LINUX Unplugged - Episode 81: Unplugging the Past | LUP 81

Episode Date: February 24, 2015

Join us as we peer into the past and revisit some big topics!

This is Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's in its time machine and ready to go in the way back machine to look at some of your favorite topics. My name is Chris. I'm flying solo this week because it's a disaster here at the Jupiter. I'm actually in the bunker right now. You didn't know this, but we have a bunker underneath the Jupiter Broadcasting Studios. A hatch opens up here in the studio right about where I'm sitting, and I just kind of fall down into it. It closes, and then that's the bunker. And down here, we can only do limited things. Unfortunately, the bunker was installed a while ago, and we just have a Tetris arcade machine in there. So I can't do a podcast. No, actually, what it is, is that we're just on

reduced staff this week. So we're going to do a look back. We've been collecting these clips. Back when we set off to do a best of, we got a whole bunch of your submissions for what could be a best of Linux Unplugged episode. And we only got to use like a super small handful of them. And so we've been kicking around ideas of topics we wanted to revisit and look back at. So this week, I'm going to join you on a journey into the Wayback Machine. We'll look at some of those topics and revisit some of the classics that you submitted from the audience. And we'll share a few anecdotes together, unbutton our pants towards the end of the show like we normally do, and have a Diet Coke.

Right? Isn't that what you're doing? That's what I'm doing. I'm joined by a totally impromptu livestream who doesn't even, I didn't tell anybody we're doing a show right now, so thanks you guys for being here. I mean, I don't know what the hell you're doing here. Shouldn't you be at work or something? What, a bunch of slackers? Anyways, we should get on with the show. So we're going to take a retro look back, and I'll join you from time to time to talk about things. And we start, of course, with a classic. Okay, but this one comes in from Bob. It's safe territory.

We're not going to get anybody too upset. He says, hi, guys. Just a quick note. Chris mused that maybe the day is near that you could run with a machine without a swap partition. Well, this intrigued me, and for the last year, I've been running my 8GB laptop with no swap partition and have not noticed any issues, even when giving it a pretty thorough workout. In fact, it worked so well that I honestly forgot about it.

One thing that had bugged me, though, was that the Hibernate hasn't been an option on Ubuntu for me. I just assumed it was a config issue or the hardware not being supported i found out i could run pm-hibernate command but it would just simply not hibernate my frustration boiled over today and i went digging for clues it looks like it may just simply be a case that a swap partition is required for hibernate to work as where the memory image is written out before the machine shuts down. I G-O-L'd, that's groaned out loud, when I found this out. I'm not yet, I cannot yet confirm this is my issue, but I thought I'd share experiences for the benefit of all.

Babb. Yeah, that is true. That is true. Interesting. That is the downside to running without swap. And, you know, I have a swap. All my machines have swap right now. Do you do swap partitions still?

I do. I mean, and honestly, it's just a legacy habit. I mean, it's almost like building machines and putting a floppy drive in it. You do something like out of habit, thinking, why the hell am I putting this thing in here? Actually, Matt, I don't mean to age you, but it's now CD-ROMs, Matt. It's not floppy drives anymore. It's CD-ROMs now, yeah. Well, I've got my cassette tape drive sitting right here.

It works. It's magnetic media. It's the future. Gods now, yeah. Well, I've got my cassette tape drive sitting right here. It works. It's magnetic media. It's the future. God. Why hibernate when you can just either suspend or boot? I mean, what kind of system takes that long to boot anymore? I don't know. I put it out to the mumble room if anybody in here has a strong feeling on swap partitions.

Anybody in the mumble room running swap free these days? Yes, kind of. I use swap files instead. Can I jump in quickly? Okay, you only need swap if you're using a laptop and you want to put it into Hibernate. If you've got more than 2 gigs of RAM, you do not

need swap. Swap is only used for Hibernation. Well, what about crashing? That's not true. That's completely incorrect. Here we go! And it's on. Basically. I actually use a swap partition.

So let's see if you've got three gigs of RAM. What swap use for? I use a swap partition in order to compile my kernel. Usually I don't have like five or six gigs partitioned or put on my rig, so I use a swap. I knew this would be a hot topic. I have 12 gigs of swap, even

on machines that have 144 gigs of RAM. Yeah, I do too. You have no swap at all. The only negative thing I add is you can't hibernate, that's it. No, there's one negative thing. First of all, if you don't have any swap space, as soon as you're out of memory, the kernel either

has to start killing random processes or panic. There's no other option. If you have even a little bit of swap. 4 gigs of RAM, it's not an issue anymore. Do you know what you're going to have? 512 gigs of RAM, 512 gigs of swap I think should be enough. Just as a safety, I mean it's 512 gigs.

You only have a boot partition or a swap file. Yeah, exactly. Oftentimes you'll make the swap only 512 megabytes or something, which is just enough so that really inactive stuff can get out of your way because any free RAM is wasted RAM. So you use as much of your RAM as you can for your file system cache and things like that. So if a program is completely idle, why have it wasting memory

that could be being used for cache if you could swap it out? This is my philosophy, too. Just to be safe. Having even just that little bit means that a program can be swapped out. Right, but if the program's always idle and its memory's not in use, then it's even worse than just wasting it. So you may as well just write it to the disk even if it's slow. It's not being used. Who cares if it's slow?

But the important thing is that a lot of applications will adjust their behavior based on memory pressure. For example, the ZFS file system will free up some RAM when there's memory pressure. But for those couple of seconds while that's happening, there's nowhere

for the program to go. Whereas if you have even just a little bit of swap, most of the time, if you need swap, you'll know that you'll need a swap partition. Otherwise, you'll never know. Your Firefox profile's being used. So it's good that you're storing it in RAM, right?

Right, but that's good because it's actually fast then. But that doesn't change the argument about using swap. Why do we need a swap? Why do we need a swap if you've got more than 4 gigs of RAM? Because you're using more than 4 gigs of RAM. I regularly use more than 4 gigs of RAM just browsing. You may not use more than 4 gigs of RAM, but there do exist people who use more than 4 gigs of RAM.

All right, there you go. So you can see, I did that as a pure demonstration that this is not a cut and dry topic, right? That was Chris making a point right there. I think there's no total right answer other than you should use some swap unless you're somebody who thinks you shouldn't. And that's really the way to leave it. Excuse me. And allow me to interrupt here.

I'm coming in from the bunker again with a quick message from some dear friends of the show. That's right. Our good friends over at Linux Academy. In fact, go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. That's where they've made a little spot for you, a little home for the Linux Unplugged audience, because you're going to get the special 33% discount on the Linux Academy subscription. And Linux Academy is a great resource to further your education, but also to challenge yourself a little bit, just to kind of see what's new, because Linux Academy does such a good job of staying on top of the latest technology

developments. Things that come along that are honestly something that usually takes most shops a while to kind of get their head around, Docker, all the changes to the virtualization landscape. And as OpenStack continues to evolve, and as DevOps becomes more of a defined thing, they're constantly tweaking and adjusting, responding to that. And they have live stream courses where you can always ask the instructors questions and you'll notice immediately during these courses that these are people that truly care about the subject matter.

And then that's where you start to get the difference, right? You start to understand that Linux Academy cares a little bit more than everybody else about the subject matter and that closes that 10%. And you really begin to see the value of the Linux Academy system when you get to take advantage of things like their step-by-step video courses and downloading that content that you can take offline and read on your own. That's material that you can refer back to forever.

That's insanely valuable. And they spin up your own server. So as you're going, your subscription includes labs, even on AWS if that's what your course is required. There's seven plus Linux distributions that you can choose from. And I would recommend one. I haven't suggested for a little while, but you hear it all the time, OpenStack.

Well, what the hell is OpenStack? Do you know? They have an OpenStack essentials course. Go over to linuxacademy.com slash dump plug and go figure it out, right? Have you played with Docker? I mean, you've heard us talk about Docker, but are you familiar with it?

What about Python? What about backing up your Linux system? What about deploying Nginx? Are you familiar with all of these topics or could you use a refresher? Have you done it once under a CentOS box but never done it under an Ubuntu rig? Because you get to choose from your distribution, not only do the virtual machines change, but all of the courseware also automatically adjusts to the 7 plus distributions you can choose from. So you could experience something on one platform, move over to the other distribution, try it over there.

And the other thing they do that's really cool is they have scenario-based training. So you get to actually implement these things in a production environment, actually bang on them from a public address, and really get a feel for the technology ever before you've gone out and done something where your job's on the line or the contract's on the line or anything like that. The scenario-based training is one of the best ways to get hands-on real-world experience under the guidance of an instructor. And it's, once again, a differentiator that they have because they've built this entire Linux Academy platform

from the ground up to match exactly what their vision was. It's pretty cool. Go check out their courses on AWS, PHP, OpenStack, Android, Ruby, Python. It's all really good stuff. LinuxAcademy.com slash Unplugged. Get our special 33% discount. Go see what I've been talking about.

