My Frustration with Linux Prognostication

greetings and salutations and thank you for clicking on the video I do appreciate it this video might ruffle a few feathers and some people might actually get miffed but the discussion in the comments should be rather interesting to read that is for sure this is not a how-to video if you are brand new to the world of Linux if you just started following my channel because of the how-to videos this one might not be for you because you might just get lost you're not going to know what I'm talking about this is really aimed directly at the Linux community and so therefore if this is not your thing then you won't bother me a bit if you go find something else to watch also if you don't like videos where they're in podcast format where somebody just rambles on for a while then this one isn't for you either because that's exactly what I'm going to do but there are some things that I want to comment on that are being talked about in the Linux world and some of it makes me scratch my head and quite frankly some of it has got me very frustrated so parts of this video may come across as a rant at the end of the video I plan on talking a little bit about my latest project which is the Dell Precision T 3500 I've changed some things since I've posted my little video the other night I've got some great feedback from folks on that lots of help from the community so thank you thank you thank you thank you I'll talk about that at the end but right now let's get down to business oh and one more thing before we get into that the noise you're hearing in the background is sandblasting operations happening across the street on a 200-foot water tower and I really hope that they get this done by Christmas of 2018 because the noise drives me insane but it is what it is so back on April the 5th this big bombshell was dropped on the Linux world when Mark Shuttleworth who is the founder of a boom - and the spiritual guide that runs canonical the company that supports a boom - and distributes it came out and said out of the blue not in an official press release mind you but in a blogpost somewhere that they were just going to discontinue all efforts on several projects that they had going some of them for number of years and that included the unity desktop and it's gone bye-bye and also a boon to touch for phones and tablets and not only that it was announced very shortly after that that all updates for anybody who preferably owns one of those devices would disappear as of June of this year and then also the other things that went away were the MIR display manager and so I posted this video once I was able to grok what was going on I mean just really understand it when I first saw the news I thought it was a joke I posted this video and for some reason or the other this video took off most videos that I post that aren't how-to videos that show you how to do something they do not get embedded they don't go out to different websites and get shared and all that other kind of stuff so usually with videos like the one I'm doing right now I'll get two thousand views on this and that'll be it it'll be done but this video was picked up by the YouTube robots and was recommended for whatever reason to people who had YouTube accounts who didn't use Linux didn't care about Linux didn't know what it was and it was a real eye-opening experience because these comments kept flooding in and the comments ranged from just rank ignorant stupidity - very thoughtful analysis of what was going on from some people and it was really interesting to read and by the way I got called every name in the book in the comments from this video of me and my entire family it worked just called every name any kind of flaming that you could think of it was unbelievable and that was a interesting experience because it really brought home something to me that I have known for quite some time and that is that in the Western world in the United States especially nobody knows what the hell Linux is I mean people who work in IT know what Linux is people who work on servers know what Linux is but your average person on the street doesn't have a clue what Linux is keep that thought in your head as we move on to the next web page here that I want to comment on this is OMG a boon - and this is an article that appeared a few days ago I am NOT going to put a link to it in the description to the video if you want to go find this just type in OMG Ubuntu and it will pop up you can find it okay somebody like on the first video several people said well why didn't you cite the article if you don't know what oMG a boon - is as far as a website is concerned I can't help you and it's not my job to hold your hand okay but anyway this is an interview from Mark Shuttleworth he says that the desktop remains really important that is the headline however the highlighted line here is where we failed and I feel responsible for miscalculating was our push into personal computing phones tablets and PCs okay let that stand for a minute and then he goes on to say in the text here that he still feels that the aboon - desktop is important but it's important for developers in other words what he's doing if you read between the line is bemoaning the fact that a boon - in the Western world did not become you know a major competitor to Microsoft or Apple although it really is anyway it really doesn't make any difference whether the general public knows about it or cares about it because it is definitely kicking their butt where it hurts and that's Microsoft and Apple I'll get more into that in a couple of moments but this kind of miffed me because I have been following what a boon to has been doing very closely for a very long time I think a lot of people who are now very active in the Linux community if you weren't around for the first round back in the late 90s in the very early 2000s then Ubuntu is what drew you in because they called it Linux for human beings and it made Linux easier to work with than it had been up to guitar that a bouns who came along they did a lot of great work at canonical and they made it available to people for free they didn't sell it and it was open source and so therefore that was all very cool and that's what Mark Shuttleworth originally intended was that when he founded the aboon to project that it would be