LINUX Unplugged - Episode 72: Best of LUP 2014 | LUP 72

Episode Date: December 23, 2014

We look back on some of the rants and events of 2014. Wether it's systemd, mir, tox, ubuntu or anything else, we covered lots of major events this year!

This is Linux Unplugged, Episode weekly Linux talk show that's already tracking. Santa's sleigh. My name is Chris, and we have something kind of special for you this week. It's a little different. It's a first for a lot of our shows on the network. This week, we're playing some of the audience's favorite moments as submitted by you. So if it's a train wreck, I'm officially transferring all blame to those of you. No, I'm kidding.

No, actually, it's gone through some of our favorite moments. And to be honest, on the Linux Unplugged show, it's just the way it goes, you guys. Some of those, they're rants. A lot of great rants, though. At least I happen to think so. And they inspired a lot of, I think, really good reflection and discussion. That's what I think Linux Unplugged oftentimes is all about. And so this week, we're going to go in and look at some of those moments and other moments that you submitted into the show. In fact, there's a lot. It's dense. There's a lot to get into. So in fact, that way I don't have to interrupt. I will be joining you from time to time. Moments

throughout the show, Chris will come in and spend a holiday moment with you. But to kind of clear the air, get us ready for it, I think I'm going to thank our first sponsor this week. You guys know them. You guys love them. That's the amazing folks over at Ting. Go to linux.ting.com. That's going to get you not only a $25 discount off your first Ting device, but a little feather in your cap for supporting the Linux Unplugged show. linux.ting.com.

Ting is mobile that makes sense. Ting is my mobile service provider. And as I sit here and take a holiday sip from a holiday beverage and reflect on the things that I do feel very thankful for, Ting is one of them. I'm coming in now on two years of Ting service. You can get started by going to linux.ting.com. No more contract.

No more termination fee. No more scams. No more getting you to pay for data that you may or may not use or a certain amount of text messages you may or may not use. Just pay for what you actually end up using. That's how Ting works. Ting takes your minutes, your messages, and your megabytes. They add them all up at the end of the month, whatever buckets you fall into. That's all you got to pay. You want to turn on

Hotspot? You want to tether that? Then just pay for the data. You don't have to be in some sort of special plan. And Ting has no hold customer service. I don't need it. To be honest, I've never had to call them. I take advantage of their incredible dashboard. But if I have friends and family, I absolutely let them know, you know what, you can call Ting and they'll answer your tough questions. They hire the Android geeks, give them the ability to solve your problem, give them the authority to resolve any kind of account issue, and then they have them answer the phone when it rings. I know, it's a crazy concept. Linux.ting.com. They have that powerful online control panel where you can take control of your account, turn things on and off as you need them. It's really impressive. And one of the things you

may have heard about is Ting is expanding into GSM next year. They're going to have CDMA and GSM coverage. And they posted up a video where they talked to one of their executives about that. So I'm going to play it for you. Dean asks, I've been happy since my switch to Ting a year ago. Any chance that Ting will offer GSM service besides CDMA? I'm sure you've seen by now that we are actually offering GSM service in addition to Sprint. There are two great things that that gives us. First, it gives people access to a wider variety of phones that they may already own or get in the secondary market. Second, probably a little more specifically,

it does now mean that you can go down to the Apple Store, buy an unlocked iPhone, new iPhone 6, 6 Plus, grab a SIM from us, pop it in, and use Ting. And for a lot of people, that's been a real limitation. You know, I do think it's worth noting that this is and, not or, and we're thrilled to be able to offer multiple networks. not or, and we're thrilled to be able to offer multiple networks. Linux.ting.com. Mobile that makes sense.

Thank you to Ting for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged show. They're also getting into fiber internet to change up landlines. Love Ting. And I think you should go check them out. Start saving right now. They have a special $100 and 50 bones credit if you have to cancel a line that has an early termination on it. No more ETFs with Ting. Linux.Ting.com. And a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged show.

Well, SystemD sure came up a lot this year, didn't it? And there was a lot of different discussions on the Linux Unplugged show, but we figured we've got to touch on it once officially to mark it for 2014. So this is one of the highest submitted discussions around SystemD. Enjoy.

Did you guys see the roll up your sleeves? We may need to fork Debian site. Did you guys catch this? Oh, boy. And I'll just read the first paragraph here. We are veteran, which is bolded, by the way, veteran Unix admins, and we are concerned about what's happening to GNU slash Linux Debian edition and they're considering forking the project.

I want to stop right here. Okay. I think that's a great idea. I think fork it. Like, instead of delaying the progress of the distribution or the direction, yeah, fork it and go your own way. That actually seems like the right approach to take.

Especially if you're never going to be satisfied with the SystemD version of Debian. That seems like a pretty reasonable response, and I hope they do. I think the competition would be good. The thing that I can't get past, and it seems like a lot of other people have picked up on it, is the language used there, veteran Unix admins and bolded. What that does is sort of projects old farts and i'm not trying to be derogatory i'm just saying like from a messaging standpoint people are saying that makes you sound like a bunch of old farts and then people sort of write it off wow what

do they care a bunch of stick in the muds and it's sort of like it immediately makes people not take it very seriously well you know looking know, looking at it from my perspective, I think it's a combination of quote-unquote old farts as well as people that are of the mind that if it isn't broke, why fix it, at least from their perspective. And so you might have an inner mixture of individuals in that space. Wimpy, do you think they're just crazy? Well, they're exercising their right to free speech and all power to their elbow and everything and if they want to have a go at forking debby and then i think everyone should just stand back and let

them get on with it and let themselves burn yeah well just just let's just try take those two words together fork debby and okay forking is hard i have first-hand experience of forking really small projects in the comparison with debian so they want to fork debian just think about all of the infrastructure that's involved there and all of the platforms and ever it's just crazy nonsense. And Ian Jackson's obviously got an opinion about this, and he posted his thing to the mailing list to suggest that this was

evaluated one last time, very expressly stating he didn't want to turn this into a System D versus whatever in its system debate. And then the internet explodes with SystemD Inferno again. This is so disappointing. I know.

It's just laughable. And if they want to fork Debian, yeah, go on. Do that. Do that thing. I'm all for it. I'm going to watch that gleefully from afar. Yeah, I would be pretty skeptical myself. And Vault, you think, no, no, don't fork. Don't do that. I'm going to watch that gleefully from afar. Yeah, I would be pretty skeptical myself.

And, Vault, you think, no, no, don't fork. Don't do that. We need more resources as it is, not less people working on the same stuff. Well, that's obviously my actual practical point is, no, don't fork it. Find a way to accommodate multiple init systems in Debian. I'm starting to change. If you want to fork Debian, yeah, go on. Go do it. If they're never going to be interested in being

involved with the project in that state, then they should just fork it. You're not really losing resources because if they weren't going to cooperate anyways, you're not losing them. They're already lost. So let them go off and do their own thing. Well, no, the thing is that no, well, yeah, okay, if they want to fork Dem fork to be

in but there's there's system bsd there's use less d yeah there are shims around system d if they were really serious about coming up with an alternative they would be looking at those projects in terms of developing them and supporting them within the Debian community rather than saying we're going to fork Debian, which is frankly insane. You're talking the biggest distribution there is, the mother of most of our distributions. Yeah.

That's a huge undertaking. Would you do a complete fork or would it be more like sort of a clone of straight-up Debian where you're just constantly swapping out the systemd parts for something else? Well, one thing that comes to mind that I want to point out here is that, now, last time I checked, most computers with blogging platforms attached

don't have breathalyzers ready. So it's entirely possible they were fit-shaped, and they got on and, yeah, Deimmy, blimmy, blah. Maybe. No, I'll tell you who's a little S-faced. How about this one? How about this one? Forkfedora.org.

Shall we forkfedora? Oh, that's brilliant. And then here's the next line. Not really. It's doing great. Maybe we're not veteran enough. That's great. That's really good.

That is fantastic. That's the best response. They sound like they're really housed. You know what? Yeah. Yeah, they're really housed, right? I would like to buy a beer for those guys. I've already verified this is a factual thing.

Yeah, no, Matt did prove that he did actually later up on G+. All of my tent people on the whole internet, but still, we exist. Yeah, that actually is getting housed as a term. It's got a ridiculous origin, though, or something. I don't remember. It's abbreviated from the other word. You guys just seen Valerie over here. It was hilarious.