And go enjoy the community too. If you ever kind of bottom out a little bit and you're losing motivation, they have a really good community that'll help pick you back up. And a lot of them are filled with Jupyter Broadcasting members too, so that's really cool. LinuxAcademy.com slash Unplugged. And a big thanks to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged program. Big thanks to all of you guys who also visit our sponsors.

Now, we'll be down here in the bunker for a little bit longer. I think I have a can of olives over there and some really old whiskey. So I should be set. I'll kick back, and we'll watch a little more of this retro spectacular with you. All right. Well, let me bring Michael Hall into our restricted casting room here. And Michael, welcome to Linux Unplugged. Thank you, guys.

So you had a really great post this morning on your blog, mhall119.com. And you said it's a new 80-20 rule for open source. So before we get into that, I noticed, are you trying to do like a blog a day kind of a thing right now? Yeah, there was some conversation at the end of January about the content going on Ubuntu Planet, and I came up with this, well, I didn't come up with it, I stole

this idea of doing a blog a day for a month. So you're hoping to sort of populate the Ubuntu Planet with some reoccurring content every day kind of a thing? Yeah, I was just trying to get people to kind of blog more actively on it. So what do you do at Canonical? Well, as you mentioned earlier, my official title is Upstream Liaison, but I really haven't been doing a lot of upstream liaising lately.

I've been doing a lot of app developer focus. Yeah, I bet. You guys are ramping up the Ubuntu touch effort, right? Yeah, and the Ubuntu SDK. It's really a lot of exciting stuff going on. What has got you most excited right now? Everything around the app development and the phone. I mean, I've got a Nexus

4 that's running Ubuntu, and it's been my primary phone since August of last year. Just the workflow using the phone is so much better for me than what Android was. So is that really what, I mean, the essence of that is, you know, because so many people, when we talk about the mobile market, so many people talk about, oh, you know, Android's there. They're the new Windows. They're dominant. The market's all locked down.

But you're telling me that you sit there, you're using this thing. You're like, you know what? This works for me. And that's what's got you excited. It's like, I see this fitting into my workflow. And do you think this is like a whole new generation of opportunity for Ubuntu? I think it is. The thing we have over everybody else in the market right now is that we're running the same software on the phone as we are on the desktop.

we're running the same software on the phone as we are on the desktop. So it's not like you've got completely different platforms like you do with iOS and OSX or even Windows and Windows Phone. And of course, Android, there's not even anything on a desktop space with Android. There's Chrome OS. So being able to have just the one platform on all the devices, being able to have the same apps on all your devices, it really changes the experience of it. So changing gears to your blog post here,

I know you've been active at Canonical for a long time. You've been in the open source community for, do you have a rough estimation of how long you've been in? I've been involved with the Ubuntu community for probably six, seven years now. And so you've had time from that perspective to sort of notice trends as they come and go, you know, the big hooplas of the week that sometimes last multiple weeks, sometimes fizzle out fairly quick. And I thought, you know, you had a really poignant piece when you wrote here on your blog, people tend to appreciate it more when you only give them 20% of something,

and then they resent you if you give them 80%. Let's unpack that a little bit. When you say people appreciate it more when you give them 20%, that sounds crazy to me. That sounds ludicrous. What do you mean by that? It does sound ludicrous, but what I realized is that at some point past the 50% mark, I just chose 80-20 because the 80-20 rule is a common thing. But at some point after you've given them more than half, people start to think of it as something that they're entitled to or something that already belongs to them. And so instead of looking at what you're giving them, they're paying more attention to what you're not giving them.

Oh, interesting. you're giving them, they're paying more attention to what you're not giving them. Oh, interesting. So it's sort of like what Matt was saying. It's one part expectations and two part, what have you done for me lately? Yeah, it is. And as people have mentioned on my blog, there's another aspect of that. And that's, you know, what direction are you changing in? I mean, if somebody goes from giving 10% to giving 20%, that's better than somebody who's gone from giving 90% to giving 80%. And that's a valid criticism of my original blog post is that the direction of change's announcement of enabling ads on their new tab page. And part of it, like Matt made a very good point on last on Sunday, that part of it is honestly how they announced it. And part of it is, I think, what the phenomenon that you're writing about on your blog is that, wait a minute, you're telling me I've gotten this thing all this time for absolutely free with no ads attached. You guys are the anti-NSA, anti-ad tracking cookie organization on the internet, and now you want to ram ads down my throat? How dare you?

This, maybe while it doesn't surprise all of us, Michael, how do you combat something like that? Because Firefox has got to make money. What can Firefox do? How do you combat something like that? Because Firefox has got to make money. What can Firefox do? It's really a tough question. I mean, obviously, it's a question that we've been trying to figure out in Canonical also. And I think a lot of it is getting the messaging right. But a lot of it is just the community needs to understand that every project is going to have missteps.

is going to have missteps. And if somebody's been doing 80-90% right for so long, you have to be a little more gentle when they have those missteps. Well, let me give you an example. So Linux Unplugged, this very show that we are currently recording at this very moment, is a symptom of this problem that you're talking about.

I knew that I needed to make changes, even just from a creative expression standpoint, to the Linux Action Show. But I also knew that we had a really great product that was firing on all cylinders and has a ton of runway still. And I knew that if I changed that product to what this show is, there would be massive upset. Oh, yeah.

And so my solution was to create an entirely new product. Now, that has been wildly successful for multiple reasons, but it was exactly this kind of pressure. And we made the mistake years ago with the Linux Action Show when we decided to broaden the scope and change it to the Computer Action Show. And we basically took a beating for an entire season over that decision because we had changed the product. And the problem is, at some level, you've got to change the product. Apple, they changed the product with Final Cut. They changed the product with the Mac Pro, right?

Two recent products from Apple that are used in professional industries, completely gutted and redesigned from the ground up with less functionality, but yet in the long term will probably be better off for it. As somebody who uses Final Cut for editing, I can tell you everybody who uses Final Cut 10 is crap, hasn't used it recently. It's way, I just recently went back to the old Final Cut. It's like going back to the 90s. It's like when you've been using GNOME 3 or Unity and you go back to GNOME 2. It feels like you've gone back in time. And sometimes a lopping off like this, a major change in implementing ads, implementing the Amazon search scope is necessary for the sustainability of the project. The very people who depend on the project are then the ones that turn around on the project and attack them. What can a project do, do you think, in your opinion,

to communicate that change better so that way they can sort of preempt some of that attack? So a lot of it has to do with the messaging that goes into it. But another thing that I've noticed that I didn't really expand on in my blog is that there's a difference in reaction between people who are just users of the project and people who are contributors of the project. And people who are contributing seem to be more understanding, be more willing to work out an ideal solution instead of just jumping on the, oh my God, you're evil now bandwagon. So I guess what I don't understand is why can a company, just doing my example I set up here, why can a company like Apple reboot something,

cut away tons of functionality, and be called an innovator, but if an open source project does the same thing, they're crazy, they've lost their way, they're evil, they're whatever people are accusing Canonical or Mozilla of that week. It seems to me, I mean, Canonical has people that deal with PR. They've got a pretty good presence online, and yet they have been unable to get in front of this. Mozilla, same thing. They have an entire crew that works there, and they were still unable to get in front of this. Matt, I want to ask you, because I know you've worked in this space before, what are these people missing? What is Mozilla missing in this case? What did they do wrong? What should they have done before the news came out?

Well, the big difference between Mozilla and Apple is Apple sells experiences. Mozilla offers a browser. A lot of people think that Apple is a computer company or a technology company. They're not. They're a PR company, pure and simple. They've mastered this years ago. And so they could literally be like, hey, we have this iHome invasion thing where we're going to come in and basically invade your house and ransack everything you own. People are going to be excited about it because they can present it in a way that's attractive. What Mozilla needed to do when they came out with their whole advertising thing for browsers and whatnot is they really needed to get in front of us and say, here's our rationale. Here's how we've been supporting ourselves thus far. Here's what we're challenged with. This is what we're planning on doing. We would like to have an open forum

debate about this and actually get all the questions out in the open and really have a conversation about it. But at the same time, we need you to understand why we're doing it, why it is or is not a threat, why you should or should not be concerned, and to quit treating people like they need to be talked at and actually talk to them. That's something that historically geekier companies don't do real well at. Google, Mozilla, two real big offenders in that space, probably Google being the worst. I see it over and over, and it's something that's not really addressed very well. And I've seen other companies do this as well. But I'd say Apple, honestly, as much as I'm not a big fan of their company, they can spin anything.

Right. They control the narrative from the very beginning. And props to them for it. I mean, really. I mean, they know how to do it. And so rather than everybody yelling at how horrible Apple is about it, let's look at what they're doing right. I mean, the products aren't kind of meh. But as far as their marketing techniques, come on.

