LINUX Unplugged - Episode 9: The Ubuntu Situation | LINUX Unplugged 9

Episode Date: October 9, 2013

Is the traditional release model failing Ubuntu? Perhaps there is a better way to harness the rapid progress of Linux then static releases. With their focus on mobile, and a rather lackluster release around the corner, we debate if Ubuntu’s switch to Unity is costing them now.Plus we chat about Linux usage among kids, and tools to learn more about Linux and technology, and more.

This is Linux Unplugged, Episode weekly Linux podcast that never shuts down, despite what those slackers in Washington are up to. My name is Chris. My name is Matt. Hey, Matt. Welcome to episode nine, buddy. Thanks for having me. Nine weeks. Nine weeks already? Ten's cool, man. Ten's cool.

But nine, that's like hipster cool, right? Exactly. Nine weeks in a row is pretty cool, and we've gotten a ton of good feedback on the show. People are loving it. I'm really excited. I think we're going to have a good discussion today because there's been something that's been on my mind, Matt, and I can't shake it.

It's Ubuntu 13.10. Oh, my. Oh, goodness. Our review's coming up this Sunday on the Linux Action Show. And it's a big event. It's a big event. And I've got to tell you, I've been struggling this week. So I want to talk a little bit about a couple of concepts I'm kicking around that after we kind of, I don't know, maybe kind of talk through them, it'll help me inform my

review for this Sunday. I think I'll be ready after this week's episode. I'm just trying to wrap my brain around a few things. Mainly, Ubuntu 13.10 looks almost certainly to be the most boring Ubuntu release we've ever seen. We've gotten too comfortable, you know. I wonder if maybe Ubuntu is becoming the Windows XP

of Linux. But not in the insecure way. Not in the insecure way. I'll explain what I mean if it the Windows XP of Linux, but not in the insecure way. Not in the insecure way. I'll explain what I mean if it's the XP of Linux, and maybe that's not a bad thing. Maybe that's exactly what the market needs. I think there could be an argument for that, too, and we'll bring in the mumble room. We'll kick it around and get their opinions, too, because I know we've got some Ubuntu users in there and some Ubuntu converts. Oh, yes. I like that.

You know, this morning I was out getting meat, Matt. You were out getting meat? Okay. Yeah, I went out and went to the local Savannah Meats, got a little meat. I don't actually get my bacon there too often, but, uh, so, you know, I, I took my son and my son Dylan is four years old and we walked in there and it was kind of early. So they were still kind of setting up in the morning. I wanted to, I like to get in there early cause then all of the crew is in a good mood. Oh, sure. You see, when you go to Savannah meets in the afternoon, sometimes they're not in good moods.

I guess maybe it's something to do with cutting up animals all day and then dealing with pain in the butt customers. Inner cave, man. Yeah, exactly. So we get there and they have on big hooks and with like a chain conveyor belt system in their ceiling, they're moving slaughtered cows through the back. And my four-year-old son just like sees them it's the first time he's ever seen anything like that sure that's quite a shock it wasn't just like you know is he gonna like get really grossed out you know what's gonna happen but he was more he was fascinated he's like you know are those cows he asked me and i kind of

started explaining it to him and the lady behind the counter hears me explaining it to him she's like well would you like to go see our our um she calls him she said would you like to go see the cows i'm thinking these are live cows right i'm thinking like a dexter rerun like maybe somebody just dropped off like a shipment of live cows and like to have the meat super fresh or something you know so i'm like okay let's go look at cows yeah sure why so i hold dylan by his hand and she brings us back into the cutter cut place where they're you know cutting up the dead animals and she opens up the huge freezer so come on in i'm like well this is not looking good these probably aren't alive and then i'm thinking

you know we get in there and it's just this huge room full of hanging skinned cows it was disgusting but he thought it was fascinating he thought it was so cool and then like he totally was gonna he totally connected like when i bought like some wrapped meat you know to butcher's paper he's like oh that's from the cow. I was like, oh, well, he doesn't seem to be affected by it, but I was. Well, here's what I think is interesting, and I think this translates into the Linux space as well, is that if you walk into a situation or an operating system without a preconceived notion, a lot of times the reaction might surprise the people around you. You know, it's so interesting you say that because we're going to talk – we're going to get a little more into this Ubuntu thing. And of course, unity is one of the first topics that comes up when you talk about Ubuntu. And I think there's so many strong

polarizing opinions. It's such a polarizing topic. Sure. And there has been a couple circumstances in my personal, you know, experience. But also, I was talking with Michael Domic from Coder Radio. He's switched a couple people on his team over to Ubuntu this week. And their immediate response was like delight and fascination. Like they didn't have any of the baggage of, well, Unity used to be like this, and then they broke it. Like none of that was there, right? And so they were just enjoying it, which was an interesting thing. So I want to talk about that a little bit.

But I thought first we should get into some follow-up from last week's show. We have a mail sack towards the end, but I'd like to do a little follow-up just to kind of keep the thread of continuity between episodes. Our first one came in from Jameson. Now last week I said that I was managing my photos by using G+,

because they have a really good photo management system where you just take the picture in the G Plus app, uploads them to Google Plus privately, and then Google Plus has face detection. They auto-enhance pictures. They figure out which ones are in the best focus and sort of highlight them.

There's a whole array of features that Google Plus has. It's really nice. Now, Jameson didn't have a replacement for all of that kind of stuff. Okay. But he did say, I'm not sure about the management capabilities of G+, but the own cloud Android client does auto-upload,

and you can have it go up to own cloud, and then you can view the library, the gallery, on your own cloud installation. He says he's completely replaced using Dropbox doing that. That's interesting. And, you know, the more I read about stuff like this and people that are kind of migrating to that, the more I think what types of own cloud companies and services are out there providing services

for people that just want that experience, but maybe in a self-contained, pre-ready-to-go box. See, I was trying to talk Alan into it. Now, he's just too busy, so I totally understand why he hasn't done it. But I was telling Alan, this could be a business for Scale Engine. Exactly. That's what I was thinking. You toss up a VM, or in his case, a jail of an own cloud instance you let because there's there are downsides to having it on your own connection especially for people who have more restrictive isps bandwidth caps you know all the dynamic ip all that that's an excellent point yes i really think there could be somebody's just like here

have a we just roll you an own cloud instance we'll up we'll make we'll update the security patches for you we'll deploy it for you we'll'll give you a login, and then you own it. If only there were more Linux and BSD administrators out there, right? Only, Matt. We need more in this world. All right, well, Pedro writes in on a little bit of the KDE topic. He says, hi, Chris and Matt. I really love the recent shows for both last and unplugged.

Finding good alternatives to cloud-based services is something I think many of us will find very important these days. Now, I feel like there should be a but here. In the last show, you said that your KDE config broke again, and you are moving to GNOME. I've been very happy KDE Plasma user for some months and won't desktop environment hop again in the near future. But what you said about the GNOME guys integrating these cool Linux-specific technologies got me thinking about how KDE is going to approach these changes. They are also going to have some pretty significant changes soon with Framework 5 and Plasma Workspaces 2, which sound very exciting. I was wondering if you could get somebody from the KDE camp, like Aaron or Joss, on the show to discuss it with them, and also the Wayland transition,

Joss, on the show to discuss it with them, and also the Wayland transition, maybe even your recent config troubles, ugly defaults, etc. Good luck, and keep up the big shows, Pedro. Boy. I kind of like that idea. So one thing I really would love to get the community's help on is if anybody out there has experience with, I don't know, with radio or podcasts where they have lined up interviews with folks, we'd love to talk. Oh, certainly.

Because I think, you know, Matt and I have great ideas, but there's just a lot of things we have to do during the week. And interviews just take up a little bit of extra time to line up. And I would love to have them much more frequently on the Linux Action Show. So if anybody out there has some work with that, shoot me an email, chris at jupiterbroadcasting.com, and we'll chat some more. Maybe there's an arrangement we can work out,

maybe a few Bitcoins or even a few PayPal dollars we can throw your way, if you can help line up a series of great interviews. And, you know, some of them, like Aaron, I'm sure, you know, we could just, you know, we could probably just ping Aaron and just figure out a time that works for him and bring him on.

But there's a whole array of folks that I'd love to have on Linux Action Show. And I'd love to have more interviews on that show. So if you're... Well, and I definitely would echo the whole timing scheme of it is that I've been trying to track down a couple of people and it's just trying to make sure

that we're on the same page as far as date and time and whether that works and whether they have things going on. Yeah, definitely could use some help there. Yeah, and it's one of those things where it's hard to... There's always ways to where it's hard to there's there's always there's always ways to record it when we're not like doing a regular show which is right seven shows now it's hard to find a time when we're not doing another show but that's always possible it'd be great

whenever we can i will also we could do things where people just join us on mumble here during this show you know they just come on and chat with us which is cool yeah like for example i you know if you want if you just had a new distro release or, you know, if you had something come out, come on here and tell us about it. We're not going to yell at you for coming on and tell us about the cool open source software you're working on. Join our Mumble server. You know, join our Mumble server.

