hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3824.txt

Episode: 3824
Title: HPR3824: 2022-2023 New Years Show Episode 4
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3824/hpr3824.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 06:08:54

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3824 for Thursday the 30th of March 2023.
Today's show is entitled, 2022-2023 New Years Show Episode 4.
It is part of the series HP Our New Year Show.
It is hosted by HP Our Volunteers and is about 120 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is 2022-2023 New Years Show where people come together and chat.
Oh, Nat Minor, you were talking about being on disability.
I don't know how old you are, but when you get retirement days, they usually drop the
disability and just put you on regular social security.
You don't have to worry about what your earnings are anymore.
Well, that's somewhat comforting, but I have some problems with dehydration, which may
indicate that I've damaged my kidneys for years of tonic or something.
I don't know if I am in shape to have the kind of employment that I used to have.
Well, I know when I was on disability, I was always scared if I did any work that I'd
make too much and they'd take my disability away, and all I'm saying is that it's a pretty
low bar.
There's a pretty low level of income you can make before they take your disability away,
but that goes away when you get retirement age.
Well, actually, I'm looking to get to the magic age where I can defer my taxes and say
it was two or three grand a year.
I am working one or two days a week as a substitute teacher, and at the high school level, that's
usually a baby sitting job.
Most of the regular teachers don't want you to actually be doing teaching to their kids,
which is really strange, but it's like 86 bucks a day on Mondays and Fridays, 76 on
the other days of the week.
If I recall high school, a lot of the teaching teachers or the baby sitting as well.
Well, it could be, but you do get some connection with some of the students and you just have
to have the patience to deal with the others.
These days, you don't even have, I don't have a degree.
I should have got a degree.
I earned a degree a few times over, but not at an institution, but they are so hurting
for teachers they'll take anybody.
If I had a teaching degree, it'd be like $120 a day.
This is the amount that people rely on degrees is really irritating because they're very rarely
actually useful.
Actually, I was a C student till I hit junior high.
And then I became an A student and anything that I applied myself to because in junior
high and high school, I could load my head with a test full of data.
Put it on the exam, move on to the next subject, reload, put it on the exam and move on.
Well, that's exactly why I did not graduate from college because I can't do that and
I have a philosophical objection to doing that.
If I'm going there to learn something, I should learn something, not just stuff figures
in my head for one test.
Well, when I got to, if I had done a junior college, I would have probably gotten a degree
because they would have continued the same project.
Or if I'd gone into teaching college, I could have gotten a degree because they continued
the same way.
But when I hit a real somewhat rigorous academic environment, that kind of rip and read did
not function very well.
So I was under tremendous emotional stress at home.
Yeah.
I've tried going back to college a number of times and I was boiled down to before a semester
is over, there's emotional stress going on and the stress at school is not helping
that any.
Well, also when I was going to college, I was getting my dad's degree because he quit
Northeastern, 14 or 16 credits before getting his degree.
And he believed that the A's that I had gotten in high school was the same as the A's that
he got in the 40's from a small town high school.
And they weren't the A's I was getting had a lot of damn Aaron.
In fact, a few years ago, they tested teaching students who had been certified.
They gave them a comprehensive, cold exam, they were roughly 50%.
They were taught the same way that I was taught and they were taught to optimize their learning
to the framework of testing.
Now Massachusetts has what they call the MCAS exam, which is the only thing standing
between you and a diploma.
If you can pass the MCAS, you get to your diploma.
You don't.
You could be an honors student, but you don't get no diploma.
Also when people start passing the MCAS, they widen its scope because they must have
a certain number of people failing the MCAS so that they know that they now can teach
more broadly.
So people who are graduating this year may flunk next year because they will move the
goalposts.
I don't know.
All the goalposts moving I've been seeing has been going the other direction.
They can't get kids to pass things so they make it easier.
Well, when I was at a Linux group, you know, some of the junior college people said they
can say, this is going to be on the exam and people will still not read it.
But then again, I heard that foreign companies have raised the requirements to junior
college when they would normally just get a high school diploma for some kind of employment
because the high school diplomas are not worth much.
Well, a lot of junior college degrees aren't worth much either, but I still don't have
one.
Well, the interesting thing is that while they're going for standardized testing, they're
going to standardized testing, which was invented by educators in Massachusetts that doesn't
line up with anybody else's standardized testing.
And what everybody's avoiding is something that was designed to provide a level playing
field for high school education, which is the GED exam.
If everybody passed the GED, they would know that whether you were taught in California
or New York or Boston, you knew the same stuff.
But by keeping everybody's exam to state standards, any problems can be swept under the rug.
Well, yes, well, our exam is different.
You can't measure those statistics against passing statistics against us.
Also a friend of mine was working at what they euphemistically called the Alternate High
School Program where kids who are not doing well in school are put into an alternate high
school and given the most boring teaching possible, non-motivating.
You see if they've won out of the alternate high school, they don't affect the numbers
of the regular high school.
In the university, I'm random, my undergrad, we actually had something for students who
were not doing great at school, like secondary school, they could come to the university and
spend a couple of weeks doing a course with us, which we called the sort of widening participation.
And if they pass that course with sort of special training, they get an offer for a place
to come to the university because basically the UK education system is pretty bad.
It's not a very good one.
One of the things that we really fall down on is if your child is not good at three specific
subjects, which is English, mathematics and science, that means they're stupid and they
can never go anywhere in life.
Of course, this is ludicrous and absolutely worthless way of determining how good people
are at the same time.
So this was a way of basically getting people to prove their skills in other areas, because
when you get to university, at least in the UK, you start specializing.
If you already weren't particularly good at secondary school mathematics, but you were
pretty good at stuff like theatre or television production or something else, you could just come
into university and start doing the thing you were already kind of good at, or computer science,
because we don't teach computer science in school in the UK, or at least we didn't when I was a
kid. And there would be a lot of people, I'm sure, who weren't very good at the course subjects,
but excelled at that.
So yeah, I just wish that we didn't have this reliance on, you have to be good at these three things.
What if those are the three things I'm not good at? Well, I guess you're stupid then,
you can go to the thick line and you get to work doing, you know, you get to be a sort of,
you know, my cleaner for the rest of the life, that sort of thing.
It's just this very classic attitude towards education, it's endemic in the UK, it's awful.
Right. Well, I looked at some pre-universities or distance learning universities
to work on getting a degree, and the best of the best appeared to be at the time,
University of South Africa, but it was completely based on the British education system,
and we don't have that here. And so I had no idea whether you are very good in.
You're very lucky. The British education system, I mean, the same British education system is
in particularly fast, Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland have different education systems.
The English education system, in particular, is exceedingly poor,
and that's because the government has changed it every year. The whole way that they arrange
their education is completely foreign to a way we have it in the US, which I'm not saying is a
better system. I'm just saying it's a foreign system to what I would need to get into the USA,
University of South Africa. Yeah, exactly. And that's the problem is, you know,
because England was such a big sort of, you know, colonial force. A lot of countries now have
been infected with our terrible, terrible university system, when actually the best country in
the world for education is Finland. We should all be using their system if we want a copy one,
but no, if we don't do that, we use the terrible education system that we've basically infected
the world with. Nobody can understand the idea. They're socialists.
Yeah, that's why the education system's so good. Right. Because they fund it properly.
No, but they've been proven time and time again, them and Singapore, weirdly, and Hong Kong
have the best education systems in the world. I'm not sure if Hong Kong is just holding up.
Well, probably not. When I went to study the, in 2014's, and this was just before the
umbrella revolution, and things were already starting to creak then. So I'd imagine it's not great
now. Yeah, it's hard times. Well, sweetish depends on where you go. You can learn Swedish instead.
So half of the, half of Finland is native Swedish speaking. You don't have to learn Finnish.
But my sister is a fluent Finnish speaker. She studied Finnish linguistics at University of Oxford.
So she basically, you know, she's very, very good at Finnish. And she's tried to teach me,
and I just look at her like, that's not a real language you're making that up.
Maybe that's why they're so good at education. They've had to master nonsense.
So you're saying your friend went to finishing school? Oh, my sister, yes.
She, she, yeah. She finally finished with a PhD, which she now does nothing with.
And this is what I'm saying about education. I mean, I've got two degrees. I've got a bachelor's
and a master's. I haven't used either of them. They weren't, they weren't important to me getting jobs.
They've never been used. And I'm just sort of like, they're like, you know, that was a very expensive
way to sit around studying Japanese textbooks for four years.
Yeah, I think I could have done that on my own time.
I've seen to have a weird learning disability work. I can learn some of just about anything.
And in each of those categories that I'd be learning in, there seems to be a ceiling I just can't
get past. And like I know tons about computers and operating systems and whatnot, but I can't
program my way out of a paper bag. I know nothing about IT. And all that I know about computers
is not sufficient to get me a job in computers, but I'm doing three podcasts on Linux. So,
I mean, it's, it's weird because so I left university in 2016 and I have postgraduate degrees.
The most useless postgraduate you can ever think of. It's cool. It's in Japanese mythology.
So, it's in basically comparative Japanese mythology and it's used in children's media.
So, it's completely worthless. And basically, because we left the European Union in 2016,
I was like, well, I need to get a job that will get me back into the EU so I can get out of the UK.
And that's why I decided to go into computing. And I basically had very little knowledge of computing.
I'd use Linux a bit. I'd use Windows all my life, but really had no actual knowledge of it.
And I got hired in a college doing like hardware repairs, just for, you know, putting
the computers back together and stuff like that. And just kind of, you know, took the interest I had
in it to learn more about it and start writing guides and stuff like that for other people.
And I found that process was really helpful, like the writing down what I discovered. And then
after about a year, I was a systems admin. And then I moved into the private sector because,
you know, public sector, there was no money. That, I mean, it just goes to show the private sector
has no idea what it's doing because I went into this company and they just, I don't think I've
ever come across a group of people less competent in my life. And I went into this company as a
second line support Asian and database admin. And then became a software developer very, very
briefly and I left and discussed. And now I'm a technical writer. So, you know, I've taken,
like I said, that initial thing I like doing, which was computers are fun. Let's write down
what I figure out about them. And now that's just the job I do. And I say that really for that sort
of thing, depending on the level of which you do it, you don't necessarily need to have any
knowledge of things like programming. What you need is tenacity. You know, you need to be willing
to, and this is what you're saying, you do these, you do a lot of playing around with computers,
you do a lot of podcasting on them. You've got the tenacity to sit down with a computer and not
let it beat you when it doesn't work like it should. And if you do that plus write it down,
that's basically technical writing. It's pretty much the same thing. Well, now they won't hire me
because of my age. So doing matter. Yeah, I just had a birthday earlier this month that gave me a
seven in front of my numbers. Right. Could have fooled me. I mean, the body's definitely
breaking down, but I don't feel 70 and I don't seem to act 70 more like 13. But
yeah, no, I mean, I'll be, I mean, I hope that that situation changes in the future because
from the looks of things now, there's no way I'm going to be able to retire before I'm in my 80s.
Because they keep bumping the retirement age. So I won't qualify for for any retirement pay
because the economy is so broken, at least if I stay in the UK, Germany seems to be fine.
Well, I was not able to get a job and hold it. So retiring doesn't matter because it just means
I'm not earning any money. There's, yeah, when you, when the longest you'd held a job in a long
employment history was two and a quarter years, you're not getting any pensions. So
do your pensions not follow you from job to job so far? Oh no. First off, I rarely ever qualify
for one. I don't believe I ever did qualify for a pension. You have to have like five years on
a job before you actually invest in the pension fund. Wow, that sounds incredible broken.
