The Homelab Show: Episode 4 Linux

all right we are live with episode four i just titled it linux because i didn't want to narrow it down we're gonna talk desktop we're gonna talk you know servers and distributions so it's just linux talk today this is uh tom lawrenson j lecroy yes so a little quick housekeeping for those of you that have been following us since we started yes it's a podcast now and for some of you who are already listening to this sometime in the future yes it took a little bit longer than we were hoping to set this up but it's the podcasts are live you can find them at thehomelab.show there's an rss feed we've got them published to places where podcasts are published like spotify and apple and everywhere else so we're easy to find everything is at the homelab.show and of course the history of all the previous shows all right let's talk about linux because you can't build a home lab without linux i think right well you can i mean i think that's a good place to start actually i mean can you um well sure some people out there might just build a home lab because their company just is a windows shop and they want an active directory server on vmware along with uh you know some other servers so there could be some people that you know use windows and some people that don't i think it's probably true the majority is going to use linux it's just very very flexible it's almost like you know just clay you can mold it into whatever you want and it's not to say you can't customize windows but you have a little bit less it's a lot more restrictive and i am not saying you shouldn't have windows in your home lab please i'm not that person um in a matter of fact a lot of times home lab is frequently deeply driven by a need to learn and if you need to learn is some of the windows stuff but i'm not positive whether that me and jay will at some time in the future do a windows version like when most of the time you use windows on a necessity not out of want but linux yeah people want to get into it people want to dive into it and like you said the flexibility the molding of it especially when you've been playing with it as long as me and jay have and once you've learned how to compile your kernel which now is a lost art like i i couldn't do it anymore like i used to that used to be kind of like a requirement like now it's not even something you can get started way easier in linux now than you could 20 years ago and it was a requirement for me because when i first started you know i was um you know quite on the low end of income i i should say and all my computers for many years were hand-me-downs um parts that i found so i would have like several generations old computers um to put it lightly and what i found is that compiling the kernel i could just delete stuff i don't use oh there's a bunch of amd modules here i don't have an amd system well actually i did so you could reverse that intel either way delete the modules outright make sure they don't load and have a kernel that's stripped down and only has the stuff in it that i care about it would take about 12 hours i thought or maybe longer to compile and the worst was like 11 hours into your 12-hour kernel compile when it would go wrong and then you'd start over actually what's worse in my opinion is when it succeeds and then your computer doesn't boot because one of the things that you've made is a module you shouldn't have or worse you have a required component that you just stripped out of the kernel that's required for your chipset so it was quite a learning experience not something that i would recommend anyone go through unless you want to learn like embedded development or kernel development then you should absolutely do that but nowadays we can compile the kernel a lot quicker but for home lab that's probably probably not very many people are gonna go in and do that i i wouldn't think um so windows you know you know to end that whole conversation i will give them some benefit they have come a long way um since you know back in the day i remember when i was in totally enamored by lvm logical volume manager um you know for discs i confused is the word i use when i reference lvm [Laughter] well um but anyway it's back then it was just so amazing that i could resize a file system you know on the disk without shutting down the machine assuming of course that there's some additional space there and you know a long time ago i'm like yeah i mean that's just going to show you how flexible linux is you could grow the file system online without shutting down the server and booting it my understanding now if i'm not mistaken as windows can it can do that now i mean i think it has been able to do that for a while i don't know for how long but it's just the way it was you know it's like we have these features in linux and then they eventually make their way into windows um but like tom i'm not that guy like if you use mac you use windows i have a linux channel right so i could be accused of having some bias but at the end of the day you use whatever you like you use whatever makes you happy whatever fits your use case um and there's no judgment but yeah i have a linux oh sorry i was gonna say that i see this and i joke around about it but there's um too much you know my friend i've seen craft computing come up in the comments come time he's great he's got a lot of home lab stuff as well and he comes at people come at him sometimes in droves and the twitter army's like you need to use linux you can't you're doing something in windows and he's like so yeah um and i'm right there with you i use linux because i love it and i enjoy it it's my it's the subject of my hyper focus i have my adhd shirt on by the way um but um you know hyper focus is the symptom of adhd i'm mostly kidding but i might not be so i focused on linux because i i just thoroughly enjoy it and people kind of as i've said before in the podcast you know people can accuse us of being fanboys and maybe to some extent that's true but when you're doing a passion project or a creativity project you kind of tend to cater more towards the thing that you're into so linux is you know when we decided to talk about it i'm like they could yeah that is a great topic well i mean of course it is for me right i have a book or actually five books three versions of mastering ubuntu server is out um has been published in a few books before that and then the youtube channel so i have no shortage of knowledge there so i figured maybe i could say a few things about linux and help the audience understand some things about it that they may not have understood talk about some distributions pros and cons of differences and and so on and then we can just go from there and we should probably start with which distribution should you choose and i'll uh duck some hate in the comments this is this is the hot topic right it really is and and one of the things that i want to get out of the way too is um a question i get asked a lot what is the difference between a server distribution and a desktop distribution the answer is nothing well that's not completely true the short answer is nothing it's a linux kernel both the desktop distribution and the server distribution have the linux kernel so it's linux either way the difference is what software is bundled with it and a server distribution generally speaking is not going to have as much bundled with it because it wants to stay out of the way for your workloads you you have something running maybe you have a web server you're serving a website um if you're running the gnome desktop on there and it may not make a big difference nowadays but there was a time where just having a a login manager display manager if you will running in the background in a display manager is what handles visual login a graphical user interface it just was a waste of cpu cycles so generally speaking it's very common that you don't have a gui that being said i also understand there's beginners out there that kind of need that because they're not there yet um and i i did require the gui when i first started and then i became self-sufficient on the command line but no judgement if you run a desktop a lot of people do and you might even run a virtual desktop think about it you have a server on your home lab that is running a desktop environment and you use something like x2go to connect to it to have a desktop in your hypervisor so yeah maybe you'll have a desktop environment then that's the main difference the absence or implied absence of a desktop environment doesn't mean you can't run one so when we look at ubuntu server for example um which is a perfect example of this that's the difference you install ubuntu server and then later on you want a desktop environment you could just install the ubuntu hyphen desktop package install that one package and it'll bring in a bunch of dependencies and pretty much convert it into a desktop and this is where they think the lines can get blurred a little bit more i mean we're used to the concept in windows like there's a server version and a home user or not home user but a desktop environment version and it gets a little bit more blended in linux because there are some maybe server applications or you can say this is a dedicated server for a thing but it may need a ui to help control those things so the lines are super blurry in linux it really comes down to how you label it the i mean obviously if you're going to use it for multimedia editing i wouldn't call it a server um it's just kind of a label and it doesn't have the same strength and meaning because it's not like it has to be separate because i can take a base server setup to do a specific function and still load some multimedia editing tools on it because the kernel is really what makes it linux that's true and to make it even more confusing for a