Tech Over Tea - Chatting Ubuntu Linux & Snaps | Popey

Episode Date: June 21, 2023

A few years back he used to work at Canonical, nowadays he's moved on to new ventures today we talk to the legendary Alan Pope or more commonly just called Popey. He's here to talk about his experience at Canonical, Ubuntu and of course snaps. ==========Guest Links========== Mastodon: https://ubuntu.social/@popey Twitter: https://twitter.com/popey Website: https://popey.me/ ==========Support The Show========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

three wait no i did that wait okay we're live recording not live i don't do it live i'm not gonna cut any of that that that can just be the intro whatever hi welcome um this show was a mess how you doing i've had to restart my computer twice today so that's good uh welcome alan pope better known as popey um Yes. Yeah, nobody calls me Alan. Everyone calls me Popey. I was going to do some sort of like, you know, nice intro there, but that's not going to happen now. Okay. Introduce yourself.

I'm a UK-based 50-plus-year-old nerd who has used Linuxux since about 1995 something like that and um i have opinions and don't we all uh yeah that's basically me well i guess we can just sort of start from like how you got into all of the linux space and then we can get into like what you've done as you you know moved up into more I guess positions where people knew about you like how did you get started in all of this this Linux thing because 95 is a while ago and I'm sure Linux was a very different space than it is even just in the early 2000s yeah I so I used to work as a technician at a local college. And the first time I heard about Linux, one of the students brought in a stack of floppy disks and was like, hey, Alan, you need to see this thing. And talked about how he downloaded these floppy disks. And it was probably Slackware or something like that from back in the day.

And I was like, that's never going to take off. That's rubbish. And how wrong i was um and then like a couple of years later i think i saw a coral linux book in a bookstore and in those days you'd buy a big fat book like three inches thick that had everything in it and included a cd inside the back cover and i got that and i had two computers at the time one was a pentium p200 and one was a p400 or something like that and on the lower spec one i put coral linux played with it and that was like okay this is pretty cool this is a bit like the mini computers that i'd used at college and i thought it was cool being able to use the command line and use vnc to remotely control it and all

that kind of good stuff and networking was was interesting between these two computers that i had on my desk so that it it piqued my interest and um oh it took a while but eventually i switched over full time to linux in probably early 2000s wow okay yeah and so you prior to using that um i presume you'd been using what windows would have been current at the time yes Yes. Well, I've been around since DOS and, you know, my first computer, my first PC. It predates that I had 8-bit computers. Prior to finding that Linux distro, what were you running at the time? At that time, probably DOS. Okay.

Yes. It would have been MS-DOS. And I looked after the networking stuff at the college so uh novel netware uh on the server and uh yeah ms dos on the on the client um yeah and then maybe windows 95 98 that kind of thing yeah well yeah like now i just realized a really dumb question because they were named the year they came out in that time because it's 95 98 yeah i don't know why i asked that question i don't know yeah it wasn't like i was moving from bsd or yeah yeah you know i i'd i'd fiddled with os2 and stuff like that you know in the in the in the early days but once i'd switched to linux um i think i i was using red hat initially

um i think that was what i i switched from coral to red hat and then at some point i switched to debian because a guy in my local linux user group um suggested debian was better and so i was like okay i'll try that so i installed debian and i was quite happy with that and then um i got frustrated with debian because uh i had a webcam made by phillips okay and it was called a two cam i think it's supposed to sound like toucan or something yeah yeah um but it was this weird beige thing with an orange um surround around if you if you do a search for philips 2 cam t-o-u-c-a-m and the driver was called pwc that was the the driver that um that enabled that camera and the person who was the maintainer for that for some

reason in debian ejected it out of Debian. And there were lengthy threads on their mailing list about there was some question about the legality of being able to distribute the PWC driver. And so it became an out of tree module. And so every time I had a kernel update on Debian, I had to go and get this PWC driver. And, you know, and so last night I posted on on mastodon a screenshot that i took um and it was the day i got my webcam working in debian and it's like a screenshot of the display and me going yay like this so you know i was that excited but i got sick of debian and then i found out about Ubuntu and started trying that out. I think I tried Ubuntu in 2005, just after Warty Warthog came out. And then I've used it ever since.

When you mentioned Red Hat, you were using Red Hat at the time. I presume you mean Red Hat Linux, like the thing that no longer exists anymore. Yeah, I was on Red Hat. And then I went to, I think Fedora core came out okay i think it's called fedora core and i was getting really sick of rpm stuff you know the you know i was familiar with dll hell on windows and the rpm hell was not much better so when when my mate hugo told me about debian that's it was the packaging thing that made me switch from from fedora core to uh debian and i appreciate that things have changed over time but that really tainted my opinion of fedora red hat and so i've i've stayed

with debian based distros since then what What was it that was weird about RPMs? Because I don't know the story myself. Oh, okay. So it wasn't so much. I think it was more to do with the way repositories worked back then. And so it wasn't so straightforward that you could just do RPM install rpm install uh whatever like firefox although you know that didn't exist at the time um you you often had to go and get the dependencies all the dependency rpms and you try and install an rpm and it didn't work so you had to go and get

another rpm and then you get you imagine having to manually go and get every dependency package for a single package that you wanted to install. And if it was a big package and it had a lot of dependencies, then that was a lot of recursively going and getting and then finding you're still missing something and then going and getting it. And it just became frustrating and tedious to install anything that wasn't in the repositories. And there wasn't a lot in the repositories at the time. So it was often that you would go off piste, find an RPM online, try and install it. And then you couldn't because some library was missing and you had to go hunt that down, install that and then find that needed something else. And so there was this recursive, you know, succession of RPM jet to install.

Whereas Debian, the repository was chock full of stuff and i just didn't have that problem on debian so that that went away for me and i appreciate that some people it was never a problem or they they built a mental model that meant i will go and get all these dependencies or i know what to do in this case but for me it was just annoying and so I just switched. So if I'm understanding it correctly, as like a modern example, it would be like piecing your Ubuntu system together

from just random PPAs online. Kind of. But even PPAs have dependencies and it's more like... Sure, but like, I guess, because there are the PPAs from like Pop!OS and then there's like Ubuntu ones, like using all of these ones from like these different SKUs of Ubuntu, like you're not really sure if it'll fit together properly, but like you're going to make it

work somehow. Yeah. Yeah. We should talk about PPAs. Sure, absolutely. Yeah. I guess the modern equivalent is like, if you just removed the dependency if, if you just removed the dependency tracking from arch and you do a Pac-Man install something and it said,

okay, I'll go and get that. And it goes and downloads it. And bear in mind, stuff took longer to download. So, you know, you take time to download and then it starts installing goes,

ah, no, you need something else. And then you, right. So it's not dependency resolving the same way. That was the main part is the dependency resolution was a bit rubbish, but yeah, once I switched to Debianian that all went away and i forgot all about that

and i i never looked back so what year do you switch to debian if you remember a roundabout it probably wasn't a lot longer ago than um i switched to ubuntu. So Ubuntu was 2005. So probably 2002, 2001, something like that. It'll probably be just after Fedora Core came out. Whenever that was. Fedora Core. I feel like it was maybe a little bit later. Fedora Core. Could be.

Yeah, I think Fedora Core and Ubuntu were like i think they were about a year apart um fedora core one was 2003 yeah yeah so that sounds about right so 2003 switched debbie and 2005 switched to ubuntu sounds about right yep yep yep and then you found your way over to ubuntu with were you using what do you want or were you using whatever the next version after that was? Yeah, I used Warty at the beginning of 2005. And my local Linux user group that I was quite active in at the time, we would get together once a month and help each other out, resolve problems in installing software or installing a distro, that kind of stuff. And when Ubuntu came along, it made that whole thing a lot easier.

And I think Ubuntu is one of the reasons why some of the Linux user groups, in the UK at least, died out because there was a less need for them because they kind of solved that problem of getting the software on your computer. There's still a whole load of other things you need to do but actually getting the distro the fact that you could um ask for a cd to be sent to you in the post yeah ship it service i used to have hundreds of them in the boot of my car like a big cardboard box full of ubuntu cds and i'd take them around and give them out to people and um yeah i remember giving giving them out at um software freedom day which i think is in september sometime i was in central london walking around with some friends and we all had piles of these ubuntu cds and there was a big red london bus stopped at the traffic lights and uh we went

up to the driver and handed him, because he was a captive audience, he couldn't go anywhere. So we handed him a CD and he's like, oh, is this that Linux thing? And we were like, yes, it is. And he was like, oh, great. Thanks very much. I was like, random bus driver knows what Linux is um it was quite eye-opening for me you know I thought it was just for us sheltered nerds in our basements so sadly the uh the ship of service ended with I'm looking at now 11.04 so a lot of people probably just won't even using Linux without ever existing like that's a long time ago now it's 12 years ago um yeah I I certainly wasn't using Linux back then i was very much in

no i i've only been using linux for like four or five years um it was it was interesting and and i know there were complaints from other distros i mean when you think ubuntu started from zero in 2004 um and a lot of people were using Debian at the time, or Fedora, or Mandrake, Mandriva, that kind of stuff, right? There was a lot of distros, and everyone was scattered across, all the users were scattered across those distros. And when the ShipIt service started, it was, a blow to a lot of other distros because nobody else could do this.

Right. You've got this multimillionaire throwing money at Ubuntu. I was going to say that it's not really like Ubuntu started from zero because you did have Mark running the distro. So it's, it's a bit different than just some like random person starting Ubuntu. If that was the case, like, you know, case, it would have never become what it is today. Maybe it would, but it certainly would have had that head start it had. Yeah, what I mean by zero is, before 2004, there were zero Ubuntu users.

