 Welcome to another edition of Unfettered Freedom, your weekly GNU-slash-Linux-News video podcast. Packing so much freedom into each episode, it ought to be legal. I think if I tried to squeeze one more ounce of freedom out of this episode, they'd cancel me. On this edition of Unfettered Freedom, the Free Software Foundation, they've elected a new president. This is their first new president since the ousting of Richard Stallman. Also, Emacs saw a big release. GNU Emacs 27.1 has been released with a ton of exciting new features that will make them fanboys just weep. Also Mozilla, they've laid off more than 250 of their employees. We're going to discuss that. HBO Max has dropped Linux support in all browsers. And distro hopping. Recently, I did a little distro hopping on my main production machine. I had some problems, so today I wanted to share some tips and tricks on how to distro hop. I am your host, Derek Taylor, also known as DT or Distro Tube over on YouTube and on Library. Those of you that want to help support my work, you'll find Distro Tube over on Patreon. And the first story we're going to talk about this evening is the Free Software Foundation. They have elected a new president. This is the first new president that they have elected since the ousting of Richard Stallman. Richard Stallman, of course, founded the Free Software Foundation. He was the founder of the Free Software Movement. He is everything to the Free Software Movement. He was the founding president of the Free Software Foundation and he served as the president of the Free Software Foundation until being forced to resign nearly a year ago because he really made some unfortunate comments surrounding some of the Jeffrey Epstein and Marvin Minsky scandals. He actually made those comments on a mailing list at his workplace at MIT and MIT fired him because of that. And a lot of people, including this article, those of you watching the video version, this article is actually titled, After a year after Richard Stallman was cancelled, Free Software Foundation elects new president. I don't necessarily agree that Richard Stallman was cancelled. I think a lot of people take this cancel culture thing a little too far. They assume that any time somebody gets fired now, they've been cancelled. I guess there's no legit reasons to get fired anymore. I'm a big fan of Richard Stallman. I'm a big fan of the Free Software Movement. I have a ton of respect for Richard Matthew Stallman. But MIT firing him for saying what he did on that mailing list and MIT was actually wrapped up in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. They had some serious problems because of that scandal the school did. And one of their employees was saying some stuff that they really didn't want one of their employees saying, So they fired the guy. I get it. You guys, I'm sure most of you guys probably get it. You can't just say anything you want to say at your place of employment. Right? If you say the wrong thing to the wrong person, you can get fired. And that's exactly what happened to Richard Stallman. Now I can understand the people that do want to argue that Stallman was cancelled from the Free Software Foundation because that wasn't MIT. And it didn't really have anything to do with the whole Jeffrey Epstein scandal. But at the end of the day, many, many people within the Free Software Foundation really didn't want to work with Richard Stallman anymore. And not just because of that one particular incident. Richard has always been a little eccentric and a little strange. He's got a weird personality and he does rub a lot of people the wrong way. And I don't think it is necessarily a bad idea that the Free Software Foundation goes ahead and asks him to resign and now has elected a new president because Richard is nearly 70 years old. Right? He's been the only president of the Free Software Foundation. It's time to find out if somebody else can lead the Free Software Foundation because Richard Stallman, no matter what you think about him, he's not going to live forever. So now is as good a time as any to find out if someone else can lead the Foundation and lead the Free Software Movement. And they have decided to elect Jeffrey Nouth as the new Free Software Foundation president. I am a member of the Free Software Foundation, but I'm not really familiar with Jeffrey Nouth. But according to this article from It's Foss, he is a computer science professor at Lake homing college, Pennsylvania, or maybe he was in the past because it doesn't look like the It's Foss article could validate that he's currently a computer science professor there. According to Jeffrey's own bio on the Free Software Foundation website, though, he claims to be an independent software contractor, a programmer, a senior associate, a systems engineer and a systems analyst at various companies. Jeffrey has been a FSF member for more than 30 years. He's been a member of the board for more than 30 years. So I think the Free Software Foundation, I think they found the right guy for the job. I think they found a good person to lead the Foundation. It's going to be some trying times for Jeffrey, though, because these are some turbulent times for the Free Software Foundation in the aftermath of them forcing Richard Stallman out because there are some people within the Free Software Foundation that are still a little upset about that. Not everybody agreed with Richard Stallman being forced to resign. A lot of people did, but some people did not. And some of those people were very angry and very vocal about it. And many of them left the Free Software Foundation in protest because of the decision to force Stallman out. And there are still other people outside the Free Software Foundation, maybe that thought about maybe signing up a membership and joining the Free Software Foundation. But now no longer choose to support such an organization because of the way Richard Stallman was treated. Of course, you also have people that maybe are more likely now to join the Free Software Foundation for the fact that somebody like Richard Stallman is not there. Is it a pro? Is it a con? Ultimately, I don't think it matters that much because ultimately, like I said, Richard Stallman was going to have to go at some point. He's nearly 70 years old. He's been leading the Free Software Foundation for more than 30 years himself. At some point, he was either going to have to retire or unfortunately, you know, he'll eventually pass away at some point. So I don't think now is a horrible time to go ahead and see if somebody else can lead that fight. And our next story is the gigantic release of GNU E-Max 27.1. This is a big release for E-Max. They included a ton of new features in this release. Some