It is, but I am also incredibly broken. So
I mean, so the way it works here is, like at least in the UK, it's like everybody has a state
pension. So that's just even if you're, even if you're not working, you're paying into state
pension. Social salary here. And then, yeah, it's the same sort of thing. But then like when you get
a job, usually each job will have a private pension scheme that they also pay out. In the US,
most of the pension funds have been spent by the companies. So yeah, whether they're, whether
you're supposed to have a pension or not, the company can just file bankruptcy and you don't have
a pension. And there is no federal backup to that. Actually, I don't think I have done that.
They file bankruptcy, come out of bankruptcy and say, oh, we don't have any pension liability
anymore. Yep. That's back in that car. Why isn't that just like something that's held in Eskrow,
like separately from the company? Because this is the US, we don't do things that way.
Why are pension retirement programs the only tax that you stop paying if you make enough money?
The people who make good money do not contribute to our pension program. Yeah, good point.
I don't know. Taxation is silly. In Germany, we've got this weird thing where it's like,
we have a socialized healthcare, but it's technically, it's all private healthcare technically.
There's no whatever, but there are three companies and you have to pay private insurance
to them, which is basically just single-payer healthcare at that point. And they're all the same.
They all do exactly the same thing, so there's no real reason to choose between them.
But the point is that you basically, if you are earning up to 60,000 euros a year,
you have to pay into what's called these social healthcare. But when you're past 60,000,
you can choose to stop doing that and just pay private if you want to.
And I'm just there, but the public health insurance is so good. Why would you bother paying more
for private? And why do we give them the opportunity to stop running into it?
It's very weird and very backwards. It just seems like nobody's thinking about these things,
but that's governance for you.
Well, also, I'm on food stamps. When I get a cost of living in Greece,
they delete that from my food stamps, unless I can prove that my expenses have gone up.
Really?
Now, what about a cost of living in Greece? Don't they understand that the reason they're giving me
a little more money is because they believe the expenses have gone up?
Yeah, you would have thought that things like food stamps and that sort of thing would be
pegged to the cost of living. So if there's a certain percentage right?
Yes, the people getting food stamps and disability probably do not own a house or a new car
and the cost of living indexes are based on the economy, which is heavily weighted toward
realty.
Right, but you do have a separate index for things such as food, right?
No, we have a cost of living index.
Period.
Okay, yeah, okay. I don't know enough about this subject to comment because I've only,
you know, always stupid.
I've only been.
Anything that the rich people can do to get out of paying taxes they do.
You mean like spending $44 billion on a website and then crashing it into the ground?
Yeah, well, if I was tax dodged, I don't know.
He just became the first person to lose $200 billion of well.
Yeah, congratulations to him.
I mean, what a way to close out the year, I suppose.
All I'm saying, they say they used to say that cocaine means you have too much money.
Well, these days anything with a bee on it and your income means you have too much money.
You know, these people are going, well, what am I going to do now?
Why do I start a space program instead of what am I going to do now?
Why don't I start paying my employees who made this wealth for me?
I'm sorry, I'm something but a socialist that I just think that the people who make the
money or the people who should be paid the money and the guy at the top is not making anything.
He may be an effective placeholder that allows you to make things and that has a value.
But that doesn't mean he should be siphoning it all off and keeping it.
Yeah, I live in a socialist country.
We have a socialist government literally for the first time in a long time now.
And unfortunately, at least in Western Europe,
the socialist moniker is literally just that.
It's a moniker at the end of the day.
They're all still just rampaging capitalists and they do exactly the same thing.
You need to go to Scandinavia for anything approaching sensible sort of actual
socialism and even then it's really only Norway because they're their oil rich and they can
afford to do that. It's a mess.
Germany just has, yeah, we have a socialist party.
Hello.
And then they're like, well, what are you going to do about all this?
Oh, well, you know, nothing.
But we are going to legalize weed.
That's what you wanted, right?
Kind of, but like, could we have some systemic change?
Yeah.
Talking to us about how terrible the CDU were and how it's going to be so much better under
this coalition.
And then it's like, so how's it getting better?
Well, now you'll be too high to notice.
Well, here in the US, we don't even have the legalized weed legal because it has to be legal
on the federal level for the weed purveyors to even be able to use a bank to keep the money in.
And it's not.
Banks are overrated.
I've got a mattress.
Well, yeah, but if you're making millions of dollars a day selling weed,
you don't want to use a mattress.
It's a very big mattress.
It'll get KO one, be pretty soon.
That's fine.
I can afford my spine straightened out.
Now, one thing I have been looking forward to actually, though, under the sort of
the shifting government in Germany is they are, there's a concerted effort in both Germany and
France at the moment to push towards using Linux pretty much everywhere.
A big ruling came out of France recently, which was they're banning the use of Microsoft 365
and Google Drive in educational establishments.
So schools and universities aren't allowed to use it anymore.
They have to use open source solutions such as next cloud or their own hosted solution.
It should be very interesting to watch.
Well, my wife is informed me she is ready to go eat.
So I will be logging out for now.
I hope to be back later.
Okay.
Give her her our best.
Believe you sir, we're I have enough trouble giving her my best.
Well, best wishes.
Thank you all.
I will be back.
You know, the most useful job I ever had was when I those months that I spent helping people
with windows 2000 as a volunteer.
I was on disability, but they were at least getting the society was actually getting some
service for their money.
Yeah, and people needed a lot of help with the windows 2000.
Well, I we had one guy who was writing something and he would write a page and have it printed
and then he'd write another page and have it printed and he used used word like a typewriter.
But that worked for him and that's what we were there for.
Now, what are you thinking?
So was windows 2000 the first sort of major addition that had the NT kernel?
Because I seem to remember,
Emmy was the one that had still had MSDOS in it and they tried to patch a lot of windows 2000
features on top of it and it was just incredibly unstable.
Or is it the other way around?
Yeah, the entity actually.
Yeah, I know NT did, but I think 2000 also had NT kernel.
Yes, 2000 did because you could think of it as XP light also.
The problem people had with millennium addition was that if you try to upgrade instead of
do a new conveyor, you had a mix of windows 2000 DLLs, you know, libraries.
I mean, you had a mix of millennium addition libraries and windows 98 libraries and
sometimes they didn't work very well together.
It was more reliable to do a new conveyor, but doing an upgrade of an already
crafty architecture just didn't work very well.
Also, windows 95 had a crash vector built in because of the
they had a counter that they used for their timing, 18 ticks per second or something,
and windows 95 would not counter, I think, 32 bits rolled over.
Your system went into LALA that.
Nice.
Now, if...
Sounds like an excellent.
If you started your system and used it as a business desktop,
that is to say you started the morning, shut it down in the evening.
It would never reach the magic number, but if you left it running,
you know, once a month or they're about, it would, it would have a headache.
But I am interested in seeing what I can do with a modern machine
and freed us on box 86.
Have you tried what's it called, React OS?
I haven't tried React OS, but then again, if I were going in that way,
I would go wine or something.
Yeah, sure.
I'm just interested in it.
Like, again, it's just a curiosity thing.
I remember meeting the developers at Phosden once and you do sort of think,
you know, but we have wine.
And now we have proton, which makes wine even more sort of powerful.
But the whole idea of just having like a completely, you know,
Windows compatible operating system that isn't Windows is just fascinating to me.
Like, it's not even really using Windows system calls,
it's using its own that just happened to be compatible with a API,
which is just, I don't know, I find it fascinating as an idea,
but I've never actually sat down and put it on a virtual machine and tried it out.
The question is, really, that they're, they're heading,
they're trying for a moving target because the Windows APIs keep shifting.
To be honest, I think they just need to hit full compatibility with Windows 7,
and there will be a lot of people who will want to use it.
Because like, there's a lot of people from Windows 7 was the ultimate,
and everything that came after was a mistake.
Well, yeah, it's kind of hard to tell whether Windows 7 or XP was the peak.
Although 7 was nice, I'm just saying that I worked XP on a lot of the problems with XP
were artificial.
Yeah, you could tell that XP was a really good operating system,
because of, you know, how long it stuck around after it became so-called obsolete.
Well, this, I think, for me, XP represented the last time that Microsoft
kind of finished an operating system.
Well, you know, that anyone did really, it was like,
after that, we got into the whole mode of delivering updates in an OTA,
and that just meant that everything could get shipped in a half-baked state,
and it was like, well, it doesn't matter,
because it's going to be fixed over the air, and that's a terrible user experience.
Whereas XP, I mean, okay, there were problems with XP,
and then we had, but by ServicePact 2, XP was solid as a rock,
like nothing was really going to take it down.
Well, the thing about XP is that most limitations were artificial,
because it had multi-core support, but it was limited to two cores, I believe.
Well, there were other limitations as well, especially when you started looking at 64-bit systems,
because yes, XP 64 existed, but there was a lot less development for it.
Yeah, that was really just a major problem was, you know,
that if they'd have kept investing in, sort of, the underlying architecture of XP,
and stop worrying about this whole thing,
if we've got to ship another one, you know, that would have been fine.
And then XP was around forever, and then, like, seven...
Well, okay, Vista was only around for what?
Two years before seven, and then seven, just a couple of years before eight,
and then 8.1 came out, and it was almost completely different from eight,
and then, yeah, 10, and now 11.
Yes.
And it's just not...
We haven't had that long.
Well, we had 10, and we were assured, this will be the last version of Windows.
We're just going to do OTA updates, it's going to be a rolling release,
and then they announced Windows 11.
And then they were like, we never said it was going to be the last one.
Yeah, and then they scrubbed a lot of marketing materials off the web.
Oh, and then it's funny that they started putting such a
major hardware restrictions for 11.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
So, my old gaming lab...
It's hot and fast.
Yeah, they're not hard and fast rules.
You can get around those rules, but they're saying that, like,
my old gaming laptop, you know, just isn't going to work with Windows 11,
is what they're trying to say, but I don't care.
Yeah, and the way they sort of phrase it in their sort of support thing is
your hardware is obsolete, and it's like,
what you mean is that a particular TPM version isn't supported by my CPU.
And that is it.
That in most cases, that is the only problem.
It doesn't have a high enough TPM version to support.
Well, okay, fine.
This is a home laptop.
I'm not keeping government secrets on here.
Right, right.
I don't need the latest, newest, fastest freaking laptop ever.
Would I like it?
Yes, sure, but I'm not going to freaking go out and spend my money on it
just because you think I should have it.
You're going to pay for that, Microsoft.
You're going to buy me a new laptop?
No.
All right, then.
I guess I'm using Linux.
Yeah, actually, exactly.
Linux.
Actually, one of the, what warmed my heart when I got this little one liter,
I, I, 5, 6,500 T, is on Amazon.
It said, is not eligible for Windows 11 upgrade.
Yeah, a lot of them aren't.
I said, what that means to me is this generation,
which I would like to get by the case, is going to be,
which even comes with an i7 if I really wanted or whatever,
is going to be artificially devalued by not having the Microsoft upgrade path,
or at least the Microsoft direct upgrade path,
because most people won't want to mess with it.
They'll go to the next generation that is Windows 11 compatible.
Well, I think this isn't the first time we've gone through something like this.
I think it was like four or five years ago with an update for Windows 10,
that came out that basically bricked all the devices that Microsoft still had contracts with,
that were, that had 32 gig hard drives, and 64 gig hard drives,
and they were still being licensed and sold at the time that it happened.