Let's get with it. So, Michael, what do you think about, like, so if we don't have the means and resources of a company like Apple, you know, these smaller, you know, even Mozilla would fall into the smaller category. What about being just more direct? Like, and I'm not asking you as a representative of Canonical here, I'm asking just your personal opinion of somebody who's been following open source for many years now. Do you think that if a company like Canonical come out and said, hey, we're doing these Amazon placements in our dashboard results because honestly, we got to generate a revenue from the desktop in order to

keep it sustainable. Or if Mozilla had come out, maybe let's take a more recent example. If Mozilla had come out and said, look, guys, we can't have all our eggs in the Google basket. We respect our relationship with Google and we appreciate the financing they've given us so far, but we've got to diversify because this browser is more important than one contract with one company and we've got to implement these ads to come up with a new source of revenue.

If they had just been totally straight, plain English like that, do you think things would have gone over better? I think it would have helped. But, I mean, you're always going to have people who would rather see your project go down in flames than have you backtrack a little bit from their ideal. And you're always going to deal with that. There's no way to explain things sufficiently for those people. But one thing we did do, when we came out with the Amazon lens in 12.10, it just kind of landed out of the blue with no explanation of why it was there or what it does.

And we're still dealing with that even today. But then the next release, we came out with the broader SmartScope service. Right. And we came out first with a public spec on our wiki. And we came out first with a public spec on our wiki. We held multiple Google Hangouts that were recorded explaining what the feature was going to be and what it was going to do and how it's going to work. And the security improvements. Yeah, and the security improvements. And that certainly helped.

I mean, if you can get the narrative right from the start, that helps. As soon as the FUD comes in and establishes itself, you're going to spend all of your time just trying to fight that. Yeah, great point. Boy, that is a really well-taken point. And I wish there was a way to sort of reinforce this with the open source community, because I'll give you another recent example I talked about on Coda Radio yesterday.

I want to say friend of the show, although he's never come on. I'd love to have him join us. But Martin, who is responsible for the KWIN project, he continues to battle this problem. We talked about it several weeks ago here on the show where the media grabs a headline from the KDE mailing list and just runs with it. First, we inaccurately reported the KDE Next release date, but more recently, and because of my lessons learned, did not run it in last, thankfully, but more recently, Pharonix ran a story that the KDE search system was a waste of money and that it's being abandoned in favor of something completely else, which is inaccurate in total, and of course, not everything's in total. And of course, not everything's being abandoned. Of course, recode is going to be repurposed. But again,

they're fighting a battle that you just touched on, Michael, where they're responding to a narrative that somebody else created for them. And this is happening more and more for open source projects because, and this goes back to something else I've been really getting on recently, the coverage in Linux and the open source space is going downhill. It's becoming industrialized and it's becoming – it's not original reporting. It's reposting based on what a corporation wants you to post and it's getting worse. And there's agendas involved and it's getting to the point where not all of the information is coming out. And the press is not giving the actual narrative a chance to get aired out. The only narratives that are getting repeated by the

media are the ones that get created first. And this is a massive problem that is plaguing Linux and open source, and it affects the way the entire open source community perceives events, I believe. And I think it's one of the things that I want to set out to help correct on our platforms, any shows that we have, is that I want to try to give the actual real narrative a chance to get some airtime because nobody else seems to be doing it. And that's why I wanted to bring you on, Michael, because I really appreciate the fact that there are some things I could disagree with on your post here. And you've actually generated a very active discussion on our subreddit. People are taking issue with minimizing the CLA and things like that. But I want to save the CLA discussion for a future episode. I'll just say,

I want to thank you for bringing this topic out to a broader discussion because I think the problem really has to be solved with the actual consumers of these open source projects. It is our responsibility to consider the long-term viability of these projects. I extend that to our own projects and our advertisers and why we have ad-supported media because that makes it sustainable. I think we have to consider the software we consider valuable. And when they make changes, we have to understand that sometimes they're doing it for their best interest in the case of the Mozilla project and perhaps even in the case of the dash lens results. And I think in that context, your

post, while I think there's plenty of things people could quibble with, it definitely provokes some interesting thoughts. So thank you for coming on Linux Unplugged today. Is there anything else you wanted to touch on before we wrap up? No, I think that's it. Oh, welcome back, friends to the bunker. It's good down here. It's starting to smell a little bit, although I think that's Rikai. I'm not trying to say my ass doesn't stink, but that doesn't smell like mine. I know what mine smells like. Hey, you know what else I know?

Digital Ocean, and they frickin' rock. That's why I know Digital Ocean. They're keeping our bunker online. They're also keeping the rest of the world online while we're down here. I don't even know what's going on up there right now, but I know my droplets run all the time. I've never even experienced an outage, and Digital Ocean has some great, great systems for you to deploy right now that run Linux, powered by KVM, all on top of the sweetest hardware you could ever imagine. It's a thrill just to use it. So go over to DigitalOcean.com, and I want you to arm yourself with a little bit of knowledge,

okay? Are you ready for this? Because this knowledge is going to save you money. I'm all about that. I want you to go play around. I don't want you to have to pay for it, all right? So use this knowledge right now. You ready? Open this spot up in your brain. Put it in the vault. D-O-1 plugged. All lowercase. One word. D-O-1 plugged. One word. Ten dollar credit over DigitalOcean. You put that in the vault now. I'm going to tell you about DigitalOcean. Then you remember, that's why Chris had me put it in the vault. DigitalOcean is a simple cloud hosting provider dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way for you, you to spin up your own cloud server. You're going to have root access to that bad mamma jamma.

It's going to be sitting on top of Linux boxes on tier one hardware that it's just so sweet with fantastic bandwidth and all on SSDs. I mean, it's great. It's so great. And you can get started in less than a minute. And pricing plans start only $5 a month for 512 megabytes of RAM, a 20 gigabyte SSD, one CPU, and a terabyte of transfer, a terabyte of freaking transfer. I mean, I've got my own cloud up on one of these things. I never go close to that. DigitalOcean has data center locations in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam,

and London. They're gorgeous data centers. As somebody who's put up a lot of really messy data centers that I'm totally ashamed of and would never want to take a picture of because the wiring mess is absolutely a rat's nest of disaster. When I see what they build over at DigitalOcean by checking out their Instagram feed, I'm like, oh, shoot. Oh, shoot, they're showing me up. DigitalOcean totally shows me up. Go look at their data center porn on their Instagram feed. And then check out that interface.

This is really the masterpiece. This is where it all comes together. This is like the icing on top. Their interface is so simple but powerful. It can get anything done you want. Backups, snapshots, redeployments, DNS management, one-click applications, destroying machines, changing the root password, HTML5 access, all the way from post to your login screen. And the best part? They have an API you can use. And that API just basically replicates all of the

function. But you want to snap it into your puppet system? Go ahead. You can do that. You just want to write a bash script that will deploy machines when you need to scale, you can do that. Or you can be like me and just take advantage of the tons of great things that the community already builds. It's really sweet. DigitalOcean also has a ton of great tutorials. Check them out. They're good for everybody. I mean, it's just Linux commands. And they're always adding more as well. So remember, DO unplug. That's one word, DO unplug. You're going to get a $10 credit. You can go try out that $5 well. So remember, D-O-Unplugged. That's one word, D-O-Unplugged. You're going to get a $10 credit. You can go try out that $5 rig. Two months, no credit card required. My gosh, what a thrill it is. DigitalOcean.com. Go over there, try it out right

now. And a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged show. It is keeping the lights on down in the bunker. Now we return you back to our retro extravaganza. So I'm going to bring, I'm going to pull Aaron back down into our private little room here. And hopefully he wasn't in the middle of saying something to the, to the group. But so Aaron, let's talk a little bit about you.

You got kind of fired up when you were watching the episode that we did recently in defense of gnome. And I think he really called me out on something that I was actually sort of kicking myself for. And that was sort of the celebration of GNOME. And I think he really called me out on something that I was actually sort of kicking myself for. And that was sort of the celebration of new and shiny and rebuilt to have a rebuilt purpose. And you sort of brought up this counterpoint and said, well, what about this methodology of refinement and evolution

and working with something and staying with it for a while and building on top of a platform, building on top of something? And that isn't almost, in some cases, really even respected in the community. What are your thoughts? And share a little bit about what got you fired up. Sure. So just to make it clear for everybody right off the top, I'm not wearing my KDE hat at all here. This is really me with my free software must-rule-the-world-one-day hat on.

Okay. And it's this exact idea that yeah you know new and shiny is awesome and yeah i mean it is new and shiny is awesome but there's cost to everything that we do new and shiny um every rewrite every new adventure um comes with a cost so when you make a bunch of applications and you decide we're just going to redo them all, you end up with, you know, being able to get the, you know,

first 90% of functionality or 80% of functionality fairly quickly. And then you spend, you know, the rest of the 90% of the development time getting the 10 to 20% that people actually need for it to become a reasonable application. And when we toss these things aside, applications that work and that have reached this point of maturity, what we might do is we might deliver something with marginally better visuals or a slightly

better workflow. But in the the meantime our users tend to be left with locations that don't have the features they need and and what happens from developers point of view who works on free software quite a bit there is a real constant pressure from a lot of people especially the attention areas of our community, you know, the media and whatnot, to always be producing something new and flashy and cool. And it's more reward for promising something wonderful and starting off by scrapping whatever you have right now. At the same time, we also get our feet held to the fire if it isn't stable and if it isn't performant and if it doesn't have the features that people need.

