LINUX Unplugged - Episode 73: Predicting 2015 | LUP 73

Episode Date: December 31, 2014

Our bold predictions for Linux & open source over 2015. Thought provoking, sometimes a bit inspired or maybe just plain wrong, this edition of Unplugged promises to entertain.Plus what goes into making a great & secure messaging system & more!

So it went up on, you know, the Free Software Foundation is doing a big fundraiser right now. They've raised a lot of money, but they're trying to get to $525,000, and they're at $248,000. That's not bad. What? Well, what are they going to do with that money? Well, it's their biggest fundraising event of the year. They have a lot of work to do, and this video makes the case for the work they have to do. This video, Popey.

And the value of this is negative. No, no, the value of this video is not negative. This video that I'm about to play for you will tell you what they're going to do with that money. They're going to explain to you why you want to spend that money. Are you ready? Don't make Ubuntu ask. Are you filling? Are you filling while it downloads? No, it's downloaded now. Here we go.

Ah, okay. Software is all around us us and sometimes inside us but what happens when the tools we use are obeying someone else a tool you control serves your interests but if someone else controls it they serve their own when you can examine tools to see how they work, you're able to learn about them. Even modify them to work differently or better. When you can share a tool and its changes, you help others, and in turn, they help you. In fact, this is how early computing developed.

Everyone could see a program's code, and people shared their work freely to drive its growth. Every user was a potential author. But when companies began to lock source code away, it stopped being possible to participate, or even to know what the code was doing. In response, hackers formed the GNU Project, to create a computer system designed to respect the autonomy of users. They adopted a copy-left maneuver, and built it into the GNU General Public License, a legal structure that preserves user rights.

In ten short years, the free software movement had produced the GNU Linux system, computing that nobody could own but anyone could use. Today it's keeping planes in the air, stocks trading, and the global internet running. We all encounter free software in invisible ways, but software freedom was designed for people. It's about what shape the technology we inhabit will take, and what kind of society we use

our digital powers to build. We've still got work to do. And it's right on the screen. Make the future. And they show up going across the screen a bunch of Linux desktop activities, making art, using some of the best free software out there. And it ends with 30 years of people, of propelling user freedom, the Free Software Foundation. 30 years of propelling user freedom. Join us, contribute, and learn more.

Interestingly, I recognize one of the faces at the very end when it flicks around. It was Jacob Applebaum from the Tool Project in the video they were playing. Yeah. So that's what they want to use the money for. And, you know, you got to kind of applaud. I mean, that's a really well done video. And it does help kind of explain what the idea is here, that there is a new form of expression that is being locked away and the free software foundation wants to free it but they need support to do it hope we don't you sound skeptical about where that money would go well no in the past i've i've been skeptical and that video doesn't

actually say what the money no it doesn't say at all uh and in the past many of the free software foundation campaigns have been highly suspect like like the doing a denial of service attack on Genius Bar people in Apple stores. That was just moronic. And they had a whole load of campaigns against Windows that were just ridiculous. And so there was a lot of negative campaigning about proprietary software, but not enough positive campaigning about the virtues of free software. And I think actually, personally, I think since Matt Lee left, he was behind some of those campaigns. I think they've turned around and they're doing more positive things. Yeah, this seemed more positive.

And, you know, it wraps with a free software user just ripping through a whole bunch of really great free software apps now. Like with that video, what I kind of thought about when I saw that video is, oh, yeah, we do have a ton of really good, like just great apps now. I was talking to Michael Dominick from Coder Radio. I said, so how's your switch to Ubuntu going? And he's like, well, truth be told, Chrome is Chrome and Sublime Text is Sublime Text, and I need a terminal. And it's working pretty well. But for everybody, it's something else.

For him, it's Sublime Text, but for somebody else, it's another application. And there just is more and more of them. For me, a really big change for 2014 is I managed to start editing the clips for Unfilter under Linux and doing it in a way that was better than I could accomplish the same task under OS X. And for me, that was a really, really important moment because for a long time, I've been able to accomplish a lot of the stuff with way more time and frustration under Linux. Now, I'm not talking full editing, but there's a specific use case that I have for clips and Unfilter that is now it's better under Linux and lets me do more stuff thanks to just some of the great apps that are available.

And so I think this video, what they showed there at the end, I was like, oh, yeah, that's awesome. That's great. So watching this back, I'm like, this is a more positive free software foundation. And it made me think more about their larger mission without them having to come and put their larger mission right up in my face hole and saying this is what we're trying to do and i i felt like i don't know i thought it was a good attempt yeah it's a great video it's good uh it doesn't really say anything new to any of us

yeah it's a good way to get the message out to normals yeah and uh it was well produced too which i appreciate yep i'm looking to see. They don't take Bitcoin, though. Sorry, Popey, you're out. Damn it. Yeah. I know you were looking forward to that. But they would take PayPal. Oh, no, never mind.

You can do Bitcoin. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You just can't do it through this campaign. You can just donate. You could donate, of course. Oh, yeah, they've been taking Bitcoin donations for a long time. But if you want to contribute directly to this fundraiser, it doesn't look like you can use Bitcoin.

So, Popey, maybe I can tempt you into Bitcoin. You need to go and look up Coin Corner. Coin Corner? Yeah, it's a Bitcoin exchange in the Isle of Man, which I know is very popular with somebody close to Popey. Oh, oh. That might be the thing. Yeah, so it's a good exchange. Sure, you can also – oh, you buried the lead, Wimpy.

You can also buy and sell Doge. Yeah, and Litecoin as well. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that never, ever provides financial advice. My name is Chris. And my name is Matt. Matt. So episode 73, we're doing it on December 30th, 2014. And last Sunday, we had our chance to look into our action crystal balls

and try to figure out what was going to happen in the world of Linux. A little behind-the-scenes bit of information, though, that people may or may not be aware of, especially if you didn't watch live. That wasn't what we planned on doing that episode. In fact, I think if you check the show notes, you can probably get an idea of what we had planned to cover. But things just sometimes with guests don't work out. And you've got to work with that situation. You've got to move on your feet.

You've got to pivot, as they say. Matt, they say pivot. Pivot. Always pivot. You've got to pivot. And so what Matt and I did is we pivoted and we just kind of came up with our 2015 predictions literally on the fly as the bits were being committed to disk. We hadn't, we didn't, we didn't have a chance to think ahead, really brainstorm, get in our zone. But now here we are, episode 73 of the Linux Unplugged program. We are going to be joined up by our virtual Linux users group, and we are going to

bounce off each other the best set of 2015 predictions you will find anywhere on the Internet for what is going to happen in Linux. And how do I know that? Because I have faith in the people that we have assembled. I have faith, you might say, of the heart. And I think that would probably be the best time to bring in the Mumble Room. Time of appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Yo.

Yo. Greetings, Lou. Room. Yo. Yo. Greetings, Lou. Greetings. I've got faith. Faith of the heart. Really? Nobody got the Enterprise reference? So that happened.

Oh, I totally got it. Yeah, I'm sorry. I know. It's the end. It's the holiday season, man. I can't help it. I'm always dropping Star Trek. Yeah.

So we got it. We got it. I got a new bag of balls that I brought that I'll just pull out a few and rub and get some predictions out of. I know the mumble room's got some. We already blew a few during the pre-show that we didn't mean to because I didn't have the record button going. I blame Wimpy. And so we're going to have a bunch of good ones. And I want to start, though, with some follow-up.

Linux Unplugged shows all about the follow-up, the continuity, if you will. And I got to talk about Telegram. And Matt, I love it because I know you sussed this one out. You saw in the subreddit we were going to have ourselves a bit of a problem with the Telegram app pick. Just a little bit. I basically dropped in and said, hey, guys, don't care. No stickers. I'm good. And I walked away. Just before the S storm starts, I'm just going to lay this out there and I'm out. I'm not're like, I'm not coming back. I'm not coming back in this. And that was wise.

And here's what happened is Chris got all excited about something, and he talked about it, and it was Telegram. And I got so excited about Telegram that I actually even gave out my contact information on Telegram. Oh, that was great. I was like, hey, everybody, let's have fun. Let's try it out. No, no, no. No, it's cool. Is it cool?

Okay. I've enjoyed talking to everybody. It's been great. Really have. Actually, my favorite one so far is I got some snow pictures from Australia. Oh, that's kind of cool. Yeah. Australia's got snow.

I didn't even know that was a thing. And now I've got a picture in Telegram about it. Now, Telegram, for those of you who didn't watch the world's largest Linux podcast, that is a secure instant messaging program that promises the entire world when it comes to security. And Viber kind of does the same thing. If you're familiar with WhatsApp or Hangouts or any of this thing kind of stuff, you get the idea. They each have their varying levels of features, a couple of core fundamentals that we have here. And I'll just super quick because I know I'm retreading ground here. And then we'll get into the Telegram stuff because I think it's important. Our requirements are mobile really has to be just as supported, if not the most supported. And that feels even dirty just saying that because I'm not that guy.

I'm all about the desktop. But the fact is our production team is literally all over the world. And they are oftentimes, the majority of them, or at least a significant portion of them, are only available at that moment via their mobile. So that sort of right there sets our limitations of what our mediums are, what our end devices are for communication. And when you think of mobile, you've got to think about all of the restrictions they're in. They're also, because they're our producers,

they're at fests and conferences. And the network at fests and conferences are notoriously bad, which means connectivity is always in a state of flux. And you need to know if somebody sent a message and received that message. You need to know if somebody sent a message and received that message. You need to know if the service acknowledges that you were able to transmit that message because your connectivity can be so fluctuating. So that's a requirement we have from a messaging program. And then, of course, because it's the Linux Action Show and Linux Unplugged, mandatory, it's got to run on Linux, right?

We've got to be able to have a Linux client. Because some of our back-end staff are on Macs, well, two, you've got to have the Mac client, right? Then, of course, there's going to be some people that need Windows. I don't know. Probably Rotten Corpse wants it on Windows or something. I don't know. How dare you?

You've got to have the Windows client. On top of all of that, then there's the features of that client. Can it send pictures? Pictures are necessary because sometimes we just like to have fun. Sometimes we've got to send a picture of the booth, what it looks like, right? Can it send voice memos? Sometimes that's important because people are driving or you're getting something very complicated and you don't want to type it all out.

So does it do voice back and forth? There's those kinds of things that are critically important. Then you get to stuff like, is it encrypted? Is it private? If you came to me and said, Chris, I believe there was a way that anybody in the Jupiter Broadcasting audience could read any Telegram thread, I almost wouldn't care because there's nothing really in there that's confidential. If I wanted to use a confidential messaging platform, well, I sure as hell wouldn't use somebody else's service, right? I would go fire up my own XMPP server, right?

