LINUX Unplugged - Episode 75: Obviously Linux's Fault | LUP 75

Episode Date: January 14, 2015

It’s a new year & a new round of Linux bashing. But are some of the criticism corrects? Can we handle a little tough love as a community for the collective good? We debate.Plus the 4 best new Linux distributions to watch in 2015, a MATE love story & an Arch victory.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, so I would give Google Domains a very solid try. I don't think it offers all of the feature sets that something like a hover does, but they do straight-up real simple mail forwarding. You can do that. To configure that, it's very easy to go right in there and set that up. They definitely have made the process of setting your domain name server, pointing it to somebody else's DNS server. So for what I did, for example, process of setting your domain name server, you know, point it to somebody else's DNS server.

So like for what I did, for example, is I registered my domain name and then I went over to DigitalOcean and I got the name server information from DigitalOcean. And it was very easy to plug that into my Google DNS account and point my domain to my droplet. And so now I've got, I had a droplet that I hadn't assigned a domain name to for a long time. I was just going by IP because it was just for me, but now I'm going to share it with Ange, and I wanted something that she could just type in the domain name.

So I thought, okay, it's a good excuse to try out Google Domain. So I went over to Google Domain because it just opened up to the U.S. public today. I bought the domain. The process is very straightforward, just like you'd expect. You essentially search for the domain. You use your Google Wallet account to pay for it. So whatever funding source you have for, like for the Play Store is the funding source you'll use to buy the domain. Once that's set

up, you go in there. It's very simple, like five-button interface to manage it. One nice thing is it lists all your domains in a nice list and the last item in the column is how many days remaining on that registration. So it's really very straightforward, like how long you

have. Very clear. It's very minimal. And then once you click into it, the fields are very basic. There's some help, but like all Google products, if you want to dig any deeper, like for example, when I wanted to find out if I could get privacy for a.us domain, they have a learn more link. Once you click that, of course, it sends you into the hell of Google help pages, which just go deep, deeper and deeper and never really answer your question. So just like all Google products, if you're comfortable, you'll be able to get something done really quick. But if you go outside their area that they have support for, you hit a wall. There's nobody you're going to call. For example, and this is an ad for Hover, they're not a sponsor, but with Hover, they are my domain

name registrar. And I had a very complicated thing happen that was like mistakes on multiple registrars. And there was like literally I was trapped between three different registrars who had had like an internal database that disagreed with an external. It was very complicated, and one call to Hover resolved the entire thing. Whereas with Google, I would have been kind of just out of luck, I think. I don't know exactly. They say they have support, chat, phone, or email support. I haven't tried that yet. I'm kind of skeptical, but Google has been stepping that up recently. So is it just a registrar, or can you actually manage your DNS zone files from within Google domains? You can go in and manage some of it. So a pre-specified amount of stuff,

like your name servers, you can set up DNSSEC, your registered hosts. You can add synthetic records to do common things like domain forwarding, or you can go to Google Apps. Custom resource records, so like your type A domains,

your CNames, your MX records. Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay, so you can, okay. Yeah, you can set all that stuff up. Very minimal interface. I'd show it to you, but it has all my AP info in it. No, no, no. Yeah. Okay, so you can, okay. Yeah, you can set all that stuff up. Very minimal interface. I'd show it to you, but it has all my AP info in it. No, no, no.

The pricing's very fair. It was $12 for a.us domain, $20, I think, for a.com. No, not $20. It was very, here, you know what? I'll search for one right now. Let's see. Give me a domain name. Let's see.

Let's do Ubuntu Touch. Let's see what we get. Ubuntu Touch. All right. So here, I can show you this UI. Now it searches. It gives you a little frowny face for the UI for the domains that are not available. I get frowny faces

for UbuntuTouch.com and UbuntuTouch.net, but I get green smiley faces for UbuntuTouch.org. Then it's also recommended UbuntuTouch.equipment, UbuntuTouch.properties, and UbuntuTouch.systems. UbuntuTouch.org, $12 a year. UbuntuTouch.equipment and properties and systems are like dot systems. So the Ubuntu touch dot org, $12 a year. Ubuntu touch dot equipment and properties and systems are like 20, 30 and 20 a year. Uh, and so it looks like dot coms are about 12 bucks a year.

Same with dot us. One question I have is, um, hover offers a volume pricing. So like the more domains you have on your account and hover, the less you pay for renewals for all of your domains. Uh, does Google appear to offer anything like that? I don't think so. I haven't played with it long enough maybe to be able to fully answer that. But from the looks of it, you're just doing one domain at a time.

And it's just always the same flat rate every time. You can add multiple domains. There's like a cart. But I don't think there's any discount. But I could be wrong. Over the weekend, I gave their latest testing iso a spin and it's kind of slick so like uh one thing that's nice is it does some notifications that are pretty good and one of the things it'll do is it'll actually update the installer so i boot the

live environment and i get a i get a notification that comes up and says hold on a second uh antergross is updating the installer it updates yeah i just had that as well yeah and it closes and reopens it so you get the latest installer, which is pretty nice. That's good. So I decided to go with the KDE 4 implementation. And when I was done, what I got was it's KDE 4, but with Numix and kind of a GTK look.

And before you freak out, because that sounds horrible, I am surprised at how not horrible it is. It flattens KDE out a little bit it takes away the blue glow and the very oxygen look of it you're going Numix icons it's kind of a GTK look to it but I actually think it's

I don't know if I'm going to stick with that look but I was surprised how well they were able to take that and translate it to KDE and the benefit was the GTK apps also looked everything looked kind of at home it was kind of I was surprised how well they were able to take that and translate it to KDE. And the benefit was the GTK apps also looked, everything looked kind of at home. It was kind of, I was like, wow. You're giving me the itch. Do you want a little bit of Arch Linux inside?

Yes, of course. So we had voting for new Arch Linux TUs yesterday. And one of the successful, trusted user. We're the people that look after the community repository and moderate the AUR and other stuff, look after back-end infrastructure. But one of the new

TUs is the maintainer for LXQT. Oh, cool. Yeah, so guess what's coming to Arch Linux into the official archive? Yeah, no kidding. And we'll probably have first-class support. That's great. Yeah, yeah. what's coming to Arch Linux into the official archive? Yeah, no kidding. And it will probably have first-class support. That's great. Yeah, yeah.

I know him quite well because he's on the old existing LXDE team. And he's the guy that does all of the package maintaining for LXDE for Lubuntu. So he's come the other way. So he's come from Ubuntu into Arch. And I've just made the transition from arch to ubuntu so we've sort of passed each other in in in between there somewhere i uh popey i was wondering did you ever end up uh getting a new laptop i know that was on your short list no i uh i postponed it because my warranty on the ThinkPad X220 doesn't run out until next year. And I wanted to keep hold of it just to keep it going until it dies, really, because I don't really need a new laptop.

I was wondering if you saw that new XPS 13 from Dell. Yeah, the new one looks awesome. But also, I like the new ThinkPads that have put back the old keyboard with the 8 gig. Not the old keyboard, the proper keyboard. It's a proper keyboard. Yeah. Yeah. Too bad the latest, unbelievably, I couldn't believe it.

I have to double check. I could be wrong. It seems so impossible to believe. I would definitely double check this. But I swear, after I saw the announcement of the new Lenovo's, I went and looked at the video cards, and they're Intel 4800s. How can that possibly be? Is that bad? Yeah.

Why? Yeah, that's really bad. Because, I mean, like, the Dell XPS is the Intel 5500. When you get to 5000, then you're in the Iris series graphics. It's a whole new category of Intel graphics. Oh, I didn't realize that. No, the 5000 ESPY with the 5500 is the new Broadwell

chip. Yeah. Their Iris is 6,000. The Lenovo must be. Oh, okay. The Lenovo must not be. So they're still based on the Aswell. That seems odd, though, right? Well, no, because Broadwell isn't even shipping yet, technically. Like, it's just starting to come out now.