You're talking earlier about, you know, is the Linux desktop ready for the average person? Well, it never will be if we keep reinventing things every few years. And so there's this conflict, right? These two motivations don't really gel well together and this is both part of what new free software developers coming into it are are bred and born on and so they come into with this expectation of oh we need to redo things so it's you know sexy and cool or go the other way and be like hyper conservative there's no middle ground. And meanwhile, those projects that try and hit a middle ground, I think come under a lot of unnecessary pressure on the one hand, but also just get overlooked a lot for trying to, you know,

going through cycles of innovation, but then also going through longer cycles of stability and support. So, you know, I, just to kind of abstract this to a level where people would kind of recognize it down to the desktop, I would say, like, for me, I do kind of understand what you're saying in the sense that I look at like the GNOME desktop and their reboot has cost them, I believe, not only untold users, but years of basically progress on the desktop. I would say that while they've obviously been working very hard, it's really now getting to a point where I'm comfortably

using it on a daily basis. That wasn't, I mean, you know, that's, if you look at the years it took to get there, that's a big reset. And it kind of came at an inappropriate time, right when Microsoft was stumbling with Vista. There was sort of, I've always felt like this golden opportunity where Linux could have succeeded a little bit stronger, where, you know, perhaps if Canonical hadn't rebooted with Unity, and Unity was really quite awful at the beginning, and if GNOME hadn't restarted with GNOME 3,

which GNOME 3.0 was really quite unusable at the beginning, we might have had a little more traction, perhaps. So then you look at it now, and these projects are getting to a good state, but one of them is about to face another reboot. And I see there's projects where sometimes there'd be value in starting over. And then there's other projects where I see it almost feels a little sad because it's so much effort and time will be lost while they rebuild and retrace things that they have already once completed and already once figured out.

Exactly. And when these products get to the point of, okay, finally, they're usable again, I can use them on a daily basis, have they really progressed the technology sufficiently to offset that cost? And I think with the wild abandon that we embrace new and shiny with at times, we tend to destroy that i mean the the biggest problem i had with something like pulse audio for instance was not that we needed a non crappy audio stack but that it was pushed on to a you know the user community when it wasn't ready um right by you know as can be clearly seen by your troubles that people had. Yeah. I mean, there was literally a distribution that shipped where the volume slider didn't

do anything. When as crappy as the Linux video stack was, it finally worked for most people. Right. Yeah, exactly. And so we seem to be, as you said, picking really bad times to reinvent things and doing it for what will deliver marginal benefit, if any, at the end of the day. Yeah, see, here's the thing.

It's this interesting culture that's driven, and I feel like it's more than just one thing that attributes to this, but from a media production standpoint, like from the Linux Action Show, people are going to be much more interested in something brand new that they want to learn about than sort of retracing how great it is that every application I use under KDE has a proper notification icon on the system tray. Like, that's an example of how staying stable and just having something and defining the way it works and keeping it that way for years benefits end users, but it doesn't make for

a good segment in a podcast, and it doesn't make for a good article on a blog. And so I do agree that that is driving the conversation in one direction, and it doesn't make for a good article on a blog. And so I do agree that that is driving the conversation in one direction. But at the same time, that's because that's what the consumers of that content want to hear about, right? And the developers that are going into these projects, they don't want to work on the old guy's old busted code. They want to come up with their new hot concepts and bring those on the world. So that's their motivation. So it seems to be like this multi-dimensional problem that just sort of is maybe human nature.

No, agreed. And so on the one hand, we need to not reward those developers who just want to come in with a wrecking ball or at least reward them a lot less for doing that if they're not bringing any real large upsetting value to it. The other side of it is, yeah, how do we present mature projects as interesting?

And I agree it requires a little more positioning and thinking and, you know, most free software projects and most people involved in free software are not great self-promoters and marketers. And so, yeah, I completely get that a new is an easier story. It writes itself.

On the other hand, if you look at, you know, so a project that I've been involved with for years was Plasma, which most people know as a desktop environment. And it gets to the point where it's mature enough that we can actually start branching off and doing things like Plasma Active where we can bring in devices. And this whole convergence story that has been really exciting for people around Unity is actually where we were three or four years ago. Now, the question is, why didn't that story get out in a more interesting way? Why doesn't it keep people's attention?

And I'm sure there's probably things that I could have done differently or better to make it more interesting. But on the other hand, I also think that there's a kind of an expectation you can only tell a story once. And I think that the Convergence story, for example, is one that has a lot of legs if we can keep ourselves kind of moderately entertained and interested. And companies like Google, for instance, there's a bunch of people talking pre-show about things like Chromebooks. And what we don't realize with these things is that, I don't think consciously, is that they bang on the same boring message for like five years before people get it. And when people get it, it's new and exciting to them. But you have to bang those old messages through. And I think that hurts the free software adoption as well, because we don't have the patience to bang the message through. That usually takes two, three years. And so what happens is we get

projects that are less interesting to people. And until someone comes along with the wrecking ball and erects the new shiny that is not usable anymore, they don't get the attention. And so we kind of catch ourselves in the spot. You also have these companies that some people in the development communities idolize, Apple, where you'll see Apple from time to time completely reboot a product, even if it's a high-end product like Final Cut or the Mac Pro, into something brand new and just say, suck it, you take it or you don't take it. And this is the way it is. And I think in some weird, creepy way, that messages to people that that's an OK thing

to do because they see Apple doing it and some people hold that in some level of regard. And so it seems to me, too, that there is a bit of commercial, the commercial companies like Google and Apple are also sort of driving this mentality a bit. Commercial companies like Google and Apple are also sort of driving this mentality a bit. And it takes a certain wisdom to sort of see past that and be still motivated to work on something that is tried and true. How do you incentivize somebody to want to do that? Well, I think that most tried and true software kind of, how do I say this politelyitely has areas that suck after a number of years um yeah the software doesn't stand up to the test of time you know if you don't change it um and so right now i'm involved in in rewriting one small part of a project that I'm involved with. That's, yeah, it's a rewrite of one small component.

And it's very interesting and it will have important, it will bring important value to the users. It's not a rewrite of everything. So I think on the one hand, you know, finding ways to create a culture of, you don't have to rewrite everything, make your thing, make your software, you know, a little bit more modular with a more forward looking design, which is something that

we need to teach each other how to do. And then, you know, you can do incremental, important evolutionary work where you can talk about it. I mean, my blogs in the last two weeks have featured quite a few times this component that I'm rewriting, and people are finding it very interesting and exciting. And it's done in a very low risk way. The other thing is, is that there are tons of topics that free software does not touch, does not cover. We don't need to be rewriting the image viewer application every two years. Let that topic area go, and let's find the other 8 million application categories that we have no answer for and create a new shiny there.

No kidding. You know, instead of just chasing our tails. But maybe that's just me. Maybe we actually do have a complete software catalog, but last time I checked, we didn't. Well, so I guess if you move, if you kind of zoom out a little bit and you look at like the whole like free software ecosystem, there are certain aspects of like Linux that have – Linux itself have had pretty even curved development and stability and also innovation. The Linux kernel has then been adopted by every company under the sun to power their product.

then been adopted by every company under the sun to power their product. And I think that speaks to sort of what you're talking about. When you have a group of people that just stay at it and keep building it, don't keep throwing it all out and restarting again, it gives people certain assurances. But because that hasn't happened really at the user space as much, we haven't seen a stabilizing there. And so you see these – we had a great thread in the Linux Action Show subreddit saying, why has Linux on the desktop failed? He looks at – this was Ersk in the chat room.

He looks at the market shares. Linux is at 1.73% according to netmarketshare.com. And he says, regardless of the distro, it's at 1.73% while XP is 12 years later still at 29% market share. One of the reasons this could be the popularity of XP in Asia, of course, and things like that. But honestly, XP was this quote unquote stable in terms of it's an easy target for developers to quantify, develop for. And I wonder if perhaps, remember when Miguel Itacaza wrote that the problem with the Linux desktop was always changing and always, always incompatibilities

always being brought in. I wonder if he sort of nailed it in a sense where, like, what we really need is something now I know, I'm just gonna sound like I'm blowing smoke up the KDE project, but we need something like KDE 4.x. That is just what you see is what you get for years. Like it's like this for it's snapshotted like this for years, much like Unity will be in the next LTS release. Does Linux need a little XPification right now? I think so. And this can be done without ossifying or fossilizing things either. Now, you brought the Linux kernel.