In fact, if somebody would paste the Mumble server info into the chat room right now, that'd be helpful. Alright, so last bit of follow up before we move into the meet. As it were, I guess, the main course. Main course? Yeah, I'd say main course sounds good. Brandon writes in. He says, hi, Chris and Matt. I wanted to share some thoughts about the comments you guys had about these kids these days who don't understand what's going on behind the screen.

Matt, we got a lot of feedback about this, so we got one more in the mail sack, but this was a popular topic. He says, I'm not denying it. You're totally right about it. I just don't necessarily see it as a horrible thing. He says, I'm not denying it. You're totally right about it. I just don't necessarily see it as a horrible thing. Now, remember what we said is these kids today, the damn kids on our lawn, didn't know how it worked behind the touchscreen. Like they were touching the screens and clicking the mice, but they had no idea what any of the context behind it. So don't get me wrong.

We obviously need some younger kids to get into computers to keep things going along, keep going long term. But there isn't any need for every kid to get into it. Computers these days are going through the same cycles that all big new technologies in history have over time. For example, when ancient civilizations first discovered how to create metal items in the Bronze Age, they had far more blacksmiths than latter Iron Age civilizations. For a lot of reasons, it was new amazing technology

that was making revolutionary changes in their lives, and everyone wanted to replace their stone tools with metal ones. In some ancient cultures, it was a rite of passage for boys to create their own metal weapons. Okay, all right. Okay, I see where he's going. That's actually kind of cool to know.

Yeah, and it also, you know, remember my argument was, is this is more important than your average passing technology because it's so integrated in all of our lives. Well, you know, what's more, metals and plastics and things like that. This is true. This is true.

He goes on to say, we live in a very specialized world. Things have grown so advanced and complex that for everyone to understand how everything they use in their daily life works would be impossible. For example, sure, you may know how your computer works, but do you know much about how your car or your home air conditioner or your own body work for that matter? Any of the other dozens of things you use every single day. Sure, these kids today might not know what's going on behind their computer screens, but they are going to grow up

and learn all kinds of things that you don't know. One of these kids may grow up to become a general contractor. He won't know how to build a website for his business, so he'll hire someone that does. In turn, someone that can build a website may hire him to add a deck to the back of their house. That's just how modern society works. Thanks, Brandon. I would expand on that with the following. First of all, I totally hear what he's saying as far as the kids obviously are going to go into their own specialty and find their own way, and I think that's great. But I think it's important to realize myself is a good example of this.

I have worked as a machine operator. I can lay carpet. I can do vinyl um i know how to change my oil and change my tires i'm not great at it but i can do it and i also know a lot of this linuxy stuff that i'm always talking about so i and i can also do some minor electrical work as well so i i've tried to widen my range a little bit and i think it wouldn't kill kids to perhaps consider doing the same thing both in tech and in other in other areas as in a little carpentry, maybe a little of this, little hands-on stuff. It wouldn't kill them. Most kids today can't do squat. They can watch SpongeBob and text on their phone.

That's been my experience. I'm living with one right now, and it's driving me nuts. So it's kind of – it's frustrating because I don't see a lot of that – boy. Passion or desire to learn. Yeah, a lot of the passion and the desire just seems to of that uh boy you know a lot of the passion yeah a lot of the passion and the desire just seems to be like vacuum packed right out of the room mutar chango when our jerem says uh if you don't know how it works you don't own it uh it's interesting i could see that i i agree with you i think there's always i i always strive to select the examples you cited like uh i have a pretty good idea how i would change the oil on my truck

i just don't ever want to do it oh same here same here. No, I'll pay someone else to do it. I do know how my air conditioner works. And I also try to, you know, very closely pay attention to how my body works, even though I suck at it quite badly. It's a learning process. I know how, I just don't care. I know what it has to say. I just don't want to listen. But I think at the same time, I still want to make the argument, although maybe just less emphatically, that computers represent a new kind of technology. Because you see, what I see happening more so than just not knowing how they work is they're

being perverted into consumption-driving machines, right? All of these apps that want you to buy things and Amazon mobile apps and this and that. They're consumption machines, but they can also be information machines and tools and learning and empowerment machines, right? I mean, the greatest thing about an Android device is that it can give you Wikipedia and Google at your fingertips anywhere in the world. And at the same time, it can also be used to sell you crap you don't need, track you and all these kinds of things. And I just, I fear that because they are so capable of a broad range of either benefits or abuses, it becomes incumbent upon the person to have a better understanding so that way they're not being taken advantage of.

True. True. It just seems like there's more possibility for abuse. And I think also, you know, again, kind of bouncing off of that a little bit, the only way I see overcoming this is we come up with apps that essentially make Wikipedia some anime thing that's like lots of flashing and lots of stuff going on. I mean like turn everything into a – Like a 3D game. A 3D game multiplayer.

Who can change the oil the fastest, the best? No, what you need is Wikipedia you can text, right? Oh, yeah. I just changed my oil. It's like Instagram, your oil change. I mean, I don't know. I mean, we've got to figure out a way to like sex this up for the kids so they're more interested, I guess. I don't know.

I think we'll find – I don't know. Something to me tells me we might find an equilibrium here somewhere. The only thing is we're also moving down to a period where it's like my – so I mentioned – I have two vehicles. I mentioned I think I could change the oil on my truck. I don't think I could change the oil on my car because when I open the hood of my car, it's got a plastic covering over the whole damn thing. Oh, no kidding, right? That's what the smartphone and the tablet is now. It's that same thing.

I think you're exactly right. Yep, that's the plastic cover, and it's like working on cars. It's the same thing. I'm not a – my brother is more of a mechanic than I am, but I think that older cars have always been considered easier versus the newer cars, which have all the computer crap and all that stuff put into it that takes special certifications and whatnot. Yeah, I think that definitely presents a challenge. But I think just finding – learning how various things work and finding a way to make that interesting to kids because you are competing with those media consumption boxes. How do you – trying to present it outside of that media consumption box is not going to happen. I think we've established that.

My 16-year-old nephew is going to definitely testify to that. I've been dealing with that unbelievably because every time I turn around, he's got his face buried in his phone. I think as people learn there can be tools to express an opinion or a view or as they become more communication devices, some of that might change. The flip side of this is that that means the remaining people who take the time and the trouble and jump through the hoops to educate themselves and let's not even talk about today let's talk about you know when my kid is is in his 30s what's that going to be like what's what's the difference going to be like and if he goes through all of the hoops to become an expert in these things he could potentially be a niche skill and maybe that means he's got a you know then he's got a well-paying gig you know that kind of thing so there's potentially positives to this too absolutely yeah no i definitely think that i think centralizing your skill set's definitely it but i

also like the idea of just knowing how to uh how to pull a toilet and replace it you know i i think that's mandatory and like brandon and like brandon says you know you can't you can't expect – when we live in a society where these monkeys without hair now have 3,000-pound vehicles that can go 80 miles per hour, we have all of these things that were never originally envisioned by evolution. You really can't expect us to keep track of everything. It's just not in our nature. So you do need technology to sort of relieve the burden a little bit. So I don't want to sit here and say you are worthless if you don't know how this stuff works. I just want to say you need to be aware of what could be – you could be getting taken advantage of. You need to be aware of the downsides.

How to spot a contractor coming in and saying he's going to give you a quote and how to call bullshit on it. How to actually know when he's pulling one over your eyes. Just little things that around the house. It doesn't have to be anything great or extravagant. Even just house maintenance stuff, like you said with the air conditioner. Little things like that can save you a lot of heartache. And I'm going to get controversial here, but I say we have this play out in the medical

industry, right? People, like Brandon said, have no idea how their bodies work. They have no idea what role nutrition plays. They have no idea how to properly take care of themselves. So they go to the doctor in the costume, you know, the white coat costume that he wears, where he makes a bunch of money and all of the office ladies that he works with are completely scared of him.

And then he tells you what to do. And you say, OK, thank you, master. And you go home and you do it because you've never educated yourself about health. Right? Exactly. And this is true. I just don't want that to happen in computers, but it already has, hasn't it? It has happened in computers.

And I think, you know, coming back full circle back into the whole technology side of things is that I think that's what Linux provides us with an opportunity of. It allows us to see cause and effect. It allows us to see how our actions can actually generate an actual reaction that we can visualize, experience, and enjoy. It allows you to go as deep as you want, right? Absolutely. And enjoy. It allows you to go as deep as you want, right? Absolutely.