But you couldn't get any updates because the updates were too large with the space
that was already being taken up by the operating system itself.
So, yeah, a whole bunch of devices that could no longer be updated.
And actually, that was about the time that Leo bought his HP Stream,
and I think that was the reason that it ended up with Linux on it,
was because you couldn't get the Windows updates.
I'm, I have a machine here that that's basically what happened.
It came with like the 128 SSD, and the update required a quarter quarter
terabyte. Right. You know, now it's running Linux with,
with a couple of half terabyte SSDs in it, but that's, you know, those,
those smaller devices like I was talking about, their hard drives were soldered on.
So, it's not like you could just go in and replace the SSD and have everything be fine.
They were stuck. Well, not only that, you're, if you go back to the netbooks,
the Microsoft limited the netbook architectures to something like two gig memory and
whatever hard drives, because they wouldn't certify them for, for XP or whatever they were running,
if the manufacturer actually upped the memory spec or made them so that they could actually
compete with real laptops or desktops. I kind of hate Microsoft for what they did to the netbook
market. Like, yeah, I think netbooks are a great idea. You know, they're, they're fantastic
little machines, but because of Microsoft's market dominance and then need to put windows on
everything. Again, we got these devices pre-installed with an operating system that was fundamentally
too heavy to run on the hardware. And so everyone just went, wow, netbooks suck. They're a terrible
idea. And it wasn't then until Google came along with the Chromebooks that everyone was like, wow,
this is a great idea. It's like, we could have had this if we'd have just used this, if we
would have just used an operating system that didn't suck. But you did have some netbooks that came
to market with Linux on it, but nobody really understood Linux all that well in the consumer space
at the time. And they'd get the devices and they'd want windows on it. Yeah. And, and also,
it depends which Linux distribution you put on to it as to whether it's actually going to offer
some sort of performance improvement over windows. Yeah. I mean, at the time, I think they use a lot
of them used Ubuntu running Unity. That's not going to help. It's like, you know, stick a
Ubuntu on there maybe, but put like KDE on it or XSE or something like that. Something
lightweight. XSE might be quite nice for, you know, all LXDE would be quite nice for Windows
users. At the time, it would have been LXDE. Yeah. Yeah. LXDE would be great, you know, but
if you call back there, there were many netbook remixes. Yeah. There were four netbooks. Yeah.
It just, it just feels to me like such a wasted opportunity because like what we ended up with
was yes, it was Linux on a, on a, on a netbook because Chrome OS is just gem to with a different
skin, but because it just runs a web browser and it has all these familiar services and people don't
understand that, know that and see that. And that was kind of the, you know, but your run is a real
opportunity. You're still running usually really good processors on them and you can make Linux
applications run or you can simply, you know, run Linux on a lot of them. But that's, that's
the weirdest thing. Yeah. Cause like I had, I've had two Chromebooks in my life. I had the Samsung
Chromebook, the original Samsung Chromebook and then I got I won an HP 11 Chromebook in a competition
from Google. And these were what I would consider to be sort of netbooks. They had
seller on processors or I think the, I think they're, I think the HP, well, might have even been
ARM processor. I don't remember. But they had very, very, you know, rubbishy processes and low
memory and all that stuff. And they ran fine to just do basic web browsing. My dad used his
for years and until it basically went out of support. But the problem is now I look at them and
it's like, okay, they're on my side. I had to come back. Well, I hear netbooks, I was like, I've
got to come back now, not based, not in an hour. I got to come back on now. And I was saying,
I'm on that book right now. Basically, it's from a UK based company called Star Labs based in
Surrey. It's the starlight. The one that's on the current sale. Cause another one is 11 in
screen. Yeah. The hardware is okay. And I even got call boot on this one actually by choice.
I choice call boot or the AMD BIOS. I want the call boot, obviously. But yes, netbook basically.
And it works. Sorry enough with the looks. Yeah. As you expect. Yeah. Well, this is what I'm saying.
But like the, the, this is not one of the markets how it's so much because of windows. But the
point I was making about the Chromebook is that now the Chromebooks like Lajewa saying they have
same stats as modern laptops. And they cost the same. Yeah, they cost the same. And that's the thing
that you're buying a GIMPT operating system. Ah, I was thinking, oh yeah, what Microsoft did as well
with the so-called netbook or low-end ultrabooks as well, high-end computers. But the so-called netbook
is they released. Some of them, I've got one for example. The laptop was okay, but it had windows,
but the problem was the space was 32 gigabytes. Yeah, SSD, which is not big enough for windows,
not really. I think when Microsoft picked up on that themselves after a while, like, oh, whoops,
we kind of release windows 10 or all these netbooks that have hardly any space. Can we give them a
sort of cut down version of windows that by then people were put already thinking, hey, these laptops
have rubbish. I have no space. No, obviously, and then obviously, Google Chrome came out.
Google Chromebook, and I mean, that's the Linux space thing really, but the public doesn't
know of that. Command Linux apps on there with the emulator installation on more recent. I've
done that on the Chromebook. That was interesting. But Chromebooks, yeah, well, Google dominate the
market with Android as well. Or if people like Google. Yeah, I just feel like, you know, with regards
to the space thing, like Microsoft tried to kind of promote, they tried to use that actually to
promote, like, with the HP stream to promote one drive. As I know, you can't store anything on
the machine because it's too small. So you should put everything in one drive. And people were
just there like, yeah, but I also want to install programs. We still don't get the files. Even when
you're wiping out everything on our hard drives as it is, because that was one thing that happened
when windows was trying to force these two large updates was they delete all your stuff in order
to fit on their stuff. And it still wasn't enough space. Well, they do that thing where they download
an update, especially for like Windows 10 when a new version came out every six months or so.
They would download the update and they would download the full thing. And it would be like, you know,
five to 10 gigabytes in size. And it'd be like, why have I run out of storage space?
Oh, because they download the entire, oh, yeah, the research lab in the Arctic.
Yeah, no, that story was people complaining about that is we get charged by the megabyte or whatever.
And then, you know, yeah, windows just said to hell with you guys. Here's 10 gig.
Yeah, there was this research group in the Arctic who were on a, you know, very, very slow satellite
connection where their bandwidth was appalling. And they found out that they their entire research
operation had been knocked off offline. Well, well, well, what people probably, well, we know
this, surely, but you know, windows, let's see, you're going to need what about 70 gigabytes,
possibly just for the operating system itself. Compare that to, I don't know, as you can get by,
would say, you know, 16 gigabytes, you can even have some space or some data in your home folder
with that probably, but with windows, you need to give it a good, you know, 70 gigabytes, maybe,
just to be sure. Yeah, the most amazing thing though is that windows updates. And I think they
have improved this since, since then, but there was this whole thing about not doing diff based
updates. And this was a problem that also happens in, in macOS, like macOS, I believe, doesn't do
diff based updates. When you update things on Linux or freeBSD or whatever, it's like, yeah, we
just patch in the difference between the two versions. But, uh, no, not with macOS and windows.
Well, well, yeah, well, yeah, it looks distro upgrade is basically the same old package of
everything, dual time. Here we go, we've got a new version, we're going to replace your
version and occasionally get some brand new package sometimes, but it's just the same old, same
old and that's how it is. Oh, what, uh, do you remember that Microsoft also was not only using
your bandwidth for updating your machine? No, for windows 10, at a feature where it would use
part of your bandwidth to update others in your area. Ready to that? Yep.
Yeah, they have this mesh update system. And you can, you can opt into it or opt out of it,
but it's phrased in such a way. Well, a bit like, a bit maybe a little bit like a torrentile,
but not really, but like a torrent, you've got the power, you've got that touch and don't have it,
so yeah, it's, yeah, it's kind of like that, although probably nowhere near as well optimized,
but yeah, it was this kind of mesh network, but the way they word it, because I think it's, if
I do believe it's turned off by default, I don't think they turned it on by default, but what they
do is they pop up the same saying, we've got new and improved, you know, ways of doing Windows
updates and this will make everything faster. So of course, most people would go, yes, of course,
I want Windows update to be faster, it's unbearable. And they enable it and then like, you know,
let me say, it just wipes out their connectivity because, you know, it's not necessarily a bad feature,
I'm not saying it's a bad feature, but it's one of those things where you have to understand the
context of somebody's internet connection and, you know, what they're sort of bandwidth,
situation is like. And most people, especially Windows users, I'm afraid to say, well,
know that stuff. Well, well, yeah, they trust the defaults and the things that are recommended as well.
The fools. The, the, the fools. The fools, I'm saying.
Well, well, well, well, well, don't, although something that Microsoft did, which was probably a good
thing in a way, really, right, is also, is also Windows update, because a lot of people won't
install updates at all, a lot of why? Yeah. Um, I, I still, I do think that they, again,
they made auto updates annoying, and that's kind of a problem, because they, you know, again,
they, they have the marked dominance for, for the desktop computing and laptop computing.
And they may auto updates work in such a way where it was really irritating people to the point
where my sister disabled auto updates and didn't update her computer for three years, because the
auto updates were so annoying. Well, yeah, that's, that's basically it as well. Do you have,
they, they, Windows is for the masses. And there are people that just, they just don't care about
the world. One of the, well, no, people are basically saying, I've got nothing tired. I've got
nothing, nothing tired. So what if there's no storage updates? The, the main thing is that whenever
Microsoft does something, they have to remember that they are, or were certain, the face of that
new thing, they weren't necessarily the first ones to do auto updates, but being the market dominant
force, they had a responsibility to do it correctly and to make it, to make people understand that
it was a good and convenient thing. And they failed. It's the exact same thing with, you know,
talking about the netbooks, there was an opportunity for netbooks to actually be a really good
opportunity, a really good choice for a lot of users who really were just using laptops for the web.
And Microsoft, being the market leader and the one with the deals, you know, with all of the hardware
companies, they had a responsibility to do it right. And they failed because, you know, they wanted
everyone to have the full windows. And I'm sure that that was not an engineering decision. I'm
sure that that was a Steve Balmer decision. And so basically now you have a generation of people
who think that web books, you know, netbooks are terrible. They think the auto updates are annoying.
And that's all Microsoft's fault. Well, we also got a generation of people who, well, some of them
will be like, can I go on there? Okay, Windows is a bit rubbish, but I've got money everywhere. I'll buy
an iPad or an iPhone or maybe a Mac for somebody even, yeah. But some will go to Chrome, but a lot
of people just use the phone now. The laptops, the desks, so you know, unless they have to be used,
before game, some specific, more specific reason is brown. I mean, I do it as well. Brown,
where I put my phone, I do that a lot. Yeah. And I think that again, the Chromebook, for me,
have a specific appeal, which is I, I find phones extremely difficult to use. I can't type fast
on the phone. My girlfriend types about 30 messages to me before I can write a single one back.
I like to keep Android all the way as well. Android, all the correct. I put messages there,
and they're not timed very wrong. And it's kind of fast as well. And I mean, disabled it,
it's still coming out with wrong messages, so it's really the way people have had to read me
on that at times. So a Chromebook, if it were priced correctly, would actually be a fine solution
for me, because, you know, it has a keyboard, it connects to the web. My family in the
£1,000, you can get a Chromebook possibly, or maybe, you know, the problem. Yeah. They should
be like £120 to £150 for what their offer is about you. The fact that they are about the price
of low-end laptops just feels ridiculous to me. I can put that in like an old ThinkPad on eBay
for £50,000. Well, that's true. And also, they were talking about the new Chromebooks. Okay,
they're going to be supported for eight years, apparently, over three years, but it's like eight
years. And at the end of eight years, the device will probably still work, actually, but it's
operating system went. So, and yes, there are some of the alternative operating systems you could
stick on to a Chromebook, but obviously, this is the average pressure, it's not going to do that.
