullet point to address the lack of AAA titles in the library. 200 Linux games and only a handful of them are the ones people are totally clamoring for. Or it could be a long-term strategy to say, kind of like Matt was saying in the last, this is really just a thin client, and while, yeah, you can play native games on it,

if you want to use this thing for five years, it's good on you. Just keep upgrading the video card on your PC, and we'll just keep streaming games on it, if you want to use this thing for five years, good on you. Just keep upgrading the video card in your PC, and we'll just keep streaming it for as long as you want. Is this a short-term thing, or is this a long-term thing? I think it's both. There's going to be some people that are just going to really want that thin client solution. And there's also some developers that will refuse to develop on Linux until it's inevitable that that's the primary gaming platform. And then there's going to be other developers that rush to support it.

So I think it's really going to be both solutions, short and long term. I do think that they should probably work on trying to entice developers and show that it's actually easier to work with Linux than it is to work with Windows. Because the thing with Windows is that its kernel structure, yeah, it's very stable, but it's not that fast, and you don't get the good performance,

and you don't get to have the capabilities that you do with Linux. Also, I feel like NVIDIA has this entirely new technology, the streaming technology, developed, and this is for them also a chance to make it like a standard, and therefore... So you agree it's going has this entirely new technology, the streaming technology, developed. And this is for them also a chance to make it like a standard.

So you agree it's going to be the NVIDIA streaming tech? Yeah, because this is a chance for Valve as well as for NVIDIA. Yeah, the consoles went with AMD, so NVIDIA could really sell some units here. And so I wonder then if this is NVIDIA's streaming tech. It sounds like, I mean, to me, and I don't know where this squares with NVIDIA saying they're going to provide documentation to the Nouveau project today. When you look at this, this to me seems like one of these features that absolutely will require the proprietary NVIDIA driver.

It would. It definitely will. See, Alan in the chat room thinks that streaming will never work. It never works for games. Now, I don't know. I don't know. See, I'm of a slightly different opinion because, for me, I

actually was able to play on live fairly successfully. And on live was going to servers up in the cloud. Now, we don't know for sure, but I think everything points to the streaming is going to happen over the LAN. But, you know, where you're going to run into issues is everybody has really crappy Wi-Fi, right? At least in average homes, nobody's got their Wi-Fi figured out. There's a dozen different Wi-Fi, you know, APs just in range within my house.

Sure. So people who are not wired are going to constantly have problems, I would think. Then it would scale down to 4 ATP. My answer to Alan, my answer to him saying that streaming won't work, I think on live kind of failed just because they didn't have the coverage. They didn't

have all the servers in place as they do now. I mean, I played on live for a while. I mean, it wasn't good because I wasn't in a closer coverage area, but if they had more servers in, say, one in Iowa or something like that, I would definitely be playing that, and it would have been great. Yeah, and I think Cheeseburg in the chatroom makes a good point.

Average Joe isn't probably going to be too impressed with the answer, yeah, I can play your games. well i actually i take that back because if you're asking the question can it play game x then you probably already have a pc and you already have that game and you want to be able to play it so maybe actually but taking it into the living room gives you better two-player ability you don't want to share your keyboard and mouse at your desk so you're assuming they can still play it back at the desk i would think it would take almost all the resources to just, cause you're going to,

I mean, the game has to, the game has to essentially run. I don't mean two player as in one person sitting at the desk, one person sitting in the living room. I'm talking about person a person B both watching the same TV in the living room. Yeah.

Yeah. Console style. Yeah. Yeah. Cause it is a console. I think the streaming is also an enticement to developers. If their game doesn't play as well over streaming and Steam picks up momentum,

then they're going to want to develop natively for Linux so that it is competitive. Yeah, totally. Yeah, I think that that would be the main point. Most of the games that eventually, especially Windows-only games, you'll start to see a dip in their games being played or being purchased because

people want to use the Steam Box or the SteamOS because they can actually play it on larger screens and everything like that. So eventually they would have to move over their games being played on Linux and actually be a win-win. Right, because in the other distros

we'll see how they got it working on SteamOS and make it work on their distro of choice. Exactly. And that's going to be huge. I almost wonder if we're going to see something to where maybe it's kind of a hybrid to where you've got the... Maybe you've got some local resources cached on the console itself, and then the rest