something that would provide this technology to people around the world that for other economic reasons or licensing or whatever the problem might be that they would have access to the technology that was exploding on the web this was of course I'm talking to past tense 10 years ago but it's still very much true and a boon to up until I would say 1204 was released was a bit sketchy if you were trying to make the switch from Windows and you were trying to learn Linux at the same time it didn't hold your hand it didn't help you out very much but after that it got pretty good I mean it's got its bugs it's got its problems I'm not here to debate whether a boon to is a great distribution of Linux or not but there is no doubt that canonical is become one of the most influential companies in the Linux world in the last ten years so we'll just leave that at that and I read this with some dismay because of the fact that other information that I have picked up basically why they are doing this is it's to stop the bleeding canonical lost three hundred and something million dollars last year and who knows what they lost before that and any company regardless of the reason why it exists or their ethics or whatever the deal is cannot continue to go on losing 300 something million dollars a year doesn't even make a difference that Mark Shuttleworth is independently wealthy I mean he could bankroll the place if he kept going at that he would have been you know he probably would have lost his fortune so that's what the main motivation for this was is just to stop the bleeding and stop putting money and resources into things that weren't returning any on the investment and unity desktop that was a pretty nifty idea I don't have anything against unity I'm not going to sit here and debate whether it was better than no more or any of the other desktops it is what it is but to push into phones the near display manager and all that stuff we've been watching this for years and the problem with it is is that the Linux community themselves didn't really rally around these ideas the Linux community wants Weiland as a replacement for the XOR display manager they don't you know nobody really wanted mirror and so there was a place that they were pushing in the wrong direction and hardware people weren't you know jumping up and going hey we want to support Mir and anyway the whole point of this is the fact that essentially they had to stop the bleeding the next thing that came out and this just came out the other day there's a couple of articles out is that a boon to is getting themselves all ready for an IPO which means a public offering that will bring more money into the company so essentially what's going on here is that they had to stop the bleeding they had to clean things up for a fire sale and the fire sale is an IPO they want to bring in investors which will bring them more money and what Mark Shuttleworth says and at this point is that they're going to concentrate on the cloud servers Internet of Things this is where they're going to put all of their resources so a lot of people at canonical lost their jobs when this happened but it is what it is and this is actually not horrible for the Linux community it's not terrible it doesn't represent that canonical has given up on the desktop or it doesn't represent the desktop Linux is dead what it represents is the fact that they have to tighten their belt if they want to survive it's just economics that's the way it is however it's being interpreted in that way by some people in the community that well if a boon to could not make Linux work on the desktop then nobody will and it's a waste of time for any of us to worry about recruiting new people to come to linux i've also heard some podcasters say that there's no such thing as new users and why do we even bother worrying about whether distribution will work for the new user and that sort of thing and as stuff just makes me want to bang my head up against a wall when I hear it because it is so out of touch it's beyond belief there are people who are discovering Linux all the time and in the last two weeks I have worked with at least ten individuals that I know of that have installed Linux for the first time on a computer and they are learning their way around it and most of them are enjoying it so no it's not millions but people are definitely coming to Linux so for somebody in a podcast which is followed by the Linux community to sit there and start talking about the fact that there are no new users we don't care about the average user it's just that stupid I mean it's like unbelievable to me that somebody would go on like that so mr. Shuttleworth will not hear this video but maybe somebody who's working in the company will and I'm going to throw out my opinion of where a boon to failed on the desktop it was not the product itself it was not the a boon to operating system ubuntu is imperfect and there's definitely room for improvement but it is if you look at it strictly as a product it certainly is saleable absolutely and if you go to India if you go to China if you go to other parts of the world a boon to is very big you can walk into a shop you buy a machine with a boon to on it these people don't think twice about it but in the Western world we've all had Microsoft and Apple shoved down our throats and the problem is that canonical did not promote a boon - they did not do that they left it too the community to do that there was no marketing department at canonical that I know of if there was it was very small there was no budget for advertising even a little bit it did not exist and they chose to put their money into chasing all of these different technologies that now have been deemed to be fruitless efforts like unity 8 and boom - on phones and all that kind of stuff but really if they would have taken some of that and put it into just flat-out advertising then maybe it would be a different story I don't think Linux has to be or will ever be the dominant operating system on a desktop I think the desktop market is shrinking I think a lot of people are getting their computing done on their phones and their tablets and they're tickled pink with their iOS and their Android and they don't give a damn about free and open source and they don't care about the fact that those platforms are controlled by mega