Like, it was announced at CES. Oh, so these laptops today shipping are with a processor that's already been replaced, essentially. Maybe a little bit. Yeah, I guess it's gotten so good at this point it doesn't matter too much, though. And Barton said there will be an Ubuntu version, so that's good.

Yeah, so that's cool. Did you guys all see Linus' rant on Google Plus? Did it happen back in December? I missed it. And I just wanted to read it real quick because i i really hate hfs plus a lot so uh there was this talk about uh i love it it's this google plus thread uh and they're talking about a bug and a wild linus torvalds appears with a great hfs rant uh he says and he goes on to talk about how there's this bug

and he talks about how there's this bug. And he talks about how there's issues with HFS. He says, quite frankly, HFS Plus is probably the worst file system ever. Christ, what shit it is. NTFS used to have similar issues with canonicalizing UTF-8 using non-canonical representations of slashes. I think they at least fixed them. The OS X problem seems to be fundamental. He goes on to, which is like okay so fundamental problems okay all right so then the thread kind of gets hot right and they start kind of some

people come in come on linus the chart calling him out uh linus then some people agree with him he comes back in to say further in the common thread the true horrors of hs plus are not in how it's not a great file system but in how it's actively designed to be a bad file system by people who thought they had good ideas. The case insensitivity is just a horrible, horrible bad idea. And Apple 2E could have pushed, or Apple could have pushed fixing it back in that era. They didn't. Instead, they doubled down on a bad idea and they actively extended it very, very badly to Unicode. Okay, so NTFS did some of the same, but Apple really took it to the next level with HFS+. There's some excuse for bad case insensitivity in a legacy model. We didn't know better.

But people who think Unicode equivalency comparisons are a good idea in a file system shouldn't be allowed to play in that space. Give them some paste and let them sit in the corner, eat it. They'll be happy and they won't be messing up your system. He goes, and Apple lets these monkeys work on their file system? Seriously? It's not even a pasted or quality thinking. It's actually actively corrupting user data by design. Christ. There are lots of good reasons not to move to ZFS though, coughed Oracle, but they could have pushed people to a case-sensitive HFS, which would have then made it much easier in the long run to migrate to anything else. But no, this is not the choice Apple took.

There is a case-sensitive option, but Apple actively hides it and doesn't support it. The stupidity it burns. Here's the thing, though. When has Apple ever not doubled down on a bad idea? Every time they've had an idea, they've always said, yeah, we're still doing this. They've never admitted that they are wrong. Yeah, they even found a way to ship a one-button mouse that, depending on what you do, actually has six buttons.

So, like, yeah, they've always just, like, they won't admit when it's a bad idea. I've got a Logitech mouse that's like that, but I love it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's not necessarily a horrible idea, but it does kind of feel like, even there, they won't admit they were wrong. Yeah, that's true. That there's use there.

Alright, so there you go. Linus Torvald's rant segment over. We should have a Linus Torvald's rant jingle, I guess. Honestly, it's really too bad that Apple gave up on porting ZFS. Yeah. As soon as Oracle got involved, they're like, nope. Yeah, that's exactly what happened. And it's like, well, if they had just held on to that and waited,

and then, oh, look, open ZFS, and they could have used that, and every Apple user would be a happy camper. Yeah, it's funny. I guess I would have expected Apple to keep working with Oracle since Jobs and Larry Ellison were BFF. But I don't know. So, yeah, I mean, it really is. And the only reason why I really want to even bring it up is because we were talking last week about how power users are getting sick of the Mac. Well, I mean, what I like is I have been bitching about HFS for a few years now because of production problems.

And now more and more people are talking about it. And it's going to be more of these kinds of things that will come out. Yeah, HFS is horrible. Horrible. Why don't they just be Mac users? This is horrible. Horrible. Why don't they just be the losers?

Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's barely finding the microphone in all of this Pacific Northwest fog. My name is Chris. And my name is Matt. Hey Matt, is it foggy up in your neck of the woods like it is down here? It's just lingering. I haven't stuck my head outside yet, but I see sunshine coming through my blinds. You are such a geek. I haven't gone outside today. I know.

I really haven't gone outside if I hadn't had to drive into the studio either. I only go as far as the Wi-Fi allows. Right, that's a good point. That's a safe bet. Yeah, it's been like this since last week. We've been surrounded in a fog, but in this fog we have had time to reflect on the state

of Linux, and we have a great show coming up for you today on the Linux Unplugged show. So coming up, just a little bit, we're going to do some quick feedback this week, and then I want to discuss the four best new Linux distributions, according to Jack Wallin for 2015. And at first, I came into this list, and I'm thinking, the four best

lists. These lists. These lists. I read the list, and I'm like, hold on best lists. These lists. These lists. I read the list and I'm like, hold on a second. I think Jack's on to something. These are some compelling distributions, and you might not have heard of a couple of them. We're going to talk about that. Plus, then, after we gave the Mac a good bashing last week and in the pre-show, it is only fair that we get a little real about some Linux issues. But I actually think it's a really great thing. And it's a list, yes, of problems, but of problems I think are addressable,

and we'll talk about that in the second half of the show. So, Matt. Yeah. We probably should get started. I'll put everything aside. Close my VLC window. Stop watching YouTube. And maybe we'll take a moment and welcome the Mumble crew to the Unplugged show.

Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Good morning. Hello. Hello. Hey. Hi-o. So before I managed to hit record today, Popey admitted to the entire live stream that he's switched over to Integros. He's now a happy Integros user.

You're a bad man. I'm still gatefully employed. I had to give you a hard time. No, actually, I downloaded the latest Integros release. I actually got the testing ISO, but Wimpy reminded me they just released a new stable ISO two days ago. And, Matt, I tried something that was crazy. I did the KDE version of Integros. Ooh, rebellious.

And when it installs, it's kind of a GTK-looking kind of KDE. Now, before you puke, it's Numix-themed, and it actually works. It's sort of a flatter KDE. It's still KDE, but with a slight GTK look. And the result is both Qt and GTK apps look great on the desktop. And overall, it's really well done. It's interesting. I don't know if I like it a lot.

I don't know if I'm going to stick with it. But I was pretty interested in it. So anyways, go check out the done. It's interesting. I don't know if I like it a lot. I don't know if I'm going to stick with it, but I was pretty interested in it. So anyways, go check out the latest Antigros ISO. They just released them. Screenshots where it didn't happen. Oh, okay, okay. Actually, Chris, the installer is running right now on a spare laptop, and I was surprised.

I, like you, you mentioned earlier the auto-update thing the installer has, and I went through the installer, and it looked really familiar. And I've realized where they borrowed some of the design from. It looks exactly like the Ubuntu installer. Actually, when I first reviewed Endergross, I made the mistake of assuming they had forked the Ubuntu installer. I was very— I know. It's their own thing, isn't it?

Yeah. And it's neat. Like Popey says, when you boot up the live environment, it automatically updates so you have the latest installer. Not to mention, when it's installing all of the packages, they're the absolute latest version. So if you're installing right now, you're going to get kernel 3.18, which is crazy, and it's great. What were you going to say, Wimpy?

I was going to say that when they started making their installer, it was heavily influenced on Ubiquiti, and they actually had Ubiquiti's source in their tree as reference for quite some time. That was why I actually thought it was. So in my review, I sort of matter-of-factly stated it was a fork of the Ubuntu installer because I went to their Git repo

and I saw the code for the Ubiquiti installer. And then, even once they made their own, they still took some assets and stuff. So some of the files were actually named Ubuntu something. And so I thought, well, Dead Ringer. It's just a fork, right? I actually looked at the freaking code. I'm like, Dead Ringer.

And so I say it in the show. And then I got a lot of people contacting me, including the Anticross developers, like, no, actually, we wrote that from scratch. And we're kind of proud of it. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, it's good. Yeah, it seems pretty nice. It is really good. Because the Ubuntu is always really nice, too.