I would make sure I'm using a fully open source client to use that XMPP server. And to be totally frank, like, if I'm super paranoid, I probably don't even use a computer. Right, Matt? Well, that's just it. I mean, first and foremost, my two rules in life are if it executes code, it can be exploited. And if it's communication besides actually, I don't know, keeping it in your brain, it can be exploited. Same thing applies. I mean, really, I mean, even paper and pen can be exploited. So, I mean, I think a lot of people got to figure out how deep they want to dive into that. And in reality, you know, does it use some

base level encryption? Yeah, sounds like it. Okay, cool. All right, so that is where we're coming at from Telegram, and we got some feedback around Telegram, and a lot of it centers around the encryption that Telegram uses. And Wimpy, I wanted to give you a chance to jump in because I know you know about a contest they have going. Yeah, well, this is the second contest they've run now. So they've put out a $300,000 bounty for somebody that can crack the encryption on Telegram. And every so often they keep bumping the value up.

So it started at $100,000, then it was $200,000, now it's $300,000. And they keep on relaxing the rules of engagement as the bounty goes up, and nobody's broken it yet. So they're obviously fairly confident in their encryption. Challenge accepted. Yeah. Wow. I'm not coming here to advocate for Telegram's encryption one way or the other because, you know, it sounds like from my understanding is they still have the problem where Telegram could hand over keys and a third party could get involved in the conversation, if not for anything else other than monitoring.

Sure. And Beatolf on the subreddit writes in, he says, being the good, being good. Okay, here's Paul. Oh, he's taking a shot at me. I see. He says, being good at going full salesman on things comes with a certain responsibility. Apparently, I'm full salesman on Telegram. If you care about your audience.

Okay. All right. Thanks. All right. How dare you like a product, Chris? What were you thinking? I mean, come on. Touting the security of Telegram should be avoided by all means.

Use it if it fits your needs, but please don't portray Telegram as something vetted and secure. That's doing the audience a disservice. Only half of the equation, the client is open source, and the protocol is full of weirdness and outright flaws. I believe their crypto contest charade was even featured and scoffed at on one of the network's channels a while ago.

Perhaps. Its encryption score is the following table. Oh, then he links to the EFF. He includes the EFF's scorecard of secure messaging clients they did recently. And I'm looking for Telegram on the list right here. If it's so flawed and they've been offering $100,000, $200,000, $300,000, then that's enough motivation for people that know their stuff to break it and claim the prize money.

And that hasn't happened yet. And what I get from these crypto contests, I haven't looked into the crypto in any degree, but they're clearly thinking about cryptography first rather than an afterthought, and it's baked into the product. Yeah. They say Telegram, you know, I'm looking at the scorecard here from the EFF. Has there been a recent code audit? They fail that checkbox. And are past communications secure if your keys are stolen and they don't have that checkbox? I would also add I believe the way Telegram works is at some level they're storing your messages on their server until all of your clients have downloaded it. That's probably something you should be worried about too. all of your clients have downloaded.

That's probably something you should be worried about too. Not only that, but I mean, stepping back to the show and what you actually said about it specifically, I seem to remember the words, not open source, used open protocol, and is reasonably secure. I mean, it was kind of what was implied. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't really under, I mean, it's like, well, okay, so I can't use online banking because that hasn't really been vetted. I sure as hell haven't vetted it.

I can't use anything with any type of SSL because I personally haven't vetted it, and I don't know who does. I mean you can just – it just becomes a really ridiculous argument after a while. Well, I guess that's kind of where I wanted to take this. I don't know. Like if I feature something on the Linux Action Show like Telegram, what is my level of responsibility for that – disclaiming that kind of stuff? The fact that, hey, i really like this product here's the fact that it's open protocol and we're using it i think it's kind of you kind of hit all the nails on the head i think i mean if you really look at it logically i don't understand how um that's unclear i don't recall you saying that this is nsa quality encryption

or you're like you know i mean i guess I'm just confused by the whole thing. Well, what is, here's some good news. And by the way, I will link in the show notes. We've also in the subreddit, you know, there was a link to somebody who takes apart some of the, some of the issues with the protocol, which is totally legit. It's fine. But there, and then somebody also linked, and I meant to grab their name, I'm sorry, a really good stack exchange thread where somebody, Hello World, goes there and really does break down kind of like if you are super, super concerned about really secure chat, perfectly secure chat, here are the things you need to consider.

Some of them are design philosophy things. Some of them are just the way the telegram works. And some of them are perhaps key issues. And I just the way the Telegram works. And some of them are perhaps key issues. And I thought this was a really good article. And last but not least, I also was provided a 100% open source Android client for Telegram in the FDroid marketplace, or whatever you call it. And this is completely GPL2. And it's an open source client. So I guess my take is, it seems like a lot of people have really been enjoying Telegram based on the messages. I think our whole team has pretty much switched over now too, which happens really –

usually when the whole team adopts something like that that fast, it usually is a good sign. I think what people have really liked is it's very clean, and I think, Matt, you kind of like it doesn't have like a Fisher price feel oh man you know i love this i loved it when viber be like hey you know what you need you need a sticker it's three in the morning let me send you a sticker it's like seriously leave you and then you dismiss it and it keeps coming back i don't get that with this i love it they sold me what are you thinking rotten corpse i'll just wanted to point out that when you featured Viber a couple months ago or so, and no one freaked out. But for some reason when you're featuring an alternative that's more open, maybe not open source in the client, but open protocol, and there are clients that use the protocol that are open source that you can easily use. But then people are freaking out about the one that's more open and didn't snap on the one that's completely proprietary.

Yeah, that is interesting. I guess maybe it's because it's more of the category. I don't know. I'm not quite sure. That's a good observation. Wimpy, I know you had a note about an Android client. Yeah, so I had been using WhatsApp for a couple of years and all of our family over our christmas gathering we've all switched over to telegram on our android phones

and we're using telegram uh telegram x for android which is made by delicious which are the same people behind uh the chomp and textra sms. So if you've ever used those, it's a really decent messaging implementation that's familiar to the Chomp and Textra users but uses Telegram instead. No kidding. No kidding. Chomp is awesome. So yeah, now I'm more excited to use that.

Yeah, that is really neat. I did see Telegram X. I did wonder though whether it was just a clone or something to be trusted or not. So that's good that it's been vetted. Thanks. Yeah, I will grab that. I've been pretty impressed overall with the speed of it too. I didn't have a good way to demo it on air on Sunday.

But sometimes when I have these chats going, I've got it on my mobile device and two computers at the same time, and I am blown away. It's not perfect, but a lot of times I send a message and it shows up on all three devices instantaneously. I don't even see how it could transfer the data that fast,

and yet it's there. Now, that said, it's funny because I think sometimes I come to these things and I test them in a way they've never been tested. Like I kind of did this to bit message and now I've done it to myself with telegram where I put myself out there. And so what ends up happening is I just get an S ton of messages. And I think sometimes these messaging systems have never had somebody that has that happen. And so I'm noticing like the desktop client will not show – like if I get, say – like say I have the desktop client open and maybe overnight I get eight new chat sessions start.

And they'll all show up on my smartphone. But when I open up my desktop, I have to close the Telegram desktop client and open it again before the chats show up. And I prefer to reply on the computer. So, yeah. Anyways, there you go. And the last thing I'll say about Telegram is the other thing that's nice is you can give out a user ID instead of your phone number like other messaging programs. And you can integrate it in with Pidgin because they've already written a plug-in for LibPurple. And you can just use your existing desktop messaging client, which is kind of cool. I'm not saying it's the best.

I forget the fact that you can also say that it's a WhatsApp cloud, basically, so it's very easy to show to others because they'll pick it up straight away. Ah, good. Nice. All right. Oh, go ahead. One last.

Yeah. Sorry. I'd also like to add that it's also available for Firefox OS. I just had a look. Yes. Thank you. That's right. I meant to mention that. It is available for Firefox OS. I just had a look. Yes, thank you. That's right. I meant to mention that. It is on Firefox OS as well. So

there you go. Okay, it wouldn't be one last one. Go ahead. This is the last last one. Yeah, what my family liked about it is unlike WhatsApp, they were able to have Telegram on their phones and their tablets and have their entire message history available. So it didn't matter what device they were on, they were able to see all of their messages, receive all of their messages and have their entire message history available. So it didn't matter what device they were on,

they were able to see all of their messages, receive all of their messages and reply. Yeah, that is really nice, especially for the family members that switch to the tablet once they go sit on the couch and watch TV. We have family members, I just noticed when we went over for the holidays, that just have the tablet next to their favorite table that's next to their favorite chair, right?

And when they're watching TV, their favorite tablet comes out. And they sit there and they play on the tablet, I'm guessing. I don't think it ever leaves that spot. And the fact that they often don't have their phone with them when they're sitting there is a big boost for Telegram. So, yeah. It's a big boost for Telegram. Yeah. So, yeah.

And I think overall, the thing to sort of note about this is this is our last episode of 2014, and this is obviously going to be a huge area in 2015. And I hate to be that guy, but this is the post-Snowden – this is one of the butterfly effects of the Edward Snowden leaks. Because everybody's hyper-conscious now about encryption and a little more suspect about encryption when people are saying, well, we have PhDs, so you can trust us. And then people are not trusting them like they used to. So some of the pushback we are seeing about Telegram is, like, totally legit. Like, exactly where our heads should be at now. Because we've just gone through a year of some shit.

And it really has shown us that we need to be a little bit more critical of this stuff. So I'm not begrudging anybody. I just wanted to clarify that this is where we are taking the input on this topic. It's something we're thinking about. I'm not totally sure, though, for us if it matters. So you just have to make those same kind of value decisions yourself. And there you go.

If you're cool with everything we talked about, check out Telegram. I think you'll like it quite a bit. And it looks like a lot of people in the mobile room are using it too. And when we go out to events and stuff, we'll really put it through its paces. Okay.

So I think the real thing to just kind of leave it at is that it's something that we like that serves a purpose for us. That's pretty much where it comes down to. And that doesn't mean that in the future you won't see a segment from us on like an awesome XMPP server setup or something like that. It's just

for us and going out in the field to make these shows for you, that that's what works for us. And it's a huge part of it, really, and it's really hard for me to wrap my head around, is that we needed something that was genuinely mobile first, because so much of our team is on their mobile

and they always have a data connection on their mobile. And when they're at conferences, they're on their mobile. And that was something that once I had made that, as Matt and I like to call it, new term, pivot, once I had made that pivot, I had realized, I've got to rethink the way I'm doing this. And speaking of mobile and rethinking mobile and making sense, Ting.