Oh, sure, sure, sure. It didn't exist, right? No, yeah, fair enough. But yeah, the curve, the adoption curve was probably sharper upwards for Ubuntu than it was for anything else. And yes, having Mark, you know, throwing his,

I think someone from Mandriva called it his magic box of shiny coins. I remember that, that phrase on someone's blog post, like talking about how Ubuntu is crushing all the other distros in terms of adoption because of Mark's magic box of shiny coins. And it's true. You know, he,

he could fund developer summit. So every six months, you know, we would all get together, including people from the community and all the canonical employees would get together and work on a button to, and plan the next release. And there was stuff that just,

yeah. Okay. Red hat had a lot of money, but they spent it in different ways, right? Yeah. Red hat was trying to compete more with, they spent it in different ways right yeah red hat was trying to compete more with you know in that grow like at the time the server space was sort of

growing massively after you know the web crash and then the sudden rebuild and what it is today and i've used uh red hat in uh corporate environments like before I did Linux, I was a SAP consultant. So I was managing SAP systems. And a lot of them were running on Linux and Oracle databases with Red Hat Linux. And so I've used a lot of Red Hat in the corporate space. And it's big. You know, there's a lot of people who use it there. But the adoption of ubuntu was initially

you know very popular on the desktop with consumers and small businesses small enterprises and hackers and you know you and me us types used it a lot so yeah the adoption went up with that ship it service that really helped and it wasn't needed after after 2011 when they shut it down it just wasn't required um because well it was very expensive you know you imagine shipping 300 cds to nigeria or somewhere it's it's it's a significant expense for the company that they could spend on other like developers or something else right right yeah it's this how i guess there's still a there is still a need in certain parts of the world and it would be nice if that is something that is like financially viable to do um but it's not like that it's not like the core audience needs that anymore like

most people who are in the position to be downloading an iso who know about all this stuff most likely have a connection where they can do it there is still definitely parts of the world where that's just not viable and it would be nice if there was some way to you know deal with that situation as well i just i don't know if there's a way to do it that's not just doing it out of the goodness of your heart, out of the sole need of getting things out there. So the other thing to remember is back then, booting from USB was not as easy as it is now. Right.

And internet speed wasn't as fast as it is now. I had a two megabit down connection around that time. Oh my gosh. Also, the ubiquity of USB devices. I could just reach across my desk and find 16 and 32 gig USB sticks just flapping about in the breeze on my desk.

I have one here. There you go. You see? Now you can relatively easily download an ISO, slap it on a USB stick, and you can just post that to a friend in a foreign land. That's fair. It's not going to cost you a lot.

And I think, I think what it all ship, it also did was reinforce this thing that you, you have the CD, you install the software and then you could just give the CD to somebody else. You can pass it on. You don't have to put it in your library of, you know, you have the cd you install the software and then you could just give the cd to somebody else you can pass it on you don't have to put it in your library of you know shiny things um you have to put it on the bookshelf behind you yeah yeah exactly among all the other tat that i've got

there yeah i yeah you could you could pass it on to somebody else totally and i think um although a lot of people like me carried them around in the car boot. You know, bus drivers. Yeah. Oh, yeah. There's still, you know, I see pop up on Reddit all the time. People saying, you know, I was digging around in my attic and I found this, you know, Ubuntu 606 CD or something. It's quite nostalgic to see those pop up as well.

I was not around using Linux back. I was like, what was I? I was six years old when Woody Warthog came out. So definitely not using Linux back then. I was, I don't know what I was doing. I was a six-year-old, probably eating dirt or something. Yeah. But I've gone back on a live stream and checked out Woody Warthog

and checked out what it really was like. Went through the install process, which is kind of annoying because you've got to do some fiddling to make the virtual machine even want to boot the ISO. You can make it work, it's just that it doesn't work the same way as modern Ubuntu. You've got to force some older tech specifically to... I think you've got to force an older type of hard drive or something, otherwise it just't want to deal with it yeah it doesn't it doesn't know what sata is yeah yeah but you can get it to work and i went through the install process and it's you know it's not

it's not modern ubuntu where it's just click next and it installs itself but it had that that setup that that baseline of a simple straightforward just mostly click next you've got to like change a couple little things and it's good and then when you get onto the desktop like you know it is that really disgusting brown color but it's that it's that sort of base of what you'd expect today like if you've used modern gnome you can go back and use Warty Warthog and it's not that fundamentally different. Yeah. It's like shinier and you know, the feet it's all like, you know, works nicer. It's faster, but like, it's fundamentally the same thing. Are you saying Linux hasn't changed for 20 years? Is that what you're basically saying?

I'm saying Gnome hasn't really changed in 20 years. years is that what you're basically saying gnome hasn't really changed in 20 years okay so the thing that that got me was in in the early days uh i say early days the early days from my perspective um if you wanted to get a graphical desktop up and running you would almost certainly have to run um some weird commands to give you mode lines for your monitor and to edit your xorg.conf or back then it would be called x386.conf or something before the xorg. I'm still about 2006 or 7 when x386 decided hey guys you know that gpl thing yeah we're gonna make a new license that's not compatible with that let's go I'm sure everyone will love that. Yeah. So back in those days, it was quite manual to get stuff working. And I think the innovation that Canonical had was they had a lot of people making sure that it just worked.

There was a lot of enthusiasm. And people, I think there was even a laptop scheme where you could ask canonical to send you a laptop if you were a contributor and so a lot of people would test stuff on a variety of laptops now there's always going to be the hardcore nerds who have a think pad right and you know ubuntu's always worked really well on basically every think pad from back then because that's what everyone had and fun fact it's always a good idea to keep an eye on the laptop that mark shuttleworth was using and the ceo uh jane silber were using because you wanted it to work for them right and so often people would buy well what's mark got now okay

we'll buy one of those because that's the worst thing you can do because then you get a monoculture of one laptop that works. You end up being Apple Mac because it works perfectly on one model of laptop and not on every other. And so when you build a community of people who are all testing on different types of hardware and reporting issues and fixing issues, contributing fixes, it gets better. And I think there was a real push to make sure that it just worked out of the box now for some people it isn't going to work out the box people who've got weird matrox peralia video cards or like a dell laptop with a neo magic 128 xd or whatever like wacky video cards that were around in those times yeah okay not everything's going to work but for the most part like you say you could boot the cd and you would get a graphical desktop at the end of it and that was uh for a lot of

non-enthusiasts like not people who run arch these days you know from nothing but normal people normal people who just want a computer and they want a web browser and they want a text editor in an office suite right those kind of people can't be bothered with all the faff of xorg.com for an end disk wrapper and all the other basic bullshit that comes along with linux and ubuntu made that go away now other distros also did that and there were engineers who worked at red hat and worked at suzo and worked at other organizations it wasn't you know just canonical but what canonical did is put it all together in a package that worked and i think that's that that was the turning point and that's that's what made a lot of people switch from other distros to ubuntu yeah for a long time like before i used linux i just assumed that like ubuntu was linux like that's the idea that a lot of people outside of linux space

it's changing a bit now with like the steam deck being a thing so people have more of an idea that maybe linux can be different things but for a very long time like the idea of you know i i thought that the linux desktop was just good no because that's that's the only the only sort of look at linux i had had from it so and it's that's just because a lot of people simply used lit as you used at bundu and it was such a massive i guess massive game changer to the way that people could actually approach Linux. There's this really old, really old clip. I think it's from like around, I want to say it's around like Warty Warthog, maybe a little bit later, about this girl who bought this laptop. And it's like this anti-Linux news story where she bought the laptop and they're like the the people

at the store like you can use this for all your your education stuff and the network at her university didn't like support the um the uh ethernet card she had in her system so it was like this story about like you know they say you can use Linux for everything, but you know, you definitely can't because you know, weird internet stuff at the time. But at the end of the day, it was still, you know, she was still using Ubuntu. Like that, like of all the things that could have been, could have been selected, it's Ubuntu that had been that, that, that centerpiece of Linux for better or for worse. Yeah. And because, you know, nerds being nerds,

they prefer David to Goliath. And Ubuntu started off being David to Microsoft Goliath. And then it switched and Canonical became Goliath and all the other distros became the Davids. You had the, you know, the Pop OSs and the mints and all these other distros became the Davids. You had the Pop! OSs and the Mints and all these other distros, which took a bit of Ubuntu's crown. I still maintain, and I can't prove this to you, but I still maintain that Ubuntu has more users

than all the other distros added together. Unless you... Sometimes it's hard for people to accept that yeah right because people often feel like well this is the distro i use and my friends use it therefore everyone right they can't see beyond that that actually there's a huge number of people out there who just don't care about linux and they're not part of the community they just want to use a computer like much like you know those of us who are fawning over the steam deck and the fact that

it's got kde on it and it's linux and it's an amazing piece of hardware there are people out there who actually just want to play games yeah and they actually don't give a shit about any of that that's why game consoles feel so popular just right it just it doesn't matter to them and i think the one of the mistakes that nerds make like i'm a nerd as well i'm not being disparaging um is that they don't look beyond the boundaries of their own bubble right and there are people out there who in their millions who use linux and the linux they use is ubuntu and so yes yes, they see Ubuntu as, well, that's Linux. That's what I use. And that is Linux, right?

Yeah. I've had a game indie game dev on the show before, and he uses, I think Ubuntu. He doesn't care about his distro. He just picked the thing that, you know, would be set up works, installs Godot on it and done. It doesn't matter. Like, you know, could use Manjaro, could use Fedora,

could use anything, but it doesn't matter because... We used to have release parties in Ubuntu and I remember being on a train with a friend going into London to the Ubuntu release party and this was on the day of the release. It always releases on a Thursday, except that one time when it didn't. And we were sat on the train and, you know, the release it always releases on a thursday except that one time when it didn't um and we

were sat on the train and you know we got all our stuff with us like cake and you know some stickers and stuff that we were taking with us on the train and at one of the stops two guys got on and were sat nearby and i overheard one of them say oh yeah, yeah, it came out today. Are you going to upgrade? And he said, yeah, I'll probably upgrade next week. Once it all calms down, I'll upgrade next week. And so I thought, oh, they're going to the release party because they're talking about Ubuntu upgrades. And I was like, hey, are you guys talking about Ubuntu?

And they were like, yeah, yeah. I was like, oh, you're going to the release party. And they were, oh, no, we're not. They were literally just users. I think they were web developers or something on the way home from the office and they just happen to use ubuntu they're not involved in the community they don't care now you know some people in the community would argue well you should care you should care about licenses you should care about privacy every single freedom read every line of code really read all the release notes make sure you

know every line of code you're installing on your system right that's not happening no that's just not happening um and so it was events like that and also on another occasion i was standing outside a large exhibition space in London, and I had a hoodie on that had just the giant old Ubuntu logo, you know, the yellow, brown, orange. Yes, yes, yes. And that's all it had on it. No words, just the big logo on this black hoodie. So you could see me from a mile away, right?