Give me the itch. I know. I know. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I Yeah, it seems pretty nice. It is really good. Because the Ubuntu is always really nice, too. Give me the itch. I know. I know. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I had the itch, too. I think they make a cream for that. You know, there's a branding opportunity here.

Yeah, that's true. That's very true. Okay. All right. So, anyways, just wanted to give those guys a plug because they do great work. Yeah. And Popey reminded me a little bit before the show started, and then I had a weekend adventure that I forgot to share with everybody. So let's cover another distribution that's been getting a lot of attention. And I think it's a favorite around here. Ubuntu Mate or Matai or Matati or Mate. So Eric writes in.

He says it's awesome. And I thought this was a great story. Different Eric, not producer Eric. And he was struggling. He was not super happy with the direction of Unity after 1204. He says, when it came out, Ubuntu 1204, I was very excited. And he says, but then Unity had to show its face. And I quickly found out what garbage it is.

And my unhappiness began. I downgraded to Ubuntu 1004. And I found I liked it more than 1204. I tried GNOME 3 before downgrading to see if it was any better than Unity, but GNOME 3 is such a pig with different makeup, only really stupid. Sorry, Chris, I know you like GNOME 3, but I'm just channeling my internal turbols here. Of course, that sounds like he's trying an old version if he's

doing it on 12.04. I'm so disappointed by the direction the GNOME team took. It feels like it's different just for the sake of being different, with absolutely nothing redeeming for the power user everything useful is turned off by default by the time you're done turning things on the desktop sort of resembles gnome 2 so why bother i asked myself i tried mint 17 and i was less frustrated by cinnamon cinnamon but it still felt like a skinned gnome 3 3. Guys, I have been truly miserable since Ubuntu 12.04. And when I heard on your show about Ubuntu Mate, there was a glimmer of hope.

I thought I'd give it a try. Ubuntu Mate is what every Ubuntu since 12.04, including 12.04, should have been. Mate is as fast and snappy as Gnome 2 was. It's clean and I know where everything is. No need to search for anything. Ubuntu Mate makes me feel like I spent the last few years in a nightmare, and I finally woke up. I have my desktop.

I have my apps like I did before. But now I have access to sites like Netflix and apps like Steam. No shitty UI. No crappy ads from Software Center suggesting what I should try. No random crashes or UI elements disappearing, my system never uses more than a gigabyte of RAM. I'm just so happy with Ubuntu, mate. I'll just say it again.

It's an effective desktop, yet I have way more than before. Hopefully Windows 10 will do the same for Windows users than Mate did for GNOME and just fix it while adding tons of more functionality. Eric. Wow, that's pretty steep praise there. I should say so. Yeah, it definitely feels like it. Yes, yes.

You should be. I think people will really appreciate it. Now, Eric, you take issue, though, with maybe basing it on a really old version of GNOME, right? Yeah, basically, 1204 has GNOME Shell 3.4, which is utter crap. If he were to use a more current version i'm sure he would have a better experience because then you've got all the uh you've got the client-side decorations

you've got the better it's just better overall and like uh some destros like fedora are pre-shipping the gnome classic environment now so it's much yeah true and you can obtain that in Ubuntu GNOME as well. Wimpy, did you see our interview with the Mate developer on Sunday's Linux Action Show? I did, yes. What did you think about his comments on the transition to GTK3? Well, I obviously agree. I'm

deeply familiar with the difficulties we've had. Although I've prepared that unofficial repository uh with mate built against gtk3 for arch users and that when when mate 1.10 ships i will push the gtk3 versions into the official arch repositories but they are very clearly tagged as experimental. And the reason for that is that whilst they're working fine against GTK 3.14 at the moment, as with every GTK 3 release, we can't be sure what's going to happen, change and break with 3.16. So we're kind of hoping for the day that GNOME 4 comes along and GTK 4 comes along

so that then we have a stable API to target. Wow. Wow, I can't believe you're already hoping for GTK 4. Meanwhile, wow. It's imminent, I think. I think it's imminent. I think it's going to come soon. And the other thing that you asked, Stefano, about MIR support and Wayland support.

So Wayland support has been on our roadmap for some time. And definitely Stefano is very keen to start work on Wayland. But quite recently, probably I first heard about it around October time last year, Canonical have started to commit MIR compatibility patches for GTK3. So if that continues and comes to fruition, technically it should be possible through GTK3 to target Weyland and MIR. And what we would need within the Marte team

is somebody who's enthusiastic about actually doing it because it's a small team and there's lots of jobs to be done. So there's opportunity for somebody to come in there and own that. Yeah, yeah. I think it's dependent on Canonical finishing their work, actually adding the support to GTK3, but I should imagine that's going to happen given this push this year for Unity Next. Now, to Blackout24's question, and I don't know in the case of Wayland,

but in the case of Wayland or Mir, is there extra burden on the Mate project to do things like the compositor or something like that? Is there more work you'll have to do besides just toolkit stuff, or is the toolkit going to bring most of that stuff for you? Yeah, with regards to Weyland, this is one of the conversations I had last year. GTK3 alone is all we need to bring Weyland support to Marte. We don't need to sit on top of Mata or anything like that.

Nice. Very fantastic. Well, I'm really interested to see how that goes. Do you think, is this going to be a transition that will be very, is there going to be a big change for users when Mate goes to GTK3, or is the theming going to hide a lot of it, or what's that going to look like?

It could be a big change. Not really. If you install it now, you can install that unofficial repository now. So if you run up a virtual machine with – do it the easy way. Go with Anturgos, seeing as you were talking about that earlier. They have Marte support, and I know they have Marte support because I helped add it. And you can start with that, and then they use the official arch repositories you can then add my

unofficial repository and it's designed to clean the upgrade from the official repository so you could jump from antergos with uh marta 1.8 built against gtk2 to gtk3 for marta 1.9 and you'd be able to see firsthand what it looks like. And by and large, it looks very similar. Interesting. Yeah, almost the same. I mean, very close. And then there's a few applications where, because GTK3 just implements things differently, it looks a bit different.

So when there's tabs in things, the tabs are laid out a little bit differently. But by and large, it looks very, very similar. And there are a few Arch users that are actually running that GTK3 version and have been running a GTK3 version for about six months now. So it is good enough as a daily driver. I saw the write-up on how to do it, and I thought about it. I think I even linked to it in the Linux Action Show show notes for Sunday. And I thought about doing it just for the interview so that way I could run it, but I ran out of time.

It looks interesting. I think I'm going to try it soon. See what I notice. Okay, you know what else you should all try soon? Something that I love quite a bit. Something that Matt and I use the heck out of. In fact, a lot of the hosts here at the Jupiter Broadcasting use the heck out of as DigitalOcean. Head over to DigitalOcean.com right now.

Go over there and check out DigitalOcean while you can too DigitalOcean.com right now. Go over there and check out DigitalOcean while you can, too, because I'll tell you what, things are a-changing, my friends, in the world, and you can have your own server up in the cloud. Earlier today, Matt, I was like, today I was like Mr. Productive, Matt. I don't know what it was. Maybe I tried Butter Coffee. Have you ever had Butter Coffee before? Butter Coffee? No, I was going to say maybe it was the fog. Maybe. I just decided not to go outside, so I stayed inside and got a bunch of stuff done, right? No, I got my butter coffee. That's coffee with a little bit of butter in it and coconut oil.

Yeah, and then you immersion blend that, Matt, like a boss. You immersion blend that. And then I decided, you know what? Let's go out there and let's see if I can get a little work done. So I tried out the new Google domains, and I registered a domain and pointed it at my DigitalOcean droplet. The DigitalOcean droplet that I've been using for quite a while to do things like BitTorrent Sync and my QuasalCore. You know, stuff that is just handy to have running in the background. But I never really thought, I'll just set a couple things up.