You can grab Ubuntu, burn it to a disk or a USB drive and install it and maybe go six months before you have to open up the terminal, right? Right. Or you can do Linux from scratch. Like you've got that whole range. Or you can be an end user or you can create code and develop for it. Absolutely. So it does. Again, I think this is going to be another huge advantage to Linux down the road is – I think so.

As we get mobilized on all of the commercial platforms and everything goes to the cloud, there's still going to be Linux. And if you want to just learn how something works from top to bottom, it's like the track you're going to get on – you're not going to go to college and take a Windows 9 course on Metro, right? Because that's not going to teach you any of the fundamentals. You're going to go to a class and they're going to be using Linux. It's just going to become one more use case for Linux. That's true. And I know Windows admins that are experiencing that now, that they're beginning to find themselves. One of them actually had to deal with CentOS here recently. And actually, we talked a little bit about that. And it's interesting that no matter how hard you try, even if you're in a Windows world, you're still going to be dealing with it. It's going to happen.

Oh, and more and more so, Matt. And we actually get contacts from a lot of guys. Hey, I'm a Windows guy. Hey, you know, I need a lot of the – because on TechSnap, we take a lot of IT sysadmin questions for people that are trying to solve a problem at their gig or whatever. And we hear from a lot of people who run Windows shops that are moving to Linux or moving to BSD because they need X and they need Y. And it seems to be a trend. And ZFS, I mean, this is why I harp on Linux Action Show and Unplugged so much about ZFS is because every week, you know, we get a dozen emails about people switching to BSD

because they want native ZFS support. And I'm not exaggerating at all. It is, I have watched trends happen as I do these shows, and the migration to ZFS and BSD, too, is real, and it's happening, and it's happening in the enterprise, too. It's happening at the small and medium business level, too, and it's like the ZFS has these wider range of features that Microsoft is trying to catch up to in Server 2012, and they have some good stuff in Server 2012, but at the end of the day, it's still NTFS and it's still their black magic and people get uncomfortable with that.

That's true. That's true. But now here's the question I would ask you. Would you gauge this as more of an IT-driven thing or is this just a bunch of excited home users? You know, I mean, like, what would you... No, you know what it is, is that, no, if anything, it's more on the IT side. That's what I figured, yeah.

We actually, we talked about this in last week's TechSnap, is TechSnap, or ZFS, if anything, it's more on the IT side. That's what I figured, yeah. We actually, we talked about this in last week's TechSnap, is ZFS was created really with enterprise in mind. Like, if you want to add a drive, you want to add some space to an array in ZFS in a pool, you know, you're in two drives minimum before you even are comfortably expanding that array. And really, you should probably do three or five drives at a time. Are you comfortably expanding that array? And really, you should probably do three or five drives at a time. So, I mean, it's a serious production system, and that's why it allows you to get the features and abilities of these massive $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 EMC arrays on your own fiber-attached storage that's hanging off the back of a FreeBSD box. So it's allowing for this huge set of advantages without all that overhead of that proprietary enclosure and software. That sounds real.

Just from your description, that's quite appealing. I can definitely see why IT would be jumping all over that. Yeah. It's just logical. It's like you would be stupid not to. It's another trend away from sort of the even in big window shops because that's where our emails are coming from too is guys that well we're windows here we're windows here but we're doing a ZFS array here for our storage. How do we integrate

these two things? Oh wow. Wow. It's going to be a crazy world. It's going to be something to watch I think in 14. I really do. Alright Matt well before we jump into our main topic du jour this week, I want to thank our sponsor. That is ting.com and ting is mobile. It makes sense. Now ting is an MVNO of the nationwide sprint network. So that means if you've got good sprint coverage,

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ting so thanks to ting for sponsoring linux unplugged ice okay man i wanted to uh i was i was trying to put my thoughts together and uh here's what i came up with so i think um last so the last time we reviewed ubuntu we we hadn't tried the Arch Challenge yet. And I think this might have kind of brought it on. But we titled Ubuntu 13.04 Best But Boring. Yeah, essentially it was a big meh, right? And that was kind of the whole thing of it. It really wasn't anything to speak of that was exciting or new.

Right. But it wasn't horrible. It just was. speak of that was exciting or new. Right. But it wasn't horrible. It just was. So I would propose to you that perhaps Ubuntu 13.10 could be the most boring Ubuntu release ever.

That's our new gauge, right? Yeah. But boring helped Windows XP become the widest deployed Windows desktop OS in history. It's still used today by 31% of Windows users, according to Wikipedia. But what's practical? Okay. So let's back up from there so if i was mcgilly to casa i would argue that linux could have used more boring back

in the day and because we weren't boring enough he believes that a lot of a lot of the changing of the back ends and apis and things like that hurt commercial adoption by large-scale development shops right i would agree with that and so whereas you. And so whereas if you're a little more steady, then the people building apps around you are able to target you better. But what's the practical cost of being boring? Stagnation, really, right? When you're boring, it means you might be stagnating a little bit. I would say I'm actually beginning to see evidence of that with some of my Ubuntu articles. And also just with articles I've written for other people that were seeing tremendous traffic.

We've seen huge drops and people aren't searching for it anymore. And I don't know if that's because this stuff's not a problem or because people are going to other distros or what exactly is happening. Yeah, I mean, stagnation, maybe as a platform, stagnation has some benefits. You could argue XP

stagnation came at the time where the Windows market was relatively mature, whereas Windows – Linux is not really in that same space. Ubuntu is not really in that same position. They might not ever be. So I think – I don't know. I think stagnation too early for them to be stagnant. I mean there's a time where you can stagnate for a period before the next big thing, and that's OK. But I feel like that they stagnated early, and it's happening for too long – lengthy of a period of time. And then of course with the whole mirror situation in the next release, not happening. That's not really helping either. And of course there's all – there's the NVIDIA stuff going back and forth as to what's going on with that. How is it going to be affecting with others? Lots and lots of stuff behind doors.

We don't know what's really going on. Yeah. And I would argue too, like maybe this is the case for, maybe they should have gone rolling. Remember when that whole debate came up and we were like, I don't know about rolling, but I thought about it, you know, after using, I'm going to say it, but after using Arch for a while, Linux is a constantly evolving beast. It's the collective output of tens of thousands of developers taking their ideas and turning it into code.

And it happens every single hour of every single day. So stagnation is not inherent to this evolving beast, right? It is the opposite of what Linux is. It's a forced solution that's grafted. They're taking an old style, like, sell your software in CDs in the store, and they're trying to graft it on top of an always-moving, evolving beast to make some sort of model from.

That's right. But the two things are not really that compatible. And I wonder if now we're seeing, like, the strain of that model here, because we have these expectations built up around these six-month cycles. We have like – we want to see like a headline feature that we used to see all the time. And that's the problem is that because they're dumping so much of the resources into all this, quite frankly, behind-the-scenes stuff that for the front-end user really isn't all that exciting to hear about.

It's more exciting for the geeks and less exciting for just casual folks. I think they really will need to go to a rolling release because quite honestly, all the distros that I'm really drawn to, I don't care what it is, I find myself more excited about a rolling distro than I do a stagnant distro. And to your point, so today I updated my Arch installation and I got GNOME 3.10. Oh, see, there you go. my Arch installation, and I got GNOME 3.10. Ooh. Oh, see, there you go. In 10 minutes on my machine, on Arch in the morning, in one series of updates,

I got more features and changes than I feel like I'm seeing in a six-month product cycle in 13.10. I feel like in one update on Arch, I have more of a revolutionary change than the collective 13.10 entire distribution. Exactly. And I wonder if distribution should maybe transition to more to like, revolutionary change than the collective 1310 entire distribution. And I wonder if distribution should maybe transition to more to like instead of being where they snapshot a moment in time and then they quality check and they roll that all up and they ship it. Maybe they could, you know, and you consider this, maybe they could instead just move to like caretakers of a safe rolling distro.

Like each major distro is building up all these sophisticated automated testing systems. And while they're not perfect, you know, if you have more people using rolling software, if you have more people using more current open source software, then that's going to make the upstream software better. And then that has cascading effects across the entire Linux ecosystem because then everybody is submitting bugs on the same upstream code. Everybody's getting the patches. Everybody's fixing.

I know this is a utopia, but it could have a dramatic adoption, improvement on the adoption of fresh open source software, which could then drive a whole new momentum around software development. Well, and there are distros that already do that. Manjaro is fairly close to that in that you have your state.