Okay, but this fork business, like, shall we fork Fedora? Time to fork Debian. Well, actually, we have. The only time I think we've ever seen the Linux community this riled up and just unable to just move forward for a long time was the Microsoft Novell deal, where you had Boycott Novell prop up,

and you had all this stuff, and there was such decisive lines, and it went on for two years, but really not... It was not as bad for two years, but it really went on for like two years but really not i mean you know it was it was not as bad for two years but it really went on for a while and this is like we haven't had a good old classic drama like this since then it's like the good old days again hooah all right oh i remember the old novell thing and i'm sitting there going thinking that's great i'm gonna go

watch tv now because i'm just like this is gonna be a week-long thing and people are gonna blow it over yeah that still cracks me up just all right wimpy go ahead ask the question that's on I'm going to go watch TV now because I'm just like, this is going to be a week-long thing and people are going to blow it over. Yeah, that still cracks me up. All right, Wimpy, go ahead. Ask the question that's on everybody's mind. Well, I'm putting myself out there again as the bloke that says, you know, System D is really quite good. But I often wonder, reading what some of the people say about systemd, and also listening to other podcasts and what they have to say about systemd,

and I'm left with the impression of you've never actually used it. Not only have you never actually used it, you've never actually sat down and written a unit file. You're not a package maintainer. You haven't had to deal with init scripts and you haven't seen the benefits of migrating a package from an init script to system D and the many other benefits of system D. Now, I can appreciate that people are very, very firm in their opinion that they like the way things are and there's's a place for that but i think a lot of the speculation and uh commentary about systemd is being had by people who simply do not know what they're talking about now i'm not suggesting necessarily that fork debian falls into this camp they would

claim to be seasoned uh lin and Debian veterans quite. So maybe they do know what they're talking about and they have legitimate reasons as to why they feel system D is not going to suit them. But there are some podcasts where I've heard them debating the various init systems and talking about the pros and cons and then admitting partway through their, you know, slagging off of system D they've never used it. Yeah. Well, how are you qualified to have an opinion?

My, uh, my, so my stance on the system D, uh, discussion, I think if you look over the history of this show has an arc where I'm pretty neutral, don't give a crap. And then I become pretty pro system D. And then I get to a point where I was a little belligerent to people who didn't seem to think going forward with SystemD was a good idea, because the reason I've... I don't know if belligerent is the right word, but I'll just label it that. The reason why I felt that way is because as a sysadmin of like 14, 15 years, there are literally things that I see in SystemD that I think, if I had that when I was managing servers, I would have hated my job so much less. Like, it's not just small stuff that I see in SystemD.

Some of the things that SystemD brings as a whole, I see as fundamentally necessary for Linux to remain competitive at scale. Like, without those things, and without those things, FreeBSD could easily eat our lunch, really. Because essentially, we're just as capable. But SystemD offers so many things. The problem is, you really don't know how important they are until you've deployed Linux at scale,

or you have a very network-demanding thing, or you have something that has to be as absolutely minimal as possible and support socket activation, or you need something that's integrated with namespaces. All these things that are edge cases but together matter so much and are so important at keeping Linux competitive, not just on the server but also in mobile, that when you argue against systemd,

what you have to realize is you have to really come with something that's extremely compelling because what you are arguing for is essentially removing what I, in my personal opinion, and I'm not saying it's right, but in my personal opinion, are fundamentally critical features to keep Linux competitive. So if you're going to say no systemd, you've got to have an answer for those problems. And, yeah, I don't think you and I can have a debate about this because I think we're clearly on the same side of the fence and we've got we've got our personal opinions. It sounds like a largely similar reasons.

So really what we need is somebody to step up and tell us why we're wrong. And I I think part of is some of the more vocal people debating this are not the same people who are as impacted by it. Like, I think there's a group of people that care a lot, but they're just not as vocal about debating it. I think I'm trying to because I get emails that seem really well reasoned. But even then, I've still not been convinced. The biggest things that convince me that it might be a problem are always the what-if scenarios. And I think yeah, if that happens we could have a problem. But that's not a today problem. That's a what-if problem. Quite, quite. Anyways, so how do we get

talking about, oh yeah, the forks. So there you go. The system deconversation once again has been stirred back up by these project forks. And you know what's interesting is you check the Linux forms like r slash Linux and just general discussion forms, and people are constantly still asking about it. It is genuinely a topic that even though it seems like we've talked about it ad nauseum, people still seem to care about. I guess that's sort of the fun of being a Linux user is you get to care about such nitty-gritty things

like your display compositor and SystemD and all that stuff. So I guess that's why we do it. And that concludes the SystemD portion of this show. However, something does tell me we'll probably still be talking about SystemD in 2015. I can't help myself, and it's obviously a huge area of interest for the Linux community. 2015 is going to be a big year for SystemD. 2015 is is going to be a big year for SystemD. 2015 is also going to be a big year for our sponsor, DigitalOcean. And I mean that.

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fast. DigitalOcean.com. Unplug December when you check out. And a big thank you to Digital Ocean for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged program. You guys, I'm looking forward to 2015. I know you guys have something. I can't even say. I can't even say, but let's just say I know some things, and I'm really impressed with what I know. Up next, though, is an interview with a talks developer. This was sent in by quite a bit of you.

Encrypted messaging space is something I'm following really closely myself. I find it to be a fascinating field with a lot of cool things happening right now, but not one that I've really zoned in on as my go-to messaging platform. So when we had this chance to interview a Talks developer, I was really interested in what they had to say. I hope you will be too. Enjoy. So I want to welcome two developers from the Talks project onto the show. Joining us on Mumble right now, we have STQ and iRun Gen2. So I know Talk Started Up is sort of a discussion thread, and I'm told, I think it started on 4chan. And now here we are, we're what, seven, eight months down the road, it's become a very active project. So where is that from where it started versus where it's at today?

Well, Talk Started Up, well, I actually, I had this idea, this very basic idea. And then, well, I was on a thread on IG. Well, that was speaking about how Skype is, well, privacy issues with Skype. privacy issues yeah skype so well i had just well i just decided okay hey let's uh i was actually a bit uh maybe drunk at the moment or something and i said okay okay let's uh let's make a skype replacement so that's that's how it started and then well i was very impressed by the positive response from everyone so i said okay let's let's start writing code let's start planning stuff and well i that's how talk started so it started kind of as a crazy idea that maybe you after you thought about it for a little bit realized this could be a good idea have you worked on this kind of stuff before or something like this before well i played around with some uh like bit torrent dht i did a couple

of scripts to uh like i once made a script to uh find out which uh to try to track everything on the BitTorrent DHT. But, well, there were some little bandwidth issues. I would have needed a big server and something, so the idea kind of died. But that gave me a bit of experience on, like, how peer-to-peer software works and everything. So that's how I am. Well, can you tell me a little bit about, and I guess it's actually pronounced salt,

but the networking and cryptography library that Talks is sitting on primarily, is this the big piece of functionality here? What does this component play? What role does that play? Well, seriously, I love that crypto library. It's very simple to use and everything, and it's very secure. I don't think Tox would have worked without it. I don't think talks would have worked without it.

It's since, well, talks, when talks started, we didn't know what crypto library would use. Right. I mean, that seems like a huge choice to make, right? Yeah. But then someone suggested it in a thread and then I looked at it and I just saw this is perfect it's simple to use it's uh it's fast it's uh it's very secure it protects against all types of uh timing attacks etc so that's uh so we picked that and I started reading a lot okay so how how do I implement this correctly in talks without screwing up things? That was my question because I've heard that I think also the Telegram messenger program uses the Salt library,

but I guess they maybe, I don't know the details, but I guess they've implemented it incorrectly. Have you looked at that situation and tried to kind of balance what they did wrong and adjust accordingly for TOX? Well, Telegram, they don't use the salt library. They use their custom crypto implementation. If they would have used the salt library, their crypto would have been fine. Nobody would be complaining about it. Right. Gotcha. So something that seemed kind of like a big deal, you guys got accepted, the TOX project got accepted into the Google Summer of Code. But you know, a lot of people have asked, is that going to influence the project in any way? What about their independence? What are your thoughts on the Summer of Code and what it means for that aspect of the project?