I completely agree with what you said about it and why it's successful. But the Linux kernel is like this massive constant churn. So it's not like they're sitting still and moribund. They've managed to marry the two. whole many years of UDEV, UDISCs. Basically, the hot plug and disk management facing the user space side has gone through a number of revolutions and not always... In fact, at each break, it was radical API change. So what the

KDE developers did was they decided to create an API that did what application developers could wrap their head around because the lower level user space APIs were also pretty hardcore for the average person who just wants to write a cool game or something. So they created a slightly simplified API, but they masked what was going on down below. And this, yes, opened up the ability to port to Windows and Mac and now ios

and android but when the you know the udisk thing came in while other desktop environments like xfce for instance had to do a lot of work to catch up their applications and and rewrite them no kd application had to line a code a new backend was written for that framework called solid and everything just continued working even more magical no one got left behind because the people who are using the old stuff use the old back end of the people using the new stuff use the new back end and no one was stranded on an old version so it is possible to do but it takes forethought and i think that miguel de acaso was correct in his criticism or his critique except that we do have projects and communities out there that do exactly what he said we should

be doing and the challenge we face is that the community as a whole on the one hand i don't think recognizes that um you know when someone who does something like solid there's a certain community or group of people in the community who hurl stones saying you're just writing, you know, yet another abstraction layer and, you know, you should be writing to the Linux stack directly. And that's the way to go. And so there's like a popular backlash against doing the responsible thing. And I think as a community, we need to take stock of what really matters. And if we do want to get that stable, approachable user land, and especially at the GUI level, we need to start valuing that kind of work that isn't very glamorous, but pays off in the long run. And we need to start

supporting those people. And the people who don't do that, maybe we should say, look, I love you guys. And you guys are doing free software, which is freaking awesome. But you know what? We need you to do it responsibly. And so we're going to go over here and support these people that are looking at five, 10 years down the road. And I think if we did that, if we shifted what we value, everybody would start doing things a little more responsibly. And then I think the whole new shiny thing would resolve itself because people tend to do by by and large, that which is rewarded. Matt, let me ask you the million-dollar question, and then I'll open it up to the mumble room. How do we shift the end user's value, which would hopefully then influence developers

and media coverage? How do we shift the value from new and shiny to tried and true? Well, I think the opportunity definitely lays with xp the problem is is that the end user looks at xp not realizing the fact that it's going to be a major problem here in the coming months and doesn't see a reason to switch but i think if you speak to the fact that they could potentially continue to use the hardware they already have without having to invest in new hardware i think money is really going to be the sweet spot yeah i think you were you so the point you're driving out here is like, there's a certain class of user that absolutely values tried and true.

And then there's a certain class of user, the more sophisticated user who maybe is a little more on the, I want the shiny, right? Exactly. That's exactly it. And I, and I think that, you know, it's really hard to hit that nail on the head, but I think the biggest problem Linux has for both groups is they really suck at marketing. I mean I can't stress that enough. They have this amazing product that is driven through very much an echo chamber world.

I mean it really is, and it's a shame because I introduce it to people, and they're just blown away as to why the hell they've never heard of this before. And they have an Android phone. They have no idea. So it's interesting. So it's going to be tough to say for sure, but I definitely say that it's going to be – the real opportunity for growth is going to come from the people that are using XP. I think that's really where it is. The new and shiny people, honestly, I don't know.

Maybe they're always going to want new and shiny. Yeah, it's like trying to herd cats. I don't know about that. Well, I think we can do both, but I do completely agree with you, Matt, when you say that people who want the tried and true, that's – how do we market to them? And that's the gap, the marketing bit. And this is kind of what tweaked me when I listened to your show. And I'm often like one or two weeks behind that I've been on the Linux Action Show to catch up. And it's what tweaked me about it, right?

It was like, you guys are the people who market us best because we do suck at it. Full stop. And so when I see people who would be our best and brightest um in terms of getting the message out of marketing you know rewarding really and for good intentions i think you know the new and shiny because i want to support and and push forward everything i mean nobody wants to be the grumpy guy who goes well you're really putting your heart and soul into this and i can see that and you're doing this free software but really um no one wants to be that guy. I get it. But if we want to succeed, there's some level of responsibility that needs to come in. And the people who do the

best marketing for us, who is not, it's not me and the other software developers, right? We need, you know, you guys to, and not just you two, but but you know the media in general who follows free software to do it and what goes even one step further of pain and heartache is when i read certain people in the media who cover free software basically going fine okay great the free software projects will never get together and again this is a systems thing because we've been rewarding the wrong things all along fine then now I'm just going to say that Google with their services are where it will be. And to me, that feels like just running the white flag straight up the flagpole and unnecessarily. strategically useful behavior, and then getting that message out to those people who would most benefit from it, such as the XP crowd. It's not an easy thing that, you know, I realize that's a

gigantic thing to take on, but I think that's the path to success lies in that direction somehow. Very good. That's a good point. It's well taken on my end too because it's something that I – it's definitely on my radar because I always cringe a little bit when – like you say, I have that same feeling. It's like, okay, it's good that you're doing this and I really appreciate the hard work. to a point that it's okay. It's worth talking about now. It's really gotten good. But at the same time, in the back of my mind, it's like,

I do understand that I'm sort of encouraging, like I called it, a form of consumerism. And I'm not generally comfortable with all those kinds of things. Oh, hey guys. We weren't... Rekai, put that out, Rekai. Put that out, man.

They can smell it. We weren't doing nothing down here. We were just hanging out. Oh, you guys still watching that retro thing? Hey, well, I got you for a second. Can I tell you about how good the Ting service is down here in the bunker? I mean, Ting is incredible, and Ting is a sponsor of the Linux Unplugged show. In fact, you can get in on some of that goodness by going to linux.ting.com.

So not only does linux.ting.com support this here show, but it's going to get you a $25 discount off your first Ting device. That matters. And also, if you've got a Ting-compatible device, you can bring your own device. Well, they're going to give you a $25 credit. So you're going to win either way, and you support the Linux Unplugged show. Now, what is Ting? My mobile service provider and Matt's mobile service provider.

Ting is mobile that makes sense because there's no contract. There's no early termination fee. But the big one for me is I'm only paying for what I use. It's flat $6 for each line. And then you just pay for your usage on top of that. Ting will just add that up and that's what you pay at the end of the month. So I've got three lines. I've got an HTC One, I've got an iPhone 5, and I've got my Nexus 5. And on there, I usually pay somewhere in the range of $35 to $40 for all three lines, all smartphones. They're all ready to go with hotspot and tethering. You just turn it on when you want it.

They have an incredible dashboard that allows you to manage all of that, and they have no-hold customer service. You can call and talk to a real human between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. East Coast time. You call them, 1-855-TING-FTW, and a real person answers the phone. They got a great range of devices, value devices like flip phones all the way up to like the best. Or you can just get a SIM and just go grab like a Nexus 6 from the Google Play Store and put it in there. And the dashboard really brings it all together. They've got mobile apps. They've got a very fantastic web app that's web compliant.

They've really done a very good job with that. And I think the best thing about Ting is they're also a company that I'm pretty comfortable my money goes to. And I've never said that about a telco before. But Ting isn't like a telco. They're mobile and they're different. And so when I think about Ting, I think it must be very challenging being in this industry, but yet being so different. And they happen to answer just that very question in a recent video. Ryan asks, what were the biggest challenges in creating a wireless company? What is the most difficult part

of maintaining such low rates? For us, the most difficult parts of building a wireless service were finding a good carrier partner, availability to offer the network, and being able to initially build the systems that supported what we're doing. You really need a great back office to provide great customer service. So the easy part was conceiving of it, imagining all of the bits and pieces, knowing that we wanted to provide

a great customer experience. The hard part was really putting together the wiring. Now that that's together, all of the challenge is around getting as many people as possible on the platform. Linux.ting.com. Go get on that platform. Finally, put your money somewhere where maybe it doesn't make you want to hate yourself a little bit. Linux.ting.com. It truly is mobile that makes sense. And I'll tell you down here in the bunker, we can't recommend any other mobile. It is the best mobile provider.

linux.ting.com. Also, Noah's a mobile search provider for the Linux Action Show. Really, the whole team here at Jupyter Broadcasting has been using it. And now that they're going GSM as well, shoot. linux.ting.com. Go join up and start savings. And check out their savings calculator. It's linked right there on the front page when you go to linux.ting.com. And that might just finally help you realize the difference. Also, if you're having like a spousal debate about it, this, giving numbers like this, getting data on your difference, you put in your current usage, you compare it to what Ting would be, and then they'll say, over the life of the two years, this is what you're going to save.

And when you see that number like I did, when you see that number, it's pretty easy to switch. And they also have an early termination relief program that makes it even better. Linux.ting.com. Big thanks to Ting for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged program. I'm going to jump back into my cozy... Honestly, it's not that cozy. It actually has a hole in it, and I think Rikai spilled some chili on it.