time i used to run ubuntu server as my desktop distribution of choice why because it doesn't come with anything but the command line so what i would do is just manually install each individual component like the desktop environment but not the entire desktop environment not the theming just the desktop base or minimal desktop with no added apps and i would just add the things i wanted i liked it it was almost like the closest thing to the arch linux experience you can get on ubuntu technically um so that's basically the difference is the absence or implied absence of a desktop environment and now we could kind of get into the distributions and the pros and cons of each i'll let you start because this is where yeah i'm just dubbing it like i started in red hat i moved to debian and my reason for staying here is because i've used it for 20 years and it works so and debian is a is a great one to talk about um and again there's pros and cons but um debian is awesome it is one of the oldest distributions one of if not the first distributions with a package manager which to us now it doesn't really seem like a big deal right like every distribution has a package manager you can use the command line to install a package it brings in a bunch of dependencies um when i started i had to figure out the dependencies myself i didn't really have that luxury to where oh package a requires uh package bc and d and so on and it's just going to install them for me i only have to install the one but i literally had to remember what is a dependency of what i started and then there was a time where you could even run apt-get in red hat they had um yeah isn't that crazy like they had a version of apt that somebody recompiled to support rpms it didn't last for very long but it gave you that um yeah so a package manager may not seem like a big deal and debian kind of made that famous in my opinion it was interesting and yeah referencing back to the what was early referred to as dependency hell which when you had to install some of those rpm packages getting the other dependencies to set something up apt really solved that and it's what brought me from red hat where i started and moved over to a debian base i should say because i still like ubuntu and i use pop os but that debbie and bass and me being very familiar with apt how to manage it how to manipulate things in the system and get them set up it really i think brought a ease of use they were kind of like the gold standard and still in some ways are there's a lot of other competing systems that work very similar to app now matter of fact they had a app essentially you can look at the way that they distributed was very similar to the way we have app stores now that when this goes back to the very beginning concept of debian we just apt to get install it would realize in the universe that is debian and pull all the tools to put things together we think about apps on our phone and things like that that's the way debian was formed long before the iphone was invented or any of these ecosystems we're used to now like an app store before we had the concept of the app store yeah and i remember using synaptic on debian for for the gui equivalent of that um so debian you know i do have some criticisms of debian which i'll get to but i i need to always talk about the positive first and there's a lot of positive stuff to talk about when it comes to debian and it's really great on servers especially um and i'm going to get into an education that wasn't in a few minutes but generally speaking debian is a good choice um bottom line regardless of my opinion uh debian is a good choice now where debian gets a little confusing for some is that some people refer to it as a rolling release it's not there's actually three different sub versions of debian they're stable so i use stable and just the blanket term debian interchangeably when i just say debian i'm mostly talking about debian stable which is the stable um i was going to say it's on a release schedule but not really they kind of release it when they're when it's ready yeah which is great because if they they think oh it's going to be out in a couple of months maybe or maybe there's going to be some bugs that they want to work out they're not like canonical with ubuntu where they live or die by their release like the release date ubuntu was late once did i ever remember and a lot of people may not remember that actually they actually delayed a release once once just one time um but they have that release date and they stick to it debian is more like we'll release it when it's ready which is a really great thing and stable it doesn't update very often i would say like you know we're on version 10 right now debian stable with 11 coming out um but we don't know when it's probably going to be you know first half of this year i can almost promise you that and that's awesome because because you don't have to worry about is it ready for prime time well yeah they wouldn't have released it if it wasn't ready and then i want to say on average something like a year and a half to two years is a new release give or take some release windows were shorter than others they had fewer bugs to fix really what it comes down to but then you have debian testing which is the next level and it's semi-rolling now when i say rolling the rolling distribution i'm sure almost all of you know this but some of you may not a rolling distribution has no release it's like it they just keep putting the new packages out there so a new version of uh the gnome desktop comes out they just you know put it in the repository install your updates you get the latest everything um it's generally what a rolling release is and that's kind of what testing is with debian but the reason why it's not full rolling is because they have a freeze window where they stop and it is a development towards a stable release meaning debian testing today will become the new stable so debian 11 today is debian testing but then at some point they freeze it they fix the bugs and then they change it to stable and then the current debian stable now 10 becomes old stable so that's kind of how that works so testing is basically the new or will be the new debian stable then we have unstable which is rolling because there is no freeze as i understand it they just keep throwing packages in there but it's unstable most a lot of people argue that it's stable enough that if you have a problem you just wait um but i don't think anyone's gonna i don't think anyone's gonna run unstable on their home lab servers and i think fewer or i mean some people might run testing i think stable is going to be the way most people go i want to make that distinction clear about the three versions so everyone understands you know if you choose debian you're probably choosing stable but the other two versions exist as well right if you want some more cutting edge packages or cutting edge surprises that come with having the latest package run unstable or testing now there's also the concept of a mixed debian stable testing which is where you add the testing repositories but you give them a lower priority so that you're always pulling from stable but if you need that new package you can just grab it from testing last i checked that's not supported you can do it many people do many people have no problem with that and a lot of desktop users will do that because they may need a new gui app or something that isn't in the repositories and they don't want to wait the year and a half or two years until the next debian comes out they want that package right now but they don't want all the packages updated to unstable or testing they just want that one thing um unless that's changed then it's not supported but you can do it and i don't really recommend it i just want to let people know that it exists in a concept because you'll hear other people doing it and and not to get too far deep into it but there's other options you have like apt pinning which allows you to pin a specific version of software and i've had to do this before even with testing because the new version was incompatible with another piece of software i ran on top of a framework but i had to temporarily pin a version uh backwards and it you know it's not a security risk to pin it to an older version but it's a compatibility this happens again back to multimedia editing which i've brought up because that's directly where you'll notice some of those problems because like editing with the caden live tool it can be a nightmare before flat pack and all that but that's another episode before we talk about platinum yeah well that's uh that's a little bit of controversy with those universal apps but um yeah there's a lot of little details you can do to dive into is what i was trying to get at with the app tool with debian so you can kind of mix and match your system be careful because you can also create your own instabilities doing so yes and i've experienced that there's also the back porch repository which is supported and it's released for stable there's no schedule on that usually they have it out with each stable release around the time it comes out and that allows the debian developers to give debian stable users some packages that they can uh freely install that are newer than what comes with debian stable normally um and i'll get into the downsides of that but but i just want to let everyone know that that does exist you could just install the back ports repository and stable there's instructions on debian for doing that so if you are you know for purposes of home lab you need a newer version of apache maybe it'll be in there um or whatever it is you're running maybe you'll have a newer version in the back ports repository now downsides um because everything i said was upsides right you have all these different