I'll go ahead and answer this. Sure. Well, I think with Google Summer of Code, we're really going to be able to finish a lot of things that we wouldn't have the time to do that due to our prior commitments we would never be able to do. We would be able to have people who have different skill sets in areas we might not have.

It would be able to help out that way. Okay. And what about this criticism that people have said, oh, well, this is a bad sign. This is about influence. What do you think of that? Is there been communications from Google about suggestions or anything like that? No, they don't do anything like that.

They exist purely to foster the development of open source projects. No secret influences, no link to this secret library, nothing like that. No insert go-to-fail line here. That's good. That's good considering that there's a lot of hopes riding on a secure messenger, and I've got to tell you guys, this is a pretty contested space right now. So I think people are looking for a lot of things to pull out to kind of criticize on. And to that end, I think, and I don't really know if there is something to be worried about

here, but a lot of people have criticized that they started as a threat on 4chan. And have you guys dealt with growing pains as a result of that? Well, we didn't start like that. But as we developed, we got people with skill sets from Reddit and all these areas. And we sort of nurtured. That's exactly. I mean, not to interrupt. I'm sorry. So I've seen this question.

It was sent into our show a few times. And to me, it just seems like these are locations that technical people hang out. True. So 4chan specifically, that little area, a lot of trolling. I think it was pure luck that the people who we have now, that all the skills matched up just perfectly. Yeah, yeah. Well, and I know it's something that's on people's radar,

and it maybe seems like one of those things down the road that it probably won't be as big of a factor. But any other growing pains you guys are seeing as the project is becoming more aware, people are becoming more aware of it? Not really. Well, there's always a bit of issues, but we've dealt with them. Yeah, good. Well, okay. So that's the big picture stuff.

I want to talk a little bit about maybe features and stuff that Tox is hoping to support down the road. What are your plans for... There's three major things I've seen requests from the audience. Conference call setups. Do you guys have any plans to do things like group calls and things like that down the road? Yes. Okay, good.

What about multiple presence? As in I can be logged in on multiple computers and the message goes to all locations. Or maybe I'm on my Android phone and I'm also on my laptop and I want my messages and calls to go to both locations. Is that possible with the security model you're using now? You know, we haven't worked out something like that just yet. We're still working on a lot of our group chats, how we can do audio and video, how we can do things like that. But when the time comes, I know we'll be able to reach that area. I know we'll be able to reach that area.

Yeah, it's possible, but it's later after we've done the TCP stuff, after we've done the group chats and the work. So is that how you're focusing right now? It seems like the talks clients that I've tried are all text chat based. You get that working, and then is the plan to then get the next set of functionality working, and then is the plan to then get the next set of functionality working, and then the next? Yeah, it's how, well, I think it's the best way to develop software, to make a feature, test it correctly, add another, add another, and that's it.

So what's on your immediate list, and then what's on your sort of, after I get this next immediate problem solved, after I get this thing that's bugging me fixed, I want to start working on so what are those two things well we have first the thing that i want to finish first well that i'm working on right now is uh the tcp tcp stuff so that i want to add TCP relay functionality to Tox nodes so that people that are behind bad NATs

can also use Tox. Currently, Tox only works people that can hole punch through their NATs, but that's not everyone. Some people are behind their NATs, but that's not everyone. Some people are behind enterprise NATs, some symmetric NATs that are weird and block certain,

like they only have a maximum number of UDP connections. That can be a problem because, well, TOX needs to connect to a bunch of people. For discovery and whatnot, yeah. Yeah. So, okay, I look at this and I think if Tox was really successful, if you could truly create a Skype replacement that was secure, you would have a system that would be used by journalists, by dissidents, by the paranoid, and by cheaters.

And it would be, these groups of people would fundamentally rely on this technology to be absolutely ironclad solid. Have you considered code audits and maybe at a certain, like, quote-unquote official release point, saying we're going to audit the code have a third party look at the code well yes of course but we want to wait till a lot of our major features are done and talking about what you mentioned earlier we're designing talks to be something that everyone can use someone talking someone somewhere i have no idea what i'm saying right now but long story short,

we want to design something that's so fast, so easy, so smooth that people would use it instead of Skype. I mean, we're not going to truly accomplish our goal unless everyone's using this, unless there's nothing that can be spied on, nothing that can be nuked. Security isn't a selling point for end users, but we want to give it to everyone that's an interesting way to put it

it's definitely for some but for the general user it's not really a big deal the only other question I had sent in from the audience that was kicking around is how do you guys plan to make money and are you going to take donations? no, we might take donations. So, Gentoo's been talking about it a bit. So, right now, all of our expenses, our build systems, everything

comes out of my own pocket, and I haven't really been taking anything in. Well, you're a good man, SDQ. So, have you considered a donation system, or a Kickstarter Kickstarter system or something like that? Can you repeat the question? I couldn't hear you. Are you thinking about... Because the reason I'm asking is we had a few people send in... Longplay wrote in and asked if you guys would... He wants to send you money, but he couldn't find a way to donate.

Are you considering doing a donation model? We might put a donation button on the website yeah that's because the reason i didn't want donations to well as accepting donations at the beginning is well what if uh we we just started and then everything fails and well people are going to be angry and everything. But, well, we've gone a long way from there. So we might put – That's good. It's good. Yeah, you want to make sure you got something that you can show for before you ask people to start taking money.

Well, so I'll open it up to the mumble room and see if there's any questions that the group has. And you guys, if you do, just ping me in the chat room with any questions you have for the folks and we'll we'll get through those and the chat room I'm also checking your questions as as we go but guys I want to thank you for coming on Linux Unplugged it's this project I'm going to be watching you know I'm I'm still really interested in picking the mobile messenger of the future and right nowyter Broadcasting Network really kind of uses Skype a lot for our shows because at the end of the day, it seems to be the sort of the best combination

of deployment and ease of use and actual video and audio quality simultaneously. I'm really excited about the Talks project. We talked about it a little bit this last Sunday on the Linux Action Show. And I demoed a couple of different apps you can use for it. It's early days right now, but I want to encourage you guys to keep going at it, keep working at it, because this is a space that people are going to be more and more interested in over the next couple of years.

Crossroads asks, how does this compare to other chat programs, e.g. BT Chat or Tor Chat? And actually, that's a great question. Have you guys seen the announcement of Tor Chat, And what are your thoughts on that versus Talks? Well, yeah, I can answer. Okay. Well, Tor Chat is, they're going more on the anonymous, well, they want to make an anonymous chat but talks isn't anonymous you connect directly to the people you're speaking to because we want

performance because well streaming high resolution video through Tor well doesn't really work well that's true right yeah that's a great point yeah I hadn't thought about the video aspect of it. And to reiterate further...

Yeah. Go ahead. I think you... I mean, we're trying to design something that everyone can use, not just the paranoid. Well, and to that end, is that why, I mean, I'm seeing a lot of different talks clients. There's not like

one official talks client. I guess it would be conceivable that you could have chat programs like Pidgin out there and others that support talks and TorChat at the same time, right? Yeah, Pidgin, there's a talks plugin in development already, so it already supports talks. Very good. That's very interesting, you guys. And I'm glad you're working on this, to tell you the truth, because one of my predictions for the Linux Action Show for 2014 was that there would be an explosion in secure messaging.

So you guys are right now confirming my prediction. So that's awesome for me. Most definitely. Yeah, I know, right? So you guys, I know you guys probably are not big fans of giving out timelines, but do you have a general big picture timeline or roadmap of when features

will roll out or be available? I can tell you the order at which we're going to roll them out, but timelines are a bit... I'll take that. I'll take order that either you want to roll things out for sure. Well, first of all, we're going to roll out the TCP relays. Then after that, we're going to work on fixing our group chats

and making audio-video work in group chats. And that's the two main... That should take a while because they're two very big features. They're going to need lots of testing and everything. And after that, we're going to concentrate on, well, maybe optimizing code or trying to implement other features like offline messaging and how someone who wants to be logged in to computers, that we might work on that.

It depends on what we feel people want the most. What they're asking for. Yeah. Well, let me ask you this. What if somebody, Dare Devlin is making a great question, making a great point in our chat room. What if you wake up one day, you go to Slashdot or TechMeme

or Reddit or whatever, and you see a top headline, New Secure Messenger Launched Available on Android, iOS, and the Desktop. It's awesome. It's rock solid. And you dig through it. Oh, and you see they're charging for the app. And then you read through the details and you realize, holy crap, they're using talks.