And this guy who was having a cigarette outside the exhibition space shouted over to me, Oi, Ubuntu boy! And I was like, what? Are you talking to me? And I said, yes. And he came over and he said the conference center was being set up for the ski and snow show

where they show off ski gear and right and uh he said all the projectors and all the lighting systems they're all running on ubuntu and he just recognized the logo on my uh on my on my jumper and just felt the need to come over and tell me that and that's the thing it's like in the same way like linux is used in lots of places and like you'll spot it on a gas station, four core running the adverts or, you know,

where you see it in McDonald's on the displays behind, you know, wherever it may be, it's in a lot of places. And I think the fact that Ubuntu made some decisions that made it distinctive and stand out, whether it's the logo or the color of the wallpaper or the fact that the terminal has got a purple hue to it those kind of things mean that

when you see it in the wild you know it's ubuntu now it's also linux right but you see it and it it's ubuntu right right i think i think the first thing that i notice whenever i see ubuntu somewhere is you see the uh the vertical bar you see the vertical bar you're like okay this is this is ubuntu's gnome i know i know what we're doing here yeah i i quite like it when i'm watching a tv program or a youtube channel which is completely unrelated to linux and the camera will pan across a workstation yeah yeah and i'll be like wait zoom enhance is that like you know and you could just spot that it's from a long way away you know and i'll screen grab them and share them online or share them with people at canonical because they like seeing that they like seeing the work that they're doing being used in the

real world by normal people doing normal things yeah i do remember that like what show was it um i don't know what it was but there was an anime that came out like a year or so ago and it's like a in like one of the labs just they had ubuntu running on one of the systems as they're like doing their research like oh that's neat and that that picture like went on to r slash linux got massively uploaded and you know yeah i think other people it's not just the people in ubuntu but like the general community thinks it's kind of neat as well it's like ah look at this you know normal people out there know about linux they you know even if it's just like a random thing they like understand that it's used in certain contexts yeah everyone turns everyone turns into Leonardo DiCaprio, that meme where he's going like that and pointing at the TV

when they see Linux on the TV or in the cinema or whatever. Yeah, it's quite fun. And, you know, just like, you know, I'm a bit of a nerd when it comes to toasters as well. And whenever I see a Jewelit toaster on a TV show, which is quite distinctive shape it's a british made toaster okay whenever i see one of those i'm just like oh do you lit toaster and it's it's true and i'm sure everyone who has a particular you know enthusiasm will will spot a

brand or a product that they they like and so yeah it's, it's expected that we would spot that kind of stuff, yeah. Have you seen Mr. Robot? I have. I've seen the first couple of seasons. He was KDE, didn't he? Yeah, I was gonna mention the pilot episode, the Gnome... An executive using Gnome? That scene is so, so cringe, and I love it so much but like that that series that series is they actually use a lot of actual real things that people would use like there was one episode where um elliot just he i think he he grabbed the he booted off a usb that was running cali linux it's like okay that's an actual way to use cali linux

unlike a while back the cali linux devs told people to stop running as like a desktop distro because you shouldn't be doing that but like you know that's you know running it off a usb doing whatever elliot was doing at the time like that's you know that's that's what it is and there's like plenty of other fun little you can watch that series just not really knowing anything about linux and anything about tech but when you do you see a lot of these little little subtle nice things in there that uh it's it's just a nice touch of realism as opposed to you know like uh have you seen the i think it was a law and order or csi one of those series where um you have two people typing on the same keyboard

trying to like crack the firewall or something yeah and they got weird ip addresses and stuff it's funny the the this the style of um display that you see in tv and film like i think people often refer to it as movie os as like some kind of you know mythical futuristic operating system and a few years ago um there was a little skunkworks project inside canonical to try and up our game in terms of making ubuntu the movie os that you would go to if you were making a film that you would choose Ubuntu as the thing you would put on the display because it is beautiful and it has all the, you know, like the Matrix stuff

and a terminal going and all that, it never went anywhere. But I think the idea was to have, you know, something that would be appealing stylistically and creatively to someone who was making a tv program or a film but often they want it to be distinctive or they want it to be different or they want the the desktop to just fade away because what they really want the audience to focus on is the email pop-up right you know the the terminal output or whatever it is they they don't actually want the background to be interesting and distinctive they want that to

just be not interesting and you to focus on the elements that forward the storyline right yeah yeah the computers there is like as a utility not the main focus but yeah you know when there are those cases like mr robot it is the main focus like you can have some cool things like that you know like what ubuntu would be trying to do so there a... my father-in-law used to work for a company that make ovens and microwave ovens, industrial ones. Is this somehow related to your interest in toasters? No, no it's not. It's completely unrelated. Okay, sure. And there was an episode of Doctor Who that came out where the person that he travels with was stuck in a place where she was making a souffle in an oven. And she was repeatedly making a souffle.

And this is set like thousands of years in the future or something. And she keeps putting this souffle mix in the oven and keeps going through this process, trying to get the perfect souffle. And I found out from him that someone spotted that the oven being used in this episode of Dr. Who was one of their ovens. And so someone had screen grabbed the bit where it was most clear that it was

their mill stream or whatever oven it was, brand of oven it was called. And they passed it around internally in the company. It was like, you know, our ovens are so robust that thousands of years in the future, people will be making souffles with them. So, you know, anyone who sees something on TV or film is bound to like resonate with the thing they recognize. like resonate with a thing they recognize i wonder if in the future we'll see you know in terminator 2 when uh john connor used i think he used like a scion 3mx or something like that in order to crack a code in the door is someone going to pull out like a steam deck from the past and use that to hack into the gibson or whatever you know i i think that's probably quite likely yeah very possibly um i actually do know that quite a few people that are using the steam deck as their main computer which is not what i

expected when the device sort of was first coming out but considering what it is and the fact that valve you know is valve is losing money selling those devices and they're making the money back on you know selling games because that's the console model. That device is really powerful, especially during that period where, you know, PC prices were just absolutely through the roof. So my desktop is a ThinkPad. My company laptop is a ThinkPad Z13.

It's quite a high-end, really nice laptop. a ThinkPad. My company laptop is a ThinkPad Z13. Okay. It's quite a high end, really nice laptop. It doesn't look like the old industrial design of a ThinkPad, you know, black plastic. It looks like something that was made in the Soviet era. And this one doesn't,

this is really nice. Like brushed aluminium, faux leather exterior, high-resolution display, all metal, no plastic. Anyway, I have that plugged into a USB Type-C thing with three displays attached and my keyboard and my microphone and everything. So if I want to walk away, I can just pull that one cable out and walk away. And I thought, I wonder how well the steam deck would work in that situation so i grabbed my

steam deck which is there and i just plugged the usb type c cable in the top and obviously it charges and i and one of the displays woke up and showed me the steam ui and i thought huh that's pretty cool so i switched to desktop mode and then rearranged all the displays and started installing all the flat packs for all the stuff i use on a regular basis and yeah it is totally usable as a desktop comparable in performance to my my think pad um so yeah it it totally is usable as a desktop and if i just left it there and then when i want to go and play i just pull the usb cable out and i can play games with it it's it's an amazing device i'm really impressed with it i'm glad i got one yeah you know i man i'm in australia val's still not selling

steam decks here i've got to import them or i'm gonna like go through a third party seller everywhere everywhere except the street i know we're in like the middle of the ocean but like korea they've just recently announced that they're gonna have like them in stores there and sorry i don't mean i don't mean to gloat really should get one oh i should no i could go and buy one from like one of the there's there are people that are buying them and then selling them in the Australian market, but there's going to be upcharges and all that stuff. I could go through the process of...

What do you call it? What do you call it? Package... Package forwarding, whatever. Yeah, shipping service. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Man, I want one. Look, by the time I get one,

it'll probably Steam Deck 2 announced. I don't know. Yeah, yeah. It does seem like a really cool device, though. It totally is. And I think one thing that I was surprised how well it works is the immutable desktop side of it the fact that i haven't really had any problems you know people say oh immutable desktops are terrible because

i can't tweak and modify it i don't really want to modify my game console i want it to work and i want to be able to pick it up press the power, launch into a game or resume a game I was already playing and not have to worry about, you know, editing config files in ETC or whatever it might be. I don't want to modify it. I want it to be a game console. Right. And so I think what they've done with the way in which the software updates are delivered, you know, I just get a little notification. I hit the button, it reboots, and I'm in a new version of steam os that i've found pretty seamless i've only had one occasion where i've had to hard reboot after a software update and that's that's not bad and i i probably had

to do the same thing on a wii and an xbox at some point having to hard reboot it so it's not unusual and i've had it for maybe a year now so yeah i'm really impressed with it well that leads us into something that is the least surprising thing anyone could ever guess and that's the ubuntu snap desktop anybody who thought that wasn't gonna happen i don't know what rock you were sleeping under but of course that was gonna happen um yeah the ubuntu snap desktop with uh the next lts i believe yeah is that correct it's funny how that's that's all evolved over time like when um i think the first time i heard of snaps was when it was announced to us um when was it hang on i've got a timeline okay so 2014 okay uh in october um most of the company flew out to washington for one of our in-person

sprints and um part way through we had some community people that this was in the time of ubuntu phone so we had community people there developing apps for the phone so we already had a second package manager called click packages on the phone right and so it wasn't unusual for us to create a new packaging system um and there was a whole app store on the phone and all that kind of stuff anyway um we all got called into a room um for a presentation okay and um the community people were told they're not allowed in the room uh because it was confidential right and so i had like we all walked in and then we had to very embarrassingly boot the community people out of the room that we'd invited uh because this was all very secret

this is before any of the snap stuff had been announced right and mark shuttleworth was not not in attendance so he did a video call on a on a big screen where he talked about ubuntu core and snappy and initially i didn't get it right and the people who were already in the little group who knew about this, because there was a small group of people who were working on this project. Sure, yeah, of course. And those who weren't working on it didn't know anything about it. Those people were super excited, like really, really excited. And they could see how this would be a way for us to be the operating

system on routers um set top boxes you know all that kind of stuff with reliable updates uh over the air updates done easily and automatically just like you want on a set-top box or a router you just want it to be up to date and appliance level stuff right and at that time we weren't thinking about desktop desktop wasn't you know it was when it was introduced to us it was all about top of rack you know switches routers all that kind of stuff um and it took a while before um we started getting um pushed to bring desktop applications to the ecosystem and so and that was the desktop stuff you remember uh so we started even before the phone was cancelled so we had some of those click packages so if you think about all the apps that were on the phone the calendar the calculator all of that kind of music app we started making

snaps of those right um and that was quite early on um so that would have been 2015, 2016, something like that. So at that time, there was no Snapcraft store as such. There wasn't a storefront that you could browse. You know, like if you had a Snapcraft IO. Yep, yep, yep. Were snaps available to the public at that point? Not yet. I'm trying to think when...