of the new features included with the release announcement here of 27.1 include things like built-in support for arbitrary size integers, text shaping with HarfBuzz. Now HarfBuzz, that's a tool employed by GNOME and KDE and even Android to make text look nice. So that's kind of a big deal. Also, we now have native support for JSON parsing. We have better support for Cairo drawing. We have support for XDG conventions for init files. We have lexical binding used by default, built-in support for tab bar and tab line, support for resizing and rotating of images without image magic. Now that's probably one of the big changes. The biggest changes here in 27.1 is by default now E-Max. They're not going to be using image magic for displaying pictures and images anymore. And that is mainly due to security concerns. They wanted to get away from using image magic. And of those changes that I just listed, that was just the overview. That was the highlights that they put in the release announcement. There are many, many more smaller changes. If you want to read the entire changelog and the list of all the new features added to E-Max 27.1, those of you that run E-Max, all you need to do is do this key chord, Ctrl H followed by N. And you will get all the information about this new release. Those of you not really that familiar with GNU E-Max, it is one of the most important pieces of open source software on the planet. It's actually one of the oldest still actively developed pieces of open source technology. GNU E-Max dates back to 1984, was actually the first release of GNU E-Max, but predecessors to GNU E-Max date back back into the early 1970s. There were some other E-Max editors before Stallman and the GNU project developed their GNU E-Max. So all these new and amazing features in this big release, if I were a Vim user right now, I'd be very jealous. And our third story is the news that Mozilla is laying off 250 employees and they claim that it's because of some of the struggles in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic and they really want to refocus the company on making money. And specifically what they're talking about with making money, they want to focus on some of their products such as Pocket, the VPN, and some of their privacy products that they offer. Now this 250 people that they're laying off, that's a big number because Mozilla only had about a thousand employees, so they laid off roughly one quarter of all the employees that worked at Mozilla. Now according to Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker, the Corona pandemic, quote, significantly impacted our revenue. As a result, our pre-COVID plan was no longer workable. So they had all these people, you know, these 1,000 employees and everything was going good, you know, back in February or thereabouts, you know, the COVID pandemic really gets going and they weren't seeing the kind of revenue coming in that they had originally hoped for. Some of the revenue streams just were starting to dry up. What makes this a little more disturbing than it's just the Corona virus pandemic though is even back in January, now that was really before the COVID pandemic. Back in January, Mozilla, there was a big news story about them laying off 70 people back then. So that is 320 people that Mozilla has laid off since the beginning of this year. For those of you wondering exactly how Mozilla makes its money, most of the money that they make actually comes from deals with other companies, especially search engine companies. So Firefox, the browser, it generates a significant amount of revenue for Mozilla through deals with Baidu, the Chinese search engine, Yandex in Russia and of course Google here in the US. Mozilla also makes some money from royalties and subscriptions from advertising and of course offering products such as the new VPN service that they recently launched. Now as a longtime user of Mozilla Firefox, I've been a Firefox user since day one. Matter of fact, my web browsers, I started with Netscape Navigator back in the early 1990s at the beginning at the birth of the World Wide Web. I was on Netscape Navigator and that's all I ran were the Netscape browsers until Netscape went out of business and Mozilla was founded and Firefox came into being and then I switched over to Firefox. And it makes me sad that Mozilla Firefox seems to be a dying browser. Market share just keeps dwindling and dwindling. Over the last decade, people have just completely abandoned Mozilla Firefox for Chrome and it makes me sad because having been around in the 1990s and saw the browser wars between Netscape Navigator and then Microsoft Internet Explorer and watching a big proprietary company, Microsoft, run Netscape out of business through some rather shady and quite frankly illegal business practices. That's not what's happening here. People is not making Firefox go out of business through any shady deals. They're just making a better product. At least they're making a product that appeals to the masses in a way that Mozilla Firefox is just not appealing to most people. People like me will run it because it's free and open source software and it's a free and open source company and I want to support Mozilla in companies like Mozilla. I don't want to support Google because very few people are ideologs like me. Most people don't care about the free software movement and because of that, you know, until Firefox can appeal to the normies out there. I don't see it surviving. I don't see it making it another five years in its current state. And the fourth story is the news that HBO Max is dropping Linux support in all browsers. So this is actually a post from the r slash Linux subreddit. So someone posted that HBO Max has stopped working on Linux within the Firefox web browser. He is running Manjaro Linux. But over the past few weeks, I guess this has slowly been happening to where I don't think HBO Max works any longer on Linux using any browser. Now there since he posted this, there have been some people to get HBO Max working inside Google Chrome running in wine. But that's about it. So all the native Linux browsers, you are no longer going to be able to watch HBO Max. It's strange when a company was already supporting Linux. Why do you drop support? That's what I don't get. You know, it's really frustrating that we have to beg so many companies to support Linux. But what's more frustrating is those companies that were already supporting Linux and then for whatever reason one day just decide to stop. It's like, well, you've already put in all the work, right? You've already made it happen on Linux. Just keep going with it. Some of the people that posted in this subreddit, and there were thousands of people that