How do you feel about people creating clients or potentially business models on top of a system that you're building today? Well, the core is licensed under the GPL v3, so they can't take the code and not give the source back so well if someone does take it and improves the source and if they make money I don't care if they because they're improving the software so dare devlin I didn't realize you're in here go ahead and did you have more you wanted to add to that dare devlin Sorry, I'm here. Can you hear me? Yeah. Yeah.

So what happened is, the reason I got this question is because I was wondering more, I know it's GPL and people are contributing back, but there's kind of business models that could involve, for example, a company making their own nodes in a way that would allow them to mimic users and i mean depends of course on the intrinsics of the project but then goes to something that is something a little bit deviated from original tax plans and it goes like it uses stock source code it uses all like uh like like uh bitcoin's litecoin that kind of thing? Yeah, kind of, sort of. So it will be with some differences that will make more a company-driven perspective and not actually providing the users direct access.

So what are the measures in place for you to incentivize people to just come to your project instead of just working doing something crazy that goes completely out of town well if if a company does something like that well and users actually use the software from that company that means you're doing something good so that's a win for you. Well, you can always take the code and put it in our project. Right. And, well. So, Josh. It's like SSH.

Go ahead. That's a good point. It's like, okay. Oh, okay. I mean, that's an interesting way to think about it. Yeah, like OpenBSD makes SSH, and they give it away for people to do whatever they want with. Right. Great point. I mean, that's an interesting way to kind of frame that.

Josh, you had a kind of a question more about funding, right? Yes, I did. So you guys talked about maybe monetizing or accepting donations in the future. So what is your opinion on allowing people to back certain features with something like Bounty Source and allow you guys to get paid to implement certain features like group chats and maybe help speed the process along or provide some sort of monetary incentive? hurts people's trust if something doesn't need a timeline. If something looks good, looks like it's easy to do, but it doesn't come up and it ends up taking a lot longer than it should or something. People get disappointed. Well, the main issue is that implementing something is relatively easy. Implementing something that's bug-free and works perfectly, that's hard.

So, well, that's... That's an interesting point. Yeah. It's something to consider, I think, because it's really fascinating. It truly tells you what people's priorities are when they assign a dollar value to it in a way that is so much more tangible than, than emails and bug requests and all these things. When people are actually willing to put money down for something, then you really know it's, it's literally of a value to them. So, but I do understand you don't want to overset expectations and you guys seem to be, you know, walking that line pretty closely. I'm going to take a quick break right here. And when we get back, I want to talk a little bit about maybe your thoughts on the future of mobile for talks.

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Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. And a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Okay, well, before Ubuntu 14.10's release, there was a lot of talk about how boring of a release it might be. I made an offhand comment in the news one episode, and man, oh man, did I get a lot of response. Popey was one of the blokes who felt perhaps my comment needed to be responded to, so he and I had a nice chat about that. comment needed to be responded to. So he and I had a nice chat about that. All right. So I want to move into the topic that was sparked after Sunday's coverage of Ubuntu 14.10.

And before we get into that, so in the Linux Action Show subreddit and in the email, there are a lot of people that apparently decided that I am very biased against Ubuntu. And one of the reasons cited was that I skipped over talking Unity's touch support when we were talking about GNOME 3.14. I just want to clear the ground right now, just quickly mention that was not me sliding Unity at all. That was just me focusing on GNOME 3.14 because we were covering GNOME 3.14. We were not covering what Unity can do. We were covering what GNOME can do. So I just didn't mention it. It doesn't mean I was intentionally, because I don't like it, leaving it out.

It was because I was talking about GNOME and what GNOME was adding and what Wayland was adding. But there is more contention over our coverage of Ubuntu 14.10 itself. It's probably, you know, people hate crickets, I think is what it is. People just hate crickets. I think it is. I think the crickets may have been something to kind of set folks off. I don't know. It's funny.

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

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

But I am impressed with the changes they're making i'm impressed with their project leader obviously we've had him on the show twice in a few weeks and it's in the times of course the second time wasn't really about fedora but uh so it you know it was funny because in that very episode of people saying well chris is such an arch fanboy they were completely negating the fact that we had like a 25 minute interview with the lead of the project of the fedora My point is, it's not a bias towards Arch that influences my reporting on Ubuntu. I don't have any distribution bias at all. That would be ridiculous. The reason I go with Arch is because it does everything I need it to do, and it doesn't feel like a distribution.

It doesn't have politics. It doesn't a distribution. It doesn't have politics. It doesn't have councils. It doesn't have advisory boards. It just is, and you don't have to worry about the politics and the people. It feels just like a meta layer on top of Linux. That's why I like Arch. I could just as easily switch to Fedora next when they've got that rolling. I could see that happening in the next year or so.

I don't have allegiance to any one particular distribution. I do have a bias, though. And that bias is a bias towards winning, people who are doing it right, people who are producing results, people who are coming through on what they say they will do. And as a company, any project doesn't have to be Ubuntu. As any project slides in one direction or the other, my coverage of that project will reflect that slide. So if they say, now I'm sorry, Poby, but let's just say there were supposed to be two phones already in the marketplace. Let's just say Mir was already supposed to ship.

Let's say that Ubuntu 14.10 is the most boring Linux desktop release we've ever seen from the most important distro maker out there. Let's accept all of these things as genuine facts, unfortunate facts, but let's just accept those things. Me reporting on that does not mean I have an Ubuntu agenda where I want to tear Ubuntu down. It's me reporting on the state of Ubuntu, one of the more important distributions in the market.

It's not coming from an Arch influence. It's coming from following these things and maybe a little disappointment. Does that make sense? Matt, can you fill in, am I missing any gaps here? I think you pretty much hit it. I mean, it's basically different. It really boils down to different strokes for different folks, I think, is just where it is at the end of the day. And for you, you have a specific set of expectations that one distro or another may or may not be meeting. And that could, of course, change over time. I think what I'm trying to get to is it feels like the conversation – I don't know if poisoned is the right word or derailed, but –

Derailed's right. This latching on to, oh, well, he's just saying that because he's a fanboy. Or Chris is too biased by Arch to cover it. Just me saying that out loud sounds ridiculous and childish. I would, the concept that I would have some sort of allegiance to some Linux distribution that would influence my coverage of it is ridiculous. What I will do is identify a Linux distribution that does something interesting. And if they're doing that something better than everybody else is, I might suggest those other distributions try to adopt some of those things.

But that doesn't make them invalid. I've used every distribution out there. I also don't report much on Mandriva, do I? That doesn't mean I have an anti-Mandriva bias. It just means they're not really moving the needle much these days, so they don't really work their way up into the coverage very often well i think it's also worth mentioning someone will undoubtedly point out okay then why are why do we does it appear that we quote unquote rip on a boon too but not a mandriva and my response to that would be simply because we have

a set of expectations for this particular distro one that we've had a lot of great experiences with and we just simply want to see certain things addressed. And that's not happening. I'm speaking for myself. Ubuntu's relevance in the marketplace makes it more likely to receive criticism. And it also makes it more likely to receive praise and hype. I mean, there's two sides to that coin. Absolutely.

Higher expectations. And so, like, in the chat room, it's pointing out, why do we dog on Mirror and not Waylon? Well, actually, I don't really think we dog on Mirror. In fact, if you trace the mirror in the last. Well, no. But if you trace the history of our show back when mirror was announced, we were some of the biggest defenders of, hey, let him try it. Let him give give him space and let him do something. And we took so much shit for that. I dressed up in a monkey suit. Exactly. Exactly. I brought the monkey suit to bed. We were there saying, let him give him a shot.

And the thing is, it's not that we don't want them to still have a shot. It's just the fundamental fact is we're still waiting. That was a long time ago. That's fine. These things take time. But results at the end of the day are what we have to report on. That's what we have here to talk about. That's what the discussion is about.

That's the reality. And so when OMG Ubuntu is in bold and italic saying there's no new features, not even a new wallpaper, what is the Linux Action Show supposed to say? What dick am I supposed to suck to make all of you happy? Because there is no dick I can find. Holy shit. Pretty much. Right? I mean,. Holy shit. Pretty much. Right? I mean, seriously.