corporations that are mining data from them and turning around and selling it for profit and the security risks that they put themselves out they don't care at all they just as long as they can get on Facebook and look at pictures of cats that's all they care about but there will always be a segment of Sirius computer users out there who want a workstation or a laptop with a keyboard and a track pad or a mouse or whatever some sort of pointing device that they can interact with this machine with and I think that Linux is definitely one of the best choices for that sort of system for a lot of reasons it's free and I don't just mean free as in free as a cost I would pay to run Linux if a boon to tomorrow said well if you want to have a boon - and I really wanted it and they charge $25 for a copy of it I pay it as long as they respected my privacy I don't care you know I will go after whatever is the most convenient and the most privacy respecting system that I can get my hands but the thing about Ubuntu and the thing about canonical in general was they just never promoted it they've left it to the community and that leaves it to folks like me who post videos on YouTube and do blog posts and stuff on the Internet to spread the word about Linux and that it just frustrates me because I worked in radio for a long time and television and I worked for some corporations and I have seen this mistake made over and over and over again a company will dump a great deal of resources into a product or a service whether it be like a radio format or a television show or whatever it is it's all the same it doesn't make any difference if it's a product of any sort you're wasting your time if you do not tell people about it nobody's going to know and of course a company like canonical which has about 500 employees is competing against Apple they're competing against Google they're competing against microscope Microsoft microscope okay Microsoft I don't know where that came from and these companies spend billions of dollars on advertising and if Google really wanted to flex their muscles they could flood the market with Chromebooks and advertise them on TV and that sort of thing they don't do that I don't see a lot of those sorts of advertisements from those companies but they could but you see nothing nothing at all from canonical and taking Apple as an example Steve Jobs was the epitome of the maestro who could develop technology and then sell it to people and those Apple commercials and ad campaigns those classic ad campaigns he was there for each and every one of them he was very involved he was sitting in the ad agency's office with the development team and I when I say development I don't mean software but I mean those who were developing an ad cam Payne he was right there in the middle of it whereas Mark Shuttleworth has never expressed any sort of willingness to speak to the general public other than to be at Linux conventions and things like that that's what I've seen if there were efforts that were made that came to naught I don't know about them but that's the main problem you never ever promoted the product they're just not good at promoting what they have let me show you an example of that let's jump over here to the boon to front page now it's pretty much look this way for a long time and it just says number one in the cloud and then we have this doohickey over here if we go to downloads and we go to desktop this is the desktop page there's how plain and boring can you get there's no mention here anywhere of why you would want to use it that sort of thing we've got the easy ways to switch to a boon to this is at the bottom of the page we don't want people to switch that's another fallacy out there is we're not asking people to switch off of their current operating system what we're asking them to do is use this and learn it so that they make it the confidence to switch so that's another thing and it's just nothing here now let's talk about some of the good things that will come out of what's happening to a boon - if a boon - is going to survive as a CO or canonical rather is going to survive as a company then what they're doing right now is probably the best thing in the world first of all they have tightened their belt they have dumped projects that weren't doing well for them and now they are going to move forward in areas where they know they can be profitable the boon - base will continue to be developed a boon - will be available as a desktop download it will include the gun ohm or gnome desktop environment you will be able to download straight a boon - whether that's going to be a better experience than a boon - with unity I don't know all I'm saying is that it will continue and since they are going to focus on IOT cloud services servers and things like that the aboon to base is going to be in really good shape and the innovation there is going to continue which is good and actually they might start paying some attention to some things that they've kind of let go in the past which leaves the flavors of a boom to like a boom to Ma Tei here I'm just using this as an example to take that base and build on it and then come up with a super new user-friendly platform and be there for people who want to start out with Linux and there are many flavors of a boon too although I will say that a boon to matei needs to change their name because the whole matei mate Mata whatever you want to say that word as and the confusion over its pronunciation is unbelievable one of the things that happened when I posted my video about a boon to here and all of these people saw this video who didn't know anything about Linux because they have not been shown it at all one of the things that they did was they joked on me for saying a boon to matei I was told over and over again how much of an idiot I was for saying that and I mean this was repetitive constant however if you listen to podcast and you listen to Martin whimpers who is the head developer for the Ubuntu matei project he pronounces it motet mata Mata and but when you look at it there's no accent over the e there's no accent over the a it looks like meat so what I have done for years is say net a or mate and lately I just say matei in videos because that seems to be what the developers want you to to do this kind of stuff in linux hurts it in the