Go to linux.ting.com right now. Sponsor of the Linux Unplugged show. Linux.ting.com will take $25 off your Ting device if you have a Ting-compatible device. And there's more and more of them. And in February, there'll be even more because Ting's going, GSM. So you got CDMA and GSM. If you have a Ting-compatible device, they're going to give you $25 of credit. That might just pay for your first month.

It often does. It did for me. Linux.ting.com. Go check them out and try out their savings calculator. You plug in your existing information and see how much Ting would make a difference for you. For me, it's a huge difference because it's no contract and no early termination fee. But what I really love, and to be honest, like the no early termination fee thing, like that's nice if you're in a contract. But for me, that doesn't matter.

I'm not going to switch from Ting. Like the no early termination fee is not a big incentive for me anymore. I can totally get like if I'm in the old paradigm like that. Oh, wow. Really? That's great. No ETF? Like how can they even do that?

Well, it turns out they can't, right? It's easy. Now that I'm a Ting customer, it's not the no ETF that keeps, how can they even do that? Well, it turns out they can, right? It's easy. Now that I'm a Ting customer, it's not the no ETF that keeps me around that doesn't make any sense. What keeps me around is that I'm only paying for my daily usage, what I use. So if I make a couple of calls today,

I'll just pay for that. I don't have to have a huge plan. But if I need to make a ton of calls, the plan easily scales, and the pricing makes a ton of sense. Ting just takes your minutes, your messages, and your megabytes. Whatever you use, that's what you have to pay. Well, guess what?

Guess what just happened to me? My Fios box died at my house. My firewall's fine. All of that's fine. The LAN's fine. But literally, the Ethernet port on my Fios box sitting outside in the freezing weather popped last night. Or yesterday. No Internet for Chris.

Well, what would I do? Just call up my cell phone provider and change my data plan for that month? Oh, hello, Mr. Carrier. Yes, I need 10 gigabytes this month and not the regular 2 gigabytes that I... No, dude, I pay for what I use. I just turn on the hotspot tethering, and now the devices in my house connect to my Nexus 5 over the Wi-Fi,

and we're going out over Ting's LTE. I'm paying for my usage, because that's how it should work. It's mobile, it makes sense. They give you tools to watch all of this. You can set alerts with their Android or iOS app, and they have no-hold customer service. They've got a ton of great devices over at the Ting store.

If you want to just grab a GSM SIM, you can, or you can go up and get yourself anything from the latest Android devices to a feature phone. I pulled out this feature phone here, the Kyocera Verve. The Kyocera Verve. It's like, wow, okay, I see a number pad there. Wait, so you mean I use that number pad to make phone calls? That's weird. It's got a camera.

But then check out this badness. Slide down full-quarter keyboard. Yeah, you can still get one. No contract, no early termination fee, $107 when you go to linux.ting.com. Why not? I mean, if you just need a phone, why not, right? All right, here's another example. The iPhone 5S, $315, no contract, right on Ting.

Are my favorite. The HTC One, no contract, $315, no contract, right on Ting. Our my favorite, the HTC One, no contract, $340. Linux.ting.com. And they've got the latest and greatest devices. They've got everything. Linux.ting.com. Go over to Ting, try out the savings calculator, and then just go look at those devices.

And then keep your eye out because in February, Ting's getting even better when they go to GSM. Linux.ting.com and a huge thank you to Ting for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged program. Love you guys. Good stuff. Okay. Can we do just a couple more quick emails before we get to the predictions? Oh, absolutely. Okay, alright, okay.

So, I'm honestly not trying to get us in trouble, but, you know, SnowTrain, great username, writes in and says, why isn't Debian as popular as Ubuntu on LAS? That's a great question. I've been following and loving LAS for some time now. So he probably knows both you and I love Debian, but he says,

it always bothers me that Debian, the mother of so many great Linux distributions, isn't discussed as a primary Linux distro option when you just throw things out there like Arch, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, and so on. What's the deal with that? Thanks for the great year and queue up the good work on last. So what he's saying to us, Matt, is not like, why don't you do more things about Debian, but when you're just saying, hey, try out OpenSUSE, hey, try out Fedora, why isn't Debian in that sentence?

What are your thoughts? Well, for me personally, as a general rule, I found that packaging is generally my first thing I look at. And this is probably all wrong in most people's eyes. But for me, packaging is the first thing I look at when I look at a distro. Arch and Ubuntu nail it. OpenSUSE, you know, they do pretty well thanks to their packaging service and whatnot and all the little goodies they've got going on. But when it comes to Debian, it's kind of hit and miss. If it's not in an existing repo, you're generally going to be hunting down a dev package or adding your own repo, which is a whole other set of issues. I do use Debian on a netbook. I actually have WattOS on a netbook right now.

And it's a great little distro. I love it all day. Would I brag about it or recommend it to people? No. I would recommend it to an advanced user, maybe even an intermediate user, but I wouldn't recommend it casually, just hand and foot. I think also some of it comes from a little bit of bias for me in terms of well, actually, Ninja Aaron said it best. He said, dude,

Linux action show. When does Debian do something exciting? When they do, that's when they cover it. For the most part, Debian just plugs along and keeps going and doing its thing, for which we are all very grateful. On the other hand, it was basically all they talked about in Linux Unplugged this year. And let's not kid ourselves. Debian's fonts. Yikes.

Yeah. So Snowtrain falls up and says, I understand that Debian isn't covered very much by other distros, but he thinks that maybe we should talk more about it, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Slackware as well. So that's fair enough. It is fair. I mean, you know, to get Debian to, I don't know,

to get it to where you really want it, it requires a little nipple rubbing. And it sounds a little weird to say that, but it's true. You've got to kind of massage things out to get everything where you want it. You've got to work with your fonts. You've got to kind of decide on what you want to look where, which desktop, all this stuff.

You know, it's not really an out-of-the-box experience in my opinion. Okay. So last email of the day. And I got the whole mumble room here. I know a lot of us looked at Fedora 21. A lot of people in the chat room have been trying out Fedora 21. The new Anaconda installer isn't new for 21, but it's new-ish. And it's new enough that Erno writes in.

He says, I've been a Linux user since the year 2000. And I can install a Linux system without a problem. I have probably installed hundreds of Linux distros over the years. I've been meaning to try out Fedora, Sabian, and other distros that use the Anaconda installer specifically. As for the life of me, though, I cannot figure out how to use and set up a multi-disk setup in Anaconda. Is it just me, or is the Anaconda installer way too damn complex after the redesign? Thanks. Huh.

What did you think, Matt? Did you find it complex? You know, I was doing just a flat install, so I wasn't doing anything multiple partition. I did the auto thing, too. Yeah. Now, if I was to try that, it would be install, so I wasn't doing anything multiple partition. I did the auto thing too. Yeah. Now, if I was to try that, it would be interesting because I'm pretty sensitive to that. Not because I can't, but because I expect that sort of thing. I expect it to just work well.

I'll have to take a look at it. I did run into a few issues with the partitioner where if I had existing partitions that I wanted totally wiped out, the partitioner's auto-suggestion system would never suggest anything that would wipe data, of course, because it's trying to be safe. So I felt a little inflexible because I said I wanted to have an auto-option that said just use the whole drive.

Anybody in the Mumba room have any thoughts on Anaconda, a rotten corpse? I see you just said something in chat. Go ahead. What do you think about Anaconda? Did you find it complex? Well, I'd say it's probably like a... It's intermediate, but it's more complex than it needs to be. But what you're saying is you don't want none. My Anaconda installer don't want none.

Okay. All right. Thanks. That settles that. All right. I think it's just a transition thing, Erno. It has been a little more complicated than I would like for a while. But at the same time, I still... There's only a few installers I like. The Ubiquiti installer I like quite a bit. The Anaconda installer is okay. I mean, it's just...

Cinchy, yeah. Cinchy? Cinchy's alright, yeah. I didn't even know that's how you say it, but yeah, Cinchy's okay. I think it's Cinchy. I don't know. Cinchy? Oh, that would make sense. It's like a cinch. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. As far as I'm concerned, the best installer is FreeBSD Installer, and all the other players can go home.

All right. So we do have a few things to get into. We have, of course, our predictions, and we have a couple other items to get to in the show. It is the last episode of 2014, and we have our 2015 shenanigans to get into. So before we do that, before we talk about all of that stuff, let's talk about Digital Ocean. That's where I spin up my droplets. I think I probably over 2014, I probably did a total of

15 droplets. I think I've kept three. That's one of the things I love about Digital Ocean, is when something just strikes my fancy. I just go over there and create it because I can get started right away. DigitalOcean is really, really simple and very intuitive. They're dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way for you to spin up a cloud server. You can go over there right now and use our promo code. I mean, this is the last day for you to use it, but it'll work for a little while into January. Don't worry. And it'll give you a $10 credit. It's unplugged December. And you can get started in less than a minute when you go over to DigitalOcean. So think about that.

If you've got an idea, if you start a virtual box on your clunker, I mean, that's going to start in like a minute, right? But you can get a whole sweet rig spun up on DigitalOcean in less than a minute. And you get an amazing interface on top of that. It's such a better way to go. And then when you want to slide it in production, it's so easy to do. So you get started in less than a minute. And pricing plans start only $5 a month. $5. For a Linux rig that you have root access, you can install any package. They've got one-click installations. You're going to get 512 megabytes of RAM, a 20 gigabyteabyte SSD, one CPU and a terabyte of freaking transfer for you, yours

you can have that for $5 a month and DigitalOcean has data center locations in New York, San Francisco Singapore, Amsterdam and a really nice one in London you know as like sponsors they should probably send me to the London data center so I can tell you more about it

they should probably just you know so you might want to put that bug in there. They can run with that if they want to. I'm just an idea guy. But it's the interface. That's what keeps me going back. When I know I got to go do something, it's never like, oh, man, I got to go manage this.

Oh, I got to go take care of this. It's like, let's go. Because it's the DigitalOcean interface that's really, really the sweet thing. It's simple and intuitive, but very powerful. And power users can replicate the interface on a larger scale with DigitalOcean's excellent API. And they have not only great documentation, but a bunch of really good community open source apps that you can use for inspiration or libraries that you can just take advantage of already and save you a ton of the work.

I think one of the coolest things, though, that DigitalOcean has done over sort of the latter half of 2014, and the audience for Jupiter Broadcasting has really played a huge role in this, has been the tutorials at Digital Ocean. They now are getting to the point kind of like where the Arch Wiki is, like when you Google for something, what you find is a Digital Ocean tutorial and an Arch Wiki tutorial on it. And that's the level of quality they're getting to because DigitalOcean is doubling down in this area. They're paying you, a Jupyter Broadcasting listener, to go over that.