Yeah, I mean, the Snapcraft store was February 2016, I think. Okay, so it was still in that internal getting-everything-ready stage. Yeah, I mean, it wasn't fully formed, for sure. fully formed right right for sure um and most of the snaps were either servers or command line things that kind of stuff right yeah if you if you go and have a look at um archive.org and look at snapcraft.io from i don't know february february 2016 something like that okay there's a few little icons of the things that are in the store and it wasn't a lot okay and it wouldn't be a bunch of desktop applications that you recognize um and when then 2017 canonical downsized and cancelled the phone and so that's when all

the click stuff basically went away. Nobody was working on that, and everyone was moved across to work on snaps. And they formed the snap advocacy team, which was a bunch of us who were tasked with getting more snaps in the store and getting adoption of snaps. And that was mostly people who used to be on the community team who moved across to be on the snap advocacy team and so we would we would generate lists and lists and lists of applications on our wish list that we wanted to have in the store and some of that was we would then just build the snaps

and put them in the store and some of it was us going and contacting developers and saying please could you make a snap of this thing um and that took a lot of time and effort we're going further with that i'm looking at it right now the earliest of the archives you've like think jenkins h top uh there's free cat on here uh and the website it tells you to go to to explore the snaps is uapp explorer yes so interestingly there was so canonical have made app stores a few times okay and in ubuntu back in 2010 and and there, there was a desktop storefront called Software Center. I think it was Ubuntu Software Center, right? And it was a thing.

It was just like GNOME software. It was a graphical application, but it was designed in-house. It was a graphical application, but it was designed in-house. Matthew Paul Thomas, MPT, designed it, and it was developed in-house, written in Python probably, and interfaced to Apt, and you could install applications. And it was – when would that have been? I think that would have been before the phone or any of that. That would have been like 2010, something like that.

And you could buy applications in there okay and developers could submit their applications to go into the store but these were deb's and this was a really tricky thing to do like if a developer who was like i don't know making a game or a simple application deb Debian packaging is not straightforward. And so getting their application into the store so that someone could buy it, you had to get the packaging done. And Canonical might help you with that. But every time there was a new release of Ubuntu, that packaging had to be updated because all the dependencies have changed and version numbers have changed. And if you ever wanted to release a new version of your application, you had to contact this application review board

who would review it before allowing it into the store. There were a lot of humans in the mix. Although I say a lot of humans. There were like five humans. There were humans in the mix, which is a lot. There was at least a human in the mix, which gated your application and would review your packaging. And sometimes you'd have to do this round trip multiple times before you got

your thing in the store. None of this upload. And then it's suddenly available everywhere. Right. It was, it was slow and painful, but you could buy things and people sold applications. Okay.

They were dead. Right. And that was before the phone was even announced before the app store on the phone was even developed and there was a web front end to that so you could browse the the storefront okay but when the phone came along and the packaging system changed from devs to clicks which were easier to create and didn't have to go through this manual process. But there wasn't a web front end to it. And so in the community, someone made Uapp Explorer, which shows what's in the click

store on the phone. And then later when Snaps came along, they adjusted Uapp Explorer because it was... Snaps are an iteration of a next generation of clicks, basically. And the people who made UAP Explorer modified it so that it could browse the click store and the snap store. So that's kind of where that came from. And then eventually Canonical built the storefront internally. And so the use of UAP Explorer wasn't needed anymore. But that's the lineage of Ubuntu Software Center with Debs, the Clicks store with Clicks, and then the Snap store with Snaps.

Yeah. Before I redirected you, you were talking about you're building lists of software you want to see available on the Snap store. Yeah. So around about the time, and this may be coincidence, but around about the time that XDG be coincidence but around about the time that uh xdg app was renamed to flat pack and way better name which is much better uh around about that time uh i think we were in a company event in um the hague and i remember sitting in a hotel in The Hague in a meeting room where

we were being told we absolutely need to focus on desktop applications. Now, because the Snap packaging system had mostly been designed around small embedded devices like top of rack switches, routers and and stuff there were bits missing for doing desktop applications um and so it was quite a task to get desktop applications packaged as a snap um and this is at the time you basically bundled everything in the snap um it took a while before we could break out stuff like Gnome libraries that were needed into their own, what we call content snaps, and the KDE bits into a KDE content snap. It took a while.

And so in the early days, most snaps were quite chunky and contained basically everything you needed. And desktop applications aren't used to being confined or certainly weren't then they were they would expect to be able to just write to dot files in your home directory and they would be expect to be able to read from files in etc and with the confinement that snap brought it made that stop working those applications broke when we snapped them and so we had to jump through lots of hoops and sometimes patch the upstream programs and provide fixes to snapd itself and so it was quite hard getting some of these applications packaged you would you get into

a pattern like you'd get a gtk3 app working and then you've got a pattern there for most gtk3 apps right um and then you get a kd app working and you'd get a pattern for doing kde ones and then you get an electron app working and now we've got a pattern for doing electron so it was a lot of work early on getting the first i don't know 100 to 200 applications in the store once you got past 200 300 500 the rest were a lot easier and it was less about the technical uh how do i get this packaging done and it was more about the softer side of how do we get these people to buy into the fact that as well as building a deb or instead of building a deb they now need to build a snap and they've got to upload it to the store so they've got to build a pipeline to upload it to the store and they've probably got to test it as

well and some of the these developers just didn't want to do it um partly because i've already got a dev why should i make another package all the fedora people are covered with the rpm all the ubuntu and debian people are covered with the dev i don't need this thing and so it took a lot of conversations to fine-tune the message that we would use to sell snaps to uh organizations and i don't mean sell us in financially there was never any financial like incentive it was you know trying to sell it as a concept of, well, you could just do one package and it will work across all the releases of Ubuntu and all these other distros as well,

was one of the selling points. And you're in control of publishing. You can publish it to the store whenever you like. Yeah, there was a whole load of advantages that we would sell. But even then, some of them, there's one very notable application you have heard of

and you may have also used that when we first got in contact with the developer, it's a proprietary application that everyone knows the name of. And we first got in contact with them and we spoke to an engineer and he said,

I always remember this, he said, Linux equates to about 1% of my user base you have one percent of my attention and so when when someone tells you that like it's quite brutal like when they say look you're just not as popular as you think you are uh is quite harsh anyway it took a year to get that application into the store. A year from first conversation with the guy, multiple meetings, multiple iterations of their application,

and then it got published in the store. And now it's like one of the top five applications in the store. So, you know, it took a lot of work. And I think that's one of the reasons why Snaps took off, for however you want to define took off how snaps took off for the desktop apps is because canonical were paying a bunch of people to go out there and do this and unfortunately the other you know app image is basically three people going around packaging stuff doing an amazing job of doing it they got so many things packaged as app images and flatpack is a community of people yeah um and so flatback nowadays also has the support of fedora behind it like they're really sort of pushing that side with you know with silverloo and all of that

yeah but they didn't have people going out it's not like they have that yeah they're not sending our engineers to do it but yeah yeah exactly yeah and that and that helped us like so i think the snap store's got like 5 000 snaps in the store now um wow and you know some of them have a lot of users like a lot and uh and that and that's that's great and it's it great. I can look back on that period and, you know, see the successes we had with some high-profile applications and stuff everyone's heard of that's in there and conversations we had with engineers from those organizations. And I can see that as a success.

Now, you know, people in the Linux community don't see it that way. Sure. They see it as Canonical trying to build a walled garden around the Linux app ecosystem. Okay, like, whatever. But it naturally makes sense with having all these applications packaged and all the frameworks packaged that you would then make a fully immutable Snap desktop. And this is not the first time this has been worked on. There's been projects in Psychonautical. It was previously called Ubuntu Personal,

was the name given. Not a good name. I'm happy that's not the one they've gone with. It's just a part of LDS right now. They were trying to brand it distinctly from the standard Ubuntu desktop. But this was a while ago this was uh i think a bit too personal was like 2016 that kind of era uh and none of it was ready like

you just couldn't put all these things on the desktop and expect them to work because it was read only and stuff would just break yeah and so. And so none of it was mature enough. But because of a lot of the work that the Flatpak guys have done, like, yeah, all of that kind of stuff, that helps. So, yeah, I'm not surprised that there's an all-snap desktop coming. Well, to be fair, Ubuntu Personal isn't much better than the original name of silver blue fedora atomic desktop it's like short it's not short no it's way too long it's but it's very like

this is named by an engineer it is what it is it is fedora it's atomic it's workstation i like it's fine as a name like it does the job but it's not like you know um it's not ubuntu it's not this like simple thing that you remember that's that's like straightforward and yeah it sounds catchy it's it's way too long and i'm happy that silver was the name that ended up like rebranding that thing too. But I don't think that the LTS actually has a name for itself. I think it's just like a stream of the LTS right now. It'll be like you can choose the dev version or the Snap version. Yeah, I don't know how they're going to market that,

whether they'll put Snap in the name or not, because that word is somewhat tainted among Linux people. Like, if the topic comes up, yeah, okay, there are toxic people in the community on our Linux who will just crap on anything that canonical works. Yeah, I mean, you know, every community. I want to be clear, the guy who runs Pharonix, perfectly fine. It's the commenters that are the problem on Pharonix.

Right, but how can I say this kindly? If you don't get rid of shitheads, then your community is full of shitheads. Sure, fair enough. And that's what happens. Because if you just let people go wild um i mean this is this is one of the reasons i left canonical is i was just sick of all the negativity like we'd done a whole bunch of good work to get a bunch of applications in the store and recognition and you know there were people out there who were grateful that they could just

snap install discord or you know snap install whatever application and there's a bunch of angry nerds on the internet who would have a go every time and we would work hard like we would work hard for like a year to get an application in the store and that company would blog about their thing and say hey our applications in the snap store and that company would blog about their thing and say, Hey, where are applications in the snap store? And the first comment underneath is when are you going to have a flat pack? And it's like, geez, dude, like let them have their moment in the sun. They've done a thing. They're happy with their thing. Just let it give it five minutes. Right. And there's a lot of negativity now i can understand why you know some people are negative about the things canonical have done in the past and people have

long memories you know we could talk about that whole amazon thing um yeah but and but that negativity gets to you after a while and so i just you you know, I didn't want to do that anymore. Well, I did want to ask you about you leaving Canonical. Because there's, I do remember that happening. And there's like a lot of people that took specific things that you said out of context. And this is why he left. He left because of snaps. He left because of this.