general public they don't know what we're talking about these weird names and strange different things this is a problem so I think the a boon to Matt a project if you're listening Martin if you're listening Helen what you need to do is just change it to mate and everybody out here we're just going to call it mate and we're going to go on with life because people don't get the yerba mate a reference in the name and all this other stuff but anyway I'm got off on that subject the point that I'm going to make here is the fact that right now the evangelism of Linux to the general public is left to the community and you probably will not be switching somebody to proper a boon to when you put them on Linux although we don't know because we don't know what they're coming up with it might be really cool once they make the transition from unity to genome known whatever you want to call it that's another one called it known for years looks like gnome if I go look that up in the dictionary guess what they talk about this little garden animal all of a sudden now we all have to pronounce the GE because it's GNU or whatever the deal is I stuff it frustrates me no end gang when you're trying to explain Linux to somebody it gets very complicated anyway the flavors of a bouns who are going to be the ones that are going to be the gateways to getting people started on Linux Debian based Linux Ubuntu based Linux is by far the best place to start a newbie because the software that is available for it and the ease of use and the stability once you get it set up depending on the distribution is unmatched by any other distribution of Linux and that it comes from testing and experience and working with hundreds of people you can choose to disagree with me if you want to Linux Mint how does this hole a boon to thing affect Linux Mint the truth is it doesn't and this brings me to my last point before I wind up this little rant regardless of what canonical does whether they continue to provide a desktop whether they shut their doors in six months and the entire a boon to world goes completely away it is not going to make Linux go away in no way will it be considered a failure even though a boon to has been the centerpiece of the Linux community for a long time now and people who have never heard of Linux proper and don't know anything about Linux they may have heard about Ubuntu that it still doesn't make any difference if it went away a distribution like Linux Mint would continue Linux Mint traditionally has used big portions of the abouttwo system however while it may have been based on a boon - with a few tweaks at the start it has developed really into its own operating system and they just at this point are a boon to compatible efo boon - went completely away and if they decided that they were no longer going to use a boon - as the base they could switch to debian and they already have the Linux Mint Debian Edition available and if you want it you can go download it it would need a few tweaks to match the polish and usability of Linux Mint with the aboon 2 base but it's there and it works and so it would be a readjustment on mints part but it would still be there now winix mint is a very interesting distribution of Linux because it is not very well liked by the Linux community it's considered to be boring they do things differently and so those who are big fans of a boon - on the cutting edge and Arch Linux and whatever they they you shun it and say well it doesn't do you know it's boring I don't want to deal with it however what Linux Mint does is it provides a very solid base for somebody who is just learning Linux it is also by far the most polished distribution of Linux when you install Linux Mint on your computer you have a fully operational system out of the box you don't have to tweak it you don't have to do anything to it if you follow the right steps during the install it's going to do what you need it to do and it will playback video and it will playback audio it has the codecs install all there's no tweaking there's no fussing you don't have to go get extra software to make it work a boon to to me even the latest versions of Ubuntu has reminded me of a house that you buy that's 90% complete and in order to finish it you've got to go in and you know you're going to have to choose your carpet maybe put up light fixtures all that you do all the decorations so you buy the thing 90 percent complete you got to do the last 10 percent Linux Mint offers you a furnished house you can just walk in and if you don't like it you can take some of the furniture out put new furniture in you can repaint the walls you can do whatever but at least you're not having to walk in and make a lot of decisions about what you want it to look like and how you want it to act whereas a boon to has always been taking about 90% of the way and then the rest of it is going to be you trying to figure out what to do with the system so that is a big compliment to mint it gives people time to learn the basics before they have to make decisions that will affect the rest of their experience and this is why I talk about mint this is why I run mint on my own computers this is why pretty much every single new client that has come to me through easy Linux in the last couple of years has asked for Linux Mint specifically it they this is why I talk a lot about men because mint takes their time when they're do a release they will not release until they are ready they test it they check it out they make sure it works and they make decisions cautiously and mint makes a very good workstation for average computer users who are just getting started now here we go with that average computer user thing yes they do exist yes there are people out there that when they find out about Linux they are want to learn about it yes they are coming to Linux maybe not by the millions but definitely by the thousands and sometimes even the hundreds of thousands depending on what part of the world you're in and Linux is definitely got a very bright future on the desk top on a laptop computer companies like system76 and dell are selling Linux computers pre-loaded inter where in europe is doing exactly the same thing and these companies are seeing huge growth from year to year to year because people want this technology so all of this negative prognostication and