You can use the link in our show notes. And there's no gimmick. There's no trick. They just really want good content in their tutorial section, so they will pay you up to $200 for it. They'll have you work with their editor. And this is an area they're investing in because once you get going in under a minute with your droplet, you get something deployed on there with a one-click installation. Maybe the entire Docker setup. Maybe it's the LAMP stack. Maybe it's GitLab. Maybe it's Ghost. I don't know.

Own cloud. I mean, it's so easy to get things going over there. But then if you ever hit a bump, you have those tutorials you can fall back on. But if you're an expert, like I'm not going to run into a bump. I'm an expert. You can still go take advantage of DigitalOcean and write the tutorial and get paid up to $200.

I think it's an area that they've, and they've really, like the hardware is incredibly fast. The bandwidth is tier one bandwidth out of these data centers. The interface is bar none best in the industry, all running on top of Linux, KVM, SSDs,

and they're like, you know what else we need to do? Tutorials. And of course, KVM, SSDs, and they're like, you know what else we need to do? Tutorials. And, of course, sponsor your favorite Linux podcast. DigitalOcean.com, unplugged December when you check out, and a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged program. You guys are firing on all cylinders.

I love their tutorials. I'll tell you, if I had a dollar for every time I came back to those, you'd be like, oh, that's how you do that. Oh, yeah. It's just great. It's good for, I mean, they probably don't want me to say this, but you don't have to. You can just go over there, and they're good for everybody.

They really are. All right, so guess what? 2015, just around the corner, Matt, you and I made our predictions right off the cuff on Sunday's show. But I've been looking forward to hearing what the Bumble Room has. I don't know exactly our best format for this, because I know everybody has a lot of ideas. So, Bumble Room, why don't we use the, you just ping me in the chat room like we normally do. And I'll start with one. And then we'll just get things rolling. Okay. And chat

room, you bang suggest away. That'll be your job. And here is my first 2015 prediction. Hold on, let me get the bell. Hold on, okay. High DPI support becomes a priority, a top priority for at least one desktop project. High DPI support. Because you're going to have things like the Yoga, the MacBook Retina, the 5K iMac, the 4K Dell display. You're going to have a ton of 4K at CES, right? CES is just around. That's one of the things we always have to remember when we do these predictions is we're doing them right before CES. And that is where I think it's going to be like a no-brainer. You have to have high DPI. I think

you're going to have a ton of Windows machines showing high DPI. You got the whole Mac line going high DPI. You're going to have all these. Just like at one point, boom, Secure Boot's here. Now we have to deal with Secure Boot. High DPI is here in 2015. By the end of 2015, we've got it solved. We're super close. GNOME has it very, very close. GNOME is gorgeous on a high DPI display. You open up an application, it totally falls apart.

So there's a big gap still. And it's not, I wouldn't even say it's 80, it's like 80-ish. It's not 85. It's definitely not 90. It's close, and I think we can close the gap in 2015. That right there is my prediction. Wimpy, I know you have something around these lines. Go.

No, I was just querying whether high DPI had actually happened this year with GNOME 3. I don't think so. I think it's a push on high DPI, Cinnamon, Elementary. Does it – I don't think it counts if like – don't think so push on high dpi cinnamon elementary does it does it i don't think it counts if like is uh what no don't call it the chrome but you know the frame around your screen if that's high dpi but every single thing you do on it is not high dpi that's not high dpi support that's like we're close you know don't you think yeah yeah yeah no that's what i was following yeah so catching up with Apple, basically.

Maybe. And also, I think Windows. I think Windows 10 is going to be a big thing. It's going to be showing off at CES, I suspect. Popey, do you have any Ubuntu, maybe Unity 8-related predictions in this range? Yeah, okay. A couple. I think 2015 will be the year Ubuntu switches to a rolling release.

Whoa! Okay. That would be sweet. That would be. How is this done? Is this Ubuntu snappy core kind of rolling release, or is this more like repos and I'm app disk updating all the time? I don't know.

I'm not sure. I think both, think both potentially you know both could happen uh i'd like to see the ability for you to uh separate out the applications from the underlying platform and not have to worry about the underlying platform and not and get your applications delivered whether they're clicks or snappy or debian packages whatever i i would just like you to just keep rolling okay all right so so poppy i think with regards to like um snappy and click packages and having a base on which those applications are installed um that's potentially possible to roll in that model but i can't see any way ubuntu is going to enter a rolling model with its debian packaging not this year no way well let's see yeah i i tell you what popey wager is in the way i wear my pants on my head at the end of 2015 if ubuntu goes to a rolling

release model on the traditional on the traditional of 2015 if Ubuntu goes to a rolling release model on the traditional Debian packages. That's how confident I am that's not going to happen. The pants wager has been made. The end of 2015, Wimpy will wear his pants on his head if Ubuntu does not. Or does. I'm sorry, if Ubuntu does go rolling.

Now, Popey, are you willing to accept this challenge? This is outside of snappy and click packages because on that model it could work, but on the traditional model, no way. And to be clear, you're not requiring... I still think it could work, even with Debian packages, because that's effectively what we're doing right now when you run the development release.

You effectively run the development release, and then every six months take a snapshot, doa release it and then everyone else just carries on but the thing is is that your upstream is debian and ubuntu don't pull everything in that comes from debian because you've so heavily patched an s ton of stuff that you you have to block things and that then prevents other packages being pulled in because that's dependency breakage you would have to sync against debian absolutely no no i don't disagree because well hang on if if we're thinking from um unstable not not testing not we wouldn't have a gigantic yeah sure but but you don't rolling doesn't mean you have to have bleeding edge of everything.

Rolling just means it's rolling and you'll get continuous updates. It doesn't mean Debian experimental. It means constant updates. So you're saying it's rolling as far as Ubuntu could do it. So as the Ubuntu project is ready to push out a package, they push it. But even so, I've experience of this, of working with a truly rolling release distribution and understanding how you have to orchestrate the changes when there's an SO bump in something. And doing that in Ubuntu with all of the patching is just going to be a colossal nightmare.

Really, if Ubuntu pull it off, brilliant. I will wear my pants on my head. But I think with your focus on phones and all the other stuff you're doing, trying to push to a rolling release model is going to be massive burnout and hugely frustrating for everyone that's involved. Two very opposing predictions. Poby, you don't have to accept the pants challenge if you don't want. You're already in pants debt. I am down one pants debt, yeah. I have another one. Okay, go ahead. This one is a little bit curveball.

I predict that in 2015, Amazon will buy Canonical. Whoa! Whoa. Whoa. That's a mind job. What? Yeah. And that actually isn't implausible when you stop and think about it.

I mean, it does kind of make sense. Look at the direction. Oh, my God, it does, right? EC2, the phones. They have a failed mobile product that didn't work out because, honestly, they were trying to use a Google thing on it. And, I mean, yeah, it adds up. It adds up. And it gives them the desktop and server.

Oh, wow. Ubuntu Touch would be an excellent platform for them to deliver a bunch of Prime stuff. They could bring that in. EC2, Ubuntu's already all over EC2. Yep. You got it. Would you think maybe they would want to own one of the biggest technologies on their own cloud platform? It makes sense.

Wow. If we're doing troll predictions, I'll go ahead and say that Arch is going to have a snapshot LTS version. on their own cloud platform? It makes sense. Wow. If we're doing troll predictions, I'll go ahead and say that Arch is going to have a snapshot LTS version. Also not going to happen. Wow. Just to be clear, I don't think either of mine were troll predictions. No, the Amazon thing has some validity to it if you really look at the texture. Yeah, you just blew my mind, Py, and I like it a lot.

You're welcome. That's a good one. I never would have come up with that. If Amazon would buy Canonical, I would switch distributions and buy some stock in Amazon, because I think it's a smart business move, but it's going to destroy your business. Yeah, you know what? In a way, I would seriously be one of the smartest business moves I've ever

seen Amazon make. Well, it makes sense. I mean, if their phone was successful, which it was not, maybe not. But because of that failure, I think that shows them, you know what? We really need someone to come in and fix our britches, essentially. Wow. But would Mark do it, Popey? I don't know. This is just a wild stab in the dark.

I don't have any inside knowledge. I don't know of any is just a wild stab in the dark. I don't have any inside knowledge. I don't know of any plans in this direction or discussion. The only way I could see it happening is if it enabled some kind of big vision or goal. Like if at the end of the day it was maybe – Like a sudden injection of cash in one particular – Right, because it wouldn't have to be like a full-on takeover, right? It could be more like a Zappos purchase. Exactly.

Where, like, they get some money, but Zappos keeps it weird, too. Yep. Right, so I said Amazon will buy Canonical, but I'm willing to accept any kind of, you know, anything where they give us a crap ton of money and, you know, we brand something Amazon thing. I don't know. I'll accept that. You're giving Amazon a lot of credit. But the thing is, the thing that would put Ubuntu in front of them

would be competition in the mobile space but also just watching EC2. I mean, they might want to do that just because of EC2, let alone the mobile stuff and all that. Wow. All right. Okay.

Yikes. All right. So. That's – yikes. All right. So let's make a big gear shift here. Keller, I love your prediction. You think Dev won huge success in 2015? What do you think? I think far from a success. One, you've got – it's very little in the project.

Two, I think everybody is looking forward towards the future. I mean, it's a back step, and I don't think it's a back step that everybody is looking forward towards the future. I mean, it's a back step, and I don't think it's a back step that everybody is going to be willing to adopt. Yeah, I think it'll be a lot of talk, but what do you guys think about the whole SystemD controversy? Is it played out?

I think Dev1 will collapse. It will just fall apart. They're just going to take their money and go at it in the Christmas sales. You think, or fall apart they're just going to take their money and have and go at it in the christmas sales you think or you think they're just going to uh maybe not or you just it'll be like a it'll be well let's shift our expectations and we're just going to keep plugging away at it and it'll become like her it'll be like her there'll be like two two guys left running it and it will it will take forever and nothing will happen hopefully there

is two guys running it two guys from from Italy that have got no experience in running a Debian derivative. So this is going nowhere. Okay, cool it then. So does that mean does the system D stuff kind of die out with them or does this debate continue on? I think everyone accepts pretty much everyone outside that circle of tinfoil hat system D haters. Everyone outside that circle is accepting that this is a way forward for Linux.

You know, even us, you know. It makes sense. Why have this fragmentation or why have this backward step? It makes no sense. Well, it was interesting. I thought one of the people that kind of just sort of put in the best soundbite possible was Mark Shuttleworth when he, you know, when I asked him about the, you know, why SystemD?

I asked him, I said, how can you make the logical justification that you've got to go with SystemD because everybody else is going with SystemD, but yet you can go MIR? And I thought he did a pretty good job of saying, well, look, this is this reason, this is that reason. And he kind of just put the whole thing in, like, basically a 30-second soundbite, which was good. He's quite good at that.