So if, obviously, if there's anything you don't want to say feel free to just skip it but like if you just briefly run down what it was that was happening at the time that made you want to leave was it just the people being negative about it was there anything else that was sort of a problem there or so partly it was um i felt like we'd come to a natural point at which the snap packaging stuff was self-sustaining so it was um we'd built up decent enough documentation we've got plenty of examples no matter what kind of application you built whether it was an sdl game or a gnome application or a kd application or an electron app or whatever you could figure out how to make a snap and publish in the store right and we had

thousands of applications with many hundreds of thousands of users right so part of me was okay i've been doing this for nearly 10 years now so i was at canonical for nine years i think i'm done with this now so that was part of it and yeah part of it was uh it's it's quite demoralizing every time you talk about your work to have angry nerds jump out of the woodwork and have a go at you and you know if i i could understand if i worked for um nestle and i was going on online forums and saying hey look at how we've uh taken all this water from this groundwater away from these villages and used it to make coke or you know whatever whatever product nestle make you know i can understand if i work for a super toxic horrible organization i don't know why you need to use the example of microsoft and that would be i'm sure you came with a better example

of microsoft no i was trying to think of something non-tech sure okay fair enough you know what if we made like you know drones or you know something yeah yeah we weaponized drones or hand grenades or something yeah i get it right and i get that people are super tribal like if i worked for bmw then someone with a mercedes allegiance would be negative about everything i say yeah i get that like you know but i think there is this um constant negativity in the linux desktop people there's a guy i used to work with, Michael Hall, who worked at Canonical for a long time. And something he often says is,

blowing out somebody else's candle doesn't make your candle burn any brighter. Like you crapping on somebody else's work doesn't make your work better, right? And so when I worked at worked at canonical we would always try not to be negative about the competition by competition like all the other distros we would celebrate a fedora release we would tweet about it and say you know congratulations on the release of fedora whatever 35 or whatever i wrote those tweets right and i put them on the ubuntu twitter

account because i wanted i wanted us to celebrate our friends in the fedora community i know people who work at red hat who work on fedora right i wanted us to celebrate their work and that was not often reciprocated in that we would be positive about other things and we tried not to shit on anyone um but that wasn't good enough and and i felt like people would constantly crap on canonical and i just got tired of it and i would rather work for a company who are making a product that the users of that product like the product and enjoy using the product and enjoy telling people about the use of that project than someone where if i mention the project i don't know if it's going to cut the room in half and half of them are going to start throwing tomatoes and half of them are going to be quite

i gave a talk at a conference years ago and i asked people to put their hands up like are you using have you heard of them too yeah uh do you Ubuntu? What do you use if you don't use Ubuntu? And afterwards, multiple people came up to me and said, I use Ubuntu, but I didn't want to put my hand up because I didn't want people to have a go at me because I was using Ubuntu. It's like, that's a shitty position to be in, to have people who are just constantly berating you

for your choice of linux distribution like it's just mental and so that was that was the main reason i just got sick of all the negativity right right yeah i i certainly like it it's fun to like poke fun at some of the fun things that have happened throughout history like i did a video about i don't know if you know this story um but back before the first release of ubuntu there was the um there was a couple of images included with woody warthog the calendar yeah okay you do know yes uh and i went and did a video yes i went and did a video on on that. And it's a fun situation from the past. But I've done videos very critical of the way that Manjaro has run many of the things they've done, like shipping out many broken updates,

shipping out updates for ASAHI Linux, shipping out ASAH linux packages without even remotely contacting the developer not testing on any hardware patches that could brick hardware like that you don't want to be messing around with stuff with like reverse engineered beta software but i wanted i was trying to make it very clear in those videos that I don't care what you run. Like at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if you're a fan of Manjaro, if you're a fan of Ubuntu, if you're a fan of... It doesn't like...

This is not the important thing about how you approach your system. If you feel like puppy Linux is the greatest thing ever and that does everything you need that's fine go ahead and run it it's doesn't even remotely bother me there's there's definitely i think it's it is definitely just that tribal thing you'll see this in not just in tech and really anything in life that people tend to make whatever especially a lot of like hobby related things, which is for a lot of people what Linux is, try to make these things like a part of their personality.

It is a part of their personality that they run Arch Linux or that they run Pop OS or they use AMD cards or NVIDIA cards or they use a PlayStation or an Xbox. But it doesn't matter. Like that's, that's my, my main point here at the end of the day, just don't get on, like, if you don't like what someone's running, just don't like, just don't use it yourself. I, I completely agree. And the analogy that I often use is I, I don't know what oven you use in your kitchen i don't know

what oven i use in my kitchen and i don't care yeah because it has no bearing on my life how you heat your food or how you keep your milk cold it it doesn't matter to me just the same as i don't care what desktop you use i don't care if you use gnome kde sway or whatever it doesn't affect me in my life in any way um but people yes people feel incredibly tribal i mean you could say i'm a little bit tribal i've got nintendos all around me here um and you know it's just old stuff to decorate the wall behind me um but yeah i i just i just don't care enough what other people i i would rather focus on helping people who have problems solve those problems on their desktop if they're using ubuntu because i know how to use

that i'll help you right and and i have helped be like countless people over the years, solve problems on their desktop. In fact, that's how I got started with Ubuntu is answering technical support questions. If you go to answers.launchpad.net slash Tilda Popey, right? Answers.launchpad.net slash T poppy you'll see a bunch of questions it's

a forum a question and answer forum before stack exchange existed right this was how we did technical support and if you scroll to the bottom you can go to the last page and you'll find technical support questions in there that i answered in 2006 or something like that. 2005, head amount, the HDD. That is your first one. There you go, see? And you'll find some of them are brief. Oh, you're holding it wrong.

Do it like this. And some of them are more detailed. Go and get this package, compile this thing, and stuff like that. And that's how I got started getting involved in Ubuntu was answering technical support questions from users uh who had problems doing stuff with their computer and i found that super rewarding in fact in launchpad um you get this thing called karma every person in launchpad has karma and you get karma for

answering questions you get it for reporting bugs solving bugs committing code it was like a motivator thing to try and get you know like like any of these yeah like useless internet points yeah get you nothing anyone who's used red understands karma yes exactly so the first ubuntu developer summit that i ever went to was in seville in spain and i paid my own way i wasn't sponsored by canonical to be there and i was sat in a room with all these developers most of which i didn't know i knew them by their irc nickname or their launchpad id and i like i had spotted a few friends who I recognized from their little hackagotchis on their on their blog right and during the opening talk one of the main guys got up on stage Kiko who

was Christian race who was one of the main developers of launchpad stood up and said have we got poppy in here sorry my doorbell's just gone good um so kiko gets up on stage and he says uh is poppy here and and i was like oh what have i done and and i i stood up and he said this guy has more karma than anyone else on launchpad and because i'd answered so many questions um the algorithm was clearly broken because i had like a million karma at the time now it ages out over time if you don't if you don't add it it will age out i probably have only got like a few thousand or a few hundred because i haven't done it for a while but what he what he was doing was recognizing that someone in the community

was super active and i got like a round of applause and the you know the adoration of my fans in the room or whatever you want to call it but that felt really nice like i was helping people and as a result i got recognized in front of my peers in front of all these developers who i respected and that felt good and I really enjoyed that part of Ubuntu is providing help to people and it getting recognized and I still do it now I go on ask Ubuntu and I answer people's questions and I still find that a worthwhile use of my time on this planet. Speaking askabundu when i had uh when i had george on he told me about the post where someone asked if he was a bot uh because he

answers so many questions as well that people just assumed that it was just some bot answering questions um i mean you've you've met george yeah he is like a machine. George, when he was on, he just ran the show. I didn't talk. He just went on. He's great. I love George. Yeah, so I worked at Canonical with George back in the day. And he and a bunch of others started the whole Ask Ubuntu thing.

And it's been great. You know, if you search for a problem, chances are somebody else has had that problem. And Ask Ubuntu may and it's uh it's been great you know if you search for a problem chances are somebody else has had that problem and ask Ubuntu may have the answer looking back through the questions you've answered I see a couple here that really date the posts um dual boot xp and Ubuntu and the one right after that uh dial up connection 2006 at the time I was working at a uh on a contract in an office where i had no work to do the um we were babysitting a system that was being shut down and there was nothing for us to do and so i would just sit there all day uh and i had the option to stare out the window we'll do something useful and i chose to do something useful. And so I started in Ubuntu contributing,

and I got to know people by going to the sprints. And I then, I think I had a few leadership roles within the community. There were a few committees and leadership organizations. And I was on the up into community council which is like the the top hierarchically the top of the the community um and in 2011 i i stepped down from them because i was spreading myself a little bit too thin and I was doing too much. And then I got a DM on IRC from Mark Shuttleworth asking me why I was stepping down from all these things.

Is there some kind of backstory? And I said, no, no, no, I'm just spreading myself too thin. Hey, on that,

on that subject, you know, we've got roles open at canonical. Do you want to come and work at canonical? And I'm like, uh, you know, we've got roles open at Canonical. Do you want to come and work at Canonical? And I'm like, you know, I'm sat there. This is like dream job. And it would have been a career change as well because I was doing SAP at the time.

I wasn't actually doing anything related to Ubuntu in my job. But, yeah, I had a couple of interviews just over the phone. And then, yeah, I got a couple of interviews just over the phone. And then I got a job offer. And my first day was flying to Florida to meet everyone at another Ubuntu Summit. It was good fun. Wow. So what was your position when you first started at Canonical? started at canonical so uh that would be so in 2011 i was working on the unity release team so again that dates this as well yeah so we were working on getting releases of the unity desktop

out the door right um oh unity wasn't out yet okay oh no it was out it was just new releases okay right when did um unity came out in 2010 i think is that when a bunny started using it when did they start using it yeah i think 10 10 might have had unity um going to first unity release let's see or 1004 1004 i don't want to know when it became a new flavor again. That's not what I wanted to know. Thank you. No, not the flavor. Ubuntu Unity is stealing all of my search results.

Do a search for Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick desktop. Yeah. That's a much better search uh linux desktop the last best linux desktop now features gnome okay wasn't that one oh maybe it was 1104 then maybe so uh yeah but i started in november 2011 so it was already desktop by then um definitely because i i remember using unity before i started at canonical so it was 11.10 yeah yeah there you go so so i had a small team who were responsible for getting unity out the door

and there were two versions of unity back then there was unity uh which we uh we started calling unity 3d which is bad because you know the unity game development engine is called unity oh yeah yeah in fact they they got quite annoyed with mark when he called the desktop uh unity because they already had the name Unity. And then we developed another version of Unity called Unity 2D, which was written in Qt with QML.