of it's being streamed in to where it minimizes any congestion. Yeah, from Valve. You know, I think people would actually prefer that. I think people would prefer to be able to stream it from Valve because then you could have somebody playing on the PC and you could have somebody playing on the, yeah. Well, and if you cache local resources,

like you got your maps cached, you got various characters cached, things like that. The problem is rendering, right? That's where the power is. Yeah, and that's where the GPU is going to have to really, you know, the whole NVIDIA thing comes into it. So, I mean, if they can kind of find that balancing act where, you know, there's still some caching going on locally.

You've still got enough to where it's not just raw data going back and forth like crazy. It's basically just gameplay. Right. You know, well, if you did it right, and essentially what OnLive did, and this is why I think you could almost do it over LAN, is OnLive took either X264 or H264 and forked it, essentially, and created their own video codec.

And they would actually render it as video and stream the video to the OnLive device. Which is what the Shield does. Yeah, exactly. It takes it before it goes to the HDMI port on your graphics card, if I'm right. So if you can support a 1 to 4 megabit transfer rate over your homeland, that's essentially all you need to be able to stream that video bitrate. Because you're not actually streaming the raw data of the vectors and all of that. You're just streaming the end output video.

Right. That's pretty much every network. Right. So it maybe is a little pushing it for broadband connections for some folks, but it should work over that. It should work even over Wi-Fi. I would think so. Yeah, I would think so.

They could probably drop the resolution to 720 without too many people noticing too. I think part of it, another reason why I'm kind of excited about it is because it's Gabe and it's Valve, right? If this was EA or Activision, I don't know. I think part of it, another reason why I'm kind of excited about it is because it's Gabe and it's Valve, right? If this was EA or Activision, I don't know, some company saying they're going to make their own box. I'd be like, okay, good. Sega! I'll look forward to that bastardization hitting the market soon.

Because Valve has a good track record with their comments. Well, yeah. I mean, just Gabe, you. Gabe just totally... It makes so much sense why he was saying what he was saying at that keynote. He's laying it all out there, saying this is the rationale. And then when the news hits, you have this total framework

to view it all in. I mean, it was pretty brilliant. It was good staging. I'm curious to see where it all goes, man. Yeah, I am too. And I think whoever did their marketing did a really nice job. I mean, it was presented in a way of here's why I care. Love me a good countdown. Yeah, exactly, right?

Get you excited, you know? One thing that I find... I think that at the end of the day, Valve should more or less focus on organizing themselves. Remember that they are just a platform in order to sell games. Make sure that their development platform

is good for the developers. Probably get one or two blessed vendors for the hardware, but mainly focus on getting their stuff ported over to Linux so that the developers are easy to move, to make a transition across to Linux so that they can get their game cells.

And if it is that they can do that, the hardware aspect of it will come eventually, whether people like it or not. They would still be able to get, whether it's System 76 or Dell for that matter, might want to jump on board because they see that, hey, everybody wants

to play games on Steam and Steam using Linux, so we need to, in order to get in on this, we have to be able to supply people with what they want. Well, you're going to have a whole range of people who just want to play some of these side-scrolling platformers or they just want to play some of these lower-end games. And as long as they're happy with streaming, too, if the streaming actually works, you could take an old box and just load the SteamOS on it and call it good. And it doesn't matter if it can't play all the games natively because the streaming is there. And it could be this great use.

And if they tie in kind of video media playback, like I'm talking local LAN playback, give me a little MKV support, maybe even a little Netflix action, I'm putting this on every TV in my house. Exactly. I think that's kind of what they're aiming for. I really do. And I think by hitting, basically looking at what the other consoles did wrong, and that's of course Wii is targeting nothing but family use only and any serious gamers laughing at it.

Xbox and PS3 completely alienates most family folks and definitely into more the people that really like to play games. I think by hitting that middle ground, and I think they can by having the side scrollers as well as the hardcore games, I think they're going to be able to hit all the nails on the head. Well, and I think, too, you have to look at some of this stuff in the perspective of a struggling middle class, an economy that is continuing to have to make tough choices about what they spend their money on. And if I, assuming I'm okay with streaming a portion of the high-end games, then to me, it's almost a slam dunk because I get a console out of reinvesting in hardware I already have.