I hate to say it. I know I keep plugging it, but it's true. You have your stable, which is basically very periodic snapshots, probably about once a month, no big deal. It's kind of a stagnant rolling kind of thing, and it's safe and it's stable and whatever. And then you've got your unstable repos that you can go to, which are quite frequent. There's a lot going on there, and so if you want to experience more of a rapid experience, you can do that too. So I see other distributions of being looking into that. I say Ubuntu should look into something like that.

You have your long-term release that is basically just, bam, here it is. It's not changing like it is now. And oh, hey, by the way, the other one is constantly evolving. That would solve the problem, I think. Yeah, I kind of feel like

maybe there's a bit of like a bias. I feel like people are afraid of upstream fresh code. Like we have a culture of fear that something's going to break, and even if something hasn't broken yet, oh, it's going to break, just you wait. It's going to break. But I wonder if we couldn't maybe

have a discussion around, like there's got to be a middle ground here, because I don't think this, well, at least for Canonical, it's just not working. And even just snapshotting, they don't have to go full art style, they just need to actually have monthly snapshots. That's all they have to do, just whatever it is. They can still do a rolling release and their typical dynamic release, and then, of course, their long-term release is as it is now.

Then they're not totally just every single day new stuff, new stuff, new stuff because that would just be anarchy on the forums for a bit too big of a change. But I think snapshots would work for them. Yeah. Yeah. I'll ask the Mumble roomble room I mean what do you guys think do you think that we are sort of seeing the end of we live in a world now where when there's a new version of Google Docs Google just pushes it to your

web browser when there's a new version of Yahoo Mail you just log in one day and you get it are we now living in a world where we should just be getting new things pushed to our machines from time to time and going with these big snapshots? Is this awkward? I'm not sure that's a good thing. I think we're looking at this completely wrong. All right, give it to me. Google has their own distribution in-house. The government has their own distribution in-house. Police departments, everyone has their own distribution,

which they actually maintain themselves. Right, right. There's actually no need for an upstream distribution to do what the companies are going to do anyway. So why couldn't then Canonical say, all right, Ubuntu's a rolling release. Here's LTSs. If you want to take those and fork those, have at it.

You know, go make GooBs. If you want to take those and fork those, have at it. Go make Goobuntu. Slackware. Yeah. You're assuming that rolling releases are, by default, good, and they always work, and they will work. But see, I ask you this. Would you use Arch

in a production environment, or would you use a more stable display, like Debian or something? Well, I do use it for media production. I was considering rolling a home server running it. I don't know. I like the idea of an LTS for a server. Yeah, that was my point. It's not going to be appropriate to put that into a big-time important role.

But if you have long-term releases that exist as they do now, that literally has no effect on it. I just feel like technology should be good enough that we could all just be using rolling releases. Like, let's get testing done. Let's write software so that it doesn't break after an update. It's not the technology, it's the people. Arch is fine in a

production environment. The only time I've ever had issues with Arch was something I did, something I screwed up. So if you know what you're doing, Arch is fine. That said, I mean, that could be said about any dish you like. If you don't know what you're doing, you can completely screw up the booth too.

You also got to realize that Arch is community driven. There's not a team behind it really, except for just the very, very minimal stuff. But it's mostly community-driven. That's where all the real estate comes from.

Thing is, there is a very horrible bug in KDE which does not copy files and doesn't tell you about it. And this has been a bug for five years, meaning if you copy from one location to another it will create the folders but it won't actually copy the files this has been a bug for five years this is one of the biggest products in Linux and this is this is a very critical bug and it has not been even addressed in three or four years. Now imagine this, imagine if this bug is not an exception. Imagine if such bugs exist in all big projects like Gnome, Ubuntu, Unity, KDE, so on and so forth. Now if we are ignoring such horrible bugs in favor of new features, I don't actually personally believe that that's a good way forward.

Yes, the idea of a rolling release and new updates is very nice. On the other hand, if there's still a lot of serious work to be done on older releases, maybe that should be the focus. Well, so your point is sort of what I was... So one of the reasons I like using Arch is because I want to – because there are – a lot of open source programs are missing some features that I would consider fundamental. I know I shouldn't get on this soapbox, but let's look at Smuxy. I love Smuxy IRC client. It's great. It just needs one checkbox, one checkbox, and that's hide join and part messages.

I know I can set up a filter. I shouldn't have to custom design a filter where I go Google search the syntax to put into a filter so I don't have to see the join and part messages. Every other IRC client on the planet can hide join and part messages. So maybe one day the Smuxy guy is going to add that. So here's my thought. I want to be on a distribution that the moment that Smuxy guy is going to add that. So here's my thought. I want to be on a distribution that the moment that Smuxy gets updated, I got it. So the other last week when VLC got an update, I saw the headline and you know what? I did an update on my system and I

had it. I had that new VLC that had those new features. I had it immediately. And as I sit here and I set up an Ubuntu box and I download a DAB and I download a DAB and I have six or seven DABs downloaded so I can get something installed and I think, well, great, now I'm just going to sit at these crappy versions that probably have some sort of bug. It's stupid. It's a system that doesn't work anymore. It's not taking advantage of the fact that we have thousands of people out there creating grand features for us every single hour, and we never get any of them. We never get any of them. We have no snapshots. I think the rolling release would be perfect because it's stable, but it still could be bleeding edge as you want. The only problem with that, it's very hard to get used to. But, all right. Well, I know it is good for companies and the family. It's very hard to get used to. But...

All right. Well, I know it is good for companies and the family. You know, you're going to have to teach them how to keep their system updated, or you can just give them one that is, you know, ready to go. I think the one that leaves you with the most... All right. Okay. All right.

You guys got to get your mics worked out. Jeez, that was awful. It sounds like speaker and mic pretty close to each other. Okay. All right. You guys got to get your mics worked out. Jeez, that was awful. It sounds like speaker and mic pretty close to each other. All right. So anyways, you know, my conclusion is that we kind of just have to adjust our expectations on some of this stuff. And it's becoming maybe less about the flash and it's going to become more about what you can get done, right? Mm-hmm. And how you it, and what you can do. So I'm running Ubuntu 13.10 this week,

just so I'm living in it, and there's been a couple of things that have worked for me that didn't work under Arch. And there are certain benefits to having something that's a little more targetable. F.lux is a program I use that automatically adjusts the color temperature of my screens when the sun sets. It's kind of amazing. Oh, yes. It's neat, right? Never works under Arch for me.

Just never works. I've never had it work under Arch or Manjaro. Yeah. Works just fine under Ubuntu. Just fine. Works just fine. SuperFrog HD from Steam. Never even starts under Arch.

I don't know why. I've deleted and reinstalled it. I've Googled around to see if, like, I need some libraries that I don't know about. Never could get it working under Arch. I install it, one click under Ubuntu, starts right up. First try. Interesting. Yeah, it's fascinating.

And, you know, going back to what we were talking about, just, you know, what works where and all that sort of stuff, I think the big picture stuff here is that – and I want to make sure everybody understands that. We're not saying that you should get rid of long-term releases and just go nothing but rolling – at least I'm not anyway – not going with nothing but rolling releases. I'm saying have the option of either or so that you've got your regular folks actually using the rolling releases, finding the bugs, being active in that environment. But the enterprise folks, if they choose to, still have a long-term release from which to work with, and then everybody wins. That's all I'm saying. Because the current model right now on Ubuntu sucks. It sucks hard, and it needs to be fixed.

I mean, that's just reality. I think it's suffering from the focus on mobile. So one of the things that I was going to mention was that there was a post in the development mailing list that got a lot of people upset and we didn't really get a chance to talk about it on last but I thought maybe I'd bring it up here just because it's sort of it's sort of it fits with what we're talking about in terms of focus so there was a post that was made by Sebastian Basher I don't know how you say the last name that's I'm going to give it a shot. Okay. And he noted that they're planning in 14.04.

So we're talking post 13.10, 14.04. They plan to stick with GTK GNOME 3.8. Now, he lists several reasons for this because now if you figure 3.10 is hitting now, right? Right. And it introduces a lot of nice new features. But they're going to stick with 3.8, even in 14.04, which that means so it's going to be like a five-year release that they're going to be using this older version of GTK. Number one reason, we, Ubuntu Desktop, are currently most happy with what we have.

Okay, that's a good reason, actually. All right. Number two reason, the focus on Ubuntu Desktop team is likely to continue to be Ubuntu Touch slash phone next cycle. Yeah, shocker. team is likely to continue to be Ubuntu Touch slash phone next cycle. Yeah. Shocker. Due to the previous factor, we're going to be limited in resources to do desktop work. Now, he goes on to say there's some other good things, too.