Yeah. So let's talk about – I said Telegram. I know it's a D-bag thing to say, but I said Telegram was a post-Snowden product. I think also some of the stepped-up security audits we've seen, Red Hat and Google have done a ton of auditing of OpenSSL and stuff like that. We saw Shellshock and we saw Heartbleed this year. I feel like one of the things is people realize, oh, crap. We've all been talking about open source code being open, but none of us have really been checking it. And then some even groups formed up to go check the code and like some commercial ones and some private ones.

And so we got a lot of stuff discovered this year. Are we done? Are we through it? Is 2015 going to be a ton of more security issues? What do you think, Matt? I think that – no, I don't think there will be a ton of new security issues. But I do think there's some stuff that we probably haven't really addressed. some stuff that we probably haven't really addressed.

By and large, just in the brick-and-mortar world, we really haven't done squat other than React when it comes to POS systems and things like that, banking networks, just infrastructure stuff in general. I think there's so much, I don't know, less newsworthy stuff that hasn't been touched on yet that we're probably still yet to experience some unfortunate stuff in the long run. So you think Linux will take a few more bruises over 2015?

I think that it will be forced to be vetted a little harder. I think that it will actually become the opposite of that. I would say that you're going to probably see more switching to Linux because of the fact that the existing systems, a lot of them incredibly dated, will be switching that direction. But then because of that, then the focus will be even deeper on Linux because of that point. Yeah, very much so, I would imagine. That actually lends itself to some other things that I think will happen this year,

is more devices and more software will ship with encryption turned on by default. Yeah, I could definitely see that. And you could even maybe see carriers. Like that could even be something like T-Mobile could be the carrier of encryption or something uh wimpy you had a thought on uh security and privacy breaches yeah so um well popey's mic is stuck hold on popey there you go he got it my my predictions uh uh uh historically terrible. So exactly the opposite of anything I predict this evening is likely to happen. But I think that a major cloud service,

so something like Twitter, Facebook, Google, Dropbox, eBay, Amazon, they'll suffer a significant privacy or security breach in 2015 that will change precisely nothing for the average users. I think 2015 will see the passage of CISPA. We won't call it CISPA, but there's already, they're always in the wake of the Sony thing. I've been tracking it for Unfiltered. There is already legislation working its way through the system today. President Obama has already called for legislation.

And it will be a cyber sharing act. It'll be the government needs to share with the private industry, and that'll be how it's pitched. There's too many cyber vulnerabilities that the government knows about. They have all of this advanced monitoring, all of this know-how because they're cyber warriors. But it's the dumb industry, the dumb private sector doesn't know about it. So we can't share with them because of laws, guys. So if we pass these laws, then we can share the super cyber information. What it really is, it'll be the same thing that happened during the Bush era. During the Bush era, we indemnified all the telcos to allow us to install all the NSA taps. This is the same thing.

This is going to be tech company indemnification. You got to be part of the big boy club to get in, but you'll be in, and they'll do some sort of cyber security information sharing after exactly the kind of event that Wimpy is talking about. The only reason why I say that is because there's literally already legislation ready to go, just needing an event to happen. And it just takes an opportunity and it's done. And we'll look at it as sort of like, oh, now hopefully they'll work together.

But in reality, it's just going to be capitalizing on exactly what Wimpy is talking about. Nothing will really change for the end user. I think 2015 is going to be, like 2014 was, boy, they really figured out like cyber, boy, we really ended the year with a cyber boogeyman. So going into 2015, that's going to be a good one. And I think you've nailed it, Wimpy. Unfortunately, I'm a bit of, I know that sounds awful. iMacon, you ever thought about point of sale systems under constant attack over 2015? iMacon, you ever thought about point-of-sale systems under constant attack over 2015? iMacon? No.

Okay. Well, I think that was his thought. Going twice? Yeah. Yeah, there you go. I guess that was kind of his thought. And that's something we followed a lot in TechSnap is the point-of-sale devices. A lot of them still XP.

So hopefully we'll get that sorted out. Well, and even someone like myself who is by no means an expert in any capacity in that area, I would – just looking at it, I'm looking at the reaction to it and the lack of anything happening. I find that interesting. Let's wave our arms around a lot and scream and yell and put it in the news, and then we'll go back to business as usual. Oh, I'm sorry. I thought I'm – he's not even here. Never mind. Wimpy, let's – you know what?

I like the way you're thinking. Let's stop talking about the negative stuff. Let's talk about VR. I've got an Oculus right here. I'm looking at it. What are your predictions for 2015 and virtual reality? You're not going to like it. Oh! Sugar-coated. and I cite the adoption of 3D televisions as reference for that prediction. I think VR is not going to penetrate the consumer market at all, if ever, and it will be the preserve of commercial applications such as digital surgery and things of that nature.

Now, have you ever used an Oculus? Nope. Like I said, everything I say this evening is probably going to be completely wrong, but put yourself out there with some ridiculous predictions. No, if you're just talking 2015, I think I would agree with you. I think the cost is still too high. Over 2014, we talked about it on Tech Talk, and it's really gone nowhere. On Tech Talk today, though, we covered Samsung's attempt.

They licensed Oculus VR technology, and they created about a $100, $200 VR kit that's totally wireless, which is good and bad, but it's totally wireless. You put it on your head. Also, though, it requires a Note 3, specifically a Note 3. And that's like a, you get that on lock, that's like a $700 smartphone. So that's just, the cost is way too, the Oculus DK2, it's totally not ready for average consumers. You know, you got four wires hanging off that thing. You got a monkey with your video settings like an animal.

It's just ridiculous. But, Wimpy, I got to tell you, I feel like in my life there has been a handful of moments where I have seen a technology before I feel like everybody else has seen it and I've gone, this is going to change everything. Like, this is huge. And I feel like when I put that Oculus VR headset on, and I but my whole body thinks I am on a raft in the middle of the ocean chilling. And I seriously had a moment. And I just think that if other people could experience that, it's nothing like 3D. It's nothing like 3D. But you've got to make the picture better right now. Right now the GPUs aren't powerful enough and the gear is too expensive.

Right now the GPUs aren't powerful enough and the gear is too expensive. I think the point about experience is the key point, is that you want to experience these things with other people. And the problem with 3D televisions is that experiencing 3D TV with other people is difficult and expensive. And the same applies to VR. Experiencing VR with other people is difficult and expensive. And I think these are the reasons why it won't be a mess. It's difficult and expensive in person, but it's the exact opposite for a remote experience. Imagine Skype, Oculus VR style. Then it's amazing because you can be in a 3D space and you and I could be looking at

each other right now. you can be in a 3D space and you and I could be looking at each other right now. And that, you know, that, you just think about how that could impact podcasting. Like we, future versions of, you know, Linux Unplugged episode 2000, we could all be sitting at a virtual roundtable having this conversation. Holodeck. Yeah. I don't know.

Well, I think the new VR space is missing two things. One is a good input device. The keyboard doesn't really work when your eyes are covered with this display. There's some really cool new things being developed and worked on. I'm hoping that something really cool is going to come out in 2015. And then once that's done and there's some nice, comfortable input device for VR, all we need is a killer app. Yeah. Maybe, you know, there's… Well, the killer app for previous technologies that have had this problem, this barrier, is basically porn.

That's the killer app that has accelerated HD streaming. Hold on. Do we have a prediction here? Do we have a prediction? Yeah, okay. Well, two related to that. One would be I think the opposite of Wimpy. I think VR will take off, but it will be the low-end Google Cardboard style.

Yeah. And I think that will take off dramatically this year, which will push the higher-end stuff maybe the year after or the year after that. But I think once porn gets into VR, then you'll see a massive uptick in usage. I'm not going to lie. I'm not going to lie. If you came to me and said there was a really good porn app for the Oculus just out of journalistic interest, I would have to check that out so I can report back to you guys.

As far as I know, there is an online streaming service that allows you to upload video online and it shows up. They have a 3D player that if you have an Oculus or the Google Cardboard, you can watch video online in 3D. Alright. I do agree on that.

It looks like, I think Keller also agrees on the input agreement. And I look at it and I think, one thing I'm happy about at this point in 2014 is, you guys know I was pretty ticked off that I bought the Oculus SDK, being told I would have Linux support, and then it got here, and it took them months,

but now the Linux support is here. Now, go figure, now the Linux support is here. I have three monitors hooked up, and I don't have any more room, but I'm going to hand it over to Chase, who's going to be experimenting with it and reporting back soon. I have another prediction I want to make, and I want to get everybody's take on this. I think over 2015, we're going to see a fork of the elementary OS project. I think people like the idea. They like the look of it, but it's moving too slow.

And people want something faster, I think, because we're geeks. We're nerds. And I think maybe it'll either be an internal division of the project, which if that happens, they're tight control over their work. I disagree. Why not just people contribute to elementary? I wish, man. I wish. Because their contributions will be added in two years. Yeah.

And it might not be fast enough for them. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. In order to achieve that level of unification that elementary has, you need that slow development process. I agree. When a new app pops up, it takes a while to refine all the UI elements. So it feels comfortable within the ecosystem of elementary. within the ecosystem of that elementary. So that slow development is the result of other priorities that elementary developers have.

And this is not going to go away with a fork. No, it will. It will, and that fork won't have some of those same values, and that's the very reason why the fork will have a small following but not be as successful. Elementary OS's slowness is actually, in a sense, what makes a difference. But I think that's a dream. I just don't think the average Linux user base is using Linux because they want a slow, stale experience.

They want something new. They want that new code. It doesn't have to be super cutting, but, you know, maybe more than a year old would be good. And so anything that falls below that, I think Linux users get itchy. There already are Linux distros that are Ubuntu-based and still look good and want to have like somewhat

unified look to all the applications, but update faster. There's no need to fork, just switch to a different distro. Oh, hey man, don't tell me. Tell the Dev1 guys. I mean, I'm not saying logic applies. I just think it might happen over 2015. I wouldn't be so...

I'm not going to make a pants bet over this one. You know what? I got a prediction I can make a pants bet about, though. I'll be willing to make a pants bet about this. Okay. All right. You know what? Okay, get ready.

Okay, hold on. I got to ding. I got to ding for the elementary OS. Speaking of Mr. Pajama Pants over here. Yeah. All right. That's the ding for the elementary OS fork prediction. I'm trying to ding.