I'll never really use this for very long. So it's not a, you know, I don't need to register a domain name. Well, today I got that done. So now my very first droplet that I ever created at DigitalOcean, I went and registered a domain name for. And now I feel official because they've all got domains. It's really easy to set it up over at DigitalOcean because part of their control panel is a real nice DNS management system

that makes it straightforward. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to remember our promo code, and then I'm going to tell you about DigitalOcean because they're really awesome. It's cool, it's brand new, and it's for the entire year of 2015, so use it wisely, my friends. DO Unplugged. DO Unplugged, all one word, lowercase. DO Unplugged is our new promo code for DigitalOcean. So what is DigitalOcean?

Go check them out right now. It's simple cloud hosting that's really done right. I've got several systems up there now. Because it's straightforward, I get going in no time. It's intuitive and really easy to spin up your own cloud server. You can get started in less than 55 seconds. The pricing plans start at only $5 a month for your own rig. You get 512 megabytes of RAM, a 20-gigabyte SSD, one CPU, and a terabyte of transfer. These droplets are running on top of Linux using KVM, all riding on SSD drives across the board. DigitalOcean has data

locations in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, and London. But it's really the interface. And I really, just today, just today, like before the show, I literally, like, before I came down, so I probably was doing this 45 minutes ago,

before I came down here, and it's just, I didn't even worry about like, oh, well, I need to go on air. I need to start the show up because I know how straightforward and intuitive the DigitalOcean control panel is. So I know that once I get in there, it's just going to be boom, boom, and I'm done. And it really is crazy straightforward.

And they've got this API. And they've done a few iterations of it now. It's really clean. It's a really elegant API that the community has embraced and built a ton of apps around. You can take advantage of that today, right now, or you can write something for yourself. They've got a great set of documentation for it as well. Head over to DigitalOcean. Check out their tutorials. They've got the best tutorials on the web and they'll even

pay you to write for them. They've got editors that can work with you and they'll pay up to $200 for a piece you write for their tutorials section. So if there's something that you're an expert on, setting something up that you see a gap and people are searching for that, you could go make a little cash on the side and write it up for DigitalOcean. There's just great resources over there. DigitalOcean.com. Go check it out. D01plugged is our new promo code to get the $10 credit. You can try out the $5 rig two months for free. Dio Unplugged. It's a great deal. DigitalOcean.com. And a big thank you

to DigitalOcean for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. It's so neat to have. I feel like I have my own server farm up in the sky. I know, right? It's like I keep... I'm actually still in the process of bringing stuff over from other folks that I work with because I'm like, can you just move it over to Dio because then I can just do it. Yeah. And I can

just get in there, get things done without having to monkey with whatever you got going on over there. It's great. All right, guys. Matt, I think you might have a suggestion. I have one suggestion, but we really have never solved this problem for the audience. Let's take one more crack at it. We can always take submissions from the audience, too, but

Dukaked wrote in, and he's looking for an open source solution for remote support. Okay, now, so I think that takes out TeamViewer and a few others. Thanks for an amazing show, as always. I wanted to ask you how you go about doing remote support and screen sharing and remote control for users behind routers. This is people like friends and family behind home routers and small businesses behind their business routers and firewalls,

with them probably using Windows. So the company I work for uses TeamViewer and Join.me, which work well for the purpose, but I want a solution that's open source, not licensed, and has no subscription. I'm considering connecting to a port-forwarded SSH server, which might help, and then using further forwarding to get into their machine over RDP.

But there's got to be a simpler way of doing this. Is there a TeamViewer-like solution that I haven't heard of? Thanks for any tips. Keep our Sundays rocking. Duke Kike. Now, what do you think, Matt? Anything jumping out at you? You know, he kind of hit the nail on the head as far as if you want to go with an open-source solution,

it is certainly doable, but it's going to require some work, some SSH, some of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of forwarding, a little bit of IP magic. There's nothing out of the box that I know of specifically that's going to do what he wants that's open source. And I personally just happen to use TeamViewer or one of the others, just whatever works at the time.

So not off the top of my head, no. Yeah, I was thinking maybe Chrome Remote Desktop, but again, that's not free. And that's been kind of buggy sometimes. I've had some issues. Wimpy, is there a way to accomplish this with X2Go? There is, yeah. X2Go has desktop sharing feature.

Oh, my gosh, really? Even if I'm not using it for, like, remote terminal services style things, somebody could remote control my session still using the X2Go client? Yeah, yeah. So I have this on my father-in-law's machine at his house. So he's got port forwarding on his router to his laptop and when he needs help i x to go into his machine on a shared session and we talk through what he needs to do and how does the ip mapping and stuff like that work like when he's behind his router does it

universal plug and play that or i've no what i've done is i've um his MAC address in the DHCP server on the router so he always gets the same IP on his laptop. So the port forwarding always works. Ah, so you set up port forwarding. So that's one disadvantage, but if you have the ability to set up port forwarding, how else would you do that? Because you'd have to have a piece of software on the remote client that's updating

the firewall in real time with your you know the the only other one i know is you can do reverse um reverse vnc connections so i i have to configure at my side the port forwarding and i can set vnc to listen and then the the client my father-in-law can establish a remote connection to me and I see his screen on mine yeah and I use I use that for for tech support at work so our customers at work can effectively send their screen to us so I'm trying to think like Skype offers some remote control features, but again, it's pretty buggy, and it uses Skype. Oh, it's horrible. Yeah, I wouldn't use Skype. Yeah, Skype's not open source, and VNC's

really slow, and... Yeah. I'm seeing Romania, R-E-M-M-I-N-A, mentioned by Kapi in the chatroom. Yeah. That was kind of where I was thinking. It's just, well, it's one of those things where it requires a little bit of massaging to get there, but yeah, that would work. Right. And Bentley's reminding us that Universal Plug & Play will do the port forwarding, but you have to have something that calls on Universal Plug & Play. And you have to where it requires a little bit of massaging to get there, but yeah, that would work. Right. And Bentley's reminding us that Universal Plug and Play will do

the port forwarding, but you have to have something that calls on Universal Plug and Play. And you have to have it enabled. A lot of people don't. And Bentley's here in the forum as well. I know. We've already mentioned Universal Plug and Play twice. So I think, and I know, so we know there's ways to do it, right? Like if there

was a way to trigger Universal Plug and Play using a remote client. I like, honestly, if you have the ability, X2Go is going to give you unquestionably the best performance. Probably better performance than any commercial packages out there. The only downside is you've got to have the port forwarding set up. That doesn't, I mean, that might be, if you're doing a small group of people, that might be doable. Yeah, I was wondering too if Jitsi, I don't know if Jitsi offers remote screen control. I think it's just remote screen sharing with Jitsi.

So I don't think that would do it. But if anybody out in the audience knows, the feedback thread in the Linux Action Show subreddit or go over to the contact page on Jupyter Broadcasting and let us know. I would love a fully-fledged open-source remote control product because right now I'm doing a mix of Splashtop, which is hit and miss, Chrome remote desktop, which is – so I literally, Matt, sometimes I have Chrome Remote Desktop and Splashtop on the same rig because at any given time, one of them doesn't work. See, and that's been it for me is that like on Ubuntu boxes, Splashtop is great.

On anything other than Ubuntu, Splashtop is a face-to-brick wall as far as on the Linux side of things. So I tend to go like with TeamViewer and like maybe if I'm running something like ArchBase or something like that, I generally as on the Linux side of things. So I tend to go with TeamViewer, and maybe if I'm running something like ArchBase or something like that, I generally have had better luck in that space. Usually it's TeamViewer or Splashtop for myself. Oh, you know, one that we've talked about three years ago on the show is Guacamole, which is an HTML5. Or maybe it was like two years ago.