But I got, nonetheless, a sleeping bag. I'm going to jump back in while you watch the rest of the retrospective. Our last bit of feedback this week comes in from Dakota. Dakota writes in about Linux in schools and says, I'm 15 years old and have been using Linux for a year now. I've done stuff from write my own code to compiling a custom kernel on Ubuntu. I think we as a community should start a petition to get open source into more schools. And like you talked about on Unplugged with the same other teens,

I think the school should actually teach you something useful in the computer and IT classes. It's really sad when there are kids out there like me who can teach the class better than the teacher. You know, that sentiment of teaching the class better than the teacher, which can come across a little bit like the youngster knowing more than the teacher and these damn kids. But in the same sense, I remember one of the reasons I wasn't super spun up about taking more college-level courses is because I quickly felt like I was outflanking my teachers and knew more than they did. And it was frustrating when the teacher would incorrectly cover something or say something wrong or use the wrong terminology or write system D with a capital D.

Bad example. But you know what I'm saying. It is very frustrating for these students. And it's interesting because we got a lot more emails than the ones I just read on air, and a lot of them iterated that point. It seems like we're a trend of young people saying, hey, don't give up on our generation. We're here. We're talking. We're sharing. We're teaching others that are willing to learn, maybe not

the teachers, but certainly other students. I'm almost coming to the conclusion that I think the future of Linux on the desktop in a non-enterprise situation, perhaps at home, will be with young people. I think that much like how Firefox had its adoption spread, I think it's going to be young people that make it happen. Interesting. Like mom and dad screwed up the computer. Let me replace the OS with something that works.

Just like they used to with the browser. Be like, oh, mom and dad, you're not using Firefox. This is what your problem is. Let me fix that for you. Yeah, yeah. You know what? You might be right about that matt uh i would say too when i think about this you know looking at these these kids that are really smart uh i think that really there's two things that uh we have to realize is that

uh younger linux users will find resources that we have out there for the adults like these shows like these shows like when we make these know, we don't really have a specific age group in mind, but we're definitely not trying to target a younger demographic. But yet they still, obviously we have an audience that they, you know, they represent a percentage of the audience that's noticeable. And they are finding the same resources that we create for adults. And I don't think we have to get in this mindset that we have to do something very special for the kids. I think smart, savvy kids that are told it is okay. Self-education is an old,

is an okay thing. If we can, you know, cause a lot of kids, I felt when I was in school, I felt that the internet was new, right? And it was untrusted. And there was pushback from my teachers when I would self-research and self-educate. Like you can't rely on that. You don't know if you're teaching yourself the right thing. You're not smart enough to figure it out on your own. You need our guidance is really what they were saying. And now looking back on that, I resent that because self-education is a fantastic tool, and the internet empowers people to teach themselves things on their own in their own room.

Don't you think? I think that's – I think you really nailed on something there even bigger than just the experiences that you had. I think the problem is it was a – it represented the changing of a guard to where it was no longer teachers who were the teachers essentially. I mean they no longer were the power player or had all the knowledge that there's this new finagled thing that kids were quite frankly more adept to than the adults were um i was at that time when this was happening i was pretty much out of my own and out of school and whatnot but i witnessed this happening a lot just in society that there seemed to be a real shift and so i think that that's probably a lot of what you were experiencing yeah and i think maybe that could still be there could be a little bit of that still in play today um because some of those same

teachers are still in. They really are, aren't they? So I think if we tell these teenagers and kids that, hey, dude and dudette, it's fine. Go out there and learn on your own. Go teach yourself. You don't have to have somebody's blessing to become educated on a topic. I think the Linux community's pride blinds them from seeing the real threat. think maybe we also still see microsoft as the threat but i think the reality is the real competition is apple i think it's i think from

they have they have compelling hardware that people a lot of people like not everybody uh the fact that they can sell so many computers without ethernet ports blows my mind but it's a thing apparently uh and they um they offer sort offer sort of at least the idea of a turnkey computing solution. And I think that is, I want to sort of keep that in mind as we talk about the overall Linux community's abrasiveness sometimes when it comes to issues that they're passionate about. And Matt, you touched on this in an article you wrote for DataMation saying, is Ubuntu animosity misplaced? Kind of from a high level, like what's the concept here?

Basically, I'm looking at it from this perspective. And I always take the Ubuntu perspective for two reasons. One, it's what my editor would prefer. And secondly, it still covers most of the Linux universe just by default anyway. So it's really a moot issue in that regard. But the point is that a lot of people come into Linux and people I introduce to Linux, they go to the forums, they go to these different places, or especially

on the social media sites, and they see a lot of real negative behavior. I mean, it's really unfortunate. The kind of stuff you would expect to see in a Windows form. You know, you like to think you got away from that, but in the Linux space, it can be really prevalent. And for a lot of people, it's a turn off. But also going deeper than that, I feel like like that so what got these people to that mindset in the first

place and a lot of it does come down to unity uh other aspects of ubuntu as well i mean just really nailed down the job you know you said uh ubuntu simply needed to give unity more time of development before releasing it because of that it got you know a big backlash from the community simply put you said i believe some folks within the community felt like Ubuntu was isolating itself with this move to Unity. I think that's probably a fair point. That caused some hurt feelings. Or, you know, maybe hurt feelings is the right way to put it. But it caused people to take sides.

And then you said, you know, down the road you had the Mirror versus Wayland debacle, which we're very familiar with. You had the Mirror versus Wayland debacle, which we're very familiar with. When it was first announced, Mirror was to be Ubuntu's choice for X.org's replacement. Once again, the Linux community sounded off. At the time, I took a stance on the matter, explaining that if Mirror didn't get at least one additional distro to use it as a display option, I would wear a monkey suit for the masses unless, well, it's 12 months later, I've lost the bet and prepared to pay the price initially agreed upon. Now for the bitter pill. You don't want to hear. The casual computer user couldn't care less about the issue.

So long as the applications work as expected, I suspect we'll be seeing shrugs of indifference throughout the Ubuntu masses. No, I see this as a battle of wills between developers and their opposing views. And I think you nailed it there. Yep. And I think if you look at Will Wheaton, what he just said, he couldn't give two craps about Wayland versus Mir. And he also defeats the thing that it's only new users that don't care. He is not a new user by any stretch. Oh, great point. So I think this is something we've got to appreciate is people, you know, as their lives get busy, just because they might not

be um uh they might be technical people but they might just decide that they don't have time for drama or they don't have time to follow this kind of stuff and that can be a whole off-putting thing in itself and you say the back and forth was perhaps even more heated than we'd seen than the unity versus gnome challenges in the past like the mirror versus whalen thing was like every time they've had something that event has been more hotly contentious than the one before it. That's true. And it seems like the animosity is building on itself

and building on itself. And it's like this snowball that just keeps rolling. And then, of course, we get into the whole Upstart versus SystemD discussion, which, you know, Canonical and Ubuntu weren't directly involved in. But you say, unlike the Unity versus Mir debate, Upstart got the attention of a fresh new crop of Linux users as it directly affected how a Linux distro starts and stops events and services.

So even if you're not a system admin or a developer, this affected anyone who uses Linux on a day-to-day basis. Definitely. And I noticed a lot of people that normally wouldn't care one way or the other about desktop environments or whatnot because they just use something else. This affected them more so because it was under the hood. It's going to change how they do things. And you said, of course, the CLA at its core, the CLA is perceived as a barrier among many developers within the Linux community. You mentioned Linus Torvalds expressed his displeasure with all CLAs in all forms. And, you know, that's been a real concern for some developers.

And you mentioned in your closing thoughts that the Linux community is passionate, involved and that's been a real concern for some developers. And you mentioned in your closing thoughts that the Linux community is passionate, involved, and sometimes overtly loud when it comes to the direction the platform is headed in. That you say, while users such as myself try hard to remain neutral and not act as though using our computers is a religious experience, the community at large continues to make their voices heard

no matter the cost. Now, what do you think that cost is? I think a lot of times the cost is that we create unnecessary contention between each other. I think a lot of times that we become so focused on stupid stuff that we really lose focus of what's going on in other areas. For example, let's look at the Chromebooks and how Chrome's doing its thing and these things are selling really well and whatnot. Rather than

focusing on outdoing Apple, outdoing Google, outdoing other stuff, I feel like we focus on our internal squabble so much that it really not only doesn't solve anything, it just makes us dig deeper into our own personal camps, but we ignore bigger issues. I'm not sure if you're thinking about it right because, I mean, there's a lot of things that are huge deals, you know, like what side of the window is the close button on? Oh, my god. I know. Oh, and how I used to – no, I'm guilty of this. I used to bitch constantly about the lack of a minimize button and no.

I made a big stink about it just when I went on and on and on and on about it. No one cares. I mean, you know, it was my problem, not yours. Right? So it's like, why would anyone care? But I'm guilty of this as well. I'm just as bad as the other guy. Riley, what are your thoughts on the Unity? Well, there's a interesting thing about Unity, too.