So you end up with advice that's insecure, and then what's going to happen really in eight years?
I think Google might change the mind again. Okay, you also will support a bit longer, but we'll,
you know, yeah. I mean, this machine I'm talking to on now is, is, what, 13 years old?
Exactly. It still gets updates because it just runs linux, and linux ain't going to abandon me
anytime soon. Yeah, so I did, when my mum's laptop kept that going in another five-year,
or so more years after XP mount support, etc, and no problem with linux, and then the hardware.
And the nice thing? Yeah, but the nice thing is because this is a ThinkPad, it's the hardware is
infinitely replaceable and easy to repair. So as long as people are still selling spare batteries
and things like that, and the CPU doesn't die, because unfortunately, it's one of the models with
the soldered CPU. And this machine could just keep going. Oh, that's the other problem. Does that
laptop have more specific kind of when I've learnt this now with a hardware? Because I bought a
Juno's computer's laptop, but they wanted a UK linux space, so there's a laptop, and then my
charger broke in the lockdown because it fell on the charger sector, right? Charging socket,
and it turns out that, isn't just as simple as that, just get a new charging socket or sound
car or whatever, as well as the sound issue as well, except for it, and because that's only
a thing when you made or something. Yeah, and that's that's the real problem, and this
why I'm so interested in these kit computers that are making these days, and you know, the ones
that are just extremely basic in terms of their hardware requirements, they use really just a
bunch of open source hardware. Which was that kit, do you say? I can't remember what it's called,
I'm saying kit computer like a kit car, because I can't remember the name of the brand.
You mean like a modular laptop? Yeah, it's a modular, modular laptop.
I ain't 64 now, that's something else, but I mean, never ask you to start as well. I ain't 64
all the stuff, but the one that he goes on about? The framework laptop is the one I'm thinking of,
and those are interesting devices, because you know, that whole point about repairability and
the ability to like 3D print parts for it, and stuff like that, that's really the future of repairability.
Yeah, it looks like also with phones, the same problem, most phones, especially now, we mean you can
go back, you can take the battery out, whatever you can, but you're not supposed to, you know.
Putting out a modular phone on the market a couple of years ago, it just didn't work out really well.
The third phone you place parts and yet things fixed, for example, I think the client's phone
paying stuff is trying to do that as well. They might be in the future, but not so far.
Yes, and then Google had their area, but they never actually released it, just announced it.
Again, this is another area where I'm really upset that. And actually Apple now allowing people
to repair their Macs, although there's no way for anyone to know, it's not quite as
impossible. Yeah, there were laws that I believe it was in the EU that came out that kind of forced
some repairability standards across the board, and everybody else in the world has benefited from it,
but I'll find another way to lock things down. Also, USB and Lightning, Micro USB,
whether you know that normal charging cable, a new one, a Lightning cable for Apple, the EU
have been pushing, but I think it's coming starting next year. You're not allowed to sell, Apple
are not allowed to sell devices in the EU with a Lightning cable. What have you, USB, C?
UK, so I'm a Brexit, but it will probably come over here like that as well, hopefully.
Well, no, it'll be across the board that they've already started switching the USB-C.
And I think that's a really good thing. I mean, I know that EU tried to do that with Micro as well,
and that worked for a while, getting almost everybody to have their connector be Micro USB
that for Apple, and now Apple is actually putting in the USB-C's. That's the thing.
The EU's point is that like, you know, the EU will say basically you have to use it for this block,
and Apple will, once they've lost that court case, they basically will just go, well, it's not,
it's not cost efficient for us to keep making Lightning, and they'll stop their feet and say,
we can't innovate if you do that. The fact of the matter is they don't necessarily innovate
with the Lightning adapter, and also they, if they are forced to work on us an open standard instead,
that benefits everyone. Yeah, yeah, exactly. The other thing is, you know, after they make the
switch to USB-C, they'll be like, we were the first and the greatest to switch to USB-C, like when
they removed the 3.5-millimeter jack, and that was supposed to be so innovative, but...
When they put in a touch screen or something, without a knock, you have the market, and then Apple did
something, you have to take some, yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. But Apple likes to make...
Those 3.5-millimeter jacks, stupid decisions. Yeah, and call it innovative.
No, they like to make stupid decisions and call it brave, which is what they do with a 3.5-mill jack,
and then reverse those decisions and call it innovative.
Well, the 3.5-millimeter jack, if you look at the...
Oh, go ahead, go ahead.
I was just going to say they made some really stupid decisions with the MacBook line,
and the new MacBooks that are coming out are undoing a lot of those stupid decisions.
So, you know, we're having, we're going to get more ports and stuff like that,
and so, you know, support for a bunch of them if they drop.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Setting up high-speed everything in the MacBooks.
Max-lack ports, that's right.
I go like...
But now, with like the 3.5-millimeter jack, the first company that I remember
removing the 3.5-millimeter jack was HTC with the HTC- and HTC-2, and you had to use,
I think it was USB mini adapters to be able to hook up 3.5-millimeter.
Gross.
Yeah, they were still cool phones.
I mean, I have sat next to me an iPhone 13 Pro Max, and my biggest gripe with it is really that
I can't just plug a pair of headphones into it.
The HTC-Dash was actually a Windows Mobile phone.
Okay, confession time. I love Windows Mobile.
I did.
In particular, Windows 10 and Mobile, I love it.
Oh, no, before 7, I really liked Windows Mobile.
Well, yeah, that's okay.
Right, well, yeah, I've had that before.
People who eat who went to the next by the way, saying that actually Windows Mobile was quite good,
but Windows Mobile Windows, well, and the reason that failed, I believe, is because of the app
for them, and they don't even know they had the money in whatever.
No, the Windows Mobile actually did really well for the longest time.
And then, when they did the transition to not really 7, 7 was the start of it.
Windows Mobile 7.
But when they did the switch to Windows Mobile 8, and tried to integrate it into Windows 8,
and then they took away all the entire back catalog of applications that, you know,
developers and people had made that you could install on your own on your Windows Mobile device,
and made those completely obsolete and tried to lock everything down to just what they provided
in their stores.
That's what really killed Windows Mobile.
Plus, Windows Mobile was a lot bigger in the PDA market than it was in the mobile phone market,
and everything was transitioning to mobile phone.
The other big killer, of course, for Windows Phone, was that Microsoft had a spat with Google,
and Google pulled access to their API, so that meant no YouTube, no Gmail, no nothing.
Right.
On Windows Phone for a long time.
And by the time Google relinquished this and allowed them access again,
it was too late.
Windows Phone was dead.
I'm really, I actually think that was the market share wasn't there.
And despite having the best cameras on the market, which they really did,
like the Lumia series were extraordinary phones.
And in my opinion, the single best set of typography and user interface sort of schemes,
yeah, the app problem was one of them.
But I think more to the point, we've had this starvation of access to resources,
and then also the fact that Microsoft was behind it.
People at that point just didn't trust them anymore.
This was after Windows 8, so why would they?
Well, I'm talking before Windows 8, you said that was after Windows 8.
Well, that was after Windows 8 changed a lot of things,
and people had to get used to it, and they were going,
ah, ah, ah, but then it improved with Windows 10 and stuff as well, really.
There was the interface that changed a lot of things that people could see.
I sort of compared the Windows 7 to Windows 8 transition to the transition from
GNOME 2 to GNOME 3.
Why not?
Because in both cases, what happened, yeah.
In both cases, the biggest problem was that the developers broke workflows,
and the last thing you do as a software developer is break someone's existing workflow.
And that's exactly what they did.
And even, and even good to GNOME 4.3.
Now, I didn't like 4.3, beginning when I saw that, but I like GNOME 3,
but then I got used to that.
Sometimes you feel like, why do you put a panel, why do you move your account
and why is that now?
I think you're specifically talking about the Metro UI.
Yes, right.
It was a good idea, but they shouldn't have tried to force it down
everybody's throat day one with Windows 8.
It still wasn't a good idea.
Specifically, well, there's a lot of benefits to the Metro UI.
I mean, for one thing, I would love for Windows to have any sort of consistent UI
across the operating system.
That would be lovely, because I love it when I open up a file browser,
and I still see Windows 95 icons.
That's hilarious.
But more to the point.
Are you just going to keep enough in the menu in any of their,
like, right-click menus, and it just turns out to be an XP menu?
Yeah, exactly.
It's still low to stuff left over.
But with Windows, they could have, they could have eased people into it
if they'd have avoided putting it in one place.
And that was the start menu.
The last thing that you mess with on Windows is the start menu.
It's the one thing everybody universally understands.
Yeah, yeah, I guess that's true.
But as in TV, or your family can think about the start menu,
is it not only is universal to all versions of Windows,
it's the one, one of the few things that's infected virtually all desktop.
Yeah, if you like it or not,
if AD looks like Windows by the poll,
yes, you can customize it.
Yes, they've got some features in from KDE,
but no, sorry, it looks like Windows for me.
And there's a video from Windows 7 when that came out in Australia
and the mall and they're going, hey, this is Windows 7,
it was KDE for all of them.
LMD, well, basically, like, all of your desktops that aren't known,
kind of look like Windows.
Or they could be the need to look at it.
Yeah, because they're following the traditional quote-unquote desktop paradigm.
Whereas, and that's the thing with known two,
known two followed this as well,
and then known three, what they did in theory is a great idea.
They went back and they said,
does this make sense for contemporary computing?
And they basically came back and said, no.
I agree, but you can't change up what everybody's been using
their internet life.
But it's not just that.
When they went from known two to known three,
at least when a boom to went from known two to known three
or even to Unity,
I used to be able to configure the hell out of known two.
And then they also known three came along
and then they've changed it,
so I can't change anything.
Even the, you know, you said,
the main interface,
the known three, four, four, four,
you know, three, and they four, four, four as well.
And I'll see those files,
but why found the ways that I never liked files?
In game three or four point three,
because if I didn't put the old thing on,
I'd say Fumah,
or maybe that's the F2C one, actually,
or what's the Marta, Marta, Marta, one,
many of those older ones,
and that's fine and good.
View my file, show my list, show the details,
but the way they've done file, they just don't like it,
but that's just one little app inside,
you know, Moneyway,
and it's the looks soup.
There's about another five file managers
to choose from, many ways.
Maybe they're all...
The thing that I take from known,
and I like, no, like I'm a known fan.
The thing I like about it,
and the thing that I think is ultimately beneficial
to Linux adoption in general,
is they offer AD fault,
and you know, you're saying,
it's a shame I can't configure it more.
That's that point.
They've kind of got to be...
Well, GNOME, right, so GNOME 43 and, you know,
onwards have offered a lot of, you know,
improvements to initial onboarding of new users.
They offer a really easy to understand,
and yeah, sort of what I would call a sane default.
Yeah, yeah.
And because they can't change it much,
users end up not breaking it,
it's very easy to support it,
it's good for both a sort of a personal use thing
and also a business use kit.
Now, a lot of people use Linux.
It even has very slight bling.
For example, when you hover over to activity,
it will do its effect.