And the reason for that was we had hardware vendors who wanted a more lightweight version of Unity. And Unity 3D was built on Compis and so required hardware accelerated right okay yeah graphics card that's why we called it unity 3d basically right right and the 2d one was written with cute and qml was leaner but it used the same design so it had the

buttons down the left hand side with the big button at the top left and the window controls in the top left and all of that you know stuff so they looked very similar but unity 2d was was light away so when i when i first started that's the team i worked on but very soon after i worked onto the i moved on to the phone team to work on the ubuntu phone which was still secret at that time in 2011 it wasn't known outside of canonical and the only prototypes we had were running on was a mock-up of the user interface running on a nokia n9 and an asus transformer tablet which was one of those tablets that like docked the keyboard and the screen yeah it was one of those and uh i think it had an NVIDIA video card in it,

which made it a bit of a problem. But those were the only prototypes that we had. And we worked on some demos for Ubuntu TV in 2012. What is Ubuntu TV? That one, I don't know about that one. So in 2012, so the idea was convergence. And we would use one code base for the desktop, the phone, and any other devices. And we had this idea that we could build an OS for televisions.

Okay. televisions okay and that you you know you think about the apple tv or netflix that kind of 10 foot user interface that you can operate with um a very simple remote control with up down left right i like forward and back right as i was looking at the uh description of what this is i just scroll past the 10 foot interface part that I guess. Yeah. Sorry. Just. Yeah. I certainly did memorize the marketing.

So that was announced in 2012 at CES. And so it got a lot of hype and a lot of marketing, but it was never released. It was never actually a finished product. The whole point of Ubuntu TV was to show it off at a trade show like ces and get conversations started with tv manufacturers and set-top box manufacturers in order to fund the development of ubuntu tv like it had a media player and a very basic user interface but it was all a mock-up the actual ubuntu tv never actually was finished i found an 11 year old video from austin evans showing ubuntu tv oh wow this yeah it it's just a bunch on a tv you can see

there's like movie rental stuff here it looks like a tv os so i can tell you what it was actually running on it was actually running on an uh asa revo desktop which was like this black and white um diamond shaped or square shaped thing that you would strap to the back of a tv it came with a clip clip on the back and it had an NVIDIA GPU, but it was very lightweight, small. I think it had a Atom CPU and it was running on one of those. It's basically a PC.

But yeah, the TV never got finished because we just didn't get partners who wanted to put it on their their hardware right and so you know a lot of people talk about how oh ubuntu never finished or cancels projects you know and they cite the ubuntu tv as one of the things that got cancelled i mean i hate to break it to these people it never actually existed in the first place

it it was like completely unfinished there was a media player it could play video files and that was it and all that was on the event tv was a bunch of trailers and big buck bunny and i think that was about it yeah we were really twitchy about playing trailers as well um at ces i think if you see any videos it's probably only you'll only ever see Big Buck Bunny playing on it. But that media player... I don't know if someone didn't tell Austin about this because he's playing a trailer for The Avengers

right now. Oh, really? Yeah. Is he doing it or is someone from Canonical operating it? I don't know. He's recording it. Someone's playing it, but either way... I think we probably did doing it or is someone from canonical uh i don't know he's recording it some someone's playing it but either way um so i think we probably did sneak some trailers on there then yeah uh so that media player is the same media player code base that's in the ubuntu phone okay and so it was it was the the idea was we would use the same applications written in QML using Qt on the phone, the tablet, the TV, the desktop.

One user interface to rule them all. That was the idea. But unfortunately, it didn't go anywhere. And then the next year, 2012, was the year things started to go a bit south. Okay. Because 1210, Quantal Quetzal, or Quantal Quetzal, I'll have you pronounce it, was the first release that had the shopping lens built in. Right, right. Yeah. the shopping lens built in right right um yeah so i know about the shopping lens story but

if you want to briefly explain that one that we haven't there's a lot of people don't know about it okay so uh in 2012 we had conversations internally to revamp the um the dash which in unity when you press the super key it's like a search thing right it's that's that's what it's for it's just like every other operating system does now you press one button and you get a panel right yes unity was one of the first desktop operating systems to do that and what the design was supposed to be was to search everything like all your files all your music all your programs search the app store and search online yes and so the the dash had a concept of lenses and there was a main home lens and if you just pressed the super key

and started typing it would search everything which is how windows 10 and windows 11 work now yeah yeah exactly um and the same as on the mac if you do super space i've used max in snow leopard i didn't know i did that now well they all do it yes It's spotlight search, right? And the separate lenses, if you press super A, then you only search applications. If you do super F, only search for files. Super M for music and so on and so on. And so you could install additional lenses, but all of the content was aggregated into the main one.

So you could just press one button type stuff and search right that was that was the idea and the idea was for the the the online search to be clever smart in some way in that it would give you contextual results and something that was appropriate to you and so one of the things they thought we could do was search online stores for products. So if you press the super key and typed AA batteries, it would show up, you know, all the search results for AA batteries with the price. And you just click and it takes you straight to the store. Right. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there was one for Wikipedia as well, wasn't there?

Yeah, there was a Wikipedia one. There was a whole bunch. We actually had a couple of developers who made a whole bunch of these lenses okay to like search all kinds of there was a music store and everything um so that was the goal right and um part of the problem was it searched amazon i mean there's a there's a succession of problems Okay. It was on by default, and it was in the dash. So when you pressed super, it searched all your local files, but it also sent those key presses, the search items,

things you're searching for, to a server at Canonical called product search. And that then proxied those to a bunch of third parties. One of those third parties was Amazon, and it wasn't the only third party, but everyone calls it the amazon lens or the amazon you know thing but they weren't the only people that the key pressures were sent to the reason why it was proxied through canonical was so that you weren't identified right so so so that it could anonymize you but also so that they could put some smarts in the

canonical side in the product search side and maybe feed you different results or aggregate results from different places so it could search 20 different stores and then show you the the results together right that was the goal but um a few things one it was it it was on by default and some people don't like online search by default being on right i get that the second thing is it arrived very late in the cycle like so there's six months between one release and the next okay and it was developed between two releases and landed in october 2010 2012 but it was very late arriving, meaning it should have been rejected and said, well, you're too late for this release. We're past feature freeze. We're past UI freeze.

You can't land this. But there is a magic incantation that can be used to bypass the rules and that is if mark says so right so if mark says just do it you do it because it's his football he can take it away if he wants to and so you'll sometimes sometimes see in a bug report or when some feature is described it'll say this is a mark ask or this has been sabbedful sabdaful you know self-appointed benevolent detective like it's his his nickname right it's been marked or it's been sabdaful meaning just do it right because powers higher than you have decreed that this needs to go in and so it didn't have the same rigorous testing as it would have done if it arrived on time or if it had been postponed until the next release and then people would have found

out that what actually happens is the key presses go to canonical then they're aggregated and anonymized and sent to amazon but the problem is the results that appear in your dash, the thumbnail images come from Amazon servers, right? And so people were like, hang on a minute. This can tell who I am based on, you know, my IP addresses because the images weren't proxied through Canonical. The images came straight from Amazon. So that was another problem with it. It was on by default, it arrived late,

and the images weren't proxied and they came straight from Amazon. And it never really lived up to the promise. It never really gained the intelligence to be contextual search. And also, it sometimes failed. You know, it would show unsavory results sometimes. Yeah, there was the issue with... Because Amazon have unsavory things. The issue with it showing not safe it's sure the issue with it's

showing not safe for work content sometimes um yes and all of that you know very funny look it's showing me a dildo when I asked for double A batteries or right because double A batteries appear in the the search results for that item right and none of that helped and so in december so we're talking october is when that landed and by december that year rms made a video where he called it Amazon data leaks. And so the end of 2012 was not pleasant because everyone was hating on Ubuntu because of this feature. And so that didn't go down well. And it was very difficult to recover from that

because once you've got a leader in the, I nearly said open source community. When you've got a leader in the free software community, like Richard Stallman calling your product spyware, and you've got a published blog on the EFF, it's very, it's very difficult to come back from that. And,

you know, we, in retrospect, the feature should either have been removed and improved for the next release or um you know it just shouldn't have landed when it did if it was off by default then i don't think anyone really could have complained like you'd have some people try to but it wouldn't have landed as strongly if you know if you enable something that searches amazon and then amazon collects your data like you did that to yourself the the switch to turn

it off arrived even later so you couldn't even like easily press a button to turn it off immediately um from my understanding one of the developers added that. From my understanding initially the only way was to either remove the lens entirely or just send Amazon traffic into the void.

You could just pseudo-app to remove Unity lens recommended or shopping or something it was called something like that yeah you could just remove the package and it's it stopped doing it like immediately yeah but um the damage was done so you know that was that was frustrating especially for people like me who are the public face of you know canonical i i remember vividly being in um copenhagen when the eff published their blog and i was at an ubuntu developer summit and i someone sent me the link and it appeared on reddit or somewhere and i was like oh shit and i showed it to the product manager

who landed this thing in Ubuntu. And he was like, yeah, whatever. And just quite dismissive of it. And I thought, okay, great. So, yeah. So that whole debacle. So interestingly, it was switched off rather quietly. And what was left was an icon in the launcher on the left hand side

which was a web app you just click that and all it did was open amazon with uh the affiliate link you know the tag you sometimes see people use amazon affiliate links it's just tag equals you know something and that's all that icon did but the guilt by association of having that amazon uh icon in there even after we transitioned away from unity and switched to gnome 3 because we had that amazon icon in there people still thought that key presses are being sent to Amazon and it's spyware because they didn't realise that what that icon was was literally a web app that was just

opened Amazon. Yeah. Some of us lobbied internally to get that icon removed and... That was there till 2004. Yep. Jeez. That was there till 2004 Yep

I was the one who asked to have it removed In 2004 And 804 LTS And as soon as I asked the director of desktop To do it he was like Yep totally and he

Went to an engineer and said could you do this and he's like i'm on it straight away and they just did it straight away because they everyone knew how toxic that icon is but even if you if you look at dell marketing material that would show a dell xps 13 it would show the ubuntu desktop and the amazon icon is blurred out. Like, nobody wants that there. But the fact is, it made money. And so for years, if you said to leadership, we need to get rid of all this Amazon integration, they would say, okay, how are you going to make money with a desktop then?

What are you going to replace that with that makes money, that pays the engineers that work on Ubuntu desktop? And I know there's this prevailing feeling that Ubuntu doesn't make money off the desktop. That's wrong. It does. Desktop is profitable. And people thought that that icon didn't make any money. It did.