repositories and ways that you can configure your software or you can ignore all of that and just use debian stable and not over complicate it and not even look outside of debian stable and you'll be fine for the most part so downsides um hardware compatibility in my opinion and debian is one of the lowest of all distributions now i know i'm going to get a lot of hate mail for this now don't get me wrong on this debian is great but more than any other distribution i've had issues with compatibility where if you install it on a piece of hardware that just came out most likely your hardware will not be fully supported it'll be the next release of the distribution which could be a few years away so just think about it for a moment and this has happened and i'm going to actually just use a story that happened to me company i was working out a while back we bought a brand new dell precision server and corporate was very microsoft centric so they just had a contract with dell we didn't even have a choice over what model that we were going to purchase want to throw that out there but dell power edge servers are pretty good so i didn't really combine that so i just grabbed debian stable and this particular device we were making a router internet gateway device so we had two gig nics on here um install debian stable didn't detect the network card at all on a brand new server the newest release of debian didn't detect it and we ended up going with ubuntu on that one even though we are normally a debian shop so sometimes hardware compatibility lags behind with debian because when they release let's say that debian stable came out today so it was released on march 31st that's not true but let's just assume that then if a new chipset comes out on april 10th chances are it's not going to have the drivers for it could it could work but it's not going to know about hardware released in the future that's the problem and that's really a problem for all distributions but that being having a two or one one and a half to two year release window sometimes that could be a problem but if you don't have like the latest and greatest you're probably not going to really run into a problem there um it is what it is and the reason why they they do this is debian stable means stable they don't want the bleeding edge software in there by default so you can also appreciate the fact that even though the hardware compatibility is a bit behind it's stable it's pretty rock solid so you do get that benefit as well it's a trade-off though yeah they're also lack of non-free uh repositories being defaultly available and for things like nvidia i mean we can argue and hate on nvidia and rightfully so for not giving us good open source drivers but i also have the realistic i can complain about it but i still have things to get done so i need this nvidia card to work and this is where ubuntu has done a good job of just check this box for the non-free and here we go now we're going to load those proprietary drivers we know we all don't like the fact that they're proprietary we can all agree on that um but we're surrendering to the fact that nvidia makes good video cards i needed my video card to work and debian's very purist on that and this is also what kind of hurts some of their driver support a little bit you know because like you said there there's ways you can enable it in debian but it's out of the box not as simple to do right so one one example of this i'm going to use a laptop example but um you know it still could happen to a server as well uh my thinkpad x1 extreme first generation they're up to generation three as of now the current stable version of debian will not boot on it at all there's just no way to get it to boot that i've found um now a new user would throw up their hands and get frustrated now if i put more time into it can i get it working yeah i could definitely get it working um but this is two generations ago it doesn't work with this hardware it's too new but it's two generations ago so let that sink in for a minute um a new release of debian is right around the corner now i installed debian testing on it and it's fine perfectly fine so one solution some people will do is they'll if they have this problem they'll run debian testing and then when it graduates to stable they'll just keep going with stable which is a good solution because you start with something that works and then it becomes stable as you go sometimes you have to do that but like tom mentioned there there's some quirks with um hardware compatibility that might frustrate new users intermediate or advanced users might not be put off by that and also like tom said yes we all hate proprietary drivers i do as well but when it's time for me to play video games because i'm done working i'm gonna want to use my nvidia card to play doom and yeah i understand i don't like nvidia and um if my computer has an nvidia card yes we could argue that amd is better and technically they are if my computer has an nvidia card and it's time for leisure time i want to play some games and yeah i'm going to require a proprietary driver as much as i hate to install it it is what it is unfortunately it's our reality for sure yeah that's what we kind of run into so um i think those are the main downsides about it now back ports is a i feel like back ports is a potential solution to a lot of the problems i mentioned because they can add a new kernel and they have done this to back port so you can have a newer kernel with newer hardware support in there it's just not really predictable like like one released debbie and i can't remember which like backports was enabled like right from the get-go like pretty much on release day another one i think is over a month until backports was even created for the current stable release even then there's no packages in there for many months and i think one release didn't even have an updated kernel for over six months but then another release had a kernel update pretty much right away so you you can't really depend on backboards it's good that it exists but it's not i can't call it a solution because it's kind of hit or miss they might have everything on there on release day they may not and there's other factors i won't get into that depends on that so generally speaking we're still talking about hardware compatibility at this point because that's generally why you want to install a newer kernel so those are the downsides but again debian is a fantastic distribution and i don't mean to talk down on it because we have to owe it a debt of gratitude for everything that it's given us and the change in things that's made in the industry and like i said earlier it is a good choice so if you uh run debian stable on your server in your home lab and it works and supports your hardware you will not regret installing it in my opinion so um so there's debian absolutely and then all the debian derivatives where do we start with those i think ubuntu is probably one i'll be to start with because a lot of the derivatives are going to be desktop related because you have mx linux which is fantastic um but that's you can install it on the server you're probably not going to ubuntu is kind of one of those things that's difficult to talk about because i write books on it obviously so you could argue that ubuntu was a source of income for me but i'm not going to just also accept everything canonical does and you know just pass it off as that's fine it's fine it's fine if um you know it deserves criticism it's going to get criticism regardless and i think one issue with um actually i should talk about the upsides actually before i get on the brand uh podium thereby ubuntu the good things let's talk about the good things i should always start with the good things hardware compatibility is in my opinion the best in ubuntu than any other distribution out there today now that doesn't mean and i know some people might say well ubuntu doesn't work on my computer that's correct it may not um that doesn't imply 100 it just means it's better not perfect but better um and keep in mind for the youtube channel i'm constantly trying computers um desktops laptops and installing linux on all kinds of different things throughout my career it's just ubuntu generally works more often than other distributions that in and of itself doesn't mean that it's going to really factor into home lab much because when we deal with servers um you know we're probably not dealing with excuse me bleeding edge hardware anyway but i do have to mention that hardware compatibility is a benefit but how is it a benefit well in order for me to tell you how it's a benefit i first have to we have to talk about lts or not or non-lts i think that's the elephant in the room with ubuntu like should i use the latest and greatest or should i use lts lpf stands for long-term support which means you get five years of support on your servers three years on your desktops and well what does that mean what does support mean is canonical gonna allow you to call them on the phone when you have a problem no what it means is you get security updates which is pretty important when you're hosting things especially when you're you know making things publicly available non-lts releases get nine months of support which means at a minimum you have to upgrade your os every nine months if you're on that train but with lts you can kind of keep your current distribution installed for a bit longer and it kind of depends on how much time you have uh if you don't have a lot of time to mess with your home lab you might have to just go to lts but i i argue that lts is what anyone would what everyone should go with and not go with it the intermediary releases um now that didn't used to be the case because you would install the non-lts releases to get newer software but nowadays they back port