When you go to the menu on the right,
yet that they've improved that menu,
actually more seriously,
more recently,
we were shut down by less than all that stuff,
but there's a slight bling here,
and you've got kind of dot-splash,
maybe maybe even inspired by Apple here,
because it used to be down the left,
the icons outside the bottom
for the thing, the icons,
but it's a bit.
And the window manager of you in the thing,
it's just very good.
Very good.
It's a, like I say, it's a good default.
It allows, it makes it much easier to support,
and it means that people moving from one system
to another, no where everything is the next time they go
to that system.
If you want a more configurable interface,
they exist.
KDE is configurable to Hellenback.
If you want something like that,
you can configure just through config files,
something like i3.
It's all there if you want it,
but there needed to be a stock interface for Linux.
If you wanted Linux to be something
that was widely used.
Yeah.
So in your opinion,
are there other places out there
who are actually using
known three as their default?
Like, I don't know,
I would usually think that somebody would use,
if you're going to put it in an office place,
you would try to get something that looks
almost more windows-like.
So they would use something like an xfc
or matte or cinnamon.
Not tape.
The point is that if you install Ubuntu,
if you buy licenses,
so you're going to buy,
if you're in America,
it's most likely to be,
you're going to get Red Hat.
If you're in the UK,
you're going to get Ubuntu or Susa,
same in Europe,
and all of those three
by default come with known.
Although I don't see what I dare to say this.
Yes, I do.
There's that whole thing about,
we've had Unity with that.
We're put on top of the GNOME,
actually underneath, really.
And actually, I did like Unity 7
and I did also like Unity 8.
Well, we gave up on Unity 8,
but I remember two rows of Ubuntu
were the preview to see how it changed in six months.
I also like Ubisoft's project,
but that's different.
Carrying on with Ubuntu,
Chrome, stuff, and tablet.
It's amazing what they do.
But Unity did do some usability tests,
I believe, early on,
with real users,
as well in sort of 2011.
Like, will this work with normal people?
And some of them, I think,
lack doing that, actually.
That kind of thing.
Well, my point being, well,
even if somebody gets a contract for
for any one of those things,
it's usually just on the server side.
And like, I hear this from everybody
that most developers develop on back,
but most of the servers running this stuff
are usually on a Linux server.
So how many people are actually using,
how many people in an office
are actually using Linux
as their desktop environment,
you know, not just on the server side.
So is that, is that, in other words,
is that I understand that they're
arguing that you're having,
is that an actual argument
that people have those?
Like, is, is there a use case
for there being a consistent type of desktop
that people can carry?
I think, I think what happens is that,
well, I've heard some universities
like Chevrolet Killboot
in the library, Windows,
or Ubuntu, for example.
But I think in the business,
unfortunately, I think most of them
are using Windows,
though, yes, they're made on the desktop,
yes, there may be some Linux servers
in the background,
but it's just suddenly how it is, isn't that?
Well, I mean, specifically,
here's a good example.
It used to be that Google,
all of their desktops were Ubuntu.
Like, that was just how they always worked.
I think that's starting to change now.
I think they've had a falling out
with canonical or something,
but they certainly always used to use
their desktops for all Ubuntu.
And in that case, yes,
it is very useful
if everybody has the same interface
because then, like I say,
as somebody who used to work in IT support,
it was very helpful if I knew
that everyone was looking at the same thing.
If somebody else is, I don't know,
they're saying, I've got some graphical problem here,
and I'm like, okay,
so what have you done?
And it turns out they're actually using KDE.
Well, my brain needs to switch over
to a completely different context
because they could have just touched a file
or entered panel edit mode without knowing it.
Yeah, so there's at least no,
they're kind of locked down.
Also, I think with a Chromebook,
Chrome OS, surely that's a bit locked down as well,
and everyone seems.
Yes, yes, yes, everything up.
And it's a big reason
that a lot of educational establishments
are moving over to Google Chrome.
It's very easy to manage remotely,
and basically, it's very easy to troubleshoot
because everyone's seeing the same thing.
And if you can't troubleshoot it,
you power wash it.
And everything's in the clouds and nobody cares.
Very.
I'm not saying it's right wrong
and different, I'm just saying.
And I understand what you're saying
about being able to having one universal desktop environment
or platform to be using.
And then it's a lot easier to troubleshoot.
I'm just saying is that like,
I've never heard that about Google,
but do you think that there are other companies
that are adopting it that way?
Sure, and more than just companies,
there are also governments adopting it.
So in Germany, I think it's Hamburg,
their entire public infrastructure runs on desktop.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Some of them are gone to Linux, I think, in Germany.
Sucess.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Consumers.
Germany, arguably,
against let's say universal interface,
and then we can go and talk about office suits
and things too, and it's like,
should everybody be using WordXL PowerPoint?
Because, yeah,
and then also we have the information
that there's a choice from not, you know,
and I think,
oh, and should they be learning more than one office suit
in the school?
It doesn't matter what they should be doing
is they need to teach how to use the tools
not to teach the application.
If I, if I look,
if you learn some basic,
some very basic spreadsheet, you know,
just general spreadsheet knowledge,
you can then take that knowledge
and use it across multiple different types
of spray machine applications.
It doesn't matter what you put me in front of you.
Well, yeah,
all the spreadsheets are running
in the same general way.
And it's the same with user interfaces for desktop.
If you know how to use GNOME and KDE,
and you connect,
and see it's in a minute,
and then the windows desktop,
and you can probably get on with an Apple desktop too,
and probably most of them with graphical user interface
and get through it on the standard.
I don't know.
I think if GNOME 3 is still a bit more,
is a lot different than sitting down
to a KDE or Mate or Cinnamon,
or even a windows is somewhere still along the lines.
You have a start bar in the corner.
You can find the little start menu.
And I haven't touched a macOS and so long.
And the last time I did,
I was still very confused as to what I was doing.
If you're looking for a start menu,
then yeah, you're not going to really find the ingolome
for you to be honest.
However, when you click around,
you realize that you don't need a start menu
because of how it generally works.
Well, this is, right.
This is the thing.
What if you're with,
when I look at it from the perspective of,
I'm going to take it from the perspective of let's say
you've got someone who has never used any computer
in their life.
I'm not talking about someone who's been using windows
or whatever as a child.
I'm saying let's take it from the perspective
of a hypothetical who's never used a computer in their life.
Give them a simple task to do.
Tell them to open up a text editor and write something.
Send them to the initial landing screen
of any one of these major interfaces,
not the login screen.
Let's say they get past that.
And we've got a problem because in Windows,
it used to be that there was a start menu.
That was easy in Windows XP,
all the way up to Vista when it became just a small, small circle.
It was very easy to say there's start there
and then you had a search bar.
Okay, we can kind of understand
that I'm going to type in text editor
and hope something comes up in Windows onwards.
It still kind of draws your eye to the bottom left
or in the case of Windows 11,
it kind of draws your eye to the four squares,
but it's less well telegraphed.
Mac OS, no idea.
Absolutely lost.
Don't know.
I've got two blue faces looking at each other on the bottom bar
and I don't know what it does.
There's nothing that looks like a text editor.
There's a compass, which I'm guessing is a map.
Oh no, wait, it's a web browser.
That's probably confusing.
KDE has the same problem as Windows
in that it doesn't really draw your eye anywhere in particular.
What Nome does, especially from Nome 42 onwards, I believe,
is it starts you with a search bar
immediately in front of you
and a list of icons of all of your programs.
It's therefore very easy to go
if the text editor is right there,
you can see it's a pencil and paper.
It's very clearly defined.
You go, oh, there it is, and you type something
or you search in text editor and you'll get it.
I don't know if you have to put it on the screen.
Well, Firefox and things on there by the fault, yeah.
How do you bring up the menu screen?
Yeah, but even then, in most,
a lot of known-based systems come with NomeWeb.
So even if you don't understand Firefox,
because again, the iconography means nothing.
But if you know what you're looking for
is called a web browser,
you can at least type in web browser
and either NomeWeb will pop up,
which is perfectly suitable or Firefox will pop up
because the desktop file includes that description
and you're okay to go.
Whereas Apple, I mean, I use an Apple machine for work,
so I'm very used to it.
But I will say that its iconography is appalling
and it gives you no clues as to where anything is in the system.
You're much better off being someone
who knows how early Unix system works
and just jumping to the command line straight away
because otherwise, the design is just atrocious.
Now, I would use NomeWeb in a long time.
But how was the new system?
Is it hot corners?
No, by default, as soon as you now from,
and I think it was Nome41 that introduced this,
basically the moment you log in,
the screen your desktop is sort of minimizing
is in the top of the screen in the middle,
sort of one of a list of virtual desktops
and underneath you've got a search bar
and a list of your applications.
So the first thing that you're going to do
is type something in, maybe just terminal
or whatever it may be, but it takes you straight to a search.
So it bypasses that hole, where do I go?
How do I get something now?
What button do I press?
It just bypasses the whole thing.
So you automatically have all the icons
in front of you as soon as you log in.
Not every single icon, there's still like a main overview
of every single program you've got
just all screened there as well,
but the main icons should be there.
It'd be like a dock on a map system, you know?
It's down, you speed up down the left
all of that in GNOME 3,
but they've changed it to the bottom screen.
At first, I was a bit like, well, you've done that.
It's like a Mac, but we're going through
the Smolachanger to actually make it quite decent
when you compare it to GNOME 3,
what was just there,
and they're taking the good things over
from GNOME 3 anyway, like the lot of it.
So it's just very, very good interface now.
Yeah, what you start off with is your favorites list,
and that will have a few stock defaults
in there that is chosen by the distro manager,
but it will usually be things like a web browser,
a text editor, the essentials.
And then you can have a search menu,
which searches all apps.
So, you know, if you're looking for something specific,
you can, you just start searching
and it goes straight away.
You don't have to worry about clicking around
into menus together.
At the bottom of the favorites list,
there is an icon that says all apps,
and that takes you to the full screen
with every single application.
And if you want to import a desktop,
that's improved as well.
I mean, only some people do that as opposed to the round team,
but yes, it's improved.
So, you know, most of the,
most desktops, as soon as you log in,
are you getting as a blank screen,
when GNOME 3 logs in,
it's automatically into the menu page?
So, you know, while I do it,
it loads up.
You see that the dog brain system background
or all paper you put down,
and then there's the dog staff icon we're talking about,
and that's about it.
Then you start clicking around
and it's very straightforward, yeah.
And all in activity,
it's not going to lock
when you shut down wireless
and all that, the rot top right as well,
like GNOME 3.
Yeah, with GNOME 4.1 and onwards,
so they dropped this whole thing where,
in GNOME 3, you would log in,
and it would literally just be your background
and nothing else.
So, in GNOME 3, at some point,
they got rid of the side doc
until you went into activities overview.
And basically, you would be met with a blank screen,
which actually is not a great thing.
The only thing about that was,
drew your eye to the word activities
up in the top left of your screen,
and as soon as you put your mouse up there,
you'd hit a hot corner
and your activities overview will pop up,
which was kind of jarring.
Now, when you start,
you're not focused on the screen itself,
like the desktop background.
That is something you can see,
but it's not selected.
What's instead shown is the activities overview.
So, your screen is split in half,
the top half shows in the center of the desktop,
and the bottom half shows your favorite actor,
your favorite apps list, and the search bar.
That's how you start.
And it's automatically selected the search bar.
Yeah, also a little side point,
but obviously in Windows, a lot of people would say,
Documents are set desktop,
and you get all the cluttered desktop with icons,
word documents, and all sorts of things.