There's a large user base who would actually use Unity on other distros if they could. People would use Unity on Arch if they could, but since they can't, they just hate on it. I actually think Unity is maybe the ultimate example of stuff

that we argue about that actual users don't care about, because here's the thing. Even if Unity was, quote unquote, the most terrible desktop in the history ever it doesn't matter if you if you are even slightly linux technically inclined you know how to use a different desktop and if you're a new user to linux you really probably have no problem with unity because truth be told it's not that bad especially if you don't come in with preconceptions and go ahead honestly isn't that bad it's very pretty desktop, especially if you've used it 12.04 forward. It's actually halfway stable. I don't care what you say.

I think it's something that general users just don't even know they should be caring about. And Ick, you think somehow maybe user choice plays into all of this? Maybe user choice plays into all of this? Yes, absolutely. Here's the thing. We keep talking about over and over again. Linux is about freedom and choice. And it's something that I wrote actually on the subreddit. When it comes to desktop environment, use whatever you like the best and works best for you.

Don't let anyone talk you into something else just because they like it more or have some other agenda. Good advice. Yeah. Yeah. Rod and Corpse, you switched your mom over to a Unity desktop? I did. How'd it go? She's been using it for about two years now.

She likes it, I guess? Yeah, she has no problem with it. The thing is, I was using it at this time because I was testing it out, and I wanted to kind of like have her opinion on it. I was testing it out and I wanted to kind of like have her opinion on it and because she's a completely she doesn't really care at all all of the de's and stuff like that's irrelevant to her it doesn't matter so when I look at unity I find the little flaws and stuff that I don't like and a few things that I do like the dash I don't like it almost at all but I asked her what she think about the dash she's like what's that and I explained. She's like, what's that? And I explained it, and she's like, yeah, I don't care. That's cool. Yeah, exactly.

Well, see, I've had – so I had my dad running an older version of Ubuntu with Unity, and he really liked it. He was coming from – it was either XP or 7. It was before Windows 8, and he was switching over, and he ran Ubuntu for a little while. And what he ran into is kind of what you touch on here, Matt. As you say, sort of closing out your article, you say, my concern is that newer users who have just come over to the Linux side of the fence will be scared away by some enthusiasts

and their misplaced animosity towards Ubuntu. Will this color how the majority of newcomers see the Linux community? It did for my dad. Yeah, and I've seen evidence of it. I actually have people that I talk to about this stuff before I write this stuff. Yeah, he saw it. He saw,

you know, when he was, so he had two problems, I think. First problem was, is he wasn't really clear on where he was supposed to go to look up problems. And like, so he wanted to, he moved at one point, and they didn't have internet access, they didn't have like cable or DSL where he'd moved to.

And so he wanted to tether to his phone and like trying to look up and he was at work and trying to do like the Googling at work and then bring that home. He got so many different results and so many different mixed messages on that whole thing that it, and I don't, I wouldn't blame it all on this, but I think it definitely, when it came time to buy a new rig altogether, he just kind of decided to go get a Mac. Yeah. Oh, yeah, because it's an all-inclusive experience. And as much as I'm not in any way a Mac person, believe me, I really don't like them, at the end of the day, they don't sell a computer. They sell a collective experience. Yeah.

They really do. And they have the whole genius angle to it too, So he was able to ask the guy some questions. And I so this article you really resonated with me here because not only did I see that through my dad's experience, but when we were taking the arch challenge, there was equal parts really good advice that I got from, you know, some awesome people on our subreddit and things like that. And there was equal parts, really like hostile, bad advice that I got everything from trying to scare me away from using arch and telling me how hard it is to use and how I, I really have to keep the system maintained. And it turns out to be like the easiest Linux box I've ever had to maintain. Right. That it would be unstable because you're using bleeding. Yeah. That was another one. Yep. Yep. And you know, don't use this tool. Use that tool. And I suspect this happened for you too, but it gave me pause for a little bit where I thought, I don't think I want to deal with this. Right.

I don't like this. I don't need this. And it's even more nuanced than it is in Arch because in Arch, there's multiple ways to install a piece of software. Where like in Ubuntu, pretty much at of day every guide's gonna tell you pseudo app get install right add this ppa like there's consistencies so you can get a lot of different you get a lot of information but they all kind of tell you to use the same tools and do the same things not the same thing in arch now thankfully that wiki is very authoritative and has a lot of good info but when you're just switching i felt like i had a lot of mixed messages and i I can, so I'm, I think that experience might be what a lot of new people get when like, you know, they're reading a comment

thread and there's just tons of Ubuntu hate in that comment thread. Um, I would agree. And I, and what you said about the wiki, the problem with the wiki is that it's, it's, it's too good. And, and, and what I mean by that is that the information in the wiki blows other distributions out of the water as far as accuracy, but the problem is locating and knowing what to search for to find it. That's the rub for a lot of people because you don't always know. Like when I was trying to figure out the whole battery life for – the battery life situation for my notebook, I wasn't necessarily finding exactly what I was looking for until about the third or fourth search, and then I clicked. And the information was fantastic, but it was finding it. So I think if they can hone that a little bit, the information is gold.

There's no problem there. Some people actually suggest people to look at the Arch wiki to find the information, which is a good idea. But they'll also suggest to people who are not using Arch, which is very awkward. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Rod, you were going to say it kind of depends on the existence of users of Linux to make regular users experiences a little more easier. Right. I was basically just going to say that when, when people talk about moving people to Linux, they always think about, you know, hair telling the advocate of why Linux is good and why they should use it, but they don't necessarily make that transition easy. Like for example,

with my mom or my roommate or my neighbor, I've moved over, I set up their computer. I find out what they want. I put the Linux thing that I think fits best for them, the distro I mean, and then I put on the different apps that they want. Like for one of them wanted WoW, so I had to put Wine in, so then I put WoW Connection. And if you give them Linux set up where they can have it just the stuff they want to use and the things they would be used to. Like the way they get Windows when it's already installed, if you do that for them, the transition to Linux is almost negligible as far as whether it's hard or not. That's true. That's true. I used to support Linux at a small bookstore in a town north to me. And I actually – the service calls were – well, they went from a ton of them to none as long as I maintained the machine.

Yeah, I definitely noticed during – I used to joke when my clients would ask me like, so what should we do here for this desktop? And I would tell them – I would say thankfully a lot of my clients use Windows. I'm very thankful for that because it gives me ten times the amount of business that I would have if they ran Linux. And that's not just me like guessing. That's like literally from my experience. Like I can put Linux in and once things are set up and stabilized, like Rotten Corpse is saying, I would go in there and I would configure everything for them. Right. And I would even set it up so it would take snapshots of their configuration settings and all that kind of stuff and back those up and we could restore them very simply.

And Webman was a great tool to help some, some of their local tech gal set up users and stuff like that. And that worked so well that I would literally lose money on those clients. Exactly. Yeah, that was that when I switched to Linux full time is about the time I got out of repair. Don't know. It was going to say full-time is about the time I got out of repair. Ick was going to say, our problem here is that we've been conditioned by Microsoft. What's going on there, Ick? Well, here, let me just go ahead and set the wayback machine to

1995, when Windows 95 first came out. People were up in arms that their programs were not right there in front of them like they had on the program manager of Windows 3.1. Now, fast forward 19 years later now everybody's looking for that start menu if they don't see that start menu they are up in arms it's just like okay uh now microsoft has conditioned us to operate this way and see that's

the thing people are assuming that a desktop environment such as humidity is unintuitive just because they're not used to it. I suppose. Yeah. That's the ding you get. Give him the ding. That man has earned a ding. All right. Well, here you go.

There you go. You get a ding. Dave, you were going to say that maybe we just need to cater to each specific user. That's your go, man. That's your go right there. No. All right. Well, that's what I think what he was going to essentially say. And I don't know. He has a little bit of lag, by the's your go, man. That's your go right there. No? That's your go, right. Well, that's what I think

what he was going to essentially say. And I don't know... He has a little bit of lag, by the way. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's complicated. No, what I was simply

going to say is every user has their own sensibility of how a desktop should and should not be. I mean, you have people who use Windows 8 perfectly with and without touch.

And you have people who see the Macintosh interface and see that's the perfect desktop. They can't use anything else regardless of whatever it is. So every user has their own sensibility of what a desktop should be and what their workflow should be. So while we're arguing about what the perfect one is, we're thinking of a hypothetical user that that doesn't really exist

that's true me exactly that's very exactly that that's what i'm kind of driving at is that intuitiveness is subjective yeah true yeah and i think so this goes going back to apple is the big threat here um i think that the thing about mac os that you got to wrap your head around is that it's it's not a great desktop in a lot of ways. Like when I use it for, you know, I have several machines here in the studio. And, you know, to me it feels very old. It feels like I can, you know, I remember the Macs from the 80s and I still see a lot of influence there. And I don't think it's that amazing of a desktop.