The 3.10 deprecates several things that they need, and it looks like Red Hat Enterprise Edition might also be going with GNOME 3.8, so that way they'd be kind of compatible with the other long-term support guy in the business. That's good uh so there's other there's other logistical reasons too but i sure don't like those uh first uh those first ones there where they say it's because the desktop team is likely to be continue to focus on touch i know this is a horse that i beat but i think this is a tactical error and i know they think they have a purpose and a mission and an opportunity to seize and i think they're completely missing the purpose and a mission and the opportunity to seize that is actually happening all around them right now. It's like I believe Canonical's grand vision of having Ubuntu be like this island of salvation as all of the rats flee Windows and Mac.

They finally are there. And it is – I am seeing Ubuntu deployed in the craziest – like there was a thread in our subreddit that a guy started a job at Amazon.com, and he walks into Amazon.com and all of the machines in his department are running Ubuntu 12.04. Which is crazy, right? It's happening everywhere. But there it is. It's the long-term release, and I think the reason for that and the whole GNOME 3.8 thing too is that the big-picture stuff we've got to remember is that people are in these environments looking for a stable situation. And so I think that if we do continue to see people distro hop, and they will, and we'll see less regular people using Linux and

probably more of the enterprise, more of the schools and such, jumping onto the Ubuntu situation. I don't know. It's going to be interesting as to where it all plays out, but I think in the long run, it's not necessarily a bad thing. I think it's just a shift in viewership or usership. Here's what I think. I'm going to have a lot to say on Sunday about 1310. There's a lot of things I've picked up on. We're going to cover that, but I think

the release to really watch will be 1404. If they just nail it as another good, steady release, folks can use that for years while they work out the Mirror stuff, the Unity 8 that they're you know all this kind of all these hitches they're going to have they can work those out for a few years with an l with a good lts release out there and then maybe things will work i work out for them i don't know i'm i still think it's i think it's damn risky i think they're playing it they have they have a huge gamble here and i think 1310

is going to suffer from it i don't want to blow the review because I'm trying to change my set of parameters in which that I look at it. I'm trying to adjust that and look at it from a different angle, and that will be my attempt for the review on Sunday. But I don't know. Well, I don't know. I mean for me, it's like I have both my cutting-edge or bleeding-edge desktop, and then I also have my Ubuntu desktop on a separate computer that I use for a very stable environment. And I think that speaks a lot to it. I think at the end of the day, different strokes for different folks. For myself, if they come out with a really boring, stable release, I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing, but I do think it's going to lose its newsline appeal.

I think that's probably where it's going to hit the most. But I think we're still going to see a lot of people, especially with all the NSA garbage going on. I think we're going to see a lot of people offshore adopting Ubuntu and perhaps jumping onto other distros as well. It's interesting. You mentioned you see it too in terms of article traffic and things like that. Oh, yeah. Big time. Huge.

Big time. I wonder what that might be something to dig into. Well, before we get into the mail sack this week, we've got some good emails. I just wanted to mention an affiliate that we had join the Jupiter broadcast. We've mentioned them once before on the unplugged show, and that is pro XPN. Now pro XPN is a VPN service provider. They support open VPN, and they also have an Android app that makes it pretty convenient to get a VPN with your, with your Android apps. And if you go to pro XPN, they've got a deal where if you use the code JB live, you're going to save 20% off the ProXPN service for life.

20% off ProXPN service for life. Now, I'm not going to tell you why you might need a VPN. I've got a few ideas and suggestions why you might need a VPN. I know we have folks that live outside the U.S. that would like to get access to U.S. services. We also have people who just like to use Wi-Fi a lot at public locations. And there's plenty of legitimate reasons to use a VPN there. In fact, I would recommend you use a VPN. And I believe the ProXPN prices are pretty outrageously low. I couldn't believe it when I saw it. And

they have a free trial you can sign up for, too. The 100% free, though, they don't support PPTP. So if you need the PPTP, you're going to have to also the app. But I just kid about the PPTP. And it's fun to say that. The premium is $6.25 a month. No kidding. And our deal is going to give you 25% off for life when you use the code JBLIVE. How about that?

Nice, nice, nice, nice. That's ProXPN and use the code JBLIVE to get 20% off. Good stuff. All right. So let's move on to the emails now. So you can email us, linuxactionshow at jupiterbroadcasting.com, or if you want to send it specifically for the Unplugged show, which we've been getting more of those,

you can just go to jupiterbroadcasting.com and click on the contact link at the top of our website and then choose Unplugged from the dropdown. Or you can also join our Mumble. But if you join our Mumble server, wear headphones. That way we don't have horrible echo and then have to hang up on the room. Yes, yes, yes. choose unplugged from the drop-down. Or you can also join our mumble. But if you join our mumble server, wear headphones. That way we don't have horrible echo and then have to hang up on the room. Yes.

Yes, yes, yes. All right. Our first email today came in for our, I guess not our first, but our first email in the email section from Noah. He says, I'm one of the few young Linux users. I'm 14 and have been using Linux for about a year. It's amazing how little my generation knows about computers. Oh, ouch. Ouch.

He's right, and good for you, Noah. And thank you on two fronts, for using Linux and acknowledging that. Yeah, and for writing in when he's 14. That's cool, too. Yeah, awesome. So Noah goes on to say that, I've been following Jupyter Broadcasting for a little while, and I really enjoy your videos.

I remember you talking about how kids really don't know computers, cloud services, servers, networks, etc. He says, this is true and not many want to learn, but I want to know more about these things myself. Oftentimes on the show, when you start talking about servers or something, I really get lost. I was wondering if you could do a show or give some pointers to young people that want to expand their knowledge on Linux, servers, and networking. I would love to know more about these things. Even if you could give a website or advice, that would be great. Can't wait till the roll your own emails every episode. Thanks, Noah.

Awesome. What a great question and what a great point. I think that's an excellent point that maybe we do need to touch on that more, you know. Let's ask the Mumble Room. Do you guys have any tips for kids that want to learn computers and networking in Linux? What's a good way they could get started, preferably online? As a 15-year-old on Linux, just jump into it.

There you go. Look for a free PDF. There are some out there that will basically start you with the essentials. And then start reading that. And then use your own distribution. Use it and start using it and keep using it and then just throw away Windows. No one's going to say listen to podcasts? Well, there is that.

Of course, that's a given. But then again, your podcast doesn't really go into how to do it like BSD does. Right, yeah. Well, I've always kind of had the philosophy of, so our audience is so diverse, there's people who don't know anything, and then there's people who know way, way more than we do. So I've always felt like try to cut it down the middle

and give people enough information that if they care, they're inspired to go out and learn, and if they don't care, they've at least picked up a little bit about something they didn't know about and they can just move on. So I kind of try to walk that line. Yes, but loss isn't really about, you know, the technical side of things, is it? Well, it can be.

You know, it can be. Like, I gave you the API call names of WebRTC last week. That's pretty technical. Well, the way I'd tell them to get into something is to rip open an old computer because way back in the day, we always used to have to mod probe our own modules into our kernels that's right we have to know what our hardware is in order to get our kernels to run correctly a good way it's hands-on is to just rip apart a computer and just get linux running on that yeah you know when i installed gen 2 i sure learned a heck of a lot back in the day

all gentoo i sure learned a heck of a lot back in the day here's how i started i started with just a year of ubuntu and then after a while i decided hey let's try arch so i switched to arch and i haven't looked back since but that's the way i learned that as far as it comes to networking and computers i was part of a class back in high school of course we're talking mid-90s here and it was it really helps to learn the hardware and the software and not only that but I really got my first look at Linux at the time too of course

that was slackware at an early age but at the same time you know if you start networking with people you know you're going to find out there's a lot of people out there who know this stuff who would be willing to take you under their wing. That's exactly what I did. The Arch wiki actually has a lot of good stuff in networking, too, and so does the Jintu wiki, if you're actually looking at right sections. Yeah, the software is directly related to the hardware. If you want to know exactly how the disks use their blocks or file systems function,

or how the network file system does its protocols, or how the kernel has locking or has rings to do virtual machines, it's all based on the hardware. You can do CPU extensions, RAM. It's all software is built on top of the hardware in order to make the hardware work. You know what? You know what? You know what? I think this generation has it...