Remember we talked about Guacamole really briefly? I do. Yeah, that was briefly. Yeah, and so that's another one to check out, is guacamole at guac-dev.org or something like that. Anyways, that's a good one that came in. Most of the WebRTC ones I can think of are all just like views. View, yeah. You can't modify. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because you wouldn't want the browser to be able to give someone remote control. Guacamole. I like the name. It's a great question, and it's something, towards the end of the show, major problems on the Linux desktop 2015 edition. One of the things he calls out is remote desktop support solutions like this. So I think Duque kind of nailed it a little bit.

I think he's kind of right. And I know there's other things out there you could obviously do. Like, for example, at first I thought I always needed if they're on Linux boxes I always thought oh I need remote desktop support and then you know what I realized a lot of the times

I can just SSH into the box kill a process update a thing install a thing and I didn't actually need the GUI login nearly as often as I thought I did well and you're escaping the bloat too so that if the hangup is in fact GUI based

a lot of times you can slide in under the radar like that and deal with whatever the hang-up is. Yeah. Gitso. I'm not familiar with Gitso, but there's a suggestion coming from you. Oh, yeah. I think that's the reverse VNC thing actually. Yeah, that's exactly it. Yeah, that's the client side of the reverse VNC, yeah.

I'm making notes as we go here because some of these are really useful. Yeah, yeah. Mini-UNPP could be used to make a program to do this. Oh, okay. Thanks, Bentley. That's good. So I guess you could string a few things together. That's kind of my – yeah, that's definitely it. Although the X2Go stuff sounds really cool.

Yeah, all you need is just access to that port. So anyways, give us your experiences out there. Send them into the show, and we'll follow them up as feedback next week. One thing I talked about today on Tech Talk Today, and again, Chrome Remote Desktop, hit and miss, not open source. But they did just announce the Chrome Remote Desktop client for iOS. So now you could use an iPad and load into your Linux box and have remote control. So that's kind of cool. I don't know.

You could also do it on your phone. And speaking of phones, why don't we mention our next sponsor, Ting. And then we'll get into the top four distributions to look at for 2015. Linux.ting.com is where you go to support the Linux Unplugged show. Linux.ting.com, mobile that makes sense. No contract. No early termination fee, and you only pay for what you use. Flat $6, pay for what you use. Flat $6, pay for

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Okay, so Jack Wallen wrote a piece for Linux.com saying the four best new Linux distributions to watch in 2015. And I almost always pass over these top lists because usually they're for clicks, and I don't think they're necessarily bad, but not my style. It's usually fluff. Yeah. It's usually fluff. Yeah, yeah. And I kind of thought this was going to be the case with this one. It's not necessarily not fluff, but it's good fluff, I guess.

So he says every every year, new Linux distributions pop up, something new and game changing. So he's looking at some of the distributions for 2015. And Mumbaroom, feel free to jump in if you disagree. Number one distribution to look forward to, he says, is EvolveOS. Ironically,

I got an email this morning that was raving about EvolveOS. He says, it's incredibly simple to use. It's inspired by the Chrome OS desktop with a user-friendly interface that anyone can sit down and use immediately. The developers of Evolve OS have taken a page from Chrome OS design look and created the Bungie desktop. Bungie is not a fork of another desktop, but is built from the ground up. And I'm pulling up a screenshot right here for those of you watching the video version. And it does look very nice.

So Evolve OS, number one. Number two, Sparky Linux Game Over Edition. It's based on Debian testing. It's a rolling release distribution. Sparky Linux Game Over Edition adds Steam, Steam Launcher, Wine, Play on Linux to Sora, along with standard gaming tools and services like Game Over

Edition. It also has in it the PSX emulator, the Kega Fusion, and Sega Mega Drive Genesis emulators, and PSP emulator. So it comes with a lot of great stuff. And also really low-resource desktops. So there's one for you. And then number three, Corora Linux. Corora Linux is a Fedora remix.

We've talked about it before. You can choose between KDE, Mate, Cinnamon, GNOME, XFCE, Desktops It includes a number of packages that Fedora can't ship It's based on The current one is based on Fedora 21 So it includes things like Adobe Flash, Dropbox Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Talk Plugin, RPM Fusion repos, pre-setup

VirtualBox All based on Fedora It's like Fedora that's ready to use In addition to all of this, Corora includes packages called Flarp, I guess, or Felarp or whatever it is. Yeah, I don't know. It makes installing drivers like the NVIDIA graphics driver super easy. I like that.

Yeah. So that's Corora. That sounds pretty badass. That sounds pretty badass, actually. And he has a great screenshot here. Ozone OS. We first heard about this on the Linux Action Show. There's very little to see at the moment, but

Ozone OS will be based on Fedora and will have a Numix flavored spin. It's from the Numix guys. And it's going to be based on the GNOME desktop, totally Numix'd up. What's even more interesting about this project is it's partnered with Nutrix, which sells Numix themed desktop PCs. So you might be able to buy desktops already

with this distribution as well. So, four distributions. Evolve OS, Sparky Linux, Game Over Edition, Karora, and Ozone OS. All pretty different distributions. I think they might have a shot. Eric, do any of these excite your distro hopping bone that would make you want to maybe try them out? Well, not really the distro hopping bone, but one I would add to the list would be Kubuntu 1504 because they will be shipping Plasma 5.

So that's really kind of something to keep an eye on, I think. There's a game changer, yeah. Dare Dovin, you feel like maybe a certain elementary OS is missing? Daredevil, you feel like maybe a certain elementary OS is missing? Yes. Actually, in 2015, and I have some rumors from some of the devs that they're working in making their desktop less tightly coupled with just specific of Ubuntu. It could be all good, interesting results.

Hmm. The strategy is coming. Like the elementary OS desktop environment, what is that called? Luna, right? Pentium. Oh, Pentium. Yeah, interesting results. The strategy is coming. Like the elementary OS desktop environment, what is that called? Luna, right? Pentium. Yeah, thank you. Luna is one of the releases. Luna is the BSD one. And in distribution-wise, there's also Deepin, which

it's a Chinese company backing it up. They have full-time developers working on it, and they're submitting code. They actually have a very different desktop environment, basically multiple type of things, but they have something unique coming out of there.

I feel like Corora should be getting more attention than it is. You think? Yeah, I do. I think Fedora is compelling, but it's just not really usable without a lot of changes like, number one, RPM Fusion, and probably Dropbox and Flash. But it's for someone that wants to open up the hood

and get in there and actually do things themselves, right? I don't know. I think Aurora has some potential. I've installed it, and I've been pretty impressed by it. And, you know, it's close to a mainline distro, so you get all the benefits of a largely supported big community distro, but with some niceties added to it. I guess that was my question. I was like, why does each feature have to have its own different version of Linux?

Oh, Alan. I think it's a fair question. It's a fair question. Honestly, I want that feature, but I want it on the Fedora that I'm used to or the Ubuntu that I already have. That's why the rest of us just run Arch, because then we just install Arch and then just install whatever you want. A lot of times it's because it's silly things, Alan.

It's like, well, this is based on this and this version of the desktop, which requires this version of the toolkit, and the main version of Ubuntu ships this version of the toolkit because they're shipping this version of the desktop environment, so therefore we're going to go off on our own direction. It usually starts something simple like that. Yeah, we've had similar complications on other systems with bundled software, and that's why we've seen a lot of unbundling happening lately.

Get everything out of the base system as much as you can so that the package repo determines what version of this toolkit you get or what version of this that's going to work with that and so on. I think my predictions is it's the top three distros for 2015 are Arch, Ubuntu Mate, and regular Ubuntu, and followed by Fedor. That's what I think the top three, like, you know. I mean, I'm not saying they're not order necessarily either. It could be a different order.

But, I mean, these distros are great. But I think you just can't deny the fact that every time we look at arch numbers, they've exploded since the last time we looked at arch numbers. So I think you got to figure that. And Matei is obviously rocking people. Like, look at you, Matt. You just switched over to Ubuntu Matei.