And I don't think it's that amazing of a desktop. I think it's what Matt's saying is that with Apple, it's this hardware, good enough software, better than the alternative, which is Windows, and that support package. And I think when you're somebody like Will Wheaton and that price isn't a factor because that's the – I'd say the number one argument, once you take out all the freedom and the open arguments, which if you're not even – if you don't even know to be concerned about that, that's not even part of the equation, right? If you take away that and you take away the cost barrier because for a huge segment of people, that's not going to be an issue, I think Apple is a fierce competitor to Linux. I think it's much more of a threat on the desktop than Windows is. Well, it is, especially for someone coming from Linux because they can drop down to a command line and do anything they need to Linux. I think it's much more of a threat on the desktop than Windows is. Well, it is, especially for someone coming from Linux, because they can drop down to a command line and do anything they need to do.

I mean, that's the other thing. Like, look at Miguel Itacaza, you know, one of the original GNOME developers who eventually just threw his arms up in the air and said, you know what, I'm going to go get a MacBook. But you could sort of get that equivalent on Linux easily if you go with something like Ubuntu and System76. I mean, they have excellent customer support,

magnificent hardware on top of generally they ship on what, like LTSs? I think this is an important piece. This is why I'm a System76 fan, is because they are also creating that entire end-to-end experience. But the problem is we don't have enough people doing that. And it's like, whereas Apple has this massively established presence and brand. And I just, you know, we do our part just to spread the word about System76 because I think it's a really important, I think that whole entire product package is super important. And I think

one way we can achieve that today is in larger installations, like at schools and at businesses where you have a person that comes in and rolls out a system for a whole bunch of people. That seems so ripe for the Linux desktop picking to me. It's ridiculous. It's just maybe a few software applications, but that just seems so ripe, whereas that home user who's a 30-something hipster that just wants to go down to the mall and buy a metal MacBook, I don't know if we're going to be able to get that person. But I think schools and businesses and any time where you can take the experience and you can build it around the need, I think Linux is such a slam dunk for that. Well, that's sort of already happening now. We see Chromebooks and Chrome OS, which is technically Linux-based in educational areas all the time now. It's becoming increasingly popular.

That just makes me sad. So I think the formula to making this work is the fact that it takes a multinational company to make this happen. Right. is the fact that it takes a multinational company to make this happen. Right, what I was going to say is that it boils down to the same thing that Matt has said a bunch of times, and that is marketing. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mac stuff, the software, is okay, and it's built on stuff that was already there, it was already good in the first place. So it's like if you took LXDE, put a dock on it, it's very close to the first place so it's like if you took lxde put a dock on it it's very close to the way mac works or like gnome 3 or you know if you spend a couple hours configuring kde right uh yeah you can have a i i really believe you can have a more modern experienced desktop that has better efficiencies it's in some ways can especially i think for gnome 3 can be more user-friendly. I agree.

This is such a problem, and I just kind of want to – and I guess I want to bring this back to how the community can make a difference here. And we're not going to convince everybody to lay down arms and embrace each other in a kumbaya, but – I have an idea. What? What if the GNU project, because they always want Linux to be called GNU slash Linux, they put up money for marketing to make it GNU slash Linux? I'll do one. I don't know. I think it's close. I think it's close. Get a GNU start with GNU slash Linux.

Well, here's an actionable formula of how this could actually be done. Here's an actionable formula of how this could actually be done. First of all, you get yourself a Kickstarter project or however you want to fund it, some sort of a collective funding process that gets a bunch of advertising dollars together. Then everybody in key metro cities goes to the Google AdWords program that allows you to advertise on your local cable channels, take a Fiverr voiceover of one of those really good movie voices, slap together some great video capture from OpenShot or whatever, just really show off what the desktop can do, make it sound like a movie intro, launch those in each one of those metro areas on television. Stop this internet crap. On TV where regular people actually get their media and watch what happens. I think you might be surprised. Isn't this part of the problem, though, is there's no Linux Inc. There's no company that needs to capitalize on this opportunity, that could capitalize.

There's individual companies that are all kind of scattered about, and I think that's one of the reasons Ubuntu has such name recognition is because there's a company behind that. And Red Hat has such name recognition and brand recognition. But there's no one company who's got the money and the presence to do that. And so maybe let me shift the conversation here. Is this why everybody is so hard over mobile? Because it's the grand reset of this technical century that we get to start all over again. And everybody is everybody is afresh and new and the possibilities are endless is that why everybody's so hot on

mobile well maybe it's because they have right now essentially two platforms that they have to look at only and they're so massively widespread now that it's easy for people who are not computer users, even just regular people who just want a tablet so they can watch something like Netflix or something. It can bring that so many more people to look at your stuff. So people are just kind of like jumping on the bandwagon of any kind of mobile device of all. Yeah. Well, I mean, and it's a lot easier to get mobile devices in the hands of individuals around the world and the fact that you know there's billions of individuals around the world that still don't have a mobile device that's a huge user base that a company could target well

like dave is saying in the chat room everybody loves a computer in their pocket but wimpy what kind of tipping point do you think we're at what you say we're at a tipping point right now? Well, 20 years ago, Apple was in the shitter. They've really turned their fortunes around. And the two companies that are really driving popularization of cutting-edge technology at the moment are Apple and Google. So I think the tipping point that we're at right now is that Microsoft is on a downward trend. They're hanging on to traditional markets and really not succeeding in that. And I think the tipping point we're at is with Apple and iOS and Mac OS X, and then Google with obviously Android and then Chrome OS

and I think it will be a battle that's fought out between Mac OS and Linux in the guise of Chrome OS. I think the big problem with Windows is it's sort of like become a tainted name. Like I know people who won't buy Windows phones because they think they'll get

viruses. It's a black mark. I agree. I think the Windows name is now a black mark on a product, and I think the general consumer thinks it's something old, and it's not hip. It's not cool anymore. I think that's what's holding back a lot of these Windows mobile devices and desktops, and I think that's... Well, I feel sorry for Microsoft because they can't win.

They try and be hip, and then everyone says, oh, we don't know how to use Metro, and then they try and be, like, old school, oh, we don't know how to use Metro. And then they try and be like old school and everyone has a go at them for not being different. It is kind of bad for them. They're trying to be hip again. They're just trying to do it through a bunch of people dancing around

holding tablets and that just doesn't work. Clicking them together. Exactly. Because when I use a computer, I'm always running around my office smacking the monitors together to try and get it to accomplish tasks. I mean, really? Yeah. That's an interesting concept. So the whole idea, is it going to be MacBooks versus Chromebooks in the future? And you'll have everybody who wants to save a buck running Chromebooks, but they'll be inextricably forever linked at the hip to Google, and you'll have everybody that wants to drop some cash,

we're talking in large percentages here, buying MacBooks, and is the predominance of Linux going to be this bastardized, closed down, souped up for their commercial cloud services client-side OS? Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You said commercial software.

Would that honestly be so bad? I mean, this is open source. People can do whatever that they choose, and people can implement it the way they want. And if Linux adoption requires that companies like Google and whoever change it the way they need to, or the tibialization of Linux, would that be so bad? Because isn't that sort of the original idea?

It's negative in the freedom dimension. I don't know. It's not what I hope for. And I think also we can't really have this conversation without keeping in mind that Linux will dominate on the server side too, and that's going to be all different kinds of operating systems. But it does make you wonder what the future holds for these desktop-focused distros and if eventually they're not just going to be kind of outdated. Yeah, the ones that survive will be the ones that are maintained by community enthusiasts. Yeah. Yeah, the ones that survive will be the ones that are maintained by community enthusiasts.

Yeah. I've noticed myself, like especially in – I don't know if it's just the point of my life I'm at, but I see my parents and my grandparents and all these people around me going and saying, I don't know what to do anymore. They've always had go with Windows if you want business or go with Mac if you want media. And now they don't know where to go. And, you know, it's kind of this weird point where people that, you know, once thought they knew what they had to do don't know anything anymore. Yeah. Kind of sad.

It is. It's a weird, we're in a weird transition. And I think what we're trying to wrap our brains around on this show is what do we need to change to get Linux in position to sort of be there to catch a certain amount of people who are dropping away from Windows? And are there things just as a community we could do? Oh, is it safe to emerge? Well, I think it is safe. So that wraps up this week's Look Back. We'll have a full crew next week, and we'll be back with a regular show.

I definitely need to take a shower. And Rikai, he's staying away from chili for the rest of the month. No more chili for Rikai. Hopefully you've enjoyed the look back at some of the more popular topics. They were sent in by you, the audience. Thank you so much for those submissions. Don't forget, we'd love more interaction. Go over to linuxactionshow.reddit.com.

Go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash contact. And, geez, join us live, won't you? We do the show on a Tuesday. Go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. Then you can participate in our mumble room, hang out in the chat room. It's a good time. Thanks so much for joining me this week. See you right back here next Tuesday. Thank you.