That's always been a great sales pitch for Linux usage. It's always been a fantastic use for it. And now we actually have a console contender. And so Valve is throwing their hat into the console ring by not creating one console but by creating a platform and then letting the community build around it. And I'm pretty excited about that. Makes complete sense. We're going to keep digging into this, and as we get more information, maybe even get our hands on SteamOS, we'll talk about it more in the Linux Action Show map.

But I thought we should probably get to a couple of email items that came in. Yeah, good plan. And before we do that, I wanted to actually make a special mention. So we talk about this pretty pretty much is uh as frequently as i feel i week people will tolerate and that is our affiliate system they have we have links at the bottom of the jupiter broadcasting website we also have chrome and firefox extensions this is why i'm bringing it up ah the topic of the day yes we did an update and i think it's really only chrome that bit us in the butt but we did an update to both to support new sites and to also kind of handle the – properly handle the way when people click on an affiliated link on somebody else's site to make sure our link doesn't override it.

That required a re – I don't even really – I don't really think it changes much except for the way it just reads the URLs. And anyways, that requires a reauthorization. We had a massive drop-off, a huge, huge drop-off. I almost wonder if people are – maybe they are aware of it, but they don't know. If they already have the old one installed, do they know how to go into extensions and do it? Yeah, you've got to hit the little hamburger menu and then go down there and say re-enable. What's that look like? Maybe show us what a hamburger menu looks like. I don't have a shot of it.

Oh, you don't have a shot of it? That's fine. So it's up there in the upper right-hand corner. Yeah, exactly. It's that three line. They call it the hamburger menu. And in there, you reauthorize it. We had a huge drop-off, so our expenses are super tight when that goes away.

Because the way we do it is we have advertising that pays for a certain running amount, and then we have a good portion that comes from the affiliates. And that sort of balances out where our different revenues come from. But if either one drops off significantly, it really hurts the production. So if you would check that and make sure it's enabled, and if you don't already have our browser extension, well, you can find it linked to the bottom of Jupyter Broadcasting for Chrome or Firefox.

We'd really appreciate it if you grab that and help us. We have huge plans for 2014. And I've been kind of discovering over the last couple of weeks there's a lot of local listeners, Matt. Oh, oh, that reminds me. Oh, so okay. So we have a lot of local listeners, Matt. Oh, oh, that reminds me. Oh, so, okay.

So we have a lot of local listeners, which how cool would it be to do an unplugged with a few people in studio? Dude, that would be awesome. Right? Uh, okay. So this is, I probably should have brought this up to you off air,

but I'm going to throw this out there is one of the things we could do in, in, in, in a future, uh, sure. Where everything is, everybody has infinite time and organization capabilities,

you know, that future that we talk about all the time? Yeah. Wouldn't it be fun to take a Tuesday and go do something on location, do an unplugged on location, and while we're doing that, record a segment for that Sunday's last,

so sort of kill two birds with one stone. So we take a Tuesday, we do the unplugged show on location, maybe do like a meetup type thing. And then, you know, I'll give you an example. I was in, this was all while I was naked. I was in the shower. I think I was, I think I had, I probably had soaped my body, but I don't think I had put any shampoo on yet. So just that's about that stage in the shower.

And why do I picture you with microphone in hand this entire time? I don't know. Oh, definitely. Yeah. I got a waterproof microphone. Yeah so I was thinking it'd be really cool. The scenario I came up with was a beer tour. Because we've met folks that run their breweries on Linux. I was thinking real world, local Washington implementations of Linux in their work environment. Something not so much like, here's our Samba server. I mean, that's cool. I mean, good on you. But we can't really make a segment out of that. But if you got like a brewery running linux or a farm running

linux oh dude a farm would be awesome anything running linux that we could go look at and shoot a segment for for last i'd love to do some on location stuff for last just kind of kick things up a notch and then we would do like a meetup somewhere around there and then that's when we do unplug so we'd be like killing like basically we take a Tuesday and just knock out unplugged and a segment for last and just have a ton of fun. I like that idea. Yeah, I think I don't see any reason why we couldn't. It's an example of some of the things I want to do and there's some ways

I want to facilitate that and I have some great ideas for 2014 but we really need folks' support so if you please click those affiliate links and grab those browser extensions, it helps us plan for that kind of stuff. Absolutely. Otherwise we're going to have to start doing helps us plan for that kind of stuff. Absolutely. Otherwise, we're going to have to start doing like, you know, save the children PSAs and stuff. Today on Unplugged, instead of doing a show, we're just doing a pledge drive.