I mean, the thing is, when I was 17, like, five, six years... I don't know, six years ago, and I was using SUSE 11.1 and Ubuntu 8.04. Now those were very... I mean, for me, they were very unstable. They had a lot of problems for me, and so getting into it was a lot harder than it is now. That ties into the whole stability conversation where if you have a stable distro, if you have something that someone can rely on, someone can trust, someone new can actually play with

and get used to, then maybe they can learn more about it much easier than they could before. Yeah, instead of throwing them into the fire of a rolling distro. You know, you touch on something that I kind of didn't really end cap that conversation with, but you mentioned it, it made me realize, like, I called Ubuntu, is it the XP of Linux? But I actually think Windows XP, while it had all of its problems, was like a huge, huge advantage for Windows because it allowed so many people to target one thing. And I wonder if, like, maybe when we talk about Ubuntu

and we talk about average users, we shouldn't even talk about the dot releases. Maybe we should only be talking in the context of LTS releases. Good point. Yeah, that's a very good point. Because if somebody can't trust their computer to work when something is critical, or somebody can't rely on a computer to be stable,

they can't really be interested in learning it now, can they? Ask Ubuntu. It's a great help. Actually, I wouldn't see Ubuntu as the XP of Linux. I'd see it more as the windows 8 hmm what do you think is not about i don't know i feel like that's being a little hard it is because it is trying to use the whole touch interface and it's like yeah it doesn't work on

desktops and come on well i think i'm excited are we still talking about a uh teenager learning about computers or if we moved on from that well it seems like we kind of i want to move on yeah i want to move on from that because i want to we have i the the the point was is like the chairman pointed out to there's how to forge command you know command line food.com uh but i think what what the room is is what the room has touched on is uh you know dig in and if you want to learn the application so if you want to learn the lower level stuff you know there's lots of ways to do that there's wikis to dig into but if you want to learn the application level stuff what the mumble room is saying and i agree with them is stick to a a stable distro that way you're not fighting quirks you're

just able to focus on the learning experience of it i would add i add on one last thing and then i'll let it go and that's something that's not been touched on yet, is create a problem, find a solution. Right. Figure out what task you're trying to do. I want to make a mail server. I want to set up a web server. I want to play with – Totally agree.

It's not so much about just diving into what. I mean they have to have an identifiable thing to dive into. And then you'll figure out the pieces in between. Bingo. That's it. Yep. I think using Linux gave me a whole new outlook on how to do things. I mean it's a whole new thought process to try to solve my own problems.

Right, yeah. You know, there are very good YouTube videos about this. Dan's courses, for example. Eli, the computer guy, they have really, really good Linux introductions, especially for beginners. Yeah. I was going to say, if you're doing something on Windows and you move over to Linux, try and find the Linux version

of whatever it was you were doing. Bingo. Yeah. All right. Good stuff. Stand by. We'll read the next email, and then we'll see if we need to get any. Oh, well, this one, I'm just getting beat up a little bit.

It came in from G. He says, hey, Chris and Matt. Well, hey, G. He says, I'm liking the new show and the format. Well, I'm not sure if it was intentional. It seems that Linux Unplugged can be where you all, pardon my Texas speak, editorialize and take it out of last. Now, with the pleasantries done, I must share some constructive feedback. Chris, you have bitched about how you nuked your KDE configuration. As a credible system administrator,

you blasted KDE with no backups? No backups? I say, shame on you, sir. No matter the application, you should have backups. Even a responsible user knows you need backups. I have to admit that I have been burned by a lack of backups, so I can't be too critical. I've started taking daily backups with the following script, and I've even started to adopt them on my laptop. So he provided the bash script that he uses

using some rsync foo, and he says, I'm sure several other ways and better ways to do it than I have in the script. I do it like a comp... I don't like the compliment sandwich but keep up the great work. Thanks for all the hard work. G7. So, I admitted to that that I should have had backups.

I do admit that. And I pointed that out to you once or twice myself. But I also know that you have a lot going on and truly, you know, you do have other things going on. Right. And I even said, like, during the ramp up to the Arch Challenge, like, well, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to take snapshots. That's why I went butter FS. And I agree. I agree.

I really have no defense other than, other than, other than, I didn't intend to do anything. Like all I was doing was I logged out. I logged into GNOME. I thought, hmm, I'm going to launch my plasma active widgets here and just see how that looks. Cause I've read, you can do that. And all they did was type in plasma active or whatever the command was, ran it. And that's what destroyed my KDE configuration.

Didn't even cross my mind that I should run a backup before I do that. Right. Cause it wasn't true. Cause you weren't running an update. You literally just changed desktops and ran Plasma Active. Yeah. And I've logged into KDE and ran Nautilus a million times. Sure.

So to me, it just – I didn't really appreciate it, I guess. I didn't appreciate what I was doing. And I had a backup, but it was like two weeks old, and I just felt like, you know, it just wasn't worth it. And that's why I don't use KDE at all. I just put that out there. I mean, I admit it was my bad. It was my bad. I'm a bad personDE at all. I just put that out there. I admit it was my bad. I'm a bad person, I guess. I should be punished, but I am really enjoying GNOME 3.10.

And I'll have my thoughts on Unity, too, which I won't say anything more. No, you've got to save that. Save that for the big show. I've already said too much. Alright, our last email for the day comes in from Mirko. Dear Chris and Matt, I'm a long-time fan of Lass, a Linux user. I use

Arch with XFCE and a developer of the game Boss Constructor, which is about building and flying your own spaceship. Based on the games you have covered so far and your sci-fi preferences, I thought you guys might like this and be interested in the game. It'd be fantastic if you could mention a link to my Greenlight campaign

on the show. The page includes screenshots and the trailer video. So how cool is this? So here's what I love. Wow. I love I'm loving these guys getting their stuff in the Greenlight because it gives these guys a chance to to, you know, make something that it's not it's not like Kickstarter. I actually kind of like it better than Kickstarter in some ways because you get you independent how it works. You get early access to the game as a contributor. better than Kickstarter in some ways. Because you get, and depending on how it works,

you get early access to the game as a contributor. So it's sort of like the game's already been in development. So it's not like you're, I don't believe you're funding it from inception. You're funding it when it's at a work enough point that Valve says,

all right, put this on here. And then if it gets greenlit, I think if you greenlight the campaign and you fund it, you get access to the game. Oh, that's interesting. And I'm watching this video here of you putting together what looks like a

spaceship. Yeah. It looks cool. It looks cool, doesn't it? It looks very cool. Yeah, this is his game, Boss Constructor. It's going to be available, of course, for Linux. And it looks like, as you build it, and depending on how you build it, of course, affects its performance, its ability to fly and whatnot. That's cool.

Yeah. Oh, cool. Bowtied Dynamiteite in chat room says he voted for this game last night nice yeah so guys go look for boss constructor uh one of our fellow last audience members is creating it and just got on green light that that must be really exciting when you've been working on something and it hits that because if it hits green light and you actually get green lit then it ends up on steam and then it's available for sale on the Steam store. That's got to be really exciting. It reminds me of when you end up with your own infomercial kind of situation. It's got to feel like that, where you're like, I'm going to be a millionaire.

How much would you pay for this great game? Absolutely, right? Yeah, I'm not kidding. So good luck to you on that one, Mirko. And if you guys want to go find Boss Constructor and give it a light, I think it's not sound that way. I don't know. Also, I'll just give a plug for Super Frog HD. That's a ton of

fun. It's a side-scrolling platformer, so you gotta like those. But I loaded that up on my machine last night, and I totally love that. Alright, I'm going to jump into the Mumble channel. Guys, one last chance. Anything anybody wants to touch on before we wrap up this episode? Run down the list. Last chance.

Clock's running out. No, just the fact that, you know, again, I'd just like to say if there are very, very serious bugs that you are ignoring in favor of features, then I don't think that should be something people should do. Meaning, you know, if you want to push, say, own cloud integration but not work on a very serious bug that has existed for like god knows how long then that's a wrong thing to do but that's my opinion yeah you are you are butting up against a complex issue my friend because it's an open source and so you have people working on the things they want to work on and sometimes the guy that might have implemented something that has the bug no longer is on the project anymore. That happens a lot, actually.

I would argue about the LTS as well. Because LTS is a great idea for stability, but when you take into account the LTS of the apps, that's irrelevant, because there shouldn't be a lockdown on the apps. There should be a lockdown on the security, the maintenance, the kernel,

stuff like that. But the app should be freely open. Yeah, this is what I would think too, Rotten Corps, is I feel like there's a place for LTS at the underlying, underpinning stuff. And then, because I mean, let's be honest, we can all sit here all day long and talk about LTS releases, but everyone in this room, if you were stuck with an LTS release, you'd have that thing so PPA'd up in six months, it'd be ridiculous, right?

Half the repos your app get checking would probably fail because they'd all been shut down, right? I mean, I've been on 1310 literally for, what, three days? And two of the repos are already giving me 404 errors. Wow. My project, I have a project that's in the Ubuntu Software Center that hasn't been updated in a year and a half. Because they just won't update it for some reason. been updated in a year and a half because they just won't update it for some reason.

That's like if the 1310 has the newest version whereas every other one has two stable versions back. What product is that? Uget Download Manager. It's a 1204, 1210, and 1304

all have 1.8 stable and we've been on 1.10 for a year. The Ubuntu Software Center is a mess on its best day, in my opinion. It's a terrible, terrible mess. Has anyone tried AppGrid? Yeah, I've looked at it. I haven't tried it yet. Have you tried it?