But GNOME had decided to sort of,
I think there's removed that function a while ago,
but you might have enabled it, re-enabled it,
but generally speaking,
not to place put icons or files on desktop and go,
and that's just not what you do.
And you don't need to it,
because apparently it works.
Yeah, and I'm with you, Mike.
It's fine.
I use enlightenment for the most part,
and mine is just basically a, almost like,
just the wallpaper,
and there's a little bar across the top
that has whatever is running and a little stuff
where like top rights got the clock,
Wi-Fi, and maybe a battery,
and maybe the volume,
but that's about it.
And it might try to keep my desktop as clean as possible.
So if I want to fumble around with files and stuff,
I'll go into the file manager.
So you've put a screen shot in the mumbled fat
of GNOME for you to look at the full screen.
All right.
Look at that.
Yeah, so that's what you land on as soon as you log in.
So I think it's slightly different,
Ubuntu has, I don't like how canonical do you keep doing this,
because they don't stick with this.
They try to make it like UnityLite,
and so they've overridden some of these default behaviors,
and it just makes it worse.
It's like, you know, canonical just can't keep their hands
to themselves when it comes to this sort of gnome interface,
which they're just on with KDE.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, kind of put the kind of formal move
or change something.
There was a feature, a map, a gnome map, I believe,
for like a bit like to win, like you've got security issues,
in your hardware or something,
all those kind of programs.
And I believe Chronicle decided that
let's not have this in Ubuntu by default,
because this is going to confuse our users,
but obviously for Dora or something still has it.
You hear about that one as well.
Yeah, yeah, canonical makes a lot of questionable decisions.
They just don't, I don't know what their decision-making process is,
but it scares me.
So I have to try gnome again.
Oh, yes, improved definitely.
Now, how is it, see, I usually like to play around
with more of the lightweight desktop environments.
How is it, does it feel like a heavy desktop environment?
So I gave enlightenment.
I gave enlightenment to last year again.
I think I was in the 21s,
and I was feeling it all started to try to.
And I thought, oh, that's a bit bad from what I remember of E17.
So because you said you liked enlightenment.
Now, enlightenment is enlightenment.
That's obviously its own beast, as you know I'm sure.
But gnome 4.3, it feels like,
well, you know, they give more than desktop as well.
I hope, like in this time, this sort of 20,
you know, this 2010 to, well,
we're going to be 20, 20, 20 for you now, you know.
And that's where if you go and blow that up,
martail or something again,
that's the old gnome 2.4.
I mean, that's showing its age now.
That's like it's from, like, what's the new 2.5?
Explain to me, Marta, next time.
I see if this other guy agrees with me if I can explain it.
Some, it just, it just looks more than indecent,
like in a times win, like this is year 2022,
so as 2023, it's been around for last 10 years or so anyway.
Where if you can start,
where if you suddenly want to know the martail,
I mean, I like martail still to gnome 2 fork,
but it's probably does look old and old school,
like it's from the year 2000 or something,
which it basically was.
It's the same with Dex FC.
I mean, that's even older.
And an enlightenment is, for me,
the only thing that makes a desktop environment modern
is does it support everything that somebody
who is used to using contemporary solutions,
such as smartphones, Mac, you know,
Mac and books and all that.
Does it support all of those things out of the box?
Well, yet in a way, yes, it does.
But I say in a way, because I know that they have been able,
they've been working on bringing GNOME, GNOME,
for free or 4.3 to a phone as well.
So, and you can, yeah, I've used that.
You can run it on a phone.
What I'm saying is that,
what I'm saying is that the design of something,
such as enlightenment, Marta, whatever,
I think, to call one set of designs modern,
one set of designs not is a slight misnomer.
For me, the thing that matters is, out of the box,
if I open up GNOME, and this is more because of the libraries
that underpin GNOME, I know that without doing anything
to set it up, Bluetooth will work,
Wi-Fi will work, sound will work,
Wayland will work, that all will just work.
That's, to me, is a modern desktop environment.
You can make arguments about what makes a modern,
you know, the compositor model,
does not proton or something to impute
and improve all the audio, so change it.
Well now, I've been reading something the other month.
But, yeah, generally,
the pipe choir is making everything much better.
Photos for installing stuff.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, probably not.
But for me, to answer the original question,
in terms of weight, GNOME is definitely heavier than KDE,
but it's not as much as you'd think.
So back in when GNOME 3 originally came out,
it was a memory hog.
It was really bad at running on light machines.
But I've run GNOME 43 on this Call to Duo thinkpad,
and it runs fine.
It's not as quick as, well, I'm currently running,
which is DWM, but that's because DWM is a single file
that you have to change to.
And I might, I might, I might,
I might, I might, I might, I might,
I would like to hear about DWM.
I was going to say I've run GNOME 43 on mini PCs and stuff,
so that we're not with the bestile web,
but then that worked all right.
Yeah, what do you want to know about DWM?
So I've been running things before like IWM
and other lightweight, very lightweight desktop environments.
But what is DWM?
So DWM is another sort of Tiled Window Manager.
It's made by a group of people called Suckless.
Don't don't look them up because they're not very nice people,
but they do, they do make some really good products.
And the whole idea behind Suckless and its group of tools
is they are supposed to be as lightweight as minimally
as possible.
I'm just going to say here quickly,
oh, Tiled Window Manager, say that's from
we've had something installed before,
but I'm going to say for old school people, they use it as.
I think it's just a choice, you know,
it's a, some people like it, some people don't.
Yeah, and I've got DWM set up so that I can use it Tiled
or I can make Windows float freely if I want to.
It's useful to have floating windows sometimes
and it's useful to have stacked and tile windows sometimes.
It just depends on what I'm doing at the time.
But the problem, so DWM I use on this computer
because I want to get as much out of the think pad as I can.
But I wouldn't recommend it to most people
because configuring it is a nightmare
and you have to actually go in and edit,
like see header files to make it work a certain way
to add new shortcuts and stuff.
It doesn't have all of the nice stuff
like a simple config file.
You have to basically change the source code
and recompile it to make it do something new
because that's what Suckless is all about.
They're like, you know, you should learn how to do this stuff.
Like I say, they're not very nice people.
From a philosophical point of view,
I don't really agree with them.
I'd say they're not very nice people.
I'm sure some of them are very nice,
but their sort of outward sort of projection
is that they are very hostile towards anyone
that they consider to be a casual
which I think is pretty much anyone
who hasn't written their own, you know, compiler.
But yeah, it's a very good lightweight system.
So this machine runs apps Linux with DWN
and idle idling where it's not running anything.
It idles at about 170 megabytes of RAM usage.
So it's very close to, you know,
it's as close to nothing as I can get it.
Beautiful.
Which is really what I wanted it for.
And why I've set it up this way.
On a modern machine, I don't set it up
with DWN, am I just installed now?
Because I like having all the modern conveniences.
Sure.
This one I had to do all sorts of stuff with, you know,
yeah, I have to use like WPA supplicant,
which I thought I'd left behind years ago.
Um, I have to, you know, this one runs Xorg
because there is no Wayland equivalent for DWN yet.
So you don't get all the nice modern conveniences,
but you do get an extremely lightweight system.
And if you know a little bit of C,
you can configure it any which way you like.
Which is cool, I guess.
Have you thought about doing a show for them?
That's not before about.
No, sorry, sorry, it's going to say,
yeah, oh, one's excellent.
Well, dear, that means you've got the old over 50 year bugs.
Some kind of joking name.
But I don't know, does it make Wayland
for the parent need to make it
reload better or whatever the reason was really?
It's largely because X, X is such a massive protocol
at this point.
And it's so loaded with security issues.
And it was like, we need something simpler, more modern.
And with a spec that isn't wildly growing out of control.
And that's where we got Wayland from.
And pipe wire is kind of complement to that
because it does exactly the same thing to, uh, to sort of audio.
Right.
I have a jack, that I combine these two.
I have my favorite cross-release.
I, I, I, I, PavU control is a, is a wonderful tool,
but it also causes massive headaches.
If we can get something that can simplify even more than that,
that would be fantastic.
You can, PavU control, yeah.
Maybe you could probably have.
Yeah, I, I use it as well.
But the only pop, the only thing is that I am not breaking,
I'm breaking a laptop with that.
I, I don't know, wow, quite.
But that speaks my volume up past last time,
percent, yes, because I've got a lot of devices,
no problem.
That new YouTube video sound will not be enough
in a way, crack or crack or pop.
And then I broke my sound on a laptop,
and it was like really internal sound.
Well, so the, uh, you could see in the, uh, in the, in the, uh,
the mumble here that there's one just called honky magoo.
And that is doing the audio stream.
So I use that to do most regular podcasting,
and I had a, uh, mic set up for it.
I got a nice new mic, Logitech wireless mic for Christmas.
I plugged that thing in, and beforehand I had, um,
when you say podcast and butt, uh, working,
and everything was working just fine.
And I tried out the new headphones and then it all broke.
I'm honky magoo, the radio, the audio stream that we got.
Okay. That's me. Hello.
So I'm on right now.
So because of the way that everything went with, uh,
trying to play with Gaview control, um,
anything that's going on inside of mumble
gets broadcasted out through butt, uh, and then over ice cast.
Yeah, I was on, yeah, I was on the ice cast.
But my, I know that's bad.
My, uh, my headset hooked up to, uh, that laptop,
you could hear me inside of,
everybody would be able to hear me inside of mumble,
but it won't go out through ice cast.
Just that headset.
So that's why I'm on another laptop that I have,
that I have pocket able to talk to other people,
and it'll still go out through ice cast.
That's the fun of Paview control.
I spent about 20 minutes and, uh,
not matter, apparently went to the,
no, he's still in the room at least if he's awake.
He, he helped me out because I sat there
and fought with the Paview control,
just trying to get something to work, right?
And this is what I finally came up with was,
I'll just log in when talk on a, uh,
different laptop.
And then I'm just going to leave this thing alone,
because it's broadcasting.
And hopefully next Friday, when I do the lug cast,
I don't screw it.
It's not screwed up, and it does the recording
just fine for lug cast.
That's the confidence.
We'll have a backup copy.
Don't worry.
Yeah, well, hopefully, uh,
maybe Daniel recorded a backup copy.
And he tries to record the, uh, Jitzi again.
Yeah.
Oh, you're doing that one, Jitzi, right?
No, we do a, uh, bet.
So, um, Danny, uh,
Minix, uh, who is on the Linux lug cast,
he, uh, set up a Jitzi server.
And we like to do the Jitzi server during the show.
That way we can all kind of see each other while we're,
I like to see each other.
Yeah, it's, it's just fun to do.
Uh, so we, uh, he started recording it.
And then he's, he set up a YouTube panel.
And so he kind of sets, he takes the, uh,
audio, he does an audio recording that attaches it to the,
the video, because we shut off audio on Jitzi,
because it messes up with doing mumble and having audio.
Uh, he should see.
So he attaches the mumble audio onto the Jitzi.
And then he, uh, uploads it to YouTube.
So that's the, that's, that's, that's the thing where he is.
So when he said to me, I'd say,
he's cocking his cock, I can see people like,
no, no, no, no, it's just audio,
but Krishna's podcast is just audio,
but then you can sometimes do video as well.
Or is that we, we are not, uh, video, but, you know,
we are, we are definitely not primarily video.
The video is just kind of like a fun backup thing,
because occasionally, you know,
Joe will be 3D printing something live during the show,
and he'll just kind of show it to us in the middle of it.