Yeah. I mean, so we are working right now on a different approach to our Ubuntu reviews that I think, it was producer Eric's idea, and I think it's a really solid idea

that'll make our Ubuntu 14.10 reviews extremely interesting. But it is requiring a completely reformulation of the way we approach a Linux distribution because we have to find something to talk about to talk about. Otherwise, we just wouldn't review it, and that doesn't seem like a good option either. I have covered this distribution for a long time, and I've never been at a point where I've literally had no idea what to say other than bad things. So we're working on a new formula to come

up, give the re-spin some attention, and really kind of have a nice comprehensive look at it. I'm pretty happy with where we're going with it, but it's required a total adjustment of our approach because of the situation we now find ourselves in. And I feel like there's a lot of energy being put in by our community. There's about five threads in the Linux Action Show subreddit right now, if you count threads that have also devolved into this topic.

So there's two or three primary threads and one or two that have devolved into this topic. Currently live in the Linux Action Show subreddit, claiming that we are so far off base with Ubuntu 14.10 because of our biases and et cetera, et cetera. There's no way for me to tell you this. There's no anti-Ubuntu agenda here. There's no Arch bias here. There is a bias towards winning. There is some Linux elitism because we've been Linux users for a very long time

and we start to know when something smells like shit and we start to know when something's winning and we call it like it is. I will grant you those things. Bias towards winning and an elitism that isn't Arch elitism, it's just a Linux user elitism. It's just there. Because honestly, after you see enough of this crap you start to tell people get off your lawn it's not a function of being uh against ubuntu it's just calling a spade a

spade or whatever the saying is i don't even know it's just that's what that's where we're at right now and i i want to address this because i'm seeing there's a lot of energy being put into this so here's a great and there's some great posts I mean like a lot of thought is being put into this stuff but it's kind of it's kind of misguided in the sense that the trouble is we we will continue to say if something's bad we will I believe it is our responsibility if something isn't going right. We cannot sit here on this show. It is the number one watch Linux media. I cannot sit on that show and say something is great when it's not great. It is our responsibility in any way we can to help these

things move along in the right direction. If that's just our voice that's just echoing the thought of some users, that's fine. If other projects watch this stuff and go, hmm, maybe we should rethink this. That's great. It doesn't really matter, but we have to be genuine to what we believe. And you have to understand that it's not about us going after Shuttleworth or making Popey cry or anything like that.

Because at the end of the day, if you watch the show long enough, you will know that if they start producing results, if in 2015 we start seeing several great phone models come out, and it's kind of great, and down the road, Unity 8's got its bugs worked out, and it's great, and Mirrors. We will be beyond elated to cover that on the show. I love covering stuff that rocks under Linux.

That's why the word action is in the Linux Action Show. We like covering the stuff that kicks the most ass word action is in the Linux Action Show. We like covering the stuff that kicks the most ass every single week in Linux and open source. I will be the happiest person. Trust me. Nobody will be happier than Chris because it'll be great content for the Linux Action Show when they have something that we all love. Go ahead, Popey. You got your mic open. You might as well go. So's a few things i i didn't know about your review until because i was away at a conference over the weekend and then someone that's fine and then someone pointed it out to me and so i i watched it a bit earlier on

and there's a few things that struck me one was that you kind of missed the fact that we've been saying all through this release that the focus is on phone we've said it over and over again engineering not lost on me it's pretty apparent right but you've waited until beta release before you decide to review it and then say it sucks because of what we've been saying no no no no on the desktop this the desktop. This is specifically why I aired those concerns when we were talking about the beta release, because I want to put all that out on the table, and I don't want it to influence the review.

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

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

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

Right. Well, I think a lot of interesting things have happened in the 10 releases, and shopping lens is obviously the big one. But those were both post-LTS releases. Right. That's my point. They didn't have—yeah, and they didn't have tremendously huge game-changing things in. Are you going back to 6.10? I Right, that's my point. And they didn't have tremendously huge game-changing things in. Are you going back to 6.10? I mean, that's...

Well, that was the first one that came to mind. Because the ones in the middle, the ones after that had Unity, and obviously that's a massive thing for people to talk about. The other thing is, it's not just Ubuntu. Not a lot has changed in Ubuntu, but then there's Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, Mythbunty, Ubuntu Studio.

I agree. That's where the interesting stuff is happening. It's just one distro. It's one flavor of the distro. Oh, now they're just one flavors. Now when that's the only place where the innovation is happening, now Ubuntu is just one of the many flavors. But of course, when all the innovation is happening – It's always been one of the many flavors.

No, of course. Of course, it always – yeah, it's just one of – it's the main dog. And the point is, is all the innovation, all the excitement is happening in all of the other flavors, which worked great for a lot of – I wouldn't say there was a lot of excitement going on in any of the others either. Oh, ouch. To be honest. There's some of them in here, dude. Look at the Matei.

Kubuntu's got Plasma 5 preview, dude. That's great. That's huge. That's not in the archive for the release. That's a preview ISO, isn't it? In the same way that Unity 8 Next is a preview ISO. Also, the Mate project isn't officially in a Ubuntu flavor. It seems like there's a common thread here.

Which is one that I didn't list. My point is... Specifically because it's not an official flavor. So you don't think it's a problem that all of the interesting things are happening in all of the distros based off you? I didn't say that. I said there are other distros, there are other flavors of Ubuntu, and there are interesting things going on there. You only focused on Ubuntu. You didn't mention any of the others.

Because what I was talking about. That's the point I was making. Those others were going to, again, this wasn't a full review. This is an announcement of the Ubuntu 14.10 beta. Right. Well, in fact, Ubuntu doesn't participate in the alphas and betas as much as all the others do. So it would be more interesting to talk about all the others on this particular release. Oh, I like how you're – okay.

Oh, okay. Right. So, Popey, you don't – No, is that not fair to say that these guys are all participating and building up to a beta release? But you don't see the – So it would be good to talk about them? You don't see the justification you're doing here? You don't see how

by, you don't see the deferment that's happening by saying, well, yeah, of course, nothing's happening in Ubuntu, but don't pay attention to main Ubuntu. Don't pay attention to the most important distribution. Don't put attention to the one that has all the people officially working for Canonical on. Pay attention to all the ones based off of us. Pay attention to these guys over here. This is a total

change. No, I'm just saying that these others are just as important as Ubuntu. That's not true at all. That's not true at all. And you know, that's not true at all. No, that is not true. They are very important, but they are not as important as Ubuntu. I don't believe that they're not as important as Ubuntu at all. Oh, come on. Come on. No, I don't. We have an archive that has a variety of desktops, and more than there are flavors. You know, there's lots of other desktops in the archive that are important. In fact, Marte is now in the archive as well.

And they're all important. None of them are. I love all my children. Exactly. I know years ago, KDE felt themselves as the blue-headed stepchild, and that was frustrating because we put a lot of work into all of them. To be far, they are the blue-headed stepchild. I'm just going to put that out there. I'm not a fan. So I think – You're entitled to your opinion, of course.

But it's not an opinion. I mean, mean yes my opinion that it is where the opinion comes in is in my disappointment but the fact of the matter is there really is nothing to talk about right okay but you could argue that that's the same thing with every lts this isn't an lts release no this doesn't have the same package with every every time there's something that the release right after an lts it always happens it's just more refinement to the LTS. Not always. No, that's kind of my point. 10.10, 12.10, 14.10, it's the same. You just listed all the ones where they rolled out major changes to the Unity Dash, including search and privacy features. The ones you just named where there was massive changes. No, the 10.10 was the Dome 2. 1210 was a slight change with adding Amazon Search to it.

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

When you're an LTS, just being an LTS, that's something to talk about. Okay? an LTS, just being an LTS, that's something to talk about. Okay? You guys, and we're getting down into the weeds of what versions of Ubuntu have what features. The important part is, what I want to walk you from is, A, that wasn't a review. Okay? We're going to do something different for the actual review where we'll take a look at the spin. So don't consider that like our final opinion on Ubuntu 14.10.

So don't consider that like our final opinion on Ubuntu 14.10. However, we are at an interesting point in Ubuntu's history right now. We're kind of in the thick of it. And we are documenting what happens while they are making this huge, huge, huge transition. This is what happens right now. We don't know. And we're not casting what's going to happen. We're not projecting what's going to happen. But what we do know is right now what we get.