linux is dead and it will never be generally accepted bla bla bla it is a waste of breath and time and energy and just spews more negativity into the Linux community and there is already too much damn negativity in the Linux community as it is it's like for somebody who comes to Linux and they don't know anything about it it's like walking into the lobby of the Tower of Babel so many different people say so many different things on the one hand you have people who are sitting here saying Linux is great it's wonderful it will set you free and then we have Richard Stallman who is the head of the Free Software Foundation who constantly walks around peeing all over everybody and weirding everybody out and it's this constant drumbeat of you know everything that you're doing is bad and you need to stop and everything there's no practical compromise coming from Richard Stallman I mean the man is a genius he started the whole thing but somebody put needs to put a muzzle on him and it's the way I feel about it because every interview that I've ever seen with him has always been cringy and hard to watch and that sort of thing sorry for you Richard Stallman fans I'm going to get flamed on that one but I don't think he's a good representative for free software the open source movement what it's really all about I take a more practical approach to it and that kind of that kind of evangelism and language that he uses and he speaks very much in religious terms that doesn't help people Linux is a tool it's an operating system it's a technology it's not a religion and we need to stop treating it as such and he definitely doesn't treat it as a religion and as a matter of fact the first lecture that I saw him do he came out that's when he used to come out with the big floppy disk on his head claimed himself as the god of open-source or whatever the deal was I don't remember what that whole deal was but anyway that's why I do what I do is just to try and put practical stuff out there and put basic how-to information for people who are coming to Linux and ordinarily in my videos I avoid a lot of these political discussions and things like that but this time around I'm just really getting like shut up let's just wait and see what happens concentrate on the good stuff let's concentrate on putting out content that is going to help people who are coming to the community the refugees for Mac the refugees from Windows those who need a computer to do something the developers that are coming along the makers the shakers those are the people who are going to be coming to Linux in those are the people that we need to be talking to not the Linux elite and not the people who sit around prognosticating it's just this whole preaching to the choir and mutual admiration society or mutual defamation Society depending on who you listen to I just gets on my nerves after a while it really does that's why I did this and I feel better now that I've actually vented up on this subject a little bit and I thank you for listening just the conclusion I guess would be wait and see let's see what happens next let's see what canonical does let's see if they get an IPO let's see if anybody buys it let's see what they do with that before we sit here and print trying to worry about what's going to happen in five years ten years whatever concentrate on the people that need to learn how to use this now for whatever reason they come to it that's what you need to do it's not a matter of I guess I guess what it really comes down to is that in the Western world we are so ingrained to look for a profit motive and Linux doesn't have one and that there's people even that have been working with Linux for twenty years and they talk about it and they write about it that never can get that concept in their brain that market shares don't matter and whether you can make money off of it doesn't matter what manners is is that it exists and that it represents a community and not any every one person in this community uses this technology the same way and no one person in this community knows everything about Linux and so therefore let's just wait and see what happens you know they've said I've heard Linux is dead so many times in the last ten years I'll just be like okay you're going to have to come in my house and take my computers away from me and force me to use Windows before I'm going to say Linux is dead because that's the way I feel about it okay real quick here the end of this video I want to thank the folks who gave me some really great feedback when I was talking about using this del T 3500 workstation called Big Boi you know I do realize this is not a new computer gang and I do realize that there are machines out there that have more memory and more processing power and all that stuff but this is a really cool machine to me somebody pointed out that I needed to go into the bias and turn on multi-threading and now I have ain't logical cores thank you all so I was talking about the price of the memory for this machine somebody pointed me to a source I just ordered 24 gigabytes of memory for this computer for not a whole lot of money so we're going to see if it works when it gets here it's used memory that somebody was selling on eBay but I found exactly what I needed and the full 24 gigabytes and it's on its way so this machine will jump up from nine gigabytes to twenty four gigabytes when I get that and now that it's got the four the the eight logical cores running the multi-threading is enabled on the system guess what I can't even make it breathe heavy no matter what a throw at it as a matter of fact for most of the time that I was getting ready for this video I had two virtual machines that were installing and updating in the background and I didn't notice anything so we're going to talk more about this machine as we roll along check out easy Linux on the web check out easy Linux on Facebook and also check out freedom penguin comm for lots of stories about Linux there's a lot of good practical to stuff in there and so if if you want to learn something about Linux you can do that as well and final word don't believe the height gain don't listen to the prognosticators they know not of which they speak they're just talking to talk and I may be accused of doing exactly the same thing with this video that's fine with me thanks for listening