And then it kind of accidentally breaks the whole, uh,
the whole, you know, audio side of things,
because they have no idea what we're looking at.
So it's kind of night that we can kind of go,
well, you know, if you want to see what we were,
uh, when we were looking at, you can refer to the video.
Or whatever my most recent project is,
or whatever I've been 3D printing lately.
Watch Joe working out in the corner during half the podcast.
Yeah, exactly.
And we can see he's got the biggest bed maybe as well.
Oh, no, that's what I was saying.
Anyway, yeah, that's definitely Joe.
I got, I got nothing.
I'm trying to, I'm actually doing, uh,
trying to shave daily now.
Used to be like every four days or something,
if that and I'm trying to, I got the electric razor going.
I'm trying to get nice and clean shave another time now.
Well, the thing is I got really lazy when I,
I was wearing a mask all the time.
I mean, I'm like, I'm like,
I'm sitting there and you're saying,
Oh my god.
No, I'm just never leaving the house.
Uh, I'm like, oh my God.
My shoes got a lady to impress.
Huh?
I don't.
Well, you have to impress your wife every now and again.
Er, you never, that's why I shave every now and then.
But my wife likes the beard.
That's it. There you go.
Oh, keep it.
That matter. You wig?
That mind was here a lot earlier and um uh,
the next thing you see here now.
God bless, he's been on since the beginning, since he started in the morning.
So, and maybe a little while before that, because he was over in the the lug cast channel.
He kind of just hangs in there going so well.
And he switched over when we started this at 5 a.m. EST.
Joe, did you get any sleep?
I had a couple of.
That's good.
I might go take a nap here shortly.
Thanks for your time yet, and then you can do the yesterday tomorrow, woo.
Yeah.
I got to drive my mother to the airport tomorrow, so I'm not sure how much.
Luckily, I don't have to, I don't have to drive her until about like 3 o'clock in the afternoon.
So, I would be out here for a little while tonight, but I don't want to be in like, I usually
wind up hanging out with the wife until about like midnight or like a little bit of a
four midnight, and then I'm coming down here, and then I'm down here until about like
3 o'clock.
Yeah.
And my kids get up at 5.
Depending on whether or not I'm like super tired later, I might just have a nice tall
glass of whiskey and pass out.
There you go.
Sporced it while he's still here, I guess not.
Are you talking to me, sorry?
Yeah, you have to here, mate.
I'm always here.
Come on to the West as I'm trying to tell you, was that you?
British, because actually.
Nope.
Maybe that was another one, maybe that was free.
The man who owned, I was kind of sure about DWM.
I don't do podcasting, so I don't know.
I don't do shows.
You just do podcasts every Friday evening.
Every other Friday evening.
Every first and third Friday of the month, you should do podcasting.
There you go.
I don't really, I don't really bother with podcasts anymore.
I mean, I've been on this, I've been on something else for a little bit, but that
it was actually saying that last week, I listened to the very last bit of this from last
year, because I was on it, yeah.
I was like, oh, yeah, remember that, Chapman, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
If you'd rather podcast on Sundays, you can join the mincast, we're looking for more
hosts.
Not mad.
And I'm on, I'm on a bunch of, actually, I got, well, no, I'm sorry, I'm on here, cause
it doesn't matter.
I think it's things changing, so basically, it does do a few versions.
It does not matter.
I mean, yeah, I run mitt, but most everybody else on the show runs whatever makes them
happy at the time, moss, which is like every other day, but sometimes for three times
in a day.
Some say, I'll do this one, Jarro, that people get on about, you know, I'm actually
pretty good.
I run the game, but that free thing, take it out of some way.
I've been running Mint for almost 12 years now.
Well, then you should definitely come and be a host on the mincast.
Nah, midcast, we're too structured.
Go on the link, the lug cast, we just basically show up with the microphone and you're
good.
Start talking to Max.
Perfect.
But tell us about that too, man.
I've been using Linux since 95, so we're perfect.
There you go.
Perfect.
Perfect.
Join all three of my podcasts.
Right.
Come on.
Right.
Come on.
The mincast.
Well, that depends.
Well, that depends.
That depends.
Well, I hope we're making it into a mincast.
So I can imagine you want some mincast.
First question.
What's the point?
I've been listening to you guys for a while.
That's a lot of things.
I've been listening to you guys for a while.
I'm certainly running the bun now.
I can learn, yeah, why do I need a minad question for green background?
Well, the whole thing is yes, it's called the mincast.
Yes, we discuss anything that's coming up with Linux.
Mint itself, but most of our conversations are Linux agnostic. I mean any Linux we talk
about it. If things are coming up in arch, if there's an application that we like, if there's
a workflow that we like, whatever we want to talk about, we just spent like four shows discussing
the history of Linux and different distros. And yeah, Mint got mentioned, but there were much
longer conversations about Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, and all the different flavors of Arch. So yeah,
Mint is an important part of Mintcast, but anything Linux related is more than...
I've got a question. Yes. This is Bill from Mintcast, by the way. Somebody mentioned that
Mintcast was a bit too structured, and I'm genuinely curious to get people's input on that,
because I feel like that was a joke. That was me, and that was a joke. Well, I mean, I have heard
that, though, and you heard that from people that can't structure themselves. We keep a structure
because we need a structure in order to be able to actually make our shows. Us getting on there
and just start talking, we might as well all quit and just join them. We've had a couple of guests
on the show since I've been a part of the show, and later on after the show, I've asked them what
they thought of the experience, and they've kind of well and overwhelmingly common responses,
that it's a bit brutal in terms of, you know, the overall time, and then also the strict adherence to
the... Well, we basically have a list of things to say, and the minute you go off that list,
people get a little uncomfortable. I don't know. Well, okay, but it is something that I've been
kind of curious about, is it something we should look at, you know? The notes are there to, yes,
help keep us on track. But if we go off on a side conversation, that's always been perfectly
acceptable, and then, you know, once that side conversation is done, you just bring it back to
the notes so you can keep hitting your talking points. That's all that those are, is talking points.
Right. Yeah, I'm just curious.
I'm going to get my...
I'm going to get my...
I'm going to get my...
I'm going to get my...
Nobody likes this thing, I'm going to get my...
I'm going to get my...
Damn, I'm getting...
I will kick you. I will drive you your house right now and kick you.
I did ask for a chance on that.
So, yeah, I had to come on and hassle them.
I have a sorry interrupt you.
Go ahead, I'm sorry.
All right, we'll ask the question, right?
Right, if I just submit a cast or the luck cast, what's the point really, is it past time,
is it hobby?
Am I going to get a nice job doing that?
Let me just say what was that?
Honestly, no.
No, look, the Linux lung cast was initially started as kind of a...
Let's talk about our projects.
Yeah, let's talk about our projects, and then it just kind of diverged into a...
Let's talk about stuff that's going on around.
Honestly, the Linux lung cast is really a lot more for the participants than it is
necessarily for the listener.
Yes, it is a lug.
It is a lot more for those people to show up than it is necessarily for those who listen.
But I have a fun time just being there, you know.
I can't...
I listen to it because I then really go back to go back and listen to some of the fun that we've
had doing it.
No, hands for the pick cast.
We choose a movie every week.
This week, what is the past movie?
We choose a movie 44.
I have watched it.
A horrible movie from the night.
Don't mess it up for me.
I have watched it.
What we've wanted to do is just because we all sit around and have the time talking about movies
and TV before we start talking about all the Linux stuff that we've found during the times
between, you know, in terms of just more of general conversation about things.
And then we have people who come on and then we've had a couple of new people come on and they
have things that projects that they're working on and you know, we sit around and talk about
some great place for people to get started with podcasting.
If they're afraid to get started with podcasting, jump on the Linux lug cast and we will help
you with your audio setup.
We will just BS and get you over that first hurdle of getting your first show out there
and feeling good about it.
We'll just come right onto Mintcast like I did in the middle of the live cast.
Spend the next 30 days like not being able to hold down solid food.
That's that's how I did it.
Just get away.
The way I explain it to people, the lug cast is if, is if a mad magazine met Hacker News and then had
a retarded baby.
Yeah, that's a good perfect.
Now, but with Mintcast, yeah, there are some shows where it's pretty light topic and then there
are some shows where it's completely like desktop focused, but then there are also shows where it is
definitely, you know, business focused or learning something very in-depth.
Man, people used to get mad at me because I would just really talk about command line stuff
and it's like, how can you talk about command on a freaking audio podcast and it's like, well,
you know, if it's that much of a problem for you to keep track of it, you could always go
check the show notes.
Which I don't understand either because if we, if the lug cast ever goes, you know,
it starts talking a lot about command line stuff, that's probably fine.
You know, if, you know, that's part of Linux.
Right.
Why is, why is talking about command line tools more, more sort of alien to an audio podcast than
talking about graphical tools?
I don't know.
How is that more alien?
I don't know.
Because, well, a lot of it, sometimes it's hard to read out all of the command itself.
A specific command.
Unless, unless you, so there's, there's a way to do it right where if you can like, if you're,
if you're doing something where my, my, my favorite command for most things is dd.
So if you can sit there and explain that you're going to go dd and then you're going to go if,
which is the infile, and then you do of, which is the outfile.
So your infile is there.
Let's say your iso and then you can say that, you know, outfile is advice you're going to set it
which is you say you explain it as slash dev slash sda or whatever it is.
If you can explain that through audios and so people can almost visualize what you're talking about,
it made it explain the thing.
But if you just start reading out, there's a different scale way down on it.
Okay, that's true too.
No, you're, you're talking about dd and dd commands can get, you know, a little bit long.
But then there's youtube dl commands, which are like combined with ff mpeg commands and will take
up like three, four lines and trying to explain all of that just isn't going to work.
And, but I wouldn't try that, you know, in an audio podcast anyway.
I would start out by explaining the highlights of that particular command and then say specifically,
check the show notes if you want to see exactly what I used.
It's going to be different for you.
You're going to be using a different path.
You're going to be getting a different file, whatever.
But this is the general idea and people would complain about, you know, well, you have,
you have people complaining about stuff that I had there.
I still don't understand how people can complain about a podcast being too long.
They have a pause button, right?
They have a stop button and they can resume it later on.
Right, right.
So explain to me how a podcast can be most long.
Most commutes are 45.
No, I agree with you completely because I listened to everything at 3x anyway.
And, you know, pause and play, I do understand how that works.
I use it all the time, especially because I listened to, you know, 8,
16, 20 hour audio books.
Right.
But the way it was explained to me was most people's commute from home to work is approximately 45 minutes.
That's the amount of time that they have to listen.
So they want one that will fit into that commute.
So after they get out of their car from their commute, they're going to forget everything that they just heard.
You know, I don't know.
Okay.
So how does the second they get back in their car?
Like what's going on?
I don't know.
Slide tangent, slide tangent here.
But I actually now have an absolute yearning to go and listen to somebody
read the DDD man page at 3x speed.
Okay, that's exactly what I need.
So there's a guy that has gone through the man page.
What was his name?
Mato.
Mato.
Mato.
Mato was on.
Hey, world order.
Where did I listen to that?
I would pay for, I would pay for the mic
for machines.
That's a really good thing.
The next manual to me.
Well, no, he has a new world order.
He did, he has, he did a like whole year of, yes.
In depth of like each, each program,
the each application, yes, it is, it is somewhere hit.
The new world order is somewhere between maddening and fantastic.
Just the amount of in depth that that man goes into is just awesome.