So what we will get in the long run is potentially a competitive mobile operating system that has some great features that could tie in really nicely with desktops and offer Power Linux users a great experience. But what we have today is not a great experience for Linux Power users today. And that's what we're documenting. power users today. And that's what we're documenting. The fact that we... Because we released 12.10 doesn't make 12.04 instantly... Sorry, 14.10 doesn't make 14.04 instantly obsolete. Actually, I think that's the interesting thing about 14.10 is in a lot of ways, it doesn't change 14.04's relevance at all. You add a few PPAs to 14.04, you don't even have to change anything, right?

Right. And we do hardware enablement kernels and XOR backports to the LTS release. So, yeah. So you could consider 14.10 to be not exciting, not that much going on. So fine. That's happened in the past. We're focused on other stuff. And we'll come back to desktop next release. I kind of feel like, I mean, so why am I getting beat up on for saying that?

I don't know. I was quite surprised myself that people reacted so badly. My only point was that you only focused on Ubuntu and didn't focus on the others. Well, and that was a little slight of hand because I plan to focus more on the respins later and I figured I'd get that criticism out of the way so that way it wasn't in the review. It's all sort of pre-setting up the review. It's me kind of... So some of this was

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

So we got it out right there in the news segment. Now it's done. Now it's sort of like it's setting up the narrative for the review, setting up the expectations, setting up the state of things. I'll tell you what. I'm really looking forward to this review. This sounds awesome. And then we deliver. Well, we'll see. I mean, maybe not.

We'll see. But, you know, so I guess people kind of jump down like our throats for a lot lately whenever we kind of bring up the topic of Ubuntu. And it sort of feels like there's an expectation that we really should only talk about the good stuff. And I could agree there could be more good stuff we talk about. Yeah, but we get grief for that too though. Yeah, exactly. Well, that was the thing. It's like we used to get a ton of grief about that. But this week it was particularly strong.

So I don't know if we've helped. I don't know if we've made any sense in any of this. But I definitely want to tamp down. I find it insulting. I find it personally insulting to be called an Arch fanboy because it implies that I am so simple-minded that my preference for one distribution over another would somehow infect how I think about everything in my life.

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

And when we had GNOME as a desktop, I think we made exceptions and would pull it in at the last minute. But now GNOME isn't our default desktop. So should we bust a gut to get GNOME in there for the final release when it isn't even our default desktop? I agree. And the fact that there is a pretty good PPA system in place where you can grab it. The reason why, and I don't think I said this in the show, but the reason why I would love to see it, just as a personal preference,

is A, it would definitely make Ubuntu feel much more like a contender for me to use as my daily driver. But there's Ubuntu Gnome Edition. But also, it just kind of seems like maybe while Unity isn't seeing a lot of stuff, while we're just going, you know, just small bug fixes here and there, wouldn't it be really cool if there was a, you know, a very fresh being worked on desktop available to me to choose from? And that would be GNOME 3.14.

And to be honest with you, I honestly think a lot of Linux users are going to install Fedora 21 because it'll be one of the first distros that does GNOME 3.14 out of the box, and they'll install it just for that reason alone. And so it would just be a nice feather in Ubuntu 14.10's cap if it could be a great way to get GNOME 3.14 right out of the box. That's why I kind of brought it up because I think that would be a great combo while Unity's kind of on the shelf but I understand you know release schedules and what not that's just how it goes and the PPA solved that

that's fine. Chatroom mentions you know maybe it's not what we're talking but maybe it's how it's brought up I think maybe that's potentially true but at the end of the day you have to understand that we have to provide some level of entertainment too so there has to be something to engage people there has to be something that makes people really feel passionate

and want to you know engage with us because sometimes uh if you just keep it really dry and boring people get bored and they tune out so sometimes it might be if it's presented in a certain way that you find offensive consider that maybe it's being presented in a certain way to grab attention well and for the love of God, people, stop being so friggin' sensitive. I mean, that's my big thing. First and foremost, I recommend Ubuntu to everybody. I do. And I rip on them hard because I have high expectations.

Everyone I know that's recently switched to Linux is using Ubuntu, and I will continue to do so because it's a good distro. I will also continue to rip on it because I care. I'll throw this in for you, Chris. Today I installed Fedora 21, Fedora 20, and Antegos. Good on you.

What possessed you to do such a thing? You'll find out later. Oh, okay. A little mystery. So I don't know. I don't know if we're going to to resolve this because it's such a fundamental. I understand, you know, you guys are really passionate about some of these projects. Some of you don't just contribute, you know, your your voice, but you also contribute your time and your code.

And I don't I don't want to discourage anybody from volunteering on any open source project they're into. And I hope I hope you will maybe consider just stick with us for a little bit and consider that our opinions are not, I think it's a benefit to be somebody who constantly re-evaluates the way they think about things and their opinions of things. And you can see over time those will transition. There's a lot of things over the history of the Linux Action Show where we came down pretty hard on something. And as those things were addressed, I mean, GNOME is gnome is another one gnome 3 oh yeah right i mean no and the reason was is at first gnome 3 was no good it just was no good and it has gotten a lot better and now our our tone our coverage of gnome has changed to reflect that it's it's just kind of natural if you think about it

it's not that weird it just it doesn't it's it just kind of it's not a fanboy thing it's it's just actions I'm teasing it off a lot wouldn't be what are what what process are we about to go through right now right okay so uh 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 14.04, right here on air. That's right. Let's do it.

Right here on air. So this is fun. So I've got my Terminator sessions open, and I've logged into my two DigitalOcean 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 WebSeed torrents, actually make the ISOs from the SquashFS,

add the assets from the official Ubuntu CD releases, and then I'll sync them to my distribution servers. So 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. 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 cloudflare in uh and that just makes sure that the updates go through. And I think we're done. So you do the web. Witnessed 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 UbuntuMate.org slash blog,

the article that you'll see now is the release notes in the article. So UbuntuMate.org slash blog. The article that you'll see now is the release notes and the article. So I'll go to marta.org slash download. Yes, that should read our, I think, because there's 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. Let's stop talking about the future for a second, and let's talk about something I think most desktop Linux users

who bounce around desktop environments have experienced. You ever seen this problem, Matt, where you got an application and it has a little system tray icon, and maybe that particular developer decided, I don't want to implement the app indicator support for Ubuntu. So when you're in Ubuntu's Unity desktop, you don't get an icon up in the right-hand corner. But when you're in KDE, you do get the icon. And no, maybe it's hit and miss.

You know, you've seen this kind of thing, right? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And it's something I've definitely experienced. But it also colors, based on the level of difficulty, which direction I'm going to go through. Sure. Because I've certainly had that experience both in Unity and KDE, less in GNOME. But yeah, it certainly happened.

And see, I feel like I've had more success in almost all of the little tray icons show up in KDE. It's totally hit and miss in Unity. And GNOME's gotten a lot better about it, but it's still hitting, missing GNOME. And this itty-bitty, tiny bit of fragmentation was introduced when a couple of different desktops decided to implement, or really one desktop decided to implement app indicators differently than the other desktops. And even today, years later, we still get that wrong. And let's be clear for what it is. It looks like amateur hour. It looks pathetic. Let's be clear for what it is.

It looks like amateur hour. It looks pathetic. It's something that the Mac OS or Chrome OS or Windows would never get wrong and does not ever get wrong. It looks ridiculous. And I think we have to be clear when we're having this conversation that this type of little itty-bitty fragmentation has much wider ramifications than how people appreciate and experience a desktop. And this, as I'm going to use this example, because it's something we can all relate to, and then we're going to look at the larger ramifications of the fragmentation at the display server level. But what I want us all to think about as we are moving forward in this conversation is

look at the future directory of Linux, of desktop Linux, quote unquote, desktop Linux competition, because it's not Windows. It might be Windows today. It might be Windows for the next few years. But five, 10 years down the road, on the high end, it's not Windows. It might be Windows today. It might be Windows for the next few years. But five, 10 years down the road, on the high end, it's Mac OS X. On the low end, it's Chrome OS and Android. And those desktops would never be caught dead

with that kind of amateur hour implementation. That was not going to happen. And that is our competition. If you look at the forward trajectory of the desktop market, that's who we're competing against. And those platforms, specifically Android, Chrome OS, and Mac OS X, already have a worldwide distribution

system with massive amounts of momentum behind them. They have stores in almost every country around the world. You can order online. They have a brand image around them. And that's what future Linux is going to be competing with. That's what we're competing with, and we are not even bringing our A game. We're not even doing a very good job with our current setup. And now we're about to introduce fragmentation at the core level of the desktop that we have, A, never had fragmentation before, and B, are fundamentally under-resourced to properly develop it as it is. The X team already split to have one team work on X11 and one team work on Wayland.