newer drivers and kernels to the current lts release so that reason alone has gone out the window because now even on a non-lts release you still are able to get the newer updated packages and i think that's a major benefit now i'm not going to talk about universal packages today but they exist we do have to mention them and now that we have universal packages which basically allow you to go outside of your distribution's repositories to install software now you can have access to applications in your lts release that you normally wouldn't have had access to unless you're using a non-lts release so more and more as time goes on the lts versus non-lts um you know debate i i feel like is is really becoming not so much a debate anymore because for the ubuntu developers intermediary releases are very important because they're testing the next just the next generation of technologies for the next lts release but for us home lab and home users i really don't see a benefit so much anymore in using something outside of lts and there's going to be counter arguments but um you know that's my opinion i use linux as my daily driver for both my laptop and desktop for my business so this is you know i like it being stable i've not had too many problems not running the lts releases but i'm also someone who's a little bit more savvy but for a lot of people if you don't have time to deal with it just stay on that long-term service release and i think you're pretty good it's like you said with them backporting some of the applications it's made the debate less because i would have argued before well don't you want the latest version of this that or the other you kind of had to now they're kind of back porting thing including some of the kernel updates and some optimizations if they're deemed stable and beneficial enough they will put them into a long-term release and you'll see an update on that yeah and that's where it comes to for me but when i asked or i made the statement earlier that ubuntu has better hardware support and i said how did they do that well that's how they do it they backboard that's how they accomplish that and their hardware enablement updates now one downside is that it's not until the i think point remember the point two of the point three um release minor version release of an lts release um we'll start to get those hardware enablement updates i'm pretty sure it's a dot too so um basically you you won't have that immediately available so that could be an issue right if you have a piece of hardware right now and you really can't wait the six months or whatever it's going to be then yeah maybe you might be forced into using non-lts because you're an edge case at that point but that's how they do it they back port things to the current lts release which is awesome i think it's great that they do that and i think if that's what makes ubuntu a game changer in my opinion for that because it's not a perfect solution there could be a race condition when did you buy your hardware when did ubuntu put out their release maybe it's not going to line up so well but if there's a better chance of that lining up than with debian in my opinion so that's a benefit there another thing that i think is a benefit is that canonical they really seem to understand and have a bigger role in the ecosystem and you could argue that's a downside but they do a lot to push ubuntu in the cloud so pretty much every cloud provider you can get an ubuntu version and yeah you can get debian too but they also enable different things in their tool set like they have lxd i think it's pronounced lex d but i i can't make myself say that no it's not lxc to me i don't care who says otherwise um it's basically an advanced without getting too much into it it's a it's a an addition to lxc lxc is a containerization technology i think it's a great one actually lxd builds some additional things on top of that and canonical makes that a possibility um so you could take that you know technology and you have you know more clustering and more options and i think some of those features that they haven't already done so will be backboarded or moved into lxc but but they they add all this to it and they make it easy to install like openstack and a number of other things they have charms they have all kinds of different tools that you can use they have metal as a service even to spin up and and provision your hardware so they have all these tools that they make available and i think will be of especially benefit to home lab people and debian doesn't have that right you can still do all those things you can still install openstack and w nothing's stopping you from doing that but if you do that same thing on ubuntu there's a way to do it quicker and whether you use that or not it's still a benefit because canonical adds these extra layers on top of debian which ubuntu is based on debian so i think that's also a benefit that they take the best of debian they kind of smooth out the edges a little bit and then we all benefit from that and now we get to the downsides oh boy um and like i said uh even though ubuntu and canonical i mean because i wrote the books obviously they're a big source of income for me um i'm not going to spencer myself and not talk down on them because when a company makes a bad decision they make a bad decision and they have made a few a lot of people will remember back in the day when they put ads in the application launcher in unity on the desktop now that's not something debian would have ever done ever like you could use debian and never worry about that in fact you don't have to worry about a big corporation making a really dumb decision when you're using debian because you know it's a community project that's not to say that there's not going to be things that happy and w happen in debian that you don't care about or don't prefer the whole systemd thing was a huge debate back in the day with debian when that became default and also the gnome desktop becoming the default again because it was technically the default twice strange but true so there's a little bit of controversy in w but not nearly as much as canonical because they're they're a company and they're going to serve their interest and and a company's purpose in life is to you know sustain itself and to produce an income and it's perfectly understandable to me if someone doesn't really want to use a project or a product that is made by such a company because would they take it away from you i'm not saying they will or if they get bought out what if microsoft buys canonical tomorrow well you care maybe so there is that um but the dumb decisions that they've made in my opinion and i could say that because i feel like it is like putting ads in an application launcher to me and i know this is a long time ago they don't have that anymore but i have to think like i just can't think of a rational project manager inside a company doesn't understand that everyone's going to hate that it's like yeah we'll release it's fine just like people you know at microsoft released windows 8 with a straight face but um you know it's like yeah this is going to be great everyone's going to love it no one's going to complain really um in the app launcher really yeah and canonicals i mean they pushed it with the whole unity thing when they were doing that um that was called right the whole before they kind of went back to using no what was that when they first released it it was pretty controversial the way they implemented it are you referring to the unity desktop yeah some of their deviations and of course the embedding of amazon links or something that just made people unhappy so so i'm going to give you uh so so i mean someone the counter argument to that is well you know they were smaller back then and also um a distribution's hard to maintain and expensive i mean if you just think about it for a minute what the bandwidth bill is on people downloading the iso it'd be great if people use torrents more because that takes some weight off of the servers and people ask me how can i give back to linux i don't have money to give but i want to do something we'll just make sure to use torrents all the time because you're you're stopping some of the bandwidth that that they have to pay for so you're technically donating money back to an upstream project by just using torrents um well i mean unless that same server on their end is also serving the torrents then it kind of defeats it but yeah um getting back to ubuntu it's expensive and someone might say well yeah they got to make money somehow and you could uninstall the package or do whatever you're going to do to disable it i agree yeah they do need to make money but there's more sensible ways of making money and the perfect example and i think tom knows the one i'm going to use here that happened to me personally on ubuntu desktop is um as an aside they had this app called jockey which i don't think has that same name anymore it's just additional drivers and it's great now because if you have ubuntu on your desktop you could just search for additional drivers in your applications it's there you click on it and if there's a proprietary video card or something on there or wi-fi card whatever you have it'll offer you um to install it do you want me to install this proprietary driver yes click the button and then it does it so that naturally becomes the first thing i did when i installed ubuntu because i had an nvidia card so me being you know the person that i am i i just type more than i click so i just hit the super key and i go to the application launcher i start typing jockey because that then was the name of that additional drivers app so so and you know how these application launchers work like if you're looking for firefox you start typing f i and it automatically knows well firefox is