It did make money. But after a while, it was taken away. But like I said, the damage was done. So it's very difficult to come back from that. But like I said, the damage was done. So it's very difficult to come back from that. So would, would you say that situations like that happening for what? Nearly eight years is probably, you know, part of why people have this like negative reaction to what snaps are doing, because it's all coming from canonical. So even though it's not even remotely related you know

there's a lot of people that have this like you know i guess negative impression long memories yeah well yeah they've this negative impression long memories of canonical and because of that then like i don't like snaps because i really hate the loopback devices i know they you can hide them whatever that's my personal reason snaps are fine for any anything else but like I have a distinct hatred for my when I run LSBLK for the loopback devices to be there but um do you do you think that was definitely a part of it the just canonical being weird about not wanting to get rid of this i think the um image of canonical was certainly tarnished by the amazon shopping lens stuff um i think there was a a resurgence of popularity of canonical in 2013 um so in 2013 the ubuntu phone was announced and ubuntu for android was announced and some people saw these as interesting you know

technologies and in july of 2013 there was a crowdfund campaign for the ubuntu edge phone um are you aware of that crowdfunding campaign um i think if you do ubuntu edge indiegogo you'll find it edge indiegogo so what this was was a crowdfunding campaign to build a device a phone and the goal was 32 million dollars which was quite a big ask they got an Indian yeah yeah they got 19 what this is Australian dollars I don't know what is in dollars 12 million us yeah yeah in real money 10 million British pounds. Yes. So that, it's a funny story about that, actually. They had two engineering samples of the phone. And the phone was pretty small.

Like if you look at like a modern iPhone, it was probably about this big. Not anything like current size. And it was a pretty little device. The device didn't exist. There was only an engineering sample it had no electronics in it at all it was just weighted it looks so you it's a sleek render yeah yeah and there were two physical ones i know because i had them and i had to transport them to america uh in my hand luggage because i was going to a conference at which this project was being

launched. So I was, they were very expensive, those engineering samples, and I was paranoid that it was going to get lost in my luggage or the, you know, my hand luggage would get searched and they'd take them away. But we launched that campaign. Yeah, it failed in the August and maybe it was a bit too ambitious. some people say that it was just a fishing expedition and there was no intention of ever making that device you know i don't know what was in the mind of mark shuttleworth when he came up with the idea to do that but it wasn't cheap there was a whole load of marketing around this they got the engineering samples made and at the time people

were like oh my god that's a ludicrous amount of memory a ludicrous amount of storage i'm looking at the uh the specs for this is the i love this spec sheet mobile os dual boots android and mobile cool desktop os ubuntu desktop no no it's like ram so the point was it was going to be this converged device, so you could plug it into a display. Right. Samsung ended up doing a similar thing years later. Yeah, DeX. I don't remember when they did that.

128 gigs of internal storage. Wait, what year was this? 2012. 2013. 2013. How were they plugged blended 128 gigs? We just don't know. We just don't know how that would have ever happened.

Okay, sure. A battery life of 30 seconds, probably. So yeah, that failed. But I think there was still some positivity around Ubuntu, even with the whole Amazon thing still going on. And we did actually launch some phones in 2015 and 2016. A couple of BQ phones from Spain, a company out of Spain,

launched the first Ubuntu phone. So the project was popular with some because they felt everyone's moving to mobile. But a lot of the community didn't like that as well because we were taking our attention away from the desktop. And so during that period, the Unity desktop didn't get a ton of maintenance didn't get any new features like if you look at ubuntu um from 2013 and you look at unity four or five years later they look basically the same there's basically no development going on on unity because it was all the developers were sidetracked on the phone um tablet tv and um then snaps so yeah it's uh it's a shame because i really loved unity i really you know found it resonated with the way i wanted to use the system um but i think i think so there's a bunch of decisions that are made there, Amazon being one of them,

which makes some people less trustful of snaps and the motivation behind making snaps, I think. However, you could also argue that the people who are anti-snaps are usually the most noisy people. For every person online who says snaps are terrible and i hate them there's probably a hundred thousand people who don't have an opinion don't care and just want to be able to install and launch discord and install and launch steam and their favorite web browser and don't care right right no that's fair that's that's definitely fair um there is

I don't know it's fun to talk about this this stuff from the like the nerd perspective but I guess that is fair that if this was as if snaps were as unpopular as people

like to make them out to be. Canonical probably would have dropped them years ago. Right. And so when we were going through the process of getting more applications in the store, we shipped the Ubuntu desktop with a graphical storefront, GNOME software, right? It's a fork of GNOME software called Ubuntu desktop with a graphical storefront, GNOME software, right? It's a fork of GNOME software called Ubuntu software. And confusingly now there's a version called Snap Store, right? But it's basically GNOME software, right?

And with the Snap integration, we can promote applications in the Snap Store. We could promote applications in the Snap Store. And when we were talking to software developers, one of the motivators would be, well, we can drive traffic to your application because if I put your application in the editor's picks, that banner at the top of GNOME software,

I could control what was going in that banner. And if you give us some artwork and an icon and good metadata, we'll what was going in that banner and if you give us some artwork and an icon and good metadata we'll put your application in that banner and every nerd will tell you nobody uses gnome software nobody installs software with a graphical tool everyone just uses apt or packman on the command line yeah wrong absolutely wrong because if i put an application in that banner in gnome software the number of installs just rockets up immediately within a day or so and we know that because the snap store gives the developer the publisher of an application detailed stats of uh how many installs which version of your application is out there,

and what distro it's being installed on. And so you can see, you don't get the IP address or the user or any other details, and you get aggregated data about what region, what country they're in. But you get graphs that show you, and a little line on the graph that says, here's where your application was featured.

And you see the line go up after that. Right. And so that helped us to believe that there were people out there who would just install stuff. They go looking for stuff. You know how some people open the app store on their phone or on their tablet and then they'll see stuff and go oh that's interesting and then install it right same thing happens on desktop among non-nerd normal people who open a graphical app store and then go oh that looks interesting click and i'll install it i don't like it i'll remove it but we can see the numbers go up when we put something in that place, which gave us the confidence that it's not the prevailing nerd opinion that snaps are terrible and canonical are bad

and nobody gets any value out of this and nobody wants this. It's wrong, right? It is wrong. It's true among a small subset of very noisy nerds, sure, but it's not consensus among users of ubuntu and being able to tell a developer that they could push an application into the store and that one application will work on five different releases of ubuntu and manjaro pop os fedora elementary and all the others is a compelling argument and so people would do it yeah that's fair

well since we're on the topic of packaging past hour you did mention earlier on about PPAs and you know before we end the show let's talk a little bit about PPAs

because they serve a they okay they they still do in some sense but they served a very important role of getting things into ubuntu like you know like the aur does on on arch getting things into ubuntu that just were not going to be packaged by ubuntu or were not the most up to date? Like, you know, traditionally, like the wine PPA, for example, please don't install the wine PPA nowadays. It's been deprecated for 10 years. Don't do that.

It's still available. Please don't install it. It will break your system. But, um, what really were the issues with PPAs? the issues with PPAs? So, if you think of the origin story of PPAs, why they existed in the first place, right?

So, the Ubuntu repository is a curated archive of software. That's what it is, right? And there's a group of developers, some in the community, some who work for Clinical, who curate that. And every time a new release of ubuntu comes out they would curate the software that goes in some of it just gets imported from

debian for sure but some of it is managed by ubuntu developers right now as i mentioned previously and earlier there was um a push to get more applications in Ubuntu, but it's making Debs is hard and packaging software is hard actually in general, but making Debs is especially hard. If you say that to a Debian developer, they'll tell you, no, you're just not reading the packaging guideline, which is like 500 pages long, right? But it's not straightforward.

And so if you're a game developer or an application developer you've generally got helper tools that will help you package for other platforms but when it comes to making a deb it's hand creating a debian control file and a debian changelog and a source file and then figuring out all your dependencies and it's it's just not straightforward right for context creating an arch package you just make a build script and then you just say like the dependencies you need and it's good done yeah it's i yeah it is a lot easier um but uh that meant that it was it was a bit of a hurdle to get packaged in in ubuntu right and it And it was difficult for developers to prototype their

stuff and get people testing their applications. And so PPAs were actually really, the goal of them was for a software developer to make a package available as a step towards getting that package in the official repositories right it wasn't meant to be a permanent solution for you to distribute software it was meant to be a stepping stone so that your web would become part of the corpus of software in the repository along with everything else and get maintained collaboratively by this community right but that's not what happened what happened. What happened was people created a repository so that they could distribute their software,

and then they stopped at that point. They didn't aim to get it into Ubuntu, partly because there's even more bureaucracy. Once you get it in a PPA, it's like, yay, I got my software out there. I'm done here. I don't need to do anything else whereas the ubuntu people would rather that went into the repository or indeed it submitted to

debian where the bureaucracy is even higher to get into debian right and so people just stopped at that point and they kept their ppa and then they promoted their PPA. And then having a PPA for your software became the thing you do to distribute your software. And so it morphed from being a stepping stone to being the de facto way you distribute software for Ubuntu. Now, that's fine, I guess, but there's a few problems with it. Like, the first problem is you've got to maintain it

because every six months a new release of Ubuntu comes out and all your users out there who are running a release of Ubuntu are going to upgrade in six months' time. And if you don't put a new version of your application built for the new release of Ubuntu in that PPA, then that package may just disappear from people's machines. And so they were working fine one day software that they installed three years ago from your PPA.

And then they come to upgrade and your software disappears or breaks. And it's Ubuntu's fault because upgrades are terrible and they don't work, you know, which is wrong. It's just that the developer no longer publishes that software in that ppa anymore and so you're out of support right with fedora and the system um they have a similar problem but they also make it clear like what versions of the software like you get you'll have like the the pop-up packet is like this is for fedora 36 this is for 37 it's very clearly labeled like what this is going to work on that doesn't really

exist with the ppas i mean if you go to the web page for a ppa you can hit a little drop down it'll tell you what releases of ubuntu the packages are for but it's not straightforward it could be better um another problem is as well as like the developer having to continually maintain that package over time they could do something wrong and when a deb is installed on your system there's a script that runs before the deb is installed and there's a script that runs after the deb is installed and those run as root on your machine right and so anyone who has a package in a ppa has root on your computer right now that's a that's a statement that mark said years ago when someone said oh i don't trust canonical i think his response was well we already have root on your computer because every deb when

it's installed the script runs as root and it do anything. It could do nefarious things. And there's no checks and balances on PPAs like there is in the Ubuntu repository. And so that's another problem is it could do nefarious things. The other thing is people could just jam anything in a PPA. They could put a new kernel in the PPA, and if they put the version number right, it'll upgrade you to that kernel. The System76 developers a while back made a PPA that had

theme stuff for Pop!OS. And Ubuntu users were like, hey, I like that theme. That Pop!OS theme is really good. And they found the PPA and added it and it broke their ubuntu install they like boot to a terminal now because the people who made that ppa system 76 assumed that certain package states would be the case on the customer system and that's true on a populous system it wasn't true on ubuntu or mint or anything else so they had to add a disclaimer the system d in this ppa yeah okay i can see how you can brick your system yeah here's another example a developer could just stop maintaining a ppa in fact the single most popular ppa you can get stats for which ppas are popular if you know the api the single most popular PPA, you can get stats for which PPAs are popular if you know the API.