I mean, the performance is great. It's closed source, but it works a hell of a lot better than the software. Wait, isn't AppGrid being created by Canonical? I don't think so. I read that it was closed source. Well, look at that. Yeah, AppGrid is supposed to be the replacement for the software center. I thought they were.

So I'm looking at the maintainer is PGG on Launchpad. I'm looking for a license. Yeah, you're right, proprietary. You're right. It's got a Launchpad 30-day trial commercial license. The project's license is proprietary. Oh, man. I wonder if this is beta or something,

and it's keeping it closed until it launches. I hope it goes open source. It's great. Interesting. Well, I'll give that a check. Now, what distro are you running on 1304? I used it when I was still on Ubuntu. Now, based on Matt's recommendation, I'm on Manjaro. Oh, how do you like Manjaro? I think it's great. I love the Arch user repository.

Yeah. I wouldn it's great. I love the Arch User Repository. Yeah. I wouldn't go back. Yeah, the only piece of advice I have there, it's going to keep you from dealing with a lot of people saying, it's not stable and it's going to break. That's crap, to be honest with you, because I've been running it and had no problems. But the main thing is every time there's an update, go to their blog and check what's going on before you update. That's the only piece of advice I have. Just in case there's something funky you need to be aware of.

But otherwise, it's pretty cool. The forums are surprisingly active. Oh, yeah, they're quite active, yeah. You know, I've been using Mint for only a day, and now I'm heading back to Arch because it was just that bad for me. What was rough for you? Yeah, you've got to be specific, so I understand. Just the fact that I don't have anything really up to date.

It's actually slower, way slower. And I can't stand it. I would give you the package age is definitely different because of the freeze releases. And it's definitely absolutely not bleeding edge by any stretch of the imagination. But slower, and I don't know, i have art on another partition and i've not that'd be that same is that yeah no i meant i meant mint as yes mint is oh oh i'm sorry mint oh yeah mint's a total turtle so i want to go back so this is this is my thing is so i guess you know one of the things about xp was that you could update all the applications but it was the

system that and see this is not true. This, this is where the analogy falls down is so much of this stuff is integrated with the repositories that also don't get updated. And I think this is really where it falls down for me because I could actually run, like I wouldn't want to, but like I could run Ubuntu 12.04 if all of the user land stuff stayed up to date. And I'm talking video driver too in that context, but Chromium, Firefox, those are like really some of the things that they do manage

to stay up to date. But I'm talking everything, Pigeon, VLC, I want everything up to date. And then you can keep the lower level stuff. And I wouldn't just argue that might work. I would argue we've seen that work in the marketplace. We've seen it work in the enterprise. We've seen it work all over the place. We've seen that model work. And I don't understand why maybe we can't break it out a little bit. Break it up, say this top part of Ubuntu would be rolling, this lower part would be static and non-changing, and maybe we'd do service packs and things like that. Those are exactly my thoughts. I was thinking the exact same thing. I was thinking, keep the core stable and frozen, but roll

the drivers and the apps. That would be a perfect world. Sadly, I don't see too many Linux distributions doing that. It seems to be all or nothing. Well, it just doesn't work that way. Because the issue is, just look at the kernel and the kernel guys. And from that point to every other point in the chain up to the desktop,

they're all separate projects. They all have their separate agendas, and they all have their need to work on the stuff all the time. You just can't say to them, please stop developing new stuff, make it stable, and next year you can come up with another new version, but please stop developing new versions. You just can't do that. But see, it'll never work in open source.

It'll never work because then they'll say, they'll give you the middle finger and they'll walk. So what your alternative is, is to hope that in the process forward, they iterate and make it better. That's kind of our best hope. We should do a hybrid. Systemd, R kernel, and GNOME are three great examples of an entire vertical stack,

which are almost linked and dependent upon each other, all evolving at the same time. To put an old kernel underneath a new GNOME with System B, it's going to be real tricky. Well, that might be a good example of where you have to draw the line. But then all you really would have to do is say, all right, well, what's the minimum version we have to get to? And then we stay there.

Although, you know, I think we should probably bring up click packages, as Mika too just said in the chat room. Click packages from canonical could change up this game a little bit. Sort of like PBIs. Click packages are the new type of installer that are really

right now being designed for mobile Ubuntu, but eventually they could become the new type of installation packages on Ubuntu where you download a click package, you click it, and it installs a new version

of the application. I seem to remember a click package specifically. I think it was KLIK if I'm not mistaken, or something like that. And basically it was distro independent and it was self-contained packages basically mimicking themselves after the OS X

way of doing things. And that was pretty old hat. And it was dismissed at the time as being stupid and they were never up to date and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Is that essentially what we're seeing with Ubuntu adopting? I mean, is that kind of what we're – I don't know if you guys are familiar with that, but it's pretty old school stuff. Yeah, I'm going to try and Google it.

Yeah, I'm going to try and get a URL for you here if I can find it. Yeah, it was very popular for a while. Let's see, click. That package is already almost like that. I mean, all you have to do is just go to G-Devi or something like that. Right. But this literally was like, I mean, had nothing to do with what, I mean, oh my God. Yeah, it was completely on its own.

On its own. Let me see if I can find it. To me, this is just Ubuntu or Canonical doing what they do to everything. Trying to bring everything in-house and just recreate the wheel over and over again. They don't have package dependencies. They're making a solution for a problem that doesn't need a solution. Just like me. That's got to buy you.

Going along with that. PBIs have a really good purpose. They're built from, like it's a source distribution for EBSD. Poor Linux apps like that it's completely different I think that

that's a good point I mean they're going off on their own direction and I think you could make the argument that yes they're going off in their own direction again but I don't know if pbis would work for them it would be interesting if they could apply something like pbis so that's a good point you just made there and that's again uh it there's there's a lot of ways to solve this but we're not there yet at least they're talking about going in

that direction right i mean at least it's not like they apparently are aware of the problem click packages right there very much indicates they're aware of this issue. Well, here's what pisses me off about all this canonical stuff. It's like, oh, we've invented the software center.

No, you guys went and hired people from Linspire, the guys that used to do the CNR packages. You didn't invent squat. Now we're doing it again with the click packages stuff. This is old hat.

I just sent Chris a link on Skype. I don't know if you're able to get to it or not. But basically it's like, you know like they're not inventing anything. They're not really even innovating anything. They're basically pretending like they are. PortableLinuxApps.org. Visit it.

Check it out. This is old stuff. I feel like that same argument is lobbied at Apple, that Apple didn't invent anything. They're just repackaging it. And if they could do it better, that's great. But Apple didn't invent anything, they're just repackaging it. And if they could do it better, that's great, but they didn't. CNR, quite frankly, as much as people hated Lenspire, is better than the software center by leaps and bounds.

It was just a better experience. Lenspire sucked, don't get me wrong, it was horrible, but CNR, back at the 4.5, 5.0 days, was actually pretty good before they broke it out for all the distros. It was actually pretty reasonable. I could have an entire software aisle installed on any machine I wanted by logging in, clicking install aisle, and going and having a cup of coffee.

It was really simple. Yeah, it was a good system. It was just apt on the back end. But again, but now you've got the software center, which is like you've got to jump through hoops and hope to God your payment stuff works. And it's horrible. It really frustrates me because I want it to be successful. I really do. I care about Ubuntu.

But they're not doing it for me right now. Yeah, I don't use the software center anymore. I don't use it anymore. No one does. It's not even in my launch bar. Yeah. And the packages are out of date. The for-profit stuff is even worse because the folks are sending them the stuff.

But as it was pointed out in the Mumble room, it's not being updated. It's a problem. I think we as Linux users have a tendency to look at the negatives here, and we want it fixed because we see the problem and we see it for a while, but I think when you look at

the actual strategy that's at play here with these LTS releases, and those we see in deploy, that's what we see Ubuntu based on, that's what Amazon's running, LTS releases. And those are what we see in deploy. That's what we see Ubuntu based on. That's what Amazon's running. That's what all these people are running is 1204. And if you're looking at it at two different types, there's two different games here.

There's the interim release game that all of the enthusiasts follow and upgrade to, and there's the LTS game. And it's almost like there's two different Ubuntus. There's stable, steady, as it goes Ubuntu that's supported for a while, and there's crazy Ubuntu that's pissing everybody off, that does all these kinds of things that nobody likes or doesn't do enough, and it's like it's either or. I have a great time. You know, I guess it seems like a problem that only affects probably the niche of the niche.