Channel: Joe Collins

Views: 26,609

Keywords: Linux, OS, Desktop, Laptop, Software, FOSS, Computer

Id: p2mHDit3XlM

Length: 35min 56sec (2156 seconds)

Published: Wed May 17 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/pongfonge]

Interestingly it was "average" Linux Users that brought me into the fold. I'm a developer and wouldn't consider myself an average user, but I had tried Linux back in the day and decided I didn't want to mess with it. Then several years later I discovered some of my friends who I would consider highly intelligent but not computer geeks, had been using Ubuntu for a quite a while as their main daily driver. They said that it was easy to install and did everything they needed. It got me wondering if things had changed since the last time I installed RedHat from a cd-rom on a 486; so, I downloaded the latest Ubuntu (circa 9.04) and plopped it on an old laptop to try it out, pretty soon I had switched over my main laptop and I've been running Linux every since. It's also worth pointing out that one of the two friends got so into it that he began distro hopping and started teaching himself a lot about IT. Eventually he made a complete career shift and now does SysAdmin work. He is a full on Arch, butterFS, XFCE using mad man now! So in any event new and average users are out there; though, some of them don't stay average users once they see what a real OS can do.

[u/glink86]

He has some points. he fairly nailed it with the canonical failing to advertise Ubuntu and the RMS.

other than that he was way off....