Maybe I'll find them in editing. I don't know. Later on, so that way when I go play these back. Because we all will have to account for our predictions. All right, so my next prediction. I'm willing to go on the record and make a pants bet about. If I get this wrong for at least an entire segment of the last I will wear my pants on my head

Okay? I don't know when The chat room will have to set the date Are you talking US pants or UK pants? Well, I was thinking US pants would be very funny Because then I have to deal with these long ass pants But if, I mean There's room for negotiation

We'll negotiate But first I'm going to tell you about Linux Academy. Linuxacademy.com. That's the right I'm telling you about Linux Academy right now. Linuxacademy.com slash unplug to get you our special 33% discount. Go over there and check them out. I know.

You're expecting me to talk about New Year's resolutions right now and give you a hard time about how you always want to do something over the New Year's and how you want to get your skills. I'm not going to do that because I think you could use Linux Academy anytime. I don't think it needs to be New Year's. I think sometimes that gets us to think about these kinds of things. But truthfully, I think we've all been thinking about a way to keep our skill set up, a way to check out new technologies without having to go through the entire implementation stack and being guided by experts.

I think we've all thought about that from time to time. Linux Academy is a unique opportunity. First of all, they're sponsors, and you can support our show by checking out our sponsors. Go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. But second of all, and I think this is actually probably the more I probably should have said this one first, but I'm selfish. It's content created by people that genuinely give a shit about this, right? They care about Linux.

They care about OpenStack. They care about all of these fundamental things that they're teaching you about. Unlike all the other online education systems that are these one-size-fits-all, come in, we'll teach you all of these subjects because we bring in all these. It's crap. That's not how it works. You start with a core group of people that really care about Linux and open source and people that are genuine educators that want to spread information

and then people that know how to build all of this and people that know how to create live streams and websites and do the coding. You bring them all together. It's great, too, because there's a sysadmin element because they have labs that auto-spin up. You bring them all together, and that rare thing is Linux Academy. You just do not get this kind of accumulation of all of this talent in one place too often. And it's Linux Academy.

Go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. You'll get step-by-step video courses, downloadable comprehensive study guides. Your courseware comes with its own server. So as you get to a point in the lab, they spin up a server for you. If it's on AWS, don't matter. You pick from seven plus Linux distributions. They'll automatically adjust the courseware to match the Linux distro. If you're hopping around distros like Popey is, you don't have to care.

You just feel good when you choose the Fedora stuff and automatically adjust all the courseware to match Fedora. They're honey badger about that kind of stuff. And you get to keep your progress right in check as you go. So you know right where you're at, how long something's going to take. They've got learning plans too. You're busy? You don't know busy. But I know busy, and let me tell you, I still make Linux Academy work.

I go into Linux Academy. I have a learning plan. I say, Linux Academy, I've got this much time available. I want to learn something. They'll automatically there dynamically generate a courseware for you with little bits of here's how long this is going to take you. They'll send you reminders about quizzes. You can download MP3s. You can check out the live streams of the courseware.

You can ask questions of the educators. They have a community where you can go participate and give you that bump when you fall behind. And they're always adding new content. Puppet, Docker, Vagrant, OpenStack, constantly adding new content. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. Go check them out. Get the 33% discount.

I'm really excited about Linux Academy because I think this kind of niche focus on the technologies that super kick ass that we all care about, that's what it takes to make money. Making that difference is what it takes. And that's what Linux Academy is all about. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. Go check them out. And a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged program. I have been a member the entire time

that they have been a sponsor, and I'm always checking out their new stuff. All right, so continuing on with our 2015 predictions, last year when I was reviewing the Linux Action Show's prediction for 2014, there was one topic that obviously was dominating our mindset, and that was Steam and Steam Machines. It was all about what's Valve going to do? It's going

to change everything. Steam games, oh my gosh, they're going to come to Linux. So I'm going to make my Steam Machine prediction right here. Now, it's hard to say because Valve has already said no Steam Machine business at CES. And so that to me was like, ooh, they're not ready to show us anything. Okay. They're not ready to show Steam Machines at CES. That's probably a bad sign. Plus, nothing ever shipped this year, really. We never really – I mean, one thing that shipped, right, was the Alienware thing that runs Windows.

And we remember how we predicted that would go. Yes, we were correct. Here's my prediction. Gaming convention, though. Yes, exactly. Exactly. What's that called? I'm blanking on the T3. Yeah, no, it's GDC and E3.

Both of them are prime opportunities for a Steam machine to be released. And I think by the time we are doing this episode in 2015, I think there will be a steam machine on the market that we can buy. I don't know. I cannot predict what success is going to be because there's so many variables involved there. But I do want to go out on a limb and say end of 2015, a steam machine that we are at least perhaps somewhat compromising but happy with and if that doesn't happen By january i'll wear pants on my head Well, dog lombardi said valve is planning a large steam machine presence for gdc 2015 which is in march so it could well happen

Yeah, the thing is and I didn't know that but the thing is that I that I I Presence well, that doesn't mean much because we actually had a Steam Machine presence a year ago. Like, we've seen Steam Machines before. Seeing a Steam Machine and then having maybe potentially millions of them in people's living rooms are really two different things. I'm not saying millions, but I'm saying it's available for purchase. but I'm saying it's available for purchase. Since then, the OS has had a lot more of a workout, and they've been delivering updates and getting used to delivering updates,

and more and more games are available. I think something like seven of the top ten games on Steam have Linux versions available for them or something like that. So, I mean, even by then, it'll be even higher. So maybe the market wasn't ready for it last year but it maybe is this year i i agree with you i reckon by the end of the year there will be steam machines on the market keller so i look at the price and i think by the time that steam machines hit the market the ps4 and the xbox one will probably have gone through at least one maybe two more pricing revisions what do you think about the price, Keller? I mean, if you can get decent hardware at a lower price

than what your consoles are, build up the library, you have a good chance to gain the users for the Christmas season. Right now, you're going to that transition phase, building up the library. Now, like I said, again, if you can just

get the cost of hardware down to where it's below the Xbox or the PS4, we can do it. That would be a slam dunk, and it's got a good name recognition already. So it's really about the price. I agree. All right. So that's my Steam Machine prediction. MX or MFoxDog.

MFoxDog? Really? Two Gs? MFoxDog. I know you have a prediction about digital production for 2015. What's that? Well, at the moment, digital production under Linux has gone in leaps and bounds, like with editing and actual animation.

So I believe that in 2015, most production will be either Linux or Apple-based because Apple's are great for design because they're high DPI. That's true. So with Linux and its graphics drivers going really well as well, with CUDA and OCL, it's just becoming more and more efficient to do production work on a Linux box. Yeah. So I believe that the vast majority of digital production will be Linux-based.

I wouldn't say the vast, but I wouldn't be surprised to see more and more. And we might not even hear a lot about it. One of the things I've noticed in our production workflow here at Jupiter Broadcasting is one of the heaviest editing shows for Jupiter Broadcasting is actually Unfilter, which might sound funny at first, but if you think about it, on Unfilter show, one show might have 100 clips in it or 30 clips. There's a huge ass range. And every single one of those clips is edited by hand by me. And 2014 was the year where it became not only faster for me to do it under Linux, but I actually got more features. One of the things is we started adding more video clips to unfilter. And I have been editing all of

those under Linux using a set of tools, most of which I've shared over the year as app picks in Linux Action Show. And that, for me, I guess I need to back up, because what you've got to understand is, for me, it's always been this guilt. Like, oh, I should be editing and producing under Linux, but, oh, my God, it takes so much time, and, oh, my gosh, the tools are not there yet. It just drives me crazy. What I have now with these clips from Unfilter is I've gone from that,

this, oh, what a burden, to, man, you know what? It's faster if I just do this under Linux. It's better. The results are better when I do this under Linux. It is more efficient under Linux now. That is not like, see, that's a big deal

because it's not just like I can do the work under Linux. It turns out better when I do it under Linux. That is not like, see, that's a big deal because it's not just like I can do the work under Linux. It turns out better when I do it under Linux. That is huge for media production for Linux. So if that continues on, if that kind of, you know, one by one,

the little tools, right now it's small tools that I'm chaining together. If that continues on, that progress, ooh, that's going to be awesome. That would be really great. I don't know.

We'll see. 2015, I think it's just going to be a slow, steady march. I don't think you can make any big predictions there. So we've kicked around Ubuntu Touch a little bit. Anybody want to make any specific Ubuntu Touch predictions? We suspect we'll see something from BQ in early 2015. Don't know who's going to be able to get their hands on it, but probably a lot of us. No?

What do you think, Matt? You think a major carrier? You think if you're on a major carrier, you'll be able to use Ubuntu Touch if you want to somehow? So here's how I see the perfect storm playing out. If we can get a major carrier to hurt badly enough to where they're forced to pull their heads out of their butts and look for something new, yes. Then I see a major carrier coming along and saying, OK, clearly we've androided ourselves to death. We need to try something new, fresh. Tap into the army of people that are still rocking flip phones or people that maybe are in the market to change their mobile operating system into something different.

I think it's entirely possible. The key is to which carrier that's going to be, and that's hard to say. Verizon's incredibly stubborn. AT&T, eh, you know, they're kind of head in the clouds. T-Mobile, you know, they might. It's really hard to say for sure, but I think it could happen, but it will take that pain point. Yeah, I would like to just – I guess what I'm looking for is yeah, I guess

it seems the better approach would be then over 2015 is devices carriers have already blessed and then you've reflashed them. That could happen too, but as far as any carrier embracement, they need pain points or they don't care. It's either dollar signs or ow, this hurts. Those are the only two things they understand.

Okay, alright. How are you feeling about firefox os any different i think that's got a real chance of uh seeing adoption in areas that have not really had a lot of uh sense of smartphones before i don't know i see them like on ebay and stuff like this and it's like they're really approachable unlocked price wise i honestly think that someone got their got themselves together and actually gathered up a bunch of these and just started popping them into kiosks somewhere, they would sell these all day long. I really believe that. And I think Ubuntu phones could do the same thing, but again, it's presence. It's presence. Yeah, I find it interesting that I felt like I was more confident to make predictions about Ubuntu Touch at the end of last year than I am of this

year. Yeah, just a lot of unknowns. I mean, it's a great option. It's a great idea. But people need to touch and feel things. They need tactile experience. That needs to happen. Yeah, this year was hard. This year, I really struggled with Android.

I think 2014 became a year where, for me, I became a disenfranchised android user i still have my nexus 5 i'd say android is 70 of the operating system runtime like 70 of my time in os is android i i now fluctuate between ubuntu touch and sailfish os and firefox os um but uh i i just i can't get past the fact that at the end of the day, I enjoy using iOS more. I think iOS is more performant. I think it's simpler for what I need to do. I just need a phone that does text messages and listens to podcasts. That's literally all I need a phone to do.