Well, and for me, I just want to put the tough love out there because I'm not doing it because I want to see them fail or have a bad day or ruin someone's hard work. I want the people that are making the decisions, not the developers, but the hierarchy, further up the chain, to really understand where we're coming from. Stop screwing up hard work of your developers. These guys are doing tremendously awesome stuff, and then you guys kind of poo-poo it with crap that no one cares about. The software centers was a great example of that. It was a great idea, and they did the worst. I couldn't have done worse myself.

It was horrible. It's just terrible. I don't even know how they consider that usable. It's, ugh. I was trying to end it on a positive note, but I will just point out that if they hadn't gone off in their own direction with Unity – Sure. That I agree with you on. That I agree. I understand there was – there's political things that happened. There was vision that they needed to execute.

But I believe one of the original ideas behind Unity was the same UI across all these devices. Now they're kind of custom-building UIs for the TV, for the tablet, for the phone, of the original ideas behind unity was the same ui across all these devices now they're kind of custom building uis for the tv for the tablet for the phone for the desktop but going back like if somehow like the planets aligned and they hadn't had that break and like they just like the politics worked out so that way the gnome project was cool working with them and they were cool with the gnome project which i acknowledged was never going to happen it's just you know too many alpha dogs in the room. But now, if they were still hitched to that wagon, they could essentially disengage from the desktop and completely focus on mobile like they're doing. And as long as they packaged everything up, applied a nice theme, and worked out some bugs, we'd all get brand new toys with our updates.

We'd all get the new stuff. We'd all get 310. We'd all get brand new toys with our updates. We'd all get the new stuff. We'd all get 3.10. We'd all get all this great new stuff. And they wouldn't have to have built an entire desktop. And that arguably may have been better initially, but as their focus wanes and Gnome and KDE and XFCE and Mate and Cinnamon all progress forward with their main focus, with what their primary task is, as they all move forward with those things, they eventually will outpace what has happened or have already outpaced Unity. And if they weren't even attached to that right now, they'd be reaping those rewards. That's true. That's true. And I've come to – well, with Unity, I've been harsh on Unity in the past.

I don't necessarily have a problem with it now. I mean, it's not my go-to desktop, but it's not ugly. It really isn't. It's not an ugly desktop. It's actually quite attractive. There's some usability paper cuts here and there. But for the most part, I'm okay with it. I don't have a real problem with it.

I give that a ding, Matt. Well, we'll leave that as a cliffhanger right there because that's where my thoughts will pick up on the review. Now that I've been running KD and GNOME and now I'm back on Unity for the week, we'll give our thoughts in the review on Sunday for this week's Linux Action Show. So we'll end it right there because I think that's a good jumping off point for the show. Kind of sets the stage for Sunday's episode of the Linux Action Show. Right there, Matt. Well done.

That's right there. I have shaken my fist at the clouds. I have spoken. All right. If you want to get a hold of us, email us linuxactionshow at jupiterbroadcasting.com or pop the contact link. You can even just choose unplug from the dropdown

or go harass our subreddit over at linuxactionshow.reddit.com. Make some noise, make some votes, because that sort of tweaks. It molds what we cover. It impacts our coverage. Plus, we take all of your comments into context. So even just tossing your thoughts in a thread help out too. Don't forget you can join us on Tuesdays at 2pm Pacific over at jblive.tv Thanks to our Mumble Room for joining us, and Matt, have a great week, I'll see you on Sunday.

Alright everyone, thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. See you right back here next week. See you right back here next week. all of the regular consumers see, and that's where they land on when they find Linux. And if the island's ruined, who steps up? Who steps up next? SteamOS. Mint. Mint. Mint and SteamOS.

Why does anyone have to step up? I think it's going to be Mint. If they've got Cinnamon 2.0 coming out, it's going to be, I don't know. What about Elementary OS? What about Elementary OS? What about elementary OS? Elementary OS doesn't have enough of an existing base. And as far as the why someone needs to step up, I think it's a matter of we would have a void like we did before Ubuntu and post Lenspire with the news outlets that those news outlets matter. If you want to appeal to those news outlets, you damn well better be Nuber friendly or Nuby friendly. I don't think elementary gets enough press, honestly.

If they got more press, then perhaps people would be more turned on. Granted. For non-geek people, yes. But the problem with elementary is that it has – It's not going to be Mint or elementary OS. I think it's going to be Steam OS, and I think the reason why it's going to be SteamOS is because of Valve, just like Android took off because of Google.

And the reason why even Ubuntu sees the success, the reason why Valve picked Ubuntu is because of canonical, right? Because business, I trust business, right? And the problem with both elementary and Mint is while they're fantastic, they're LLCs at best. You know, one or two guys.

Yeah, it's just not simple. Whereas SteamOS, I think, will be. But I think that's going to be a loss because Ubuntu is a full-fledged desktop with your office suite on there, with a browser, a messenger. If we're only looking at a replacement, then SteamOS is probably first in line.

But if anything, I want friggin' Ubuntu to fix their friggin' problem. Swallow their pride and fix their shit. I would disagree. I would say that, you know, Fedora, OpenSource, maybe even Arch, and... But Ubuntu doesn't have to be a pain in the ass. It's doing it by choice. And other distros, I'm saying other distros are good enough to replace Ubuntu at any time Ubuntu is not the

only one with stability and with reliability now now OpenSUSE and Fiddle and all of them are very very good so they're perfect alternatives you know but the funny thing about all of those you've listed they've been around longer than Ubuntu and none of them have been able to achieve the popularity that Ubuntu

did they've whatever either it's execution of what they're offering or it's the marketing or whatever it is. All of those examples were around before Ubuntu and will, yeah, be around after Ubuntu, but it doesn't mean they're going to get any attention. They didn't approach the distro idea like the way Ubuntu did where they want to make it as easy as possible. That's right. They wanted to give as much customization and control as possible, whereas people who are coming from Windows do not care.

One thing I want to point out is that if anything is going to succeed, it's got to be Ubuntu because Mint, Elementary, SteamOS, they all kind of ride on their coattails because they're all built on Ubuntu. So if Ubuntu dies, where do they all go? I see Mint going to Debian, but I don't

know about anything else. Elementary dies. But can we even count SteamOS because SteamOS, it is meant for a living room. Yeah, and it's meant for Ubuntu. That can't be a replacement for Ubuntu. It's gaming-focused.

Yeah, it can't be a replacement for Ubuntu. It's gaming-focused. Ubuntu is the misguided child. Simply Maps. So who is the reigning champion, the desktop island of salvation for the fleeing rats, when Ubuntu sinks? I think whatever it is, it has to be pretty. That's something that a lot of people look over, but when I was first starting on Linux, I looked around.

I barely knew what distribution was, but I saw this pretty little sidebar, and I was like, ooh, that looks cool. What if it is Chrome OS? I think a lot of people are just going to go to Distro. I hate Chrome OS. Check out what's out there. I don't think there's going to be any one specific distro that's going to fill that niche. I don't, but if you can't offer a turnkey answer to that, I think you're going to be any one specific distro that's going to fill that niche. If you can't offer a

turnkey answer to that, I think you're going to turn away a lot of switchers. Oh, you are. There's going to be a lot of people that are going to go back. I have a turnkey answer. It's basically the reason why Ubuntu became such a huge thing is because they took GNOME and made it really simple.

That's what GNOME is trying to do by themselves. Whenever Ubuntu dies, the one that's going to take over, it could be a new one, it could be just one of them that existed, but they're just going to take GNOME and make it just as easy as Ubuntu was trying to in the first

place. It's about the desktop environment, actually. We can't be desktop environment. Honestly, forget the desktop environment, it's whatever's't be desktop environment. Honestly, forget the desktop environment. It's whatever's the most simple. And the most simple for the majority of people is the web browser, and then that goes back to Google Chrome and Chrome OS.

I agree. Chrome OS has got the most press right now. They're going to get all the popularity. They're in the stores. And they're going to add more features. So by the time this singularity happens, it'll have more desktop-like functionality, I'm sure. They've just presented...

Chrome OS is full of C, but it doesn't even have an office suite. It does. It's got Google Docs. Right. It's going in the web browser. You know it's connected to the internet. Speaking of Chrome OS,

did you guys see that they had a new Chromebook? Yes, I did. The HP. I won it. It charges with a micro USB cord. That's how you charge it. That's crazy. What?

And as far as it being popular or not popular, let me put this in perspective. Go to Amazon.com and look up their most popular notebook. It's the Chromebook. It's the Chromebook. It's the Chromebook. Chrome OS is going to be it. I really think, unfortunately. There's going to be a replacement.

It helps that the price is pretty good as well. Amazon is not where post people go to get their laptops. You can get Linux on hardware. That's the issue. You can get Linux on hardware. What you guys are all really saying is Gen 2 is the winner. Absolutely. Oh, yeah, totally. absolutely oh yeah totally