The single most popular PPA that most people have or had when I last checked this a couple of years ago is empty. There's nothing in it. There's nothing in the PPA because it was insanely popular because it distributed a piece of software that lots of people wanted

and then the developer rage quit and deleted all the packages from the ppa and so all these systems are apt update apt upgrade and they're checking ppa for package updates and there's nothing literally nothing in that ppa and there are thousands of machines out there checking that ppa and it's empty so they're not getting they're not getting any new packages no security updates for you on those pieces of software. So yeah, PPAs were great. It was a good idea at the time, and it serves a purpose.

Right. But there are risks inherent with using them. Like, I don't even know yeah I I think one of the yeah yeah no I think one of the one of the the biggest issues with PPA

is that like the fact that it's not an Ubuntu system like that's if it was just for Ubuntu that would make sense but the fact that other Ubuntu based dist If it was just for Ubuntu, that would make sense. But the fact that other Ubuntu-based distros are allowed to put things up as a PPA, like, if we look at the AUR, for example,

the AUR maintainers, if Manjaro came along and was like, we're going to put something from Manjaro in the AUR, I'd be like, no, go away. Package it on your own distro. This is for the Arch. What are you doing? So, yes, and that leads to an interesting conversation over a pint that i've had with people at canonical in the past was so there are lots of derivatives of ubuntu like the popular ones that you know

like zorin mint pop os and then there's a thousand others right of these derivatives but the the big ones that people actually use are pop os mint if you're looking at like numbers of users after ubuntu mint is probably the next biggest i wouldn't be surprised yeah and and manjaro and then but if you're looking at just ubuntu based ones you said manjaro. But if you're looking at just Ubuntu-based ones... You said Manjaro. Yeah. Are you talking about just based on other distros? So if you're just looking at numbers, raw numbers,

it's probably Ubuntu at the top, then Manjaro. Oh, you're talking about the biggest distros. Right, right, right. Yeah, numbers of users. But if you then look at just the Ubuntu-based ones, then there's Ubuntu, Mint... Yeah, I was confused for a second. Yeah, sorry. of users but if you then look at just the ubuntu based ones then there's a bunch of yeah sorry um and all the others like pop os and and all the others and all of them ship pointing to the

ubuntu repository all of them get i don't know 80 to 90 percent of their packages from the ubuntu repository the kernels, the, uh, the desktop packages, libraries, languages, compilers, all of that kind of stuff, all the boring stuff comes from Ubuntu.

And then the thin layer of thing that they put on top, whether it's the cosmic desktop or cinnamon or whatever it is, and their additional applications that they put in that makes them beautiful and unique and whatever those are usually in their own repositories and those might be in ppas or they might be in their own self-hosted repositories right and that means that all of those distributions are totally reliant on ubuntu and ubuntu security team and all those community of packages who are building that

software. And that comes with a risk. A risk that if Canonical make choices or Ubuntu makes choices, that that breaks things for some people down the road. And this is partly why the whole concept of flavors exists.

Like there's Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu. They're all built from software in the repository. There's no PPAs enabled on it, any flavors. So that if a developer in Kubuntu land does something that breaks Lubuntu, it gets fixed before release, right? Whereas if Ubuntu does something that breaks Mint or Ubuntu does something that breaks mint or ubuntu does

something that breaks uh pop os there's no real comeback because you're building something on top of ubuntu but then you're putting your own special source on top but you're not part of the family and the whole point of being part of the family of a flavor is that you collaborate, you work together. So, you know, coming up to release day when a new version of Ubuntu is about to come out, you'll see all the leads of all the different flavors of Ubuntu talking amongst each other. You know, we need to update this package. You need to update that package. Let's coordinate. There's no coordination with the external um third party um distributions so yeah if it breaks

tough shit basically yeah yeah um yeah i i guess that's part of the reason why with like okay the the same sort of system exists on the arch side what we have you've arched doing all their their things and then you have like garuda and dev or all these things that are just pulling directly from the arch repos i guess it's not managed super well in every situation but that's part of why manjaro has that like layer between where they hold the packages and then send them out. It doesn't work in every situation when they don't test things properly or they hold things back.

Yes. Ubuntu has the same thing. But they have a lot more people. Well, not even... Yes, people, but also process. Right. There's a web page you can go to called Pending SRU.

And that is Pending Stable Release Updates. I don't know if you can find the URL. I think it's somewhere in people.canonical.com somewhere. But Pending-SRU is probably the page. And it's just basically a big table. It's a big table of packages that have got updates that are waiting to land in each version of Ubuntu. are waiting to land in each version of ubuntu okay yeah and it packages will sit in there until someone marks the bug as that they have tested it and it can only move forward

if it has been tested it doesn't just bake for an arbitrary two weeks it sits in there until someone says yes i have confirmed that this definitely works and if you click through to the bugs you'll probably find someone asking hey anyone who's experiencing this bug we've pushed a new package please could you test it and then mark verification done and when they tag the bug verification done that allows it to then move forward and so someone can come along and go through all of the pending stable release updates and say, yep,

that one's verification done. We'll allow that one through. So it's a similar process to Manjaro, but with a bit more process around. There should probably be an end period where they clean stuff out. Cause there's one in here that's from 2367 days ago. I don't think that matters. What package is it?

Uh, BCM WL. So the, uh, days ago. I don't think that matters anymore. What package is it? BCMWL. So the Broadcom wireless thing. It's got like 10 different bugs attached to it. Yeah. What were you saying, sorry? What version of Ubuntu is it though?

Is it a version of Ubuntu that we don't care about anymore? It's for Trusty. Yeah, right. Trustee. What's that? 1204? Yeah.

Oh, we don't care. Yeah, so someone should clear that up. So someone should just close that bug. Yeah. But, you know, there's a bazillion bugs out there. I created a bot on Mastodon, which uses the RSS feed. It's called Ubuntu Bugs. If you go to Ubuntu.social slash at Ubuntu Bugs is

the account name. And all it does is post a toot every time a bug is reported in Ubuntu. That's all it does. And it's quite relentless. Like there's a lot of bugs. So it's not surprising that there's some that, you know, don't get tidied up don't get cleaned up that hang around for a while for sure but that's the same in every project i still get emails about bugs that are reported in kde like five years ago or bugs are reported in firefox a decade ago you know that's it's that's the nature of open source every project has too much stuff to do and not enough people right right right no that makes sense um well on that note i guess we should probably be starting to like wrap

up the show because we can i can keep this going for like another two hours plenty of stuff that i've not even talked about yet like i didn't even get into talking about happy to carry on if you want to talk about if there's stuff you want to talk i want to go make some food we can do we can do this another time um because i want to talk to you about like what you're doing now i want to talk to you about um the bungee social about you know about bungee mate didn't get to any of that um but you know plenty of stuff for another time then i'm available anytime for you awesome um i guess I'll let people know where they can find you. And if you, if you want to talk,

if you want it, if you want it, any one to know where they can find you. So I've recently started doing a new podcast with a couple of my friends. We used to do the Ubuntu podcast and now we do a podcast called Linux matters. If you have Linuxatters.sh, you'll find our big fat heads at the top of the screen. And we just talk about stuff we're interested in, stuff we've been working on. It's not news.

It's not argumentative. It's generally pretty positive. And it's just us talking about the stuff that matters to us in the Linux field. So, yeah, feel free to subscribe to that. We're only on episode four so far. But we've also got a Discord and a Telegram channel and all that kind of stuff if you want to join us. They're all linked from the website, unixmatters.sh. If you want to get in contact with me and tell me I'm wrong about anything,

then poppy.me has got all my uh contact details on there just go to popi.me i'm popi basically everywhere except for places where some other prick has got the name popi and i've had to i've had to register some other contrived version of my name annoyingly like popi dc where the dc stands for dot com by the way so if you see popy dc it's popy.com yeah there you go i did want to ask you like how the the popy name stuck because obviously it's you know your name with a y on the end but like how did that become the name you use but just like you didn't have anything you're like whatever so this started in uh many years ago i used to teach training courses for SAP in the UK.

And there was a Scottish guy called John on reception. And every time I'd come in the room, he'd go in a Scottish accent that I can't really do very well. He'd go, Popey. And he would call me Popey. And then one day I came in and he went, Popey.com. And I thought that was quite funny. And I didn't own the domain and he called me poppy.com. And I thought, ah,

that's actually not a bad idea. So I registered the domain, I think in about 97, 1997, 1998. And I've had the domain ever since. Wow. Um,

so what's that nearly 25 years. So 24 years I've had that domain. Um, and yeah, don't go looking at it on archive.org. I promise it's boring. But, yeah, pictures of cats and terrible iterations of blogs and stuff. That's where it came from. But it's quite funny when someone asks for your email address

and they're expecting Gmail or Hotmail or something like that and i say alan at poppy.com and they're like poppy what like your name yes and my kids have got an email address on that domain as well in my life and so yeah it's quite cool for them to be able to have a poppy.com email address it's very silly but you know nerds eh what we like was that that all the things that you wanted to mention was the podcast and your website yeah that'll do awesome

as for me go check out the main channel BruderObson I do Linux videos there six-ish days a week probably sometimes I throw in some random other stuff by the time this comes out I'm way ahead in like podcasts I have no idea what's coming out this will be out in like

two or three weeks I need to like take a week off the podcast so I can lower my backlog a bit because it's getting to be a bit of a problem what a wonderful problem to have yeah it's a nice problem it means I can like take a week off and be good the

I've got the gaming stream. That's Brody on Games. I'm currently playing through Yakuza 0. And I guess by the time this comes out, I guess Final Fantasy 16 should be out. So come watch me play that, I guess. If you're listening to the audio version of this, the video version is on YouTube at Tech Over Tea. If you're listening to the audio version of this the uh video version is on youtube at tech

over t if you're watching the video and you want to hear the audio version you can go to any podcast platforms on spotify apple something whatever it's cool there's an rss feed as well search tech of a t you'll find on any platform and uh yeah um i'll give you the final word what do you want to say lovely chatting to you. Thank you for giving me the time to talk about all kinds of stuff. It's a pleasure to finally meet you. I've had conversations with you in

my early days of using Linux. I probably said some really stupid things. We all do that. Yeah, well, look. What's that thing where you think you know a lot when you're first starting using something? What's that called?

I'm not even going to pretend to know what that is. Yeah, it's like the lessons. I mean, Kruger. Yeah, probably that, yeah. Yeah, I guess that's it then. I'll talk to you later, and I'm out. Sweet.