Oh, yeah. All my systems, except for two. I think I still have one running arch proper, but everything else is running Ubuntu Matei. So yeah. Yeah. For sure. There you go. There you go.

Chat room says Quoror is not that great. All right. I. For sure. There you go. There you go. Chatroom's just not that great. All right. I'll take the word. I don't actively use it. Well, and one thing I want to touch on in that article is that I think

articles like that are cool in the sense that maybe they bring a little limelight to distros we might not have otherwise heard of. And they're cool to check out, you know?

Yeah. That's very true. Like, you know, I've heard some folks in the community talking about Evolve OS now to see this written up here. And I haven't really been following

Sparky Linux Game Over Edition because it's called Sparky Linux. Right. Yeah, it does sound a little unusual. Yeah, I know. I'm just going to plug it because I already plugged it. Alex says in the chatroom, no KDE Plasma 5 love. And that's why I mentioned

Kabuntu is because they're going to be plasma 5 straight up starting in april so that'd be good hmm wimpy what do you think uh deepin should be getting some love well it's definitely interesting i installed it um a few months ago to have a play because i'd heard good things about it and i have to say if you've got a mac switcher who's looking to go to a linux platform they're going to feel very comfortable with linux deep in you need a fairly decent machine because it's composed to the hilt but it's got some very sexy transitions and it's got a unique take on control panels and what have you it's a very tidily put together modern distribution that i have to say is different from everything else out there it's not at all like gnome 3 it's not

at all like kde or kde plasma it's not at all like unity um you know they've really done something different huh dare devon were you going to say something were you adding something i was saying that it's not even looking like elementary. He mentioned, you know, the Mac familiarity. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. It is distinctive, and it's quite good. If you've got a decent machine, it's worth a look.

Yeah, it does look very nice. It looks like they don't do very many releases, but that's not necessarily a bad thing at all. And I know I've even looked at it before, but I cannot remember what it is based on. I think it was Debian. Yeah, it's definitely a Debian-based system. I don't know if it's a Debian. And I seem to remember their software manager was very creative, very colorful.

Yes, we liked that a lot, didn't we? We did. Real robust. Yeah, the Deepin store. And the reason it's difficult to pin it down is because every time they have a release, the UI is completely different. So I don't know if they've settled on this kind of incarnation of the UI, but every

version of Deepin has been distinct from the last. But maybe they've settled on this one now. It'll be worth a review if you're doing a distro review. Yeah, we should look at it again, because it's been a year and they have a new release and Urban 120 in the chatroom says it's Ubuntu based, and I believe Urban.

I trust him. Makes sense. Yeah, and they have some of their own tools, like Deepin Movie Player, Deepin Music, Deepin Screenshot, even, and they actually look like decent tools too, which is nice. This is definitely worth another look, I think. So I will put this on the list.

You're talking about my distro hopping bone. This kind of itches my distro hopping bone a little bit. I wonder which version of Ubuntu it is. If we did some digging, we could probably figure out exactly which version it's based on. I would hope so. Yeah.

If it is, then I might give it a go. I think I might give it a go. Well, all right. There you go. Deepin. And, by the way, the URL if you at home would like to check it out, linuxdeepin.com. Linux D-E-P-I-N.com to check it out. And you can download the 2013 or 2014 edition.

And let us know what you think. We'd love to hear your thoughts. I'm looking at the view package list right now, which just redirected me to DistroWatch. I'll do some post-show digging because it's been a little while since I've looked into it, and it looks pretty good. Okay, we've got our last topic of the day to get into, major problems on the Linux desktop.

And at first, I thought, oh, great. This is a troll. You know, I do appreciate, boy, the snow is making my browser freak out, though. I'll tell you that. So it's got a snow background, which I do appreciate quite a bit. And I do think the headline is not quite as provocative, major Linux problems on the desktop. I think we've heard other headlines out there for these types of things that are much more attention-grabbing. So I think that's reasonable. The snow, though, really puts it over the top for me.

But it is an epic write-up. And it is a long-running release, too. This is the 2015 edition, and it's brutal. So we're going to talk about that. And I think, you know, maybe counter some of it, but acknowledge some of it. And maybe not all bad. Maybe not all bad. First, I want to talk about something that's great, and that's Linux Academy. Shake linux academy i'll shake it off shake it off i think that's a song actually uh

linuxacademy.com yeah yeah shake shake it right linuxacademy.com slash unplugged hey matt linux academy just added uh some nginx courses now we've talked about nginx quite a bit on tech snap and if you've heard us mention it and you're like what is it what is why is it so great why not go take some courseware? Docker courses were recently updated. Vagrant was recently updated. Puppet stuff was recently updated. I mean, it's really all the stuff

that you really got to get current on. And the great thing is is that Linux Academy folks are super passionate about all this material. So they're the experts to go to. They've got step-by-step video courses. You'll be able to take advantage of this.

So I want you to go over to linuxacademy.com right now. Unplugged is the slash you go to. linuxacademy.com right now, unplugged is the slash you go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged, get your 33% discount, which is a killer discount. And then you get access to all of the content at Linux Academy, get your own server as the courseware requires it, you choose from seven plus Linux distributions, it'll spin up that virtual server, it'll give you a public IP address and a DNS name and you SSH into it to do all of your management courseware. And then, of course, when you've chosen, like, say you choose a CentOS rig to do your courseware on.

Well, then, since that's your virtual machine, all of the courseware, all of the stuff automatically adjusts to match that distribution. You've got only a limited amount of time available? Well, they've got learning plans. You go in there and say, with sliders, Monday I have two hours. Tuesday I have one hour. Wednesday I have no time. I've got them filtered. It's crazy. I don't have any time Wednesdays. Thursdays, well, a tech snap's kind of like going to school, so I'll just do one hour. Fridays, I'll put in three hours. Then it generates me a learning plan, automatically just fits that schedule for me, keeps me in the loop. It'll send

me a little reminder like, hey, bro, you got a quiz coming up tonight. Don't forget to study, okay? I'll be like, thanks, Linux Academy. It's great. It keeps you right there. You go back in. You see how long the next section is going to take. You can download this content and listen to it on the go like a podcast. They have live streams where you can ask the educators questions directly. They've got a community that will get you going if you ever have a little bit of a bump. It's a really cool system, you guys. It's linuxacademy.com slash unplugged.

Why not start with the OpenStack Essentials? Really. Like, OpenStack is such a fundamental technology in the industry, and if you don't know about it, why not go just take the fundamentals courseware? I hear from folks all the time that start with Linux Academy as a total noob on a topic and take it all the way and go get certifications.

It's kind of a pretty neat phenomenon. And I've even... It's unbelievable. Like, there's folks that have gone to Linux Academy here in Washington State, some listeners of our shows, that have taken Linux Academy courseware and are now working at Amazon. Linux Academy has a full set of AWS courseware, too.

So you can go in there. And I heard from one of them recently who gave me some info that was really useful that helped me correct something I made a mistake on. And he says, yeah, by the way, I got the job. Thanks for my course at Linux Academy. Yeah. Isn't that neat?

It's really cool. That is really cool. Yeah. So go check it out yourself. Linuxacademy.com slash unplug. And a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged program. You guys are doing an awesome job. They're adding new stuff like crazy, too.

Holidays didn't slow them down. Okay. So this article is super, super, super long. And it is full of snow. But it is a regularly updated article that is trying to be the most comprehensive list of problems anywhere on the Internet with the Linux desktop. Now, this person is not a Windows advocate. He even says here, this is not a Windows versus Linux comparison. He says, I want to make this crystal clear.