you know meets that requirement so it's going to narrow the list down to anything with fi you type r and then you know narrows it down more so as i start typing jockey i see ads in the application launcher for jock straps so i'm looking to install my nvidia driver and i'm seeing underwear in my app launcher so yeah that was what i went through um and i i think i might be i wish i knew what video it was i mentioned this in because i i mentioned this right in the video check this out i'm going to search for jockey underwear um yeah not a good not a good decision and that's an example of something that would not happen in debian let's be honest um they're not going to do something like that right um they're i think they need to make it was more safe for work i did the same demo but i typed in calc and look look it's advertisers for calculators i actually just wanted to open up a calculator just like not buy one yeah but yours is really on point this was one of those heated debates and decisions that was made that was terrible over at canonical but they've that's so many years ago we're really digging up something old they haven't done anything like that in quite a while which has been great and the reason why i bring up this old thing specifically is because the mindset hasn't changed they made a number of other decisions that we'll get into a long time ago and they've removed those changes a long time ago but the reputation is hard to get rid of i mean there's still people to this day that'll come in about the linux mint security fiasco when they had that i think it was a easy to guess password in their database server and they got completely owned in the iso it just got um owned as well um you know what forgiveness right um yeah they learned a lesson it's fine um but but there's going to be people that remember that there's been and i remember this particular instance because it's funny with the with the whole jockey thing but there's people that don't think that's a downside and maybe it is that that's the company that made that decision but they've been fine and they switched to gnome from unity i think it's been great they've done a lot of upstream work now for gnome and improving it a lot of the speed increases that gnome has seen in other distributions even is because the canonical engineers have submitted patches to push that those changes upstream get rid of memory issues and handle threading more efficiently everyone benefits from that so that so there's a downside there potentially and then i think that's really the main downside in my opinion because i feel like ubuntu even though they've they've had some bad decisions they're still kind of a victim of a mindset that won't change like even even microsoft is dealing with this and even i still have some stigma um against microsoft but they've done a lot with the open source community because they've really come around and a lot of people didn't think that the microsoft gloves linux thing would last more than a few months but here we are i don't know how many years it's been now and they're still on that but the mindsets are going to change after a while yeah and they they've been in i mean honestly the real reason microsoft loves linux is because it turns out it runs in azure really well and they can monetize azure so microsoft loves things they can monetize and when linux was against their monetization model they didn't love it now they've integrated into their monetization model so now it's fun it's it's a wonderful thing we've never hated this have we yeah well i mean but but i think the important thing to understand is um you know if if any of us as people did something that we were sorry for or did something that we said yeah sorry about that i'm not gonna do that again we would want that forgiveness you know right um but we're not so willing often as as a species to give that forgiveness to a company yeah but canonical made some bad decisions um you know what let's just see how they're doing now and as time goes on um and they continue doing better things then my you know confidence starts right it's really good and companies i think are even easier to forgive than people sometimes because when you really look at it they're they exist in name that has has continuation but the people that drive that company may have been changed it may change the dynamic of how that company operates so they may still exist in name but in purpose so to speak and intent they've changed a lot with the people that maintain and are steering that company um but anyways let's get back over to linux uh because you get back over to linux and talk about some distributions now centos is something that we it's like the elephant in the room that we should talk about but yeah there's a lot of change around centos right now and i don't want to get on that bandwagon because my current opinion is that it's really not something that i'd recommend anymore but then again i do understand there's definitely use cases for it it's just that it used to be in currently still is but won't be for long a um basically a clone of not a clone but a re-implementation of red hat or basically it's a recompile of red hat without the branding so rather than pay for a red hat you can have the same thing but you don't have the branding and yeah it's still that today but they're they're moving away from that long story made short um i don't want to really get on that bandwagon so you have a whole video on that topic so i do i do i i think easy to find you you should use it if it works for you um there's no judgment there if you are using centos because your company at work is a red hat company then you probably want to use something that's red hat based and that's been the benefit of sent to us for a very long time um and now i think you can get a developer license of red hat it for you to play around with where you don't have to pay for it i didn't look into the news yet but i heard that was the case so i'm going to assume it's true it's a good thing you can get red hat installed without paying for it if you're a developer um again you know don't you know feel free to fact check me on that i need to do more research on it that has changed but it exists but if your use case is that you want to use what work is using well maybe you should try to use red hat now and not sent to us if you can but maybe you'll try sent to us stream which is what they're leading into and maybe you'll love it and maybe it'll work out for you or maybe you might look at fedora server or something like that instead but i'm not really going to talk much about centos because i've never been much of a center west person um i have a lot of respect for it but some of the pros at least were the fact that it works well with red hat and it's compatible allows you to um you know have a testing environment for your red hat servers or even just run your servers on centos and it also serves as the base for other distributions as well i'm pretty sure amazon linux is based on it if i'm not mistaken so there's that as well downsides um before this whole fiasco i would say hardware compatibility again although i think it's gotten better and i don't think they do that anymore they used to really want you to install that desktop but not so much anymore and everyone just pretty much ignores it and installs minimal which means command line but sent to us as an option you could try it in your home lab you could see if it works out for you if it's more in line to what you use at work or your style then uh yeah maybe it'll be a good choice yeah in centos i would say it's just one more and someone you know in the comments throughout rocky there's a lot of different you know rpm based distributions out there it's kind of like there's two families oh two big families there's more i know but you have debian based ones which is popos which i mentioned at the beginning and ubuntu and then you have things that are rpm based and or red hat based essentially or related deeply to red hat um that are going to be rpm based so there's actually a lot of uh diversions in there um between those two and then we have open sousa yeah enterprise linux which now share a lot of the same back-end packages i can't speak as intelligently about those because i haven't used them in quite some time but i do plan on when i get some more time diving back into susa because there is a lot of good there they are in rpm based distribution there are some people out there that are claiming that you know we have all my linux and we have rocky linux as replacements for centos which i'll get to in a minute but um some people argue susa is is a good um step in that direction i don't know maybe maybe not but one thing i can tell you it was the case and i have to assume still is because i haven't heard of this changing i used to recommend susa to people that are a mixed shop like like you're at work you have a windows rack you have a linux rack you want to tie into active directory at one point microsoft was really helping out with that and bridging the gap specifically in susa in their tools to help it integrate with the microsoft tools better and i would recommend it to people in that situation and no one that i've recommended it to ever came back to me said how dare you that was horrible that was a train wreck um nobody had any complaints and they seemed to appreciate that recommendation so i think i was right to recommend it um i do plan on diving back into it like i mentioned i don't know when i'll have more opinions on it at that time but i don't think anyone's going to be um having a problem choosing susan open sousa you know for their um stack i think they'll be fine with it and there's a lot of people that really passionately love susa so that's something i keep in mind too i've met a few of them at a couple events they