Well, think about this. What if Ubuntu, in some parallel universe, had decided to go with Wayland? That would mean millions of more users banging on Wayland. That would mean more bug fixes, more refinement at a higher pace to Wayland, making that core part of the Linux desktop experience

more refined, more tested, more performant. All of these things that matter, especially as game developers are moving over to Linux. But instead, we are splitting our resources, we are splitting our attention, we are splitting our testing, we're splitting our development time. And at the same time, we're introducing all kinds of fragmentations that developers are going to have to account for. Because here's how humans work, right? You're going to have your distribution, you're going to develop on that. It's either going to be a Wayland-based distribution or a Mir-based distribution. And whatever it is, that's the one you're going to properly test on because that's the one you use. And that's the one that the features are going to work correctly on. When I go to the next track in Clementine, whichever

distro display server the Clementine developer is using for, that's the one I need to use if I want the next track on-screen notification. And that's even more amateur hour. We are introducing a level of fragmentation at the core of Linux that will mean that applications are even more hit and miss now in what they feature. Does this application have a screenshot button? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. Depends on what desktop you're on.

Do you get an on-screen display? Maybe you do, maybe you don't. And here's another reason why you need to care. Because if you only want to use Unity for the rest of your life, then Mirror's going to work great for you. But if you ever want to use Ubuntu with another distribution, well, you better learn how to install Wayland. You better figure out, this is going to be an explosion in blog posts on how to load Wayland on Ubuntu desktops.

Because everybody out there that wants to use anything but Unity ever is going to need to learn how to install Wayland on their Ubuntu machine. And that's another reason why you should care. The reasons stack up. on their Ubuntu machine. And that's another reason why you should care. The reasons stack up. And these very issues, these fundamental issues, are exactly the kind of thing that affect users.

So while I might not care if it's Mirror Wayland, I sure as hell care if my application doesn't work correctly. I sure as hell care if I have to spend an hour figuring out how to install Wayland on my Ubuntu install, so that way I can try out GNOME 3 whatever. It does absolutely affect users. It fundamentally affects users. I think it also slows down adoption in a very serious way because I think over time – Yeah, and that's the piece that I see the bigger – because at the end of the day, granted, I fall back to my old the market will sort it out, and it will.

But we shouldn't have to sort it out in the first place. I mean that's the big piece of it right there is that we're spending unneeded time sorting this out when it shouldn't have been an issue in the first place at all right and it's gonna get sorted but it's gonna be like a 10-year process and developers are always like oh linux is too fragmented i don't know what i should target this just changes the equation even more uh you look at how 3d games capture the mouse pointer that's going to be different between desktops or display environments that's going to game developers are going to have to think about this kind of stuff. And the other thing is, you know, from my old contracting background, and Aaron touches on this in his post, and I thought it was really well done. He says, think about it from an IT support perspective,

right? You already get people like, I had several clients that had Linux on the desktop. And, you know, the question, the problems would always arise if they one person was on one distro and another person was another distro. One person would have something work. Another person wouldn't. And then it would be, oh, well, you need the build utils. Well, what's that called on Fedora? What's that called on Ubuntu? I mean, it's already the diversity that we have there, while in some ways it strengthens and empowers Linux. It also, from a support standpoint, is already too complicated. Well, that's what's just going to happen when the display server changes.

Currently, as Aaron writes, guides and manuals covering Linux can assume that X.org is running and other troubleshooting tips with that assumption can be in place. This is also one reason why the Linux world is standardizing on systemd is such a good thing. Support will become easier

when we don't have to ask, are you using system with system5 in it, system 7 in it, systemd, upstart? You just have to start troubleshooting at that level. Multiple display systems will produce a similar result. In commercial settings, this also translates to more cost, particularly to companies who provide professional IT support for companies running desktop systems. Does this matter to users?

Well, it means less clear documentation, more difficult support for Linux, and higher commercial support costs. So yes, I would argue that matters to users. And man, did that resonate with me because I have been, I have watched Linux go from the joke when I recommend it to, yeah, let's implement Linux, right?

And I have been advocating the deployment of Linux in businesses for years. And I was already feeling the pushback from like my doctor clients all wanted Macs. All my doctors wanted to get Macs. And I really – it is – as soon as that support argument is brought up, my arguments are completely deflated because how do you compete with Apple stores everywhere? How do you compete with a warranty in writing and a system that's honestly less of a moving target? It's really hard for me to fight against that. It's a unified experience that – even if we go system D, we go Wayland, we go the whole thing.

We still don't have a unified experience. We don't at any level. We're not even near that. It's happening at a time where we could be coalescing around Wayland. We could be coalescing around system D. And these are major coalitions that could be happening. Exactly. And he says – go ahead.

I was going to say if they get those two and they get the packaging figured out, Bob's your uncle. You're good. Those three things together would do wonders. Aaron points out this matters to display systems. One thing free software does not have is enough of its graphic developers. With X.org, they're exactly one place you could contribute to if you wanted to push forward the display stack on a free software operating system, such as Linux. Then Mir came along and introduced a split in the developer community, which means fewer human resources applied to a topic that

really needs every single pair of hands we have. Instead of one system that is as good as we can make it, we'll end up with a slower development of two systems with the risk of more of them being less than great. And I think this part could be argued because you could say good competition spurs good innovation. But at the same time, if you're familiar with the Core X development, you know how bad that situation is and how much we do need all hands on deck for that kind of thing. And Aaron points that this is obviously no minor task. Mirror was originally promised to be the display system of choice in desktop Ubuntu in 2013.10. Then it was pushed back to 2014.04. And now it's pushed out to 2016.04. This is not

a trivial sort of project and making it harder by limiting human resources available is unwise. And I think what we fall back on too often, and I think something we can chant, there's a couple of things we chant a lot in the Linux community. Well, yeah, maybe KD isn't making you happy. But you know what? It's great because you got choice.

Well, that choice is not all that great if none of the choices are awesome. So, but you know, Saigo says he's hopeful. He says, I do hold out hope. The free software community is speaking with a singular voice. And that voice is saying, after X, it's Wayland. Wayland itself is still being worked on and has reached a level of maturity that allows real world use. Several of the major

desktop products are well on their way of supporting it as a first class option, including Plasma by KDE, Gnome Shell, and Enlightenment. All the major toolkits upstream have support for Wayland today, and Wayland has the broadest driver support next only to X itself. So that's a good point to be made. So he's a little hopeful. And he goes on to say the MIR team keeps bringing up these topics, although so does the KDE team. What's up? But he says maybe they need to defend their position.

So does the KDE team. I can emphasize with how they – I don't want to repeat what he's saying here. But what he says is, sure. I can emphasize that they are working on something they truly believe in in and they're being told it's the wrong thing to do. He says, I feel it is their right to develop mirror at their heart's content and I cheer their moxie. Similarly, it is our right as developers and users to choose what to support and what not to. Such decision making is aided by having an accurate and complete information. And it's with that goal in mind that I wrote the post above.

having an accurate and complete information. And it's with that goal in mind that I wrote the post above. And I thought this was a great post because I think what we are entering into is an era of unprecedented fragmentation in the graphical space for Linux. And I want to reel it back in here because I'm pretty upset about this, the more I think about this, because what I see this potentially as is I see this as, I don't want to use the words i'm thinking of but the this is a politically correct version maybe well it is it is hobbling desktop applications in order to push forward the ubuntu agenda because i don't believe we can we have already

seen unity itself introduce a level of fragmentation that is below commercial desktops, that would be intolerable for commercial desktops. We have already seen the play out of that. So when you introduce some fundamental stuff at the display server level, you either have two options as a developer. You try to target both main display servers, and one of those targets is probably not going to be as optimal as the other, or you simply ignore one altogether. In either scenario, users lose. So if you don't care about what display server you're using, then you probably ought to stop using Linux, because at the end of the day, this is going to fundamentally change how the application landscape looks on Linux. And even if it is just one application has an on-screen display on one display server and doesn't on the other, that is enough to have me upset because that is unacceptable.