Windows, in some regards, is worse than Linux, and it's definitely not ready for the desktop either. So it's not – and this guy fixes bugs for the Linux kernel for many of the desktop environments. A longtime developer. And he writes in here, in different categories, the problems that are wrong with Linux. So I'll just read a couple of them, okay, guys? And this isn't about bashing Linux, but I actually think if we look at this list, it's not such a bad idea to itemize the problems we have with Linux because then we have a central place to sort of acknowledge these problems

and work on them, right? So that's not a bad thing. And it definitely reads like an article that was written by someone with a clue. I disagree with a number of points, and I think there's some cherry-picking, but I think it's worth looking at. So he, of course, bashes on NVIDIA Optimus technology and AGI dynamic GPU switching, still not supported on Linux. Open source driver limitations he bashes on. They say, he says, open source NVIDIA drivers not properly and fully support power management features and fan speeds. Mesa problems, of course.

You cannot easily mix proprietary drivers and open source drivers. So, you know, some things in the audio subsystem, he picks on the audio system, no reliable sound. He's referencing a lot of things here. He complains, like, one of ours is too many layers of abstractions lead to situations where you just cannot determine why his audio output is not working. So you have ALSA kernel drivers, ALSA library, then to DMX, PALSA audio server to ALSA library, then PALSA backend, then to the application. Six layers of audio redirection. And if you're on KDE, it's seven layers of audio redirection because of phonon. No reliable high-definition audio support things like above 96 kilohertz or greater than 24 bits, pretty much unusable often on Linux.

No reliable system-wide echo cancellation. You might notice that from our mumble room sometimes. On Windows and macOS, there's a system-level echo cancelization that applications can take advantage of. Lots of slamming on X. X is largely outdated, unsuitable, insecure. X doesn't automatically switch between desktop resolutions if you have an application that goes full screen and running and crashes for some reason X doesn't restore gamma properly if an application

changes so if you play a Valve or a Wine game and experience a problem, you know, he's got a command here that'll fix that. Lots of complaints with X. A huge section on X High DPI support is pretty much non-existent at the X level. Wayland. He's got complaints about Wayland. Applications must implement their own window shadowing under Wayland because Wayland Decorator has no access to application subwindows.

Applications must implement their own font anti-aliasing, or the GTK or QT toolkits must. And there's no API for setting system-wide font rendering. He says most sane advanced window systems, windowing systems, have exactly this. Windows, Android, Mac OS, you can all set system-wide font rendering. He says, most sane advanced windowing systems have exactly this. Windows, Android, Mac OS, you can all set system-wide font rendering. In Wayland, all clients read all applications are totally independent in this regard. Applications read GUI toolkits

must also implement their own DPI scaling. Again, Wayland doesn't do that. Wayland, even though its version is above 1.0, is still largely incomplete and not supported by proprietary NVIDIA and AMD GPU drivers. He's got a whole section on font rendering, the Linux kernel driver,

problems stemming from a vast number of different Linux distributions. It's a pretty long list of problems. He does provide citation for 99% of the stuff, and so I'll give him props for that. I think my only real gripe with it, because it's really well written, I mean,

it's very detailed. A lot of work went into this. Yeah, I mean, he actually cares and honestly knows what he's talking about, but I do feel like there's someone that might need to just, whatever he's developing or working on, take a break, dude. Calm down. It's not going to bite you. And there's some stuff where it seems a little arbitrary and there's not enough information.

This is the new init system. Systemd has been utterly broken by design. Systemd can and does segfault, crash, and freeze. In the same world, init system should never crash. And he even says in the comments that it's crashed for him. And then his proof for this is, well, he Google searched systemd segfault, and that's his proof. I've got systemD running on nine systems under pretty heavy production load right now,

and I've never had it. They've never crashed, period, let alone SystemD. I've never had SystemD crash, ever, in two and a half years. And if you look at his regressions link, you know, great writer, I have no problem with who he linked to specifically, but

it doesn't actually prove anything. You know, it's just a citation no problem with who he linked to specifically, but it doesn't actually prove anything. Yeah. You know, it's just a citation. And so it's kind of like, you know, there's a lot of subjective stuff here. It's like how, at the end of the day, if he's really this upset about it, you know, let's maybe flip this upside down and try and find solutions to it. Okay, there's a lot of layer abstractions. There's a lot of layering stuff in Linux distributions in general. It's kind of the nature of the beast.

In 2015, computing holistically blows. I don't care what platform you're on. And that's okay. We don't have to, you know, you don't have to make it your daily thing. So, you know, I don't know. I look at this list and I think to myself, alright, some of these problems are legitimate problems. Like a lot of the problems you mentioned

with X and stuff. Right, right. But they don't really prevent an average user from using the computer. Bingo. They don't maybe even notice that if you're really an average user. No one knows. If I park this in front of some random guy on the street, they don't care. Yeah, DPI scaling, sure. There's a bunch of stuff like that. It just makes

it really hard to use a system where if you used a different operating system it would just work. And it's really annoying, but at the same time, it's the kind of thing where a developer can work around it and just decide they don't care, but it's the type of thing that you can't convince your mom to live with it. Well, and the toolkit does provide, like GTK and Qt can provide some, so if they're just using, if it's a GTK app or Qt app,

they'll still have whatever the GTK and Qt system-wide anti-aliasing setting is. But like, oh, P audio, you know what? I'm just kidding. It sucks. It's just still not working. I mean, like, as soon as I try a KDE desktop, it's not working. If I'm on anything else, it's fine. But it's just too much.

Alex, do you have input on the audio frameworks? Yes. I wanted to mention that the audio situation is very complicated. What I would like would be a part of the Media Kit from Haiku. Media Kit seems to be the best competitor to the sound solution on the Mac OS, which is by far the best one so far on any computing. I'll look into that. That's interesting. Daredevil, you had a point on the Wayland and fonts issue.

Yes. Actually, the Windows in their design, it's system-wide and everything, but also it's worth noticing that whenever you're using anything else that is not the Windows forms, you also have issues. Not to mention that actually it opened up an extremely dangerous vulnerability just because they did it in that design, in that model.

I remember the font bug, yes, where you could own a system with a font. Yes, it's like with a browser at that point because you can send fonts via browser. Yeah, that was a good one. When I looked at his list here, I thought it was exactly what you said, Matt. God, in a way, computers suck in 2015. And then I thought to myself, I couldn't use anything else. I just can't use anything else. That's just it.

Well, like his printer and scanner argument, that made me angry because I will tell you any day of the week, you give me a printer and you hook me up on a Windows box. I'll drop the CD in and then I'll take a trip up to visit Alan and then I'll come back and it'll still be installing the software. I'm just saying. I didn't even read that because I just felt like, and also that's an old argument. Well, these don't work with a Macintosh. You buy the stuff that works with what you use. That argument is crap.

If you bought a WinModem back in the day and then decided to switch over to Linux and the WinModem didn't work, well then you bought the wrong device or you shouldn't have switched to Linux. When you buy a printer, you check compatibility. That just seems like a given. Specifically, when I bought my new printer, I bought one that was networked so that it wouldn't matter. I didn't have to plug it

into any machine. It also meant I didn't have to have that machine on when I wanted to print because I wanted to put the printer in my office downstairs and I didn't want to have to leave a computer on. Zero, I was curious about your point regarding the NVIDIA driver. So, the thing with NVIDIA,

it kind of piggybacks along with what you said about printers and scanners. You know, get hardware that works with what you use. You know, a lot of people complain that NVIDIA doesn't have good support using Linux. And that's mostly, especially, you know, Optimus and things like that, that's because we have proprietary drivers that work well when they work,

but can fail often from NVIDIA, who has time and time again shown that they really don't care about Linux at all, and got the finger from Linus Torvalds over that. That's true. And the people who are trying to make these things work in Linux, who are reverse engineering these things, you know, there aren't very many people like that because the people who cared about freedom in the first place enough to potentially reverse engineer these things just didn't buy NVIDIA in the first place.

Yeah. Wimpy, you have a point regarding printers. I'd like to hear that. Yeah, just like any bit of hardware, when you buy a printer these days you should buy a printer that supports your operating system just like alan said and when i went shopping for a new printer last year i was able to find one that not only clearly had linux support but also supported android and that wasn't through the Google Cloud Print API. This is a brother printer and they actually have a printing app in the Google Play Store.