Seriously, yeah. Just, we're just going to keep talking. Get some music going. We'll keep talking. You know, what we'll do is we talk about iPhones until people pledged. And then when people pledged, we could talk about Linux. And then once the timer had run out, we'd have to go back to iPhones. Basically, a torture technique. Or it has us rummaging around various

dumpsters looking for food because you guys aren't supporting us with our... Yeah, I mean... Yeah, we'd take last and convert it into a dumpster diving action show. Exactly. Hey, this could run Linux. He's out of the dumpster, right? Oh my gosh. So it's up to you fellas. We'll see what happens.

We'll see where it shakes out, man. All right, well, Matthew wrote in. He said, I've been an Arch user for over a year now, and it's basically because of the awesomeness of MakePkg. The problem I'm having is that I can't find a desktop environment I like. Here's why. I'm a typical user. I'm not a typical user, I don't think. I spend 99% of my day jumping between terminal and web browser.

I don't like messing with my desktop. I want it to look decent, but basically out of the box and get out of the way. I'm using Cinnamon right now, but I've tried Elementary OS after a review, and I really like Pantheon. Based on this, I'm leaning towards installing Elementary and running Arch in a VM. That said, he says because he maintains a couple of packages in the AUR. Good on you, Matthew. He said, that said, there are still some

apps I require the latest versions of, like Gix and Git, I'm sorry, and Tmux. So I'm planning on just compiling the latest versions of those myself on, say, like Elementary. I realize this may not work for everyone, but for DevOps, admins like myself, who don't like to waste time

tweaking the desktop, it's becoming the ideal solution. I mean, I think we kind of zeroed in on that's who elementary OS would be good for. The part I don't agree with is, I mean, it sounds like maybe he needs like, you know, Xmonad or awesome window manager. I mean, it kind of does. Yeah. And that might be something for him to explore as well.

And I'd also chime in on the whole arch in a VM. Just do yourself a favor and do a separate partition. Honestly, you'll be so much happier. Especially when you're doing from the AR, you need to build, right? Building in a VM is like, ugh. And just Arch in a VM in general, just getting it set up, it's actually massively simpler on a partition than it is in a VM, based on my experience.

LXDE, we got a recommendation from Ick in the chat room that LXDE would be good. I guess, I think that really, I'm still, so I switched back to GNOME for a couple of hours this week and decided to go back to KDE. Really? Yeah, you know, with all the extensions. I had extension problems again, and I just felt like with KDE I can make it be what I want even if it takes a little bit of tweaking.

So I honestly think – I do see how maybe try to just experiment with getting the Pantheon desktop running under Arch I know there's people out there working on that see if that gets you where you want then try out elementary OS sure alright Jonathan writes in regarding Windows I'm not sure where this fits but I just wanted to send it

to you guys I'm more or less left on Windows in the Windows world and I've been stuck in the XP era every time I had to take a quick trip into the Microsoft pool, it left me with shivers, viruses, stupid GUIs, and infinite reboot bonanzas. And he's come to an epiphany. He said, I think I finally understand why Windows

has ruled the enterprise desktops for so long, despite all of the shortcomings he just listed. He says, I'm interning at a large IT company, which means someone else does all the rebooting, virus scans, and whatnot. In that setting, Windows is very usable. Only the bad UI is left to deal with, and of course, IE. And he's got a great point because in Enterprise, IT pulls their hair out with all the problems Windows has. And the end users are all la-di-da-di-da.

Circus music is going on in their head. They don't have a clue. You know, early on was one of the motivations to getting Windows out of my home. You know, I can't remember what OS Andrew's on. I mean, this is probably Windows 2000 before I switched to OpenSUSE and KDE. And I just, you know, I'd come home and she'd have Windows problems, printing problems.