And so for me, Firefox OS, Sailfish OS, and Ubuntu Touch are very appealing because they essentially could very easily be able to satisfy those needs. Now, it's funny because I'm also the same person where when I go somewhere, my requirements for a smartphone totally change. Now, all of a sudden, it needs to be able to do Waze, right? It needs to be able to do Gmail. That's just it, yeah. Yeah. So it's – I find it – that's what I like about the Nexus 5 is that right now, like, when I become that person, I can use Android. And when I'm the guy that just needs to listen to stuff and make text messages, I can use a different OS.

But I find none of them to be ideal at this point. Yeah, I think anything that can embrace your existing ecosystem has an edge over the other. So obviously Android is the most likely to be embraced ecosystem. I think that's really the main piece of it. For myself, I like to use apps just to run my apps so that I can manage my apps. I live in apps. I think that's really the main piece of it. For myself, I like to use apps just to run my app so that I can manage my apps. I live in apps. I app everything. It's ridiculous. When I dropped iOS years ago, I don't know, $300, $400 of crap. I mean, I lost a fortune. So I'm very sensitive to that ecosystem change. Yep, yep. Great point. And that's a bigger deal than ever

now. And Wimpy, we got to talk about, I mean, I know this is a family-friendly podcast. We've got to talk about the C word, though, convergence. What do you think? Well, I have a prediction about convergence, and that's Canonical's definition or Mark Shuttleworth's definition of convergence. definition of convergence. So right now I've got a Samsung Note 2, which was issued by work, and that's now two years old and it's up for renewal. In terms of the hardware, there is nothing on the market today that is significantly better than this phone that I've got that's two years old. You know, the cameras have got slightly more megapixels. There's a touch more RAM. There's a couple more cores on the

processors. It definitely feels like it's slowed down, though. But there's not much to compel me from a hardware point of view to change the device. I feel the same way about my Nexus 5. I feel the same thing. Because I've got Cyanogen on this phone, from a software point of view, it's perfectly fine. This could march

on for another year quite happily. So my prediction about converged devices, and this is Canonical's definition of convergence where your mobile phone could be your desktop PC, is that this convergence story will be adopted by the big players on the Android platform. the Android platform, and that convergent story of turn your phone into your desktop will drive the next generation of mobile specs on your phone with regards to CPU, GPU, RAM, and storage. Now, when you see this, is it HTC's implementation, Samsung's version of it? Like, is it, like, each? Yeah, each of the, yeah, so the Samsung's HTCs will have their own, you know, Yeah, so the Samsung's HTCs will have their own, you know,

adaption to what happens to your device when you hook it up to a keyboard, mouse, and fixed display. But I think they're all going to move to that convergence story because the only way you can justify all this extra hardware is to make the extra hardware do something. Yeah, I can see that. I think this already, like Google already started making significant moves towards making this happen because as far as I've been able to figure out in the new material design specifications or whatever you call it, they actually included something like Ubuntu has,

which allows the application to scale from, easily scale from a phone size application to a full 69 screen type of application and still be usable. So they're making moves in that direction so but as far as i can tell that that might be a very correct prediction yeah i think it makes a lot of sense too because i think over 2015 will be the year you see 64-bit processors hit all of the of the anything that's considered a modern smartphone over 2015 will point towards the end of 2015 we'll have to have 64-bit i'll make that a prediction because that's going to be a marketing thing, right? And why do you need 64-bit?

Because you need more than 4 gigs of RAM. And why do you need 4 gigs of RAM? Because you want to run desktop applications. It sounds horrible. I mean, we all remember the Atrix. But I also had a client that would love this. I can think of a specific person who was a big hitter for a company, and this would be perfect for him as long as it was rock solid.

Here's where I don't think it's going to be rock solid. Different implementations, like Samsung's. Samsung's going to do horrible at that, right? Yeah. HTC, probably going to do horrible at that. And so maybe, we'll look at this and go, but you know who baked this in at the core level is Ubuntu Touch. Maybe that'll happen, maybe not. Or what's going to happen, likely is apple will come along rip it all off get it right and then nobody will ever talk about anybody else but apples and that'll probably be the way it goes i i can't see apple doing it i'd be surprised if they do and i really hope i really

hope that canonical are in the right place at the right time with Ubuntu Touch and the devices with the specs actually deliver on this. Because for all the people that knock Canonical and Ubuntu Touch, this is proper Linux on a mobile device. And we should all be supporting that endeavor, really. Yeah. Hell yeah. Yeah. I think, boy, that's, you know what? I think you nailed it. I think they're going to have to use Convergence. And, you know, the other thing is they're going to be, I think, boy, that's a... You know what? I think you nailed it. I think they're going to have to use convergence. And, you know, the other thing is, you know they're already looking around for ideas.

They're looking over at Mark Shellworth, and they're thinking, boy, that guy's saying something smart. Maybe we should grab that. And they're going to go do it. I think you nailed that. I'm going to give that a double ding. All right, Keller, you want to close us out on the convergence topic with thoughts about Intel? Well, I mean, for true convergence to happen, we can't have two separate processor lines

to focus on, ARM versus your i86, I mean, x86 line. We're going to have to find a way to get Intel more integrated into the mobile space. Yeah. I mean, they're fiercely working on that. But yeah, you're right. You can already buy Intel phones and tablets. Yeah.

But what's it going to run on? How are they selling? I mean, they're getting closer, though. That's the other thing. You know, Canonical could make a platform and software that runs on both. I mean, Android already does. You can download the same Android app. I mean, they're does. Yeah. You can download the same Android app.

I mean, they're fat binary builds that have x86 code and armhf code inside. But the same thing could happen for pure Linux, like Ubuntu. Yeah, you know, and I wouldn't, my 2015, another maybe just as my final 2015 prediction would be, I don't think Intel is going to make any significant inroads in mobile. Because the reason why I think that is because I've been around longer than five years. And seriously, I've seen Intel talk about this since the 90s, right? It's just around the corner.

It's just around the corner. It's always just around the corner with Intel when it comes to mobile. And I'm not trying to be this guy, but at the same time, you're seeing some amazing ass come out of the ARM shops. It is really going to start kicking their ass. You look at the performance of some of these high-end tablets coming out of NVIDIA and the new iPad 2 Air. These things are crazy. Six-core GPUs and stuff like that. Intel, wake the F up.

The ship is sailing. So they've really got to double down. And I think at the end of the day, it's going to be more solved, like Popey's saying, by things like Dalvik or whatever the hell it's going to be at the time or QML or whatever the hell it's going to be. It's going to be handled on the software side, less on the processor side. And so you'll have devices that are Intel. You'll have devices that are ARM. For two years, I've been predicting the ARM desktop. I'm not going to make it this year, but I'm surprised it doesn't happen.

Interestingly, the Intel-based tablets that are on the market at the moment were subsidized by Intel. Yeah, they were a lot cheaper. Yeah, and I think maybe people will be less reluctant this year to do Intel-based devices, or maybe they'll be more inclined to do it because the way has been proven last year that it is possible to make Intel tablets that survive a decent battery life and are performant and can run all the same applications as well.

I wouldn't put it past Intel to be able to pull it off. This time last year, my dad was looking for a tablet, an Android tablet. And one of the Samsung tablets had an Intel chip in it. And it was significantly cheaper than the Samsung 10.1 ARM box. And I advised my dad not to get the Intel device because I said, you're going to be limited in the apps that are available at this point because it's a fairly new technology and not everyone's adopted it yet. I'd feel a bit differently this year. If it was me spending money on a tablet,

I might seriously think about an Intel tablet because I can hack more with it than I can. My main tablet is an Intel one and it's better than any ARM tablet I've got. I would much, if I was going to buy a tablet, I would much prefer to have an x86 tablet. I want all the things about an ARM tablet, too, though. But that's just me and you guys. We prefer x86 because it's just easier to load anything we want on it, A. But B, we prefer it because it's x86 and it runs our stuff. Consumers don't give a crap about that, though.

They don't give a crap. I actually want an ARM laptop, though. I'm surprised. I mean, there are some out there. I'm honestly surprised we haven't seen an Android. How come some major OEM hasn't released an Android-based laptop in the U.S.? I think there's some in Asia. That's true.

Google have stamped on a few people that have done this, haven't they? Oh, okay. Chrome OS. There is Chrome OS ARM laptop. Yeah, Chrome OS is going to have a good year over 2015, I think. For some reason, the new Samsung Chromebooks are hard to get in Canada, and this is the only reason why I don't have an ARM laptop yet. Those of you who are on Google Plus today may have spotted that a Google intern,

now with, I guess, potentially Google blessing, I'm trying to find the post on Google Plus right now, which never happens for me. I shared it earlier. Oh, you did? Oh, okay. All right, I'll go search for you. So you know what I'm talking about then, that there is a crouton in a window now. Yeah, here it is right here. Yeah. Oh, weird.

Yeah, so a Google intern has added support to run crouton in a Chrome OS window. Thanks to 447 lines of code, fearless people can now run their favorite Linux distributions on their Chrome devices in a window without jumping between terminals. on their Chrome devices in a window without jumping between terminals. So now Ubuntu or another distro could be essentially like an app on Chrome OS. So part of me thinks that's great, that's awesome, it allows you to switch more easily between the two. And part of me thinks, is this Google doing their best to try and keep you away from the second OS that people are putting on their very cheap Google subsidized Chrome devices in order to keep you in Chrome? I think it has to be that.

Because that's the only thing it does. It doesn't improve performance. It keeps you in Chrome OS, and it makes this a feature of Chrome OS, which is fine for some people. And we shouldn't be doom and gloom about it because you could make the same argument about, you know, OpenOffice and LibreOffice and Git being available for Windows. Oh, let's people stay on Windows. It helps, you know, people make the transition. I think, though, it's going to be, I think it's telling, I think it's telling how 2015 is going to go.

My thoughts. It's going to be interesting. You know, it's going to be one of those things that we're going to have to hold up a stick to see it move, because I don't think it's going to happen quite as quickly as people anticipate. We'll get to the end. Yeah, no, you're right. We'll get to the end, and we'll be like, whoa, whoa, what happened? What happened?

Oh, yeah, that makes sense now. That makes sense. And we could be all wrong about all of this. We may be wrong. You have a chance. Timing and context. You have a chance to prove us wrong. You never know.

You can hold us accountable. You can because now it is documented forever right here on the Linux Unplugged show. So, Matt, if we got it wrong, it's on the record. That's right. You actually got, like, the best record out of all of us, though. So you, like, nailed all of your predictions last year. So I don't even want to. Whatever.