So you can even now find hardware that's compatible with your mobile devices as well. Yeah, very good point. And Urban, I'll let you have the final word because it's a great point. You can't necessarily blame Linux if HP doesn't make a driver for a scanner, right? Yeah, I think that responsibility for drivers is

entirely on the company that makes the hardware and it's not on Linux. If HP doesn't do drivers for Linux, screw them. We'll use something else. That's right. I mean, that's why I bought a brother laser printer for the office because it just had great Linux support.

What I did is I just went and checked CUPS and saw the driver in CUPS. I'm like, okay, well, then I know it'll work on everything that runs CUPS, and I'm good. Yeah. That's just it. At the FreeBSD Foundation, I've been trying to take that argument kind of the other way. Instead of being like, hey, this manufacturer

doesn't make drivers for their device, screw them. It's more like, well, why don't we get together a big group and demonstrate the demand to them, and then they'll bother, and we'll give them the resources to help them build the driver. That's a great idea, too. That's excellent. And that's how we have more 40-g gigabit network drivers than other operating systems now because we demonstrated the need. Well, and, you know, shops like Microsoft, they have huge departments dedicated to specific pieces of hardware.

So they have, like for the Windows server development team, on that team there are sub-hardware teams that work just with manufacturers on getting drivers into that version of Windows. So there's a networking card department, a printer department, a storage department, and they might even have sub-departments. I mean it's very structured, and all those teams do is work with vendors to get drivers written and certified for Windows. So that makes the Freebsd approach make sense because that's you know what the commercial shops have been doing for a while well one last thing with this article too i want to point out that i wish he would have addressed is that when it comes to legacy devices such as an older printer an older scanner um including canon products you will find that linux is quite supportive whereas newer versions of windows will tell you to go f yourself

yeah um you're on your own. So, you know, just saying. He's got a great bunch of stuff. And the reason why I like it is it's hard. It's a little aggressive in its language, but it's accurate. It's referenced for the most part. Some of it's conjecture. Some of it's personal opinion, but some of it's fact and you can't deny it.

Pretty good citation too. I actually think it's not bad. Some people think I'm being negative. I don't think it's bad to lose sight of shortcomings so that way we can focus on those and make them even better because there's opportunity if linux shores these things up so and the only way to do that is if we keep ourselves accountable absolutely well and hand in to his credit when an adjustment is made or he discovers something that actually counters a previous point he will cross it out and actually update it so that's cool yeah very much very much. All right. But if you're not thick-skinned and you might be a little hard to read,

I don't know. Put your big boy pants on, you'll be all right. Pour yourself a cold one. Exactly. Well, go on. Okay, that's fair enough. You can read it. Throw it in your read later too or something like that. Oh, by the way, just fun to point out,

I just went off the whole list of problems with Linux. It might be fun to mention. Here's a few things he thought was wrong with Windows. Devastating Windows rot occurs. No enforced file system and registry hierarchies. SVS host.exe. No more needed to be said there.

Not a true safe mode. It is not legitimately a true safe mode. No clean state option. The user as a system administrator is bogus, and most users just totally ignore UAC. No good packaging mechanism. MSI is a fragile abomination. No system-wide update mechanism, which includes third-party software. Windows is extremely difficult to debug.

Windows boot problems are often fatal and unsolvable unless you reinstall from scratch. Windows is hardware dependent, especially when you're running from UEFI. Windows updates are unreliable and they also waste disk space and there's no way to cleanly upgrade your system. There'll be thousands of leftover files, etc. So, again, he's not saying Windows is great. Yep.

And I would agree with all that list. Yeah. He did a pretty good job, I think. I mean, considering. Alan, final thought on the topic? Oh, I thought I heard Alan, but then I didn't. Oh, I guess he left. He said something in the mumble room and then he left. He dropped his BSD microphone.

He's like, you know what? Boom! Yeah. But Alan wanted me to mention before he left that TechSnap, episode 200 of the TechSnap program is coming up just in a couple of weeks. And if you've listened to TechSnap and something we've talked about, a story we've covered, a question we've answered, or anything like that that's ever helped you at home on your network or in your office, project, somewhere out there, a little TechSnap advice has been helpful for you, please send it into the TechSnap program. Go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash contact.

Choose TechSnap from the dropdown and send in your story. We're going to have a special episode 200 where we'll be reading through some of those to celebrate. So it's kind of amazing. 200 episodes in a row, too. Wow. Which is nuts. All right, guys.

Well, I just will wrap it up there. I want to remind you that I'm looking for your personal Runs Linux. Either ones you find, that's fine, too. But I'd really love to see your setups. Email them to linuxactionshow at jupiterbroadcasting.com and put Runs Linux in the subject line. And if you need to send in a video, put that up on YouTube.

If you've got a picture, please put that up on Imgur and link that because I just pull down the text. I don't pull down attachments. And I'd love to feature those in an upcoming Linux Action Show. You can also submit ones you find out in the wild to linuxactionshow.reddit.com to linuxactionshow.reddit.com.

linuxactionshow.reddit.com is also a great place to make this show and our other shows even better and give feedback. linuxactionshow.reddit.com. Anything like a story, community engagement, an app pick, a runs Linux, anything like that on the subreddit, it's really welcome.

And it helps make everything better. And don't forget you can join us live, jblive.tv, 2 p.m. Pacific, jupiterbroadcasting.com, slash calendar, to get that in your local time zone. And then you can hang out in our chat room, join our open mumble room, and even title our show. It's a lot to do. So join us, won't you? All right, Matt. Well, coming up on Sunday's Linux Action Show, we'll have a great show.

And I've been following the news already. Got a few stories I can't wait to talk about. So join us on Sunday for that. So I'll see you then, Matt. See you then. Okay, everybody. Well, guess what? We'll have a great option, jblive.info. Okay, everybody, thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. See you right back here next Tuesday. Thank you. jbtitles.com everybody go to jbtitles.com and we, boat, boat. And we'll go while you guys vote. I want to play, I don't know if there's been a series of videos, the Ubuntu Touch Terminal Emulator. It came out once before, but we didn't talk about it on the show.

And this is the new multiple tab Ubuntu terminal that we might see ship in 1504. And one of the things I would look at is the animation's pretty smooth. It's pretty slick. It looks pretty good. I like that. Yeah. So watch this now. He'll click this and there he zooms out and there's a different tab. So instead of tabs along the top, you have sort of like a tab overview. Sort of almost like the Firefox tab overview page. And you can see like the scroll action there looks real smooth. It's nice looking. Looks like a nice useful product. So just to be clear, this is the terminal for the phone that

we happen to have made sure it works on the desktop and tablet. Convergence, bitches. Convergence! It's not in the phone yet. It's in the store if you've got a phone and you can grab the code. It's all open source. It's actually maintained by the same

guy who made Cool Retro Terminal. Oh, great. Oh, man. That's cool. I love Cool Retro Terminal. You know, I just got to say, it's stuff like this that makes Linux so compelling. This is just good. Yeah.

Yeah, this is fun. And I like the, you know, it's definitely, I mean, not like desktop optimized, but I like that, you know, they didn't make it for the desktop necessarily, but yet it's still functional. So that's good. Yeah, I saw it had a retro cool terminal mode too, which is really neat. Yeah, the little thing down the bottom, I don't know if you can see this. Yeah, we're like the.

There's a little pop-up menu. And what we're planning for that is for it to be customizable. So you can have a pop-up menu for Emacs and a pop-up menu for Vi and it has all your keyboard shortcuts pre-filled in and you can define your own and download your own. Oh, shut your mouth, that's cool! That's great, guys.

That's really quite cool. I can't wait for that. Did I just hear customizable and Ubuntu in the same sentence? Oh, boy. Oh, snap. Sure. Snappage.

Get back in your box.