And I was just like, no! I don't want any more of this. Well, yeah, and for me, it was like, I was literally, I'd already been running Linux for some time, but I went exclusive Linux when I found out that, I think it was WinFS. I was looking forward to that file system with all the neat features they're babbling about. That wasn't going to happen. I'm like, that's it.

If I hear the word NTFS one more time, I'm going to shoot something. I just couldn't handle it. He needs some advice from you, Matt. He says, I've been forced through this company to use Internet Explorer exclusively. I'm in need of some therapeutic tips to get that dirty feeling off me when the workday is over. Any advice? Kill it with fire. Actually, burn – try and find like an old IE5 CD.

They used to come in packages. Get some of those. Light them on fire. Do a barbecue. That could help. I don't know, man. That's tough. Spend some quality time with candlelit candlelit mozilla you know just

kind of get it around your monitor get some uh berry white going you know you know what i would do honestly too is like sometimes you need to like relive how bad it used to be in ie land so like go like find a vm of like windows 98 with like ie3 or something and then live that for a day and then be like wow this, this new IE is great. This new IE is really great. And it's not. That's the horrible part. Kiwi in the chat room says that he could just drink heavily.

That could also work. Yeah, that works. Yeah. And beer goggles in IE is looking pretty good. Yeah, there you go. So we had an email that came in from Riddison, who is a Manjaro Linux user. And he wanted to talk about SteamOS versus Ubuntu Edge. I started to get through it, and I was going to read it because he says, last is my favorite

podcast of all time. He looks forward to it every week. And I thought, well, okay, I got to read this guy's email. It's all strong. Yeah, right. But it's very long. But what he says is he thinks it's an interesting correlation to look at sort of the big run-up to Ubuntu Edge and then the immediate drop-off where Valve has sort of taken this different approach

where they've started very small, you know, make this work better. Like Gabe called it the sweater approach where they pull one thread and then it just leads to the next thread and leads to the next thread. And they've been making those things better, whereas Canonical was kind of like,

put everything out there, let's go, let's do this, buy it. We don't even have all the bits done yet, not all the infrastructure done yet, but if you commit to this, we can try to get it done. He says that he feels like it requires large companies like Valve who have deep pockets to make this possible. He says, I look forward to the crazy future of Linux, but I resent that it does take these huge companies like Google and Valve, you know, of course Google with Android, to push it forward to public adoption.

Sometimes. However, I feel like Gabe understands and respects the philosophy of open source more than others companies like Google and Valve, you know, of course, Google with Android, to push it forward to public adoption, sometimes. However, I feel like Gabe understands and respects the philosophy of open source more than others and actually used the word Linux on the SteamOS announcement page, unlike certain popular distro that makes no mention of Linux anywhere on their website or mobile OS. I truly feel SteamOS is pure Linux's chance to gain market share and a user base it deserves. Wow, that's a lot to digest. This could be, um... This could be, like, uh... I don't know. I don't want to be too crazy

But if you look over history The common platform Eventually takes over Like you start with individual things Like very purpose built Operating systems, very purpose built devices That really only do one thing And then as the general technology

Advances and becomes more powerful It just becomes economically More viable to use that technology and to continue to create your own technology every single time, all these individual platforms that we have now. So it kind of – I've always kind of seen a day and age where these big guys move on. Microsoft moves on. Apple moves on. And what we're left with is a really healthy Linux ecosystem because Linux has kind of taken over there. Linux kind of moves into mobile. Linux moves into the living room.

Linux moves into the desktop. And over time, it's on the server. It's on the cloud. It's everywhere. Because as people leave that area or the common generally available platform becomes good enough, it just becomes almost crazy not to use it. good enough, it just becomes almost crazy not to use it. Steam could be, SteamOS could be the beginning

of that takeover, not just from a TiVo standpoint, but from a really large-scale deployment standpoint of an ecosystem where people are actually making money, people are actually developing and creating something of extreme value. I'm really, really excited that it's Valve doing it, and I'm

really interested to see the kind of opportunities we're going to have in the last to cover this because there's tons of potential for them to screw this thing up royally. Oh, yes. Yes, there is. Right? And we're going to be there to watch that happen if that does happen. But there's also opportunities for like what's the best way to build out a Steam rig? What's the cheapest Steam rig you can buy? What's the nicest Steam rig you can build?