seem like really nice people i always feel like it has a lot more popularity over in europe than it does here in the united states that's at least my impression of it i i just haven't run into it that often except for a company we have a couple companies we worked with here that are based out of like germany and they seem to really like uh susan that's the times i've run into it they're they're companies operating in the u.s that we've worked with but they're based out of there so like i'm much like you i don't use it so i can't speak a lot to it the people seemed happy so and they said support was great and i was like cool i'm just here to fix this thing hey i get the impression i don't know if this is true but it seems like centaur excuse me um susa is to other countries as centos is to us here in the united states yeah it seems that way um at least in some countries so it definitely has a great following um but we have to be honest i mean susa has like the probably one of the best benefits of all the distributions that i've mentioned that you know we need to talk about and that's the fact that it has a chameleon as the logo come on how cool is that yes the brand is the best thing ever and don't think millions as logo aren't they the ones that release the videos that go coincide with the releases i don't remember yeah they have that that song i think they call it uptown funk they do parody videos oh yes yes um [Music] that that was when i was in my head i was thinking about this video where they released a video about how to say susa and it's literally just i don't know how many minutes somewhere between three to five minutes of people from all walks of life saying susa and it i don't think it was meant to be funny maybe it was maybe they have a sense of humor but it was great right you had the video full of people just saying susa over and over again so and i googled you know earlier in my career i don't know how long it won't go how do i how do you say susan the video came up and i clicked on like oh okay yeah so there's another advantage to susa they they have a whole pronunciation video which is hard because most time i read things and then until i started doing things on youtube i don't know how to say them in person linux conferences when i first started going to them were just a way to figure out how to say words sometimes like what are you calling it again oh we're talking about the same thing we just say it differently and because we've only talked about it online in forums yeah i don't want to be the person that says debian that drives me crazy no judgment if anyone listening to the sentence i was that person i said it for a long time because i don't know i knew someone else who said it and no one else corrected me and then i was like oh i'm saying it wrong well maybe and you could argue the word devious is d e and then the letter and then i i mean same difference but um another distribution that we can talk about and i think a lot of people are going to be even like very surprised that i even brought this up and um that's arch linux right um and i don't want to play off the memes i run arch and all this stuff and yes i do too though um it's a desktop distribution i mean not i mean it's not technically but that's what most people use it for i do legitimately feel that in the hands of the right administrator somebody who has a way of managing it that arch linux can and can be and often is a very good choice for servers now that's going to be very surprising to a lot of people because it's a rolling release it changes a lot every day and server administrators they really don't want to keep up with that and i get it because everyone's busy and it's hard but if you really think about it the you have to update arch um constantly thing is not true you do have to update it at least once a month probably um every two weeks install your updates but there's this mindset you have to update every day that is totally not true i mean that's counter to uptime right i mean how many everyone in the linux community knows someone whose laptop has been online for 300 days straight and they're bragging about it um in-arch linux is going to need to be rebooted more often because it changes more often but all things considered if you keep the packages that you've installed to a minimum because you have full control over what packages you have installed your margin of breakage is lower if you only have the packages that are absolutely required for the purpose of the server for example if you're running a web server you you don't want to have a desktop on there right um you have only what's required to run apache nginx or whatever you're running and that's it so now you have fewer packages installed and then the margin of error increases now there's still a margin of error there's a problem now my way of handling arch has been install it on lvm and use lvm snapshots and what i would do is update every two weeks and then when i update i'll take a snapshot before i update no vm snapchat i'll install the updates and then if something doesn't work i'll revert the snapshot and then i'll try it again a week later maybe they fixed it it doesn't happen often where there's a breakage but when it does i'll give one week and then i'll try the updates again do they work now yeah everything's great so i'm gonna finalize the snapshot and make it permanent because everything is great and this is my known good server configuration with the packages that are installed right now and then i'll repeat the process time to update take an lvm snapshot um test it out you could even do it on a test server first which is probably a good idea anyway um the benefit of arch because a lot of people might be thinking why would i go through all that i'll just install debian and install and updates when i feel like it um but the one benefit is that you don't have to worry about a new release you just keep it just a rolling distribution you just keep updating and you never have to um have a situation oh debian11 is out i wonder what the update process is going to be like and maybe i shouldn't have mentioned debian because generally speaking upgrades work well there but i could say ubuntu because there's going to be a bigger margin of error there but it's but still i get it right um you could have make an argument in both ways but i think arch is worth considering yes it's a lot more work but if you do automation which we'll get into in another video you could automate your entire arch install and it doesn't matter anymore or you could even have a very minimal base and run containers on top of it and all the complexities in the containers not in the os so there's just only a kernel and docker and nothing else and the required libraries to make that work and that's it there's no other packages to update because you're running containers we'll talk about containers in the future yeah just found that out there i will also throw out there the archwiki is solid i have found a lot of just general linux results or something i was trying to configure something to set up to find a parameter and i was like wow the archwiki had a really good write-up on the answer um they just have a good set of documentation which is linux documentation it's not specific to arts just a lot of like here's all the parameters just they've done a good job of maintaining and curating really good information and good write-ups on how to change settings it's i'm amazed how many times i'm looking up a parameter on a specific application or server application and the archwiki will have the answer to the configuration for that which is great and someone mentioned uh manjero which i'm pretty sure i always say that wrong a a spin of arch linux that has they have a little bit of a delay in a system in place it's not a fail-safe system but they're not as likely to just throw packages at you they're going to hold it back a little bit and kind of wait wait a week or two or something like that um and also if a lot of people are complaining about something they might actually just say okay yeah we're not gonna update that right now we're gonna nope looks like we lost jay for a second um oh yeah i guess i must have dropped off what was the last thing you heard me say yep you're back now uh you said sometimes people like to update so in regards to mangero which was mentioned there um just to try to make that short um it is a is it an option um you can consider and um i would argue too that because manjero has a delay in the updates coming to you that in and of itself isn't much of a benefit because you can implement that same delay on your arch system it's just you don't have mangero forcing it on you in the stable repositories you could say i will not update the servers or i will wait three weeks for the packages before i put them in my server you could control that but that that's an aside either way it's an option and someone also mentioned well wouldn't there be too many updates to keep track of well yes and no if you install everything but the kitchen sink it's not unlikely an arch you're gonna have like 300 packages to hazy yeah there's there gets to be just like a lot of updates when you're trying to do that there just gets to be a lot of updates that can be problematic when they all come at once like that um i i think i wonder i kind of wonder sometimes speculatively like what does it look like 10 years from now well rolling distributions at some point just become the way we do things i kind of do see it as a future for things where we just constantly we're used to this on a lot of other devices that they just constantly get updates and sometimes that can expand out to the whole operating system where everything just kind of rolls like 20 years from now we'll look back with grayer hair going remember when those people needed version