It is not good enough. And I want the most kick-ass display server possible. We have the most kick-ass kernel possible. How about we get the rest of the stack as kick-ass as we can? And to sabotage a display server like this for one company's personal gain in a mobile market that is not likely to be tremendously successful anyways feels awfully selfish to me right now. Well, I honestly – and I think even Valve will be included in this. I don't think anyone is going to give a ripping rat's butt about Mirror one way or the other going forward. I really don't. I think just from the backyard developer guy who's doing this in his boxer shorts down to the multibillion-dollar corporation, I don't – I think they're going to look at this fundamentally and be like, honestly, I'm going to go whichever way the community is going, whichever way the video card vendors are going, whichever way – direction they're headed.

Basically, it's a numbers game, and so I think this potentially – I'm hoping I'm right on this – that this could work itself out fairly early on. I'm hoping. The more I think about it, the more I think that it's – Well, that's a good point. Look. I hope so. I mean it's definitely early days, and I think something I wanted to kind of kick around to the mumble room is maybe abstraction can solve it because we're all looking at this with today's set of problems and today's set of tools to solve this problem. Sure.

And I think also something that Martin and Aaron were trying to make the push is developers are users too. And in fact, I think developers make up a good user base of Linux, right? I think that's probably who a lot of the users are, are developers. So by impacting developers, you are impacting the users of Linux. And I think that's a segment that's going to continue to outgrow any other segment of Linux usage. But I don't know, anybody in the Mble room want to take a first shot at this? Is this a problem that future Chris and Matt aren't even going to have to worry about?

Can I ask you a question, Chris? Go for it, puppy. What's the single most used display server on Linux right now, as in most deployments? Xorg? No. Surface Flinger on Android in way more deployments than anything else. Wayland, MIR, or Xorg? Good trick question, Popey. That was a good one. Surface Flinger is the display server on Android. Nobody seems to have told them that they can't have their own internal project for a display server, which is used on millions of devices. But the difference there… Why do we get that flag? But isn't the difference there…

But that's sort of, in a sense, a whole cloth creation, right? Where it's a whole new ecosystem with a whole new set of apps that are designed for that system. But on the Linux side… Just like Ubuntu phone. Yeah, exactly. If anything, the most biggest problem is it's a whole different paradigm compared to our legacy or at least what everything else has ever been. I mean I think Poby makes a good point, but I think the subtle difference is that you only have to target Surface Flinger on Android. So when you're making your Android apps, it's not really something that even has to be a consideration.

No, you don't. You don't. Because that's abstracted away from you in exactly the same way that Robert and Robert Carr have both blogged about. That stuff is abstracted away from you by the toolkit. You would disagree then with the assertion that Saigo and Martin are making that it's not quite as abstract as everyone would like. No, I'm suggesting that there are certain edge cases where you need to know about the underlying fundamental bits and pieces. And yeah, a screenshot tool is a real easy shooting fish in a barrel, you know, one to pick because it obviously needs interaction with the display

server but there are way more applications out there than there are screenshot tools and there are way more developers out there developing tools with toolkits which will just work on these display servers and won't have this problem so you say the canonical has the amount of influence and power that Google has when it comes to the mobile marketplace is just a little bit of a excessive state. Did I say that? When it comes to comparing Surface Slinger to Mirror, a little bit. All I'm suggesting is that it's entirely possible for someone to come up with a display server on Linux which isn't Wayland and isn't X, and for them to deploy that to a large number of handsets around the world and it work, and for application developers to do their work on top of that and not really care that it's Surface surface fling underneath and not XOR or Wayland or whatever.

So I think the fundamental disagreement I see here is one side thinks that it's really not going to be that big of ramifications for developers or application functionality, and another side seems to disagree with that position. The surface area of mobile is also far smaller in a way that it's very specific. Its kernel is predefined, other than the CyanogenMods or whatever personally built mods that Android has. Otherwise, the desktop is very, very different. There's a lot more ambiguity.

And it's a lot harder to do, which is one of the reasons why MIR hasn't landed in the desktop. Right, and well, it's kind of the point you mentioned that if it comes down to here's a toolkit you can use to build your app and it will guarantee it'll work, that works. But that's not a model that Linux has typically gone with before. I think their argument is no toolkit is actually that comprehensive. There's bugs or there's just gaps in what it's capable of providing that eventually... It'll work in a special case of Unity pretty much only. I think their argument is eventually you have to close a few gaps and when you do that

you've got to write directly to the display server. You can't write to the toolkit. I think the concept of a perfect toolkit is sort of like a dream, but I don't think we've ever in the history of computing of a perfect toolkit is sort of like a dream, but I don't think we've ever in the history of computing achieved the perfect toolkit. No, and I agree. There are going to be holes in every toolkit, and there are bits that we're going to have to do at the plumbing layer and components that we're going to have to provide that won't be provided by Q. We know that, and we're building those as we go.

And, yes, it's a bit of a learning exercise for us as well. But I don't think the criticism is necessary. I don't think it's as warranted as some might think. In some ways, it feels like, okay, right, we've got them to switch to system D. Right, what's next? Oh, yes, me. Let's have a go at them about that.

Let's see if we can get them to change that one now. Right. Yeah, I guess what I'm worried about is I'm worried that wishful thinking is influencing that thinking because in an ideal world, I think that's too ideal. Because in an ideal world, I think that's too ideal. And I think the history of specifically desktop Linux shows us that things are very fluid and things are never quite as great as we want them to be. And the idealism usually gives away a little bit of pragmatism. And I think at the end of the day, there's a lot of bets on things kind of coming together at the right time to make all of this work. at the right time to make all of this work. I think Ubuntu's time is coming to an end soon because, I mean, they've been alienating

and alienating the user base so much over the years with Unity, with Mirror, with... Yeah, I don't know about that. You know, Riley, I hear that a lot, Riley, but the thing is... I haven't seen evidence of it. The thing is you can't discount the massive cloud deployment that Ubuntu has, which will naturally push a lot of developers and sysadmins to want to run Ubuntu. I mean they're doing really great there.

And I think also – I think let's look at it from an alternate perspective. We fast forward three years down the road or 2016 or whatever it is where we have like this great QT based desktop, which I think a lot of us think QT has a strong future ahead of it. You know, maybe this is a little bit further down the road, but it's sitting on top of system D. The only piece that has a lot of questions is how is I think what people are really worried about is the fragmentation being introduced. It's such a critical layer. I mean, we can all argue about package names and how they're different between all distributions or the locations of certain libraries and how they can be different

or where the config goes can be different. But we as a user base and as developers have never had to worry about that display layer. I mean, yeah, it's gotten old and its time has come to be replaced. But at the same time, it has been at least a consistent thing, not just across Linux, but also across Linux and the BSDs. It is a consistent aspect for software development when you're targeting these systems that is now no longer going to be consistent. And I think you cannot understand that. Except for that other platform that you keep forgetting about that has more deployments than all of those. Well, I mean, there is a reality to that. But, you know, I'm very focused on the actual desktop aspect of Linux.

And maybe, you know, down the road, I mean, we're already seeing more and more laptops that are shipping with Android. I just recently saw a post for a full-fledged desktop with a keyboard, mouse, and monitor running Android. So, I mean, you know, it could be a the point now where they're so good that it's these little things that bug us like the indicators and all this kind of stuff. We're really getting to a good point. And if we kind of screw this up, Android and Chrome OS and the Mac are going to eat us alive. It's been a lot of fun having the spirited conversations. I think one of the things I love about Popey's is he's always willing to have a great spirited conversation, and then we have a laugh at the end of it. Thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged.

Linux Unplugged for me over 2014 has changed a bit, and I really like where it's gone. It's become a place to openly talk about issues that we as Linux users experience. It's a place for Linux users to talk about this stuff. It's one part talk show, maybe one part counseling a little bit. And also we get those surprisingly great insights from our mumble room. And having great guests just randomly show up. Join us for a live show sometime, won't you? Our mumble room's always open, we just got to check your mic,

and you can submit topics to our subreddit, linuxactionshow.reddit.com. We'll see you back here on the 30th for some of our virtual lugs 2015 predictions. You can be part of that. Should be a great episode.

Thanks so much, everybody. See you right here next Tuesday. Thank you. you