Oh, it's endless possibilities. Endless possibilities. And then just watching adoption as well, because as we all know, computers are nothing more than how do I accomplish blank. Most people don't really pay a lot of attention to what the OS is. It's how do I do this? How do I do that? How do I Skype?

How do I browse the web? How do I send an email? How do I game? And Valve is going to be sending the game. And what I like about that is it's totally solving that problem. Exactly. At the same time you could be completely checked out of the whole Steam ecosystem. You could never buy a title. You could never use SteamOS. You're still getting better Kernel X. You're still getting

better NVIDIA Y. You're still getting all of these improvements that they're making that are going to hit the rest of general Linux. And that to me is also sort of like this everybody wins scenario here. If it's successful, right? I think it will be. And I think the advantage they have is that they don't have the pressures that, say, Apple or Microsoft have from shareholders. Now, that's not – I don't know what Valve's exact corporate structure is. Last time I checked, I think they're privately held, which if they are, stay that way.

You'll be happier because it's less headaches and you can go long game. Once you go public, you're short game, and so that limits your options. So yes, I think in the long run, they will be successful. It may not happen all at once. They may have some bumps in the road. They may even have some costly mistakes. But I think because they're taking that sweater approach, it's going to work out for them. Yeah, because they're doing all of the really low-level grunt work that has to be done first and not just building the flashy presentation on top of all of that first.

They're doing the stuff that general consumers will never, ever, ever give them credit for. It's not sexy. It's not going to win them over in the general consumer markets. Only the stuff that us Linux nerds care about. But it shows that they're taking the right approach. And here's something they won't do that Google did. We've talked about how Android basically sold their souls to get themselves with various mobile carriers and various phones.

And of course, the phones themselves would be bastardized with all the software and stuff. Valve won't do that. Valve stuff will remain pure. I believe that through and through. That anyone they hook up with, you're not going to see lots of, hey, get this new, you know, lots of little icons appearing all over your screen or any of that. It's going to be great. It's going to be really solid. Wouldn't it be interesting, too, like if Roku eventually rolled out a Steam box?

Because if they can take the platform and they just have to put a, you know, you could have the Roku. You could have the Roku. Maybe in three years, the Roku XL has got a really good graphics processor in it, and it has the Steam OS on it or something like that. I think so. Well, and just to look historically at Roku, and I'm probably partially correct on this, and I think I am. If I remember correctly, the guys behind Roku are actually the guys behind Replay TV. Oh, yeah. These guys know what they're doing. And Roku is Linux-based already.

Yeah, it is Linux-based, and they got it right. So I think that, yeah, if they did hook up with Roku, that would be very wise of them. Anybody could. I mean, you could just take, I mean, if the BoxeeBox was to come around, say that, you know, the BoxeeBox guys time-traveled to the future and created their product, why not base BoxeeBox

on SteamBox? And if you could, you know, maybe there's a way to do video and all that kind of stuff, because then you just get the advantage of the Steam library. It's like when you ship an Android tablet, you want to be able to put the Play Store on there. Bingo. Exactly. All right, Matt. Well, I think that'll wrap us up for this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. Don't forget, you can contact us by going to jupyterbroadcasting.com and clicking that contact link and choosing unplug from the dropdown or even better, start a thread in our subreddit over at linuxactionshow.reddit.com.

Join us on Sunday. We've got a good show planned. Matt's going to help you secure your house with cameras and Linux. Oh, yes. On Sunday, and we'll be doing some more SteamOS coverage and following that as well. We'd love to hear from you. You can also join us live on Tuesdays over at jblive.tv. We kick that off at 2 p.m. Pacific.

Hey, by the way, calendar page has been updated. You can now select your time zone on the freaking calendar page. Pow. Anywhere in the world, not just U.S. That's right. Hey, Matt, have a great week. I'll see you on Sunday. Sounds good. See you then. All right, everyone. Thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. See you right back here next week. you