numbers on their operating system yeah i agree with you i i do predict and i i i've said that before not on the show but i do think that's going to be the case now first of all i predict at some point that ubuntu's non-lts releases will become at least semi-rolling like debian has testing they freeze it becomes a new release now ubuntu releases every two years no matter what for lts so i think that they would have a system where they're rolling in between that and that gives people the latest stuff because the difference between lts and non-lts is blurring so much it's like we get the new gnome release that's about it we're not even getting that in this new one that's coming out um but i think the way i would like to see it in the future because you could argue that rolling is too unstable because there's breakage but what you could have is a base that rolls every three months you're your kernel your drivers they don't have to roll every day you can have your your base distribution core packages that makes your distribution boot and memory management and all that um in your virtualization tools on there um just roll every three months then you could have a application repository that rolls every week because that gives you your latest firefox and your latest google chrome will actually go chrome is a bad example but your latest application packages in a separate you know release or repository that's rolling faster because people want the latest browser and then you could have a the desktop environment rolls every six months because the new gnome is out every six months and then you have it kind of split up like that so then you have varying levels of stability and then corporations or organizations can change it say yeah i don't want anything to you know update unless a security related for six months to keep it a little slower but i do agree because even windows 10 is is kind of a rolling release now yeah so well when they said windows 10's the last version they kind of meant it as in we're just not naming other versions they're still going to keep changing out under the hood and i think there's something to be said for the experience being better that there's new versions coming out but it doesn't require us reloading the whole computer like it's not windows 11 12 13 and then you're reloading in the upgrade process i mean granted yes i know it's far from perfect and it does break that's part of what i make a living on but the concept is there it may not be best implemented in the windows example but the concept is there where you just change out some of the components and some components and browsers being your biggest threat surface they need to be updated almost in real time as threats come about or as flaws are found in a browser because we interact with the internet as a whole directly through the browsers and it's not the firewalls protecting us it's whatever you know threat can sneak through by us opening up a web page there are components due to security not just features that need to be updated rapidly and i'm going to do something that i don't do often i'm going to defend windows not review or anything but i'm actually good i mean because i think it's important if even if it's not my preferred platform that i call out something good um yes there's break it because it's a rolling release technically but how do organizations handle it or i should say how should they handle it because just because microsoft puts out the new version or the new update today with all the new features doesn't mean anyone has to install it today now the downside for home users is it's probably going to try to install it um and that there's a way to make that happen slower so you're not getting everything as quick but it's interesting to me like someone will say oh yeah windows just deleted all my stuff well that sucks and it should never do that that rule number one of an operating system that should never delete your data right but i could also argue that just because it's available today doesn't mean that you should install it today and companies will often have a and i've seen this happen they'll have a few people that are like you know enthusiasts that work at the company like hey do you want to be on the um get the updates first theme or whatever they call it and then they'll just be kind of like guinea pigs just give them the newest version of windows first and then if they don't say that they've had any problems and it generally seems fine they could graduate it to the next tier of users and the next tier of users um problem is some people don't have time for that but at a home user level you i mean if everything was rolling uh think about it we have the app depending you mentioned that earlier tom we have app pinning in that and that's not gonna go away so if you're if you have like you know i use caden live for editing my videos and and i have a specific version i don't want that to change right now until i bet it even though it's rolling i could pin it don't change this i want to keep this where it is and then you can have control over that and then all ubuntu would have to do is put a gui tool over it that you could check a box and lock a version yeah you could absolutely have rolling all the things and if it's done right it could actually be a win i i think it's funny someone might get the impression where developers are not developers but us content creators because we've all complained about uh pinning development tools for creating media because it's crash worthy you know some people will pin like versions of python or like i'll pin ansible or something like that it's good that we have that flexibility but there seems to be this mindset that it's either completely rolling and bleeding edge or it's not now i don't agree i think it's often that way yes in real in the real world doesn't have to be like that though i i agree i don't think we need version numbers of distributions anymore we could argue with lts ubuntu that's fine they release every two years why do we need a new release every six months especially when not much has changed since the last one i've released videos reviewing ubuntu yeah nothing much has changed uh not a whole lot to talk about here and it's happened multiple times yeah there was a lot of fine tuning done but no major sweeping changes between six months of versions that happens a lot exactly so did we leave out any distributions i know i feel like there's an elephant in the room that we didn't cover that's just glaring me right in the face um i know we've covered the i know we didn't talk about fedora much but that's generally not run on servers as often even though they do have a server version yeah i think we covered i mean there's there's always all the little offshoots so you can go to distro watch and uh have a heyday of how many distributions there are which creates a little bit of confusion which is also something that um if you're new to linux you're like hold on it seems really important because there's 50 different options that must mean there's 50 different choices and now i don't know where to start we'll cap it off with this probably ubuntu is a great place to start i think you probably share my opinion in that for i would say debian or ubuntu is pretty much interchangeable for home lab people the only thing i would say there to differentiate those two is if your hardware is new ubuntu if it's not new hand me down second hand server debian or ubuntu is fine if you want to leverage any of the additional tools that ubuntu has you can go with ubuntu but either if you take all that out of there debbie and ubuntu are practically interchangeable if hardware compatibility isn't an issue yeah and and you may have a book on this topic where they can dive into and get your book at learnlinux.tv i'll give you a plug yeah if you to server third editions available at ubuntu serverbook.com i made an easy uh alias for that if you want to check that book out and uh debian fans um i do have a debian review coming out tomorrow on my channel should be up by around 9am if you want to check that out um it's going to be a fun review of debian so don't miss this one so there's that and um yeah and you've already reviewed arch and we both have covered pop os i've even talked i didn't dive into it but i mean i know people really like the desktop environment which we didn't dive deep into but i have topics like caden lot uh i'm sorry katie neon on my channel so if you like the kde desktop environment i reviewed it i think you reviewed it too haven't you jay i did and i liked it better than kubuntu and i haven't checked it out lately kubuntu was the kde edition of ubuntu and i came away thinking like wow kitty neon is is great actually um why would i want to use kubuntu at this point because kitty neon unless it's changed if it's still the case now i think it's a great distribution for that right and we'll we'll have a separate episode where we just talk about desktop environments because no matter which one of these distributions you chose the desktop environment bolts onto the top of it so that becomes a choice this is one of those things that once you start getting into linux you realize the disk show you choose will change the nuance of the package manager but doesn't really change that much if you wanted to run the kde or gnome on either a rpm based distribution or something that's based on the app system you can do that so yeah well that'll be a whole nother show and a whole nother topic and another thing about that too is that you brought up a good point a lot of people are will ask like what should i learn on well i mean let's just think about it for a minute if we take the package manager out of the equation the ls command has all the same options and all the distributions right you see the different directories if you