That's where he did frightening at the same time.
Because he started doing that after, you know,
I talked about people complaining about me talking about command line stuff.
And then he just goes into this like,
damn, 10 times more in depth on the command line than I was talking about.
Just kept pounding it.
Good new world order has always been that way.
He's all of his stuff has just has always been very,
very, very in depth in a lot of it is very, very,
very in depth command line type stuff.
That's, yeah, if you want completely in depth command line stuff,
that's the, he's the way to go, man.
And then he goes, he's the educational counterpart to the love cast.
Yeah, he's where you can actually learn something.
No, you gotta, you gotta provide a steps in the, in the Joe steps.
There you have tilts that talks about Joel's house all the time.
You have love cast where we talk about, we talk about, you know, text stuff.
But we also talk a lot about movies and television,
you know, all sorts of tangents.
And we talk a lot of, there's a lot of crude jokes on there,
especially once Danny starts talking.
No, what's it about me?
That's a look back.
And then you have like mid cast, which is a little more,
it's, it's more structured, you know, they're trying to get everything
into their timing and whatnot.
But we will talk about our personal projects and
we will talk about our in depth topic.
They have like a new world order, which is, is very in depth,
mostly like command line stuff in, is if that's what you can,
if like I couldn't, I couldn't follow that.
It's just, that's, that's above my knowledge on things.
I could probably get, you know what, I could probably follow some of it a bit more now
than I could want to initially start listening to a new world order.
But we love doing interviews with whoever we can find
that's doing whatever in the industry.
But interviews are always fun.
That's why I like it when new people come on because the love cast,
because I, I almost, I try to almost do like interview style,
just try to, you know, try to ease some stuff out of them.
I like, I want to just, we said in the industry,
so here's a question in that case.
It actually works within that, so it's also, I use the hobbyist.
Well, I work with Linux, but, you know,
anybody that does any kind of Linux administration works with Linux.
I work with Windows, unfortunately.
I work a lot with Windows too, but I hope everything is Linux.
Yeah, at home, everything is Linux.
Actually, the project I work on at the moment is, is tangentially related to the new
hotness, because like everyone is talking about mastered on now,
and I'm a maintainer of a different sort of federated project.
So we're just sat in the corner going,
Oh, you maintain Front Quill?
Oh, I love Front Quill.
Yeah, we love Front Quill on the show.
We all have, well, a couple of us have our own servers.
It's great.
Like a couple of us, you and I,
Yeah, that's a couple.
You two make a great couple.
We do.
That's cool.
Who is this talking?
Yeah, it's me.
I'm not my computer, so I can't see.
I know.
You can't kill me.
I go by, I go by smaller.
Okay, cool.
So are you in there?
Yeah, I've ever seen Matrix translation.
Yes, yes.
Oh, okay.
I'm seeing one of the admins in there.
Nice.
No, I think I'm in there as just my real name, just cure on.
Okay.
I used to be Sparif, and then I changed it in one of my clients,
and it updates it in every single room, and I just ask whatever.
If you see any blog posts by Fun Quill,
it's usually signed off by Sparif,
because I'm usually the one writing that stuff.
But cool.
Well, we have a couple of shows.
We'll gladly invite you on for interviews.
Okay, I've been invited for a few interviews today.
No, I'm not joking.
Yes, you have.
And the other day, it's going to be.
In fact, you've even been interviewed without knowing you've been interviewed.
Well, talk to Bill and get things set up,
and he'll get you set up for an interview with MintCast.
Phil's still on?
No, you don't even mention the luck test.
I see where you're in priorities.
Oh, I was going to let you handle that.
I knew you were going to open your mouth any second.
Well, nice.
Night PM Eastern every first and third Friday of the month.
Anytime you want to show up is cool.
We will interview you.
We will just sit there and chat with you.
You can just hang out and talk about what we're talking about.
We're talking about this.
Yeah, basically.
Watch some stupid TV shows before you join,
so we have to talk about movies.
I don't know.
Does anyone here watch Retro Strange?
It's an own cast server that just shows public domain movies
and infomercials and TV shows on the little constant,
like 24-7 loop.
It's brilliant.
That sounds like George and I.
All right, we're saying just the best.
We go in there and just watch their Japanese movie
and make we glued comments.
And we're usually not even talking, though.
Did anybody watch this year's Mrs. Brown's Boys Christmas Special?
I know the New Year's Special should be coming out here in a few hours.
Hey, nobody knows what you're talking about.
I was just trying to pretend in the background, yeah, I'm nodding.
Yeah.
obscure Irish TV show reference.
Yeah, I'm sure.
Is Mrs. Brown's boys sub-skill?
I don't know.
It's obscure in the U.S.
I'm not in the UK, it's not so short, it's not real TV in the UK.
That's not a TV anywhere here.
I've just been getting into trouble.
Oh, is this Lever Eaton Johnson?
Yeah, I went to the living river and dipped out another SSD for my new computer.
Nice.
How's your new year going so far?
Your pre-new year, I guess, New Year's Eve?
It's going pretty good.
As soon as we forgot to use the show notes, everything improved immensely.
We're left off.
Well, thank you for something to do again.
We're still using the show notes, but we're just building them as the show goes on.
Right.
The New Year's show notes.
I don't know anything about those.
Yeah.
We started off at the beginning a long time ago, and no one has touched it since.
I didn't know.
Is there a link to it?
Yeah, on the HBR page.
I'll add stuff.
I forgot there was even New Year's Eve show notes.
I think next year we're going to have to move away from the mumble.
What?
The problem is, is that going to be a next year with some of the stuff going on the world?
There might be a new curve wall or something.
There is.
I'll still podcast as long as I'm not dead.
Then we might not have to worry about it at all.
So don't borrow trouble, especially trouble that far ahead.
Then even after he's dead, he'll still podcast.
That's right.
I'll have a back cue.
I'll just put my stuff on repeat.
There you go.
Just bearing me with my microphone.
Yeah.
On my cell phone.
It says.
Yeah.
He got to send me with some headsets.
Yeah.
That's probably at least 150 headsets in this room.
At least.
What about the horses in Thailand right now?
He might jump on.
He was on this morning.
He was on earlier.
Oh, it wasn't.
Yeah, with El.
Nice.
Well, they were driving down the road.
They're very pretty countryside.
They got dark quick too.
Come on, guys.
El could make new work look good.
We're not jerseys.
I've just thought what's the name?
Net miners back.
Net miners.
You know what that means?
The next five to the next hour.
Yeah.
You know what I'm getting at?
Yeah.
Do we know who the next hour is?
Well, we Finland and yeah, Finland.
And Ukraine.
I actually believe you.
Yeah, Ukraine.
And well, they're still near maybe.
Yeah.
We are.
Parts of your work.
But yeah, Ukraine should be.
Also, also next year, we'll put Eastern standard time next to the Zulu time.
We got to do the translation.
Net miners.
Net miners.
We can use North Korean time in calendars.
Why?
Why?
Because we have a lot of North Korean time in calendar and all that.
That's why it's at UTC.
It's actually.
Yeah.
Yeah, Ukraine next.
And Finland.
Also.
You.
You.
Some well as well.
You got you guys have inspired me not to rip apart my new computers so that I can install the SSD in it until the new SSD comes.
Oh, glad we could help.
Inspired.
Inspired.
To that, you inspired somebody today, Joe.
Is that a rare thing or what?
I will go from 240 gigabytes to.
I inspire people to tell me to fuck off all the time.
Spires people to expire.
That's inspirational.
Well, you know.
I'm sure it hasn't thrown up, however.
I know.
I invited her on the show.
She was like, no, you always record me saying something dumb, Dad.
Oh, by the way, if you don't want to use the jigsaw server, you're welcome to do so.
We did early on it.
Well, you did.
Okay.
Me and that miner are the one people that are right now.
I'll jump back on in a minute then.
Yeah, well.
I don't worry.
I don't activate my camera.
I don't activate my camera.
I found the next country.
I don't want to cross.
I don't want to cross.
All you guys are replacing your monitors.
So I don't activate my camera.
I felt like I paid for any of these monitors.
It's like for the Herman Munster looks in the mirror.
It just shatters instantly.
I found the list of countries on Wikipedia that are on the UTC plus two punters.
So yeah.
These are ones where the new years is happening.
Yeah.
Happy new year.
I hope you're looking here as I should.
So I know Finland, Ukraine, yeah.
Should be.
South of Africa even apparently.
You get Egypt.
That's out.
I guess Libya.
Malawi.
Nambia.
Sudan.
Some beer.
Some bad way.
I think that's right.
Standard time year round.
Latvia.
Lithuania probably.
Bulgaria.
South.
South.
Right.
Do that.
No.
We know where we are in the show notes.
We never talk about anything.
It's in the show notes.
The UTC plus one is due and we want you to see.
Clearly it's Turkey as well.
Another few.
I'm going to say happy new year.
Ukraine.
Finland.
And those are a few countries in that same time zone as well.
Happy new year to you.
Now since you're working on fun.
Well, do you know.
Do you know what that word?
First of all, the decentralized book review platform.
Also, the next hour is even more important for the new year thing.
Because it's going to be mostly Europe with a section of Brexit land.
And the Canary Islands are not included.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Well, I just left all of mine.
Well, typical.
Basically architecture,
well, I left all of mine.
Original
BackWarm
He justード
Quick.
Quick.
Quick.
Quick.
Quick.
Quick.
Just like that.
Just like that.
For Bitcoin
I understand but it's still good and I pay $20 a year for it. It's exactly what I'm looking for is a
Federated open source decentralized version of letterbox because I like it sounds like a project. We can all work on well
See that link. Yes, I actually thought about forking bookworm. You get it. No, come on. Yes
But yeah, that that's exactly what I would like to have is that is a is a open source letter box
So I love letterbox to you, but I quit I quit posted not there. I love posting on there make lists and everything once I drank the cool
Late I got off letterbox
It's my new face
Of course I'm posting on Facebook and I don't know years. I mean I post pictures
Give me a federated
New Year's Eve. Yeah, exactly
Well, it's still this borough
I don't want to give it back. So yeah, that's a lot. Does that exist? A federated letterbox
No, which is red that box. I'll wait there's one just round there on the street. Yeah, because I had talked I had talked about bookworm
That what they did for books for you know compared to goodreads if there was something similar for letterbox that would be awesome
Yeah, I mean in theory, there's nothing stopping it you just back on to
TMDB as your
your sort of data cells and then just have
persons
reviews and
Diary as a federated channel. We'll see what would be the easiest way was just to be to fork bookworm and
Change the interface and all that stuff. We're not there easy, but
Rather than start from scratch
Yeah, in theory, but like at the end of the day these things are all
Relatively similar in the sense that if you forked bookworm you would still have to change the entire
Database structure API structure you would have to change the data sources that you use because that backs on to like open library and stuff like this and in this case
You'd be backing on to TMDB probably
And you'd want to represent different data, which means you would need to format your
Activity streams calls differently because that's kind of how federation works
So you would you would have to you would end up building so much of it again that you would you might as well just build a
Scratch because that would also give you more freedom to to design it how you want to design it and stuff like that
And also I don't know what stack bookworm uses, but maybe it's a stack. You don't like, you know
I mean funquel is written in
Django rest framework and I personally if I were starting a project from scratch, I probably wouldn't use that
Not that there's anything wrong with it. It's fine, but like I just personally would rather have something much lighter
Especially for something as simple as a letterboxed clone
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