I'm the guy that said the Google public offering thing was a fluke. There's always that classic. You go back far enough, there's a lot of failure. If you'd like to make your prediction, go over to linuxactionshow.reddit.com and leave your feedback in this week's thread, or go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash contact and send yours in, and we might read it on a future show. Don't forget you can join us live on Tuesdays, 2 p.m. Pacific,

over to jblive.tv for that. Go to broadcasting.com slash calendar to get it converted in your local time zone. And last but not least, we'd love to have you join us in that mumble room. It's an open mumble room. You can be part of our virtual lug. You just got to get your mic checked. jblive.tv on a Tuesday. See you back here next week, everybody.

Thanks so much for listening to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. See you next Tuesday. See you back here next week, everybody. Thanks so much for listening to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. See you next Tuesday. Oh, I have a last-minute breaking prediction for myself. I will spend an inappropriate amount of money on Steam games, and my wife will give me a hard time in the month of December in 2015. That's my prediction. Have you checked out the, what was it, Fist of Jesus or something like that? Yeah, I've heard of it. I haven't tried it yet.

It wasn't as good as I had hoped, but there's some other good ones out there. Yeah. Oh, yeah. You got more? You got more? I haven't tried it yet. It wasn't as good as I had hoped, but there are some other good ones out there. Yeah. A couple of things that didn't crop up. Yeah, oh, yeah. You got more? You got more? My prediction is that Sony is going to be hacked and aliens will be blamed for it. Oh, aliens.

All right, all right. Nice, nice. JBTitles.com, everybody bought. Wimpy, did you have more? Well, I didn't have more, but nobody mentioned wearables or Windows 10, which is surprising. I would have thought somebody would have had a prediction about either of those two things. Either we don't give a shit about it and we think it's irrelevant and therefore not discussion worthy or I don't know. I think maybe on wearables, I think yes.

I think on wearables, that is true. I think on Windows 10, we're all a little melancholy because Microsoft's ripping us off and it's probably going to help stop the bleeding a little bit. Yeah. I didn't want to say it, but I've got a horrible feeling that Windows 10 could suck some Linux users back. They weren't good Linux users to begin with then.

Well, no. These are the kind of people that are using Linux because it doesn't cost them anything rather than they you know buy into the culture yep that's very true hmm that's uh yeah the windows 10 and the wearables thing uh yeah and the other thing about it is i think the apple watch probably the most successful and that sucks so bad because it's the most locked in one like you can't use it with your linux desktop you can't lose use it with your android device it's the ipod iphone situation all over again meets watches yeah yeah is windows 10 i'm going to be free yes for consumers so i don't think the

business one will be free though no there's going to be some hobbled version for home users isn't there that's going to be free and And I think that will tempt people back. Well, returning the conversation to wearables, I still think that Pebble is the only smartwatch that I would consider buying. Yeah, that is a good, that one's very compelling. See, for me, it's, I already have to charge my phone every day. I already have to charge my phone every day. I already have to charge my laptop every day. I have to charge my tablet every day.

I don't want to add another device to that list, especially something that I watch used to be something that I didn't have to think about. Yeah, it would just run forever, right? Yeah. Right, but I think the ones that have like a dock that you can put next to your bed and are a bedside clock with an alarm, you know, every time you go to bed, you just take it off, put it in the dock. Yeah, like the Moto, right?

Yeah, that makes it way more compelling for me. Yeah, this is a valid argument, but I don't think you know how often I forget to change my phone and then wake up in the morning with like 5% of the battery left. Oh, I get the same. I get the same. I collect classic digital watches from sort of the 70s and the early 80s. and some of the models from the 70s that have got the lead uh displays oh yeah they they burn the battery really fast in that the battery burns out in about six months which used to be considered a major pain in the ass but against smart watches which at the end of the day you're mostly going to use for telling the time on that you need to charge at least once a day. Look fucking epic.

Hall room is now that's long since gone. So is the foosball table and pinball machine and the, the cocktail arcade cabinets. And I know Popey's got one of those. Popey, you've got bomb Jack, haven't you? You bugger cocktail.

Bomb Jack. Never even heard of that. Oh, bomb Jack is the best arcade game from the 19. Oh, maybe I'm just a slacker. Let me check. Let me see.

Bomb Jack? What is it? I know you do. We've discussed this. Yeah. Bomb Jack is great. Oh, okay. All right.

I'm looking it up right now. It's one of the only games where I had to rotate the screen in my arcade cabinet. I had to pull the screen out, turn it 90 degrees, and put it back. There it is. Cool. Bomb Jack is ace. the sound there it is cool bomb jack is ace and the reason i love bomb jack is um i um i participated in the uh the world arcade games on two occasions and uh the games that i uh i played were bomb jack 1942 and gr kung fu and i was european champion for bomb jack but i did

i didn't get the uh the world title well done sir i see that i get the game this looks fun it's really good yeah a little stressful a little stressful no it looks a little stressful because you only got a limited time to get around and there's a lot of guys in your way and you have to do it in sequence as well that's where you really ramp up your points that's the whole the whole point of the game is learn all the sequences on all of the levels it's great and and the collision detection is just forgiving enough that you can pull off some really tight moves around the enemies. It's a really well-designed game.

And in fact, new into the Android Play Store is Freejack. And Freejack has a free version and a paid version. That's only just turned up, and it's basically a clone of Bombjack. Yes. Freejack has a free version and a paid version. That's only just turned up, and it's basically a clone of Bombjack. So, yeah, give that a go. I have heard of Freejack. Did you guys see about this IDE for GNOME? Did you see this?

Oh, I've been hearing about it. Yeah, Builder, an IDE for GNOME, is doing an Indiegogo project. They've raised $12,000 out of $30,000 so far. GNOME, a modern, elegant desktop with a wide range of applications and high focus on usability. But underneath the surface, GNOME is showing its age. Our developer tools on Linux are from the last decade. Meet Jim.

Jim wants to start contributing to free software. Our community is strong and happy to help. But how should Jim begin writing software? As of today, there are too many tools Jim needs to learn first. Meet Builder, the perfect development environment for Jim. Builder is an idea of mine.

This summer, I quit my job to focus on creating a new IDE from scratch, with everything a developer will look for in a development environment. By integrating GNOME's documentation and platform API with a powerful editor and UI designer, we can make it easy for people like Jim to contribute. With the funds this fundraiser can provide, I will work on Builder full-time. If we reach $30,000, I can work full-time for the next three months and implement Builder's core features. Here's a spotlight of three of them. With global search, you can find and open anything you need. Builder will, as you type,

find files and documentation. This can even be extended by additional search providers in the future. Many free software projects use a combination of tools to manage themselves, known as auto tools. Builder intends to automate the use of these tools. This will make it easy for anyone to build and manage their projects. Builder will have autocompletion for C and C++. If we reach our stretch goal, we'll add support for Vala and Python. To make writing even easier, Builder will also provide auto-indentation and API exploration on the fly. So the idea is, like, if you want to start developing for the Linux desktop,

you know, right now there's not a real clear path you're supposed to take. This is something we've heard about from people that write into Coder Radio. They're like, I've been writing applications for this platform for my entire life. Now I want to write for Linux, and I have no idea where I'm supposed to start. Do you have any advice? And this is kind of like, well, you would idea here, but you point them to this. And to give the project credit, like the guy quit his job in the summer. He's been working on it over the whole summer.

And the budget of $30,000 is also included, like going to conferences to talk about it with people and, you know, doing collaboration and stuff like that. I'm kind of impressed. I think I'm going to back it. I don't know. You're not impressed? Why? You think it's just a text editor? What's the problem?

Do you want all my concerns about this in the form of a list or should I make a presentation? Wow. Just give me your top three. Okay. So, first of all, if you want to contribute to any linux based projects regardless of your skill level if you just want to contribute go to the irc uh channel of that project and tell the guys that you want to contribute that's all you have to do that's antiquated and painful yeah and the thing is they don't know that a they don't know they don't they don't know that and b the

thing is is then what tool you telling them to go use? What tool are they supposed to go use? Because they don't like that. You're playing with a tool. But no, see, the thing is, it's hard for us to understand. We all know there's only one tool. It's Quassel. Well, I was going to say VI.

No, the thing is, you tell them that, and that, to me, makes sense. But then when you tell developers that, that they don't have any familiarity with the linux platform they glaze over there's too many options there's too many choices there's no obvious path no dude it works like this if you want to write for ios or you want to write for android go to this website create an account download this single program and that's all you have to tell the developer and they can go make an app for that platform when they don't have to wait for someone in irc to like answer the question or hopefully get the same answer twice or whatever. Or have a holy war, like, oh, you want to use Eclipse? You should use VI.

No, they just need something, and I totally agree with you. I think it's kind of silly, but when I see it from their perspective, I can see where Builder fills that niche a little bit, and it could, you know, maybe help the developers get started. Okay, but as far as I can tell from the video

and from the description of the project, and this is my second point also, it doesn't really help you. It just, in the search bar, it also searches the documentation. So it's not really that impressive. What you get is this Unity scope style search of everything and really distorted

results because half the time the top result will not be even in the category of what you're looking for. It also has a UI designer as well and a few other like debugger and things like that in there. We have those tools already.

We have something like cute creator which does all of this very nicely but it's not gnome specific and they want something for gnome that's why and they're in nice for c and c sharp with ui designers already well there's a difference between there are and are they good. In the video, it specifically says they want one tool to do it all. Yeah. Another thing is a valid point,

does it exist or is it good? I have no guarantee that what this guy is making is going to be any better. No, that's fair. It may suck toes, but it'd be interesting to see him try. Yeah. What were your thoughts, Wim? The older they become. No, go ahead, Wim.

Chris was talking about building something for Linux. And I don't want to rag on this project because more development tools is a good thing as far as I'm concerned. But this is a development tool that's aimed at building applications for gnome gnome 3 and what popey has described is an sdk uh that's designed to build uh applications for ubuntu uh specifically ubuntu touch and what will become no i think to create yeah yeah so it's going to be you know ub, Ubuntu in the future. No, no, no. Key Creator is independent of us. Well, yeah, I know. But it's Ubuntu, isn't it?

It's about making apps for Ubuntu. You guys need to do a podcast. No, no, no. I have to support Wimpy here. The only time I used Key Creator was to make apps for Ubuntu. No, no, no. It is not an Ubuntu thing, but I think what Wimpy's getting at is that's what Poby wants to see, right?

Yeah, yeah. I mean. No, no, no, no. If I meant to say that, I would have said Ubuntu. I agree. I specifically said Cute Creator because it's already existing. Wimpy's having a go at you, and one that I appreciate. I think we should all just recognize that Klay's the best option.

I am pointing out that Ubuntu is heading down a road of you develop for Ubuntu, you don't develop for Linux, you develop for Ubuntu. And that's no bad thing. That's an admirable objective. It's kind of a commercial objective, and I can understand where those commercial pressures are going to come from. But this is not, neither of these tools are addressing developing for

Linux.