install vim or nano or whatever your text editor of choice is it's generally speaking going to be the same on each so there's a ton of carryover from one distribution to another it's not until you get into the package manager or the desktop stuff or the version of the kernel that it starts to change but it's you'll be well served by any of those uh distributions i think yeah there's um there's a lot you can do with all of them so it's not yeah that's right i don't want to get people like thinking that if you use ubuntu that's only gnome or anything like that or gnome's the only desktop environment but like i said we'll have to do that as a entirely diving into because that we could talk another two hours about desktop environments but we have to wrap it up at some point [Laughter] yeah and a few quick things because they're um there's some questions here someone asked about the pine phone review um it didn't work out i'm gonna probably try it again but i bought the one that had the dock so you can have it you know desktop environment on there and i can't capture any screen footage because that has never worked i'm going to check it out again just just kind of dusted it off i tucked it up to a failed project but i might actually dust it off again it's been sitting around so i may as well do something with it have you seen any questions on there yeah um i think there was a question about gaming on linux that again would have to be its own topic but that is a big challenge um as much as companies are slowly working towards things in proton and all the different options yeah we do know that games are sometimes what keeps people especially some of these games with the online play with anti-cheat options that anti-cheat option i know breaks inside a linux that there's not always a workaround for so yeah i do understand and feel your pain on that yeah jay does too i my my windows gaming system that's where i do run windows i'm of the opinion on that though i know this is not going to be a popular opinion but it is my opinion i just don't think it matters as much as people think it does and here's why i feel that way because when i was a kid stupid analogy alert i had a sega genesis and i fully understood that my super mario world cartridge would not fit in the sega genesis right so i knew that there was a library software for the genesis any library of software for the super nintendo you picked one and you just despite your friend having this awesome game that you can't play because you don't didn't choose that system you just had to deal with it because you can only have one so i guess i don't always understand the concept that linux should run software that it was never designed to run software that was never designed to run on it and that being a downside to linux and i totally get it if you're a gamer the choice might be made for you possibly we could talk about this in more detail later but i don't feel there should be any requirement perceived or real that an operating system is supposed to run software was never meant to linux is linux when it was windows if you can get it to work and i encourage you to try because that's part of the fun it doesn't work i'm going to force it to work then your opposite oppositional defiance kicks in and you really want to make that software work it's not even about playing the game anymore you just want to force it to work to show that you can and brag about it i totally get it but if you get it running then even great even better um but that's again probably a whole other video yeah and uh something that came up a few times in the comments that i'll i i don't like when people think this is the solution like how do i get my entire office of 500 end users to use linux you just don't it's not a likely scenario the cost of retraining people the confusion it creates by having a different operating system windows is still uh the winner so to speak in the desktop environment of the general business office now if you have a team of developers maybe but it kind of goes back to the gaming thing where like jay said trying to get linux to run that a lot of the tools like okay let's say an autocad office or an office using a bunch of microsoft office tools they are going to be best suited to run and the tooling and everything in the active directory world in the uh tooling that runs on there that's all based on windows products trying to get those through compatibility layers working would be so much more support and this is what the reason people ask is like well isn't linux more secure not exactly a one-to-one here when you're talking about that are there less viruses for linux desktop environments targeted end users yes because there's less users but once you give a bunch of end users the ability to click and run things with some admin privileges the problem will start right back up again so it becomes like it's kind of a complicated topic that's not as black and white as people think it it's not a binary answer of linux better than windows and this is how you solve it and this is one thing you know both of us do spend time working in corporate world even if it's at it service level so we understand that you can't just flip a switch and swap these out and it's not as not as easy as that so and i i agree completely but i also feel like i don't like the all or none mentality if you think about it like if i was to like purchase another dominology but if i was going to purchase an auto mechanic shop i had like 12 mechanics working there and on the first day i come in and say you are all going to use this brand of wrench i guarantee you they're going to laugh me right out of the shop floor they're not going to not for a minute they're they're going to use the tools that they use to do their job the best each individual employee is going to have their preferred you know tools for their job and they're they're going to be happiest when they're using the tools that they prefer to use i think the goal might be to help handle mixed environments better so that you blur the line so someone can use that mac and someone can use that windows laptop or that linux computer and your systems and security and authentication ldap whatever you're using understands how to how to differentiate itself based on the platform would be a better goal in my opinion and as far as how the future looks i've i've commented this many times there's there's not really any startups making their new killer application to run only on windows all the new applications pretty much are focused on being web enabled without a local install now this excludes things like security or tooling applications that help those are assistive applications but like the next version even microsoft with microsoft office or google's been there for a long time with g suite things that are more browser-based are huge because they suddenly take the operating system environment out of it you build a single sign-on method so we're seeing changes in the software industry that's making the desktop a little bit less relevant for the masses the specific users we still have our power user use cases and doing that in the cloud is not going to happen anytime soon but for the masses this is what allows work from home they log in through single sign-on to a handful of applications and now they just do everything through essentially a browser because browsers are calling a browser it seems like they need a new term because you can run doom in a browser they're full of they're on their operating systems almost until themselves they totally are and it's also kind of bringing up a very uncomfortable truth for me but it's still a truth nonetheless like you said the operating system layer is mattering less and less it's a very slow decline it's going to take many years but you know i have learn linux tv is my youtube channel name i mean 10 years from now however long i could reach a situation where the line has blurred so much i might even have to change the name of the channel if um if it comes to that but probably learn browser tv it's like our operating system is a way to get a browser on our screen or to run a virtual machine for development right so hopefully this answered some of your linux questions uh feel free to leave some comments below and uh thank you james morris you have anything else j i think we covered it all i don't wanna i do have one more thing um actually i forgot to mention this um we mentioned i think it was the last episode where you had or maybe the one before that you had a tip about using a kvm for for the um [Music] for like um gosh i'm blanking on the name of that um tiny pilot for the tiny yeah yeah and you mentioned just putting a um a kvm on that um i got an email i got an email actually uh from the developer the lead developer there he says that that won't actually work because he says it's being presented as a usb on the go hub and it's not going to something like it's not going to send the proper signals through i don't completely understand it but he did say there is one that works but i just want to make sure no one's going to buy a tiny pilot and putting a cable cam on it i do recommend the tiny pilot it's great yeah you just had a review of that and i'll have a review soon of it too so right i think we covered all the major stuff here i think we have but that was someone sent the email over so i wanted to send you here so um you can find each of us on our respective channels uh learn linux dot tvs where you can find jay and all of his stuff and all my stuff is over here on this channel and at largesystems.com thanks again for joining us on this podcast and see you next time

Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 26,438

Keywords: lawrencesystems

Id: dcSBBjKWnJM

Length: 76min 8sec (4568 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 31 2021