posted in this particular subreddit, it's got more than 2,000 upvotes here, 634 comments. So a lot of people were interested in this story here over on the r slash Linux subreddit. And one of the guys wrote that by companies doing this, all this does is encourage piracy because if people want to watch something that's only available on your streaming service and you make it impossible for me to use your service legally on Linux, then why wouldn't I just illegally pirate your stream? Now, I'm not advocating people doing that. Obviously, that's completely against the law. You really shouldn't do that. At the same time, when companies do what HBO is doing here, it's almost like they're encouraging it. Really, it's almost like they don't even care. They understand when they do this that you guys on Linux have no other choice but to pirate our content. We don't really care because the Linux market share is so small. Basically, you guys don't even matter. Go ahead and pirate our content anyway. Now in the subreddit thread, there are a lot of speculations about the reasons behind HBO dropping Linux support. I don't think HBO actually officially said their reasoning behind this. But typically, when a large company like this, especially a large streaming service, or some kind of media platform decides to drop already existing support for a platform like Linux, it usually has to do with some of the people they partner with. So some of the people that are giving HBO content to stream will only license our media to you if you support media security standards X, Y and Z. And some of those maybe are not supported on Linux at all. Therefore, HBO wants to work with these people. It's more important for them to do what these people want than it is to support the Linux community. Because at the end of the day, we're just not that big of a market share. Now one thing to note is I know a lot of people these days do stream things like HBO Max and Netflix and Hulu and stuff like that from mobile devices. Apparently that's the way most, especially the kids these days. I see them all watching Netflix on their phone. I don't do that. I know probably many of you guys, especially if you're older like me, you're used to watching TV and movies on normal size screens. So I do watch Netflix on my computer monitors. You might have got 24-inch monitors. I would never watch something like Netflix or HBO Max on my phone. But those of you that do, this may not be a big deal. For somebody like me, though, it would be a deal breaker because watching on my computer is the only way I watch some of this stuff. Now the fifth and final story tonight is not really a story. Recently, I did a little distro hopping on my main production machine. And I had a lot of struggles with that distro hop. But really more than talking about the struggles that I recently had distro hopping. I wanted to talk about some of the things you should do to make your distro hopping experience a little easier. For those of you following the Distro Tube channel over on YouTube and on library, check out a video I did just a few days ago. The title is Distro Hopping Sucks I'll Never Leave You Again Arch Linux. Now that is a nice click-baity title. But I distro hopped about eight times in 24 hours on my main production machine because I tried a variety of different Linux distributions on my main production machine and most of them failed to install properly. But I don't want to rehash that material again. If you're interested in that, check out those particular videos on YouTube and on library. But what I really wanted to discuss, I'm going to take this opportunity to discuss some of the things that you guys really should consider when you distro hop. Because I've made a lot of blunders in the past when I distro hop. It seems like every time I distro hop, there are steps that I should have taken that I always forget. So let's talk about some of the things you guys really should do. First of all, the number one thing, of course, is backing up all your data. This is obvious, right? Before you wipe out your hard drive and your SSDs, back up all your important home user data. So back up your .files, your configuration files. Those of you that are not pushing .files to something like GitLab or GitHub, start doing that because when you do that, it makes the backing up process a little easier because you always have a backup. It's backed up to GitHub or GitLab. So if you didn't actually physically back it up to a USB drive or a USB stick, you still have it on that GitLab repository such as my case. So that's what I would do with .files. You know, start using GitHub, GitLab, get into that stuff. The sooner you get into that, the easier your life becomes, especially when it comes to reinstalling your other home user data that you really want to take a look at. Most people put their important documents in their home slash documents folders. Always backup documents, backup music, backup pictures, backup videos. My videos directory can get rather large because I make videos and that's typically where I put them is in my home slash DT slash videos directory. If your entire home user directory is not very large, you could just back up the entire home directory to a drive or a USB stick. I have one directory on my computer that is rather large and it's important. I don't want to lose all the data in that directory and that is my music directory. I have like 110, 120 gigs of music in my home slash DT slash music folder. Now what I do is I actually have that music folder on its own partition, on its own drive. So when I reinstall, I don't touch that drive. My music is already there, so I never have to worry about moving all of that music because that would be a big transfer, you know, transferring 120 gigs of music to a backup drive and then transferring 120 gigs of music back onto the computer. That would take forever, so I don't want to deal with that anymore. So if you've got big music folders, big video folders, just don't even bother moving that stuff. I would invest in a second drive if you don't already have a second drive on your computer and just start mounting your music and videos to a second drive. Of course, when you put stuff on another drive, on another partition, if you format your drives using DD, make sure you never DD the wrong drive. That's one thing you guys definitely need to take into account. Now some of the stuff that I back up outside of the home directory, because not all of my important data is in home slash DT. There is stuff in the root file system that I also want to go grab and maybe you guys want to go grab one of the ones I always remember to backup. I always go get user share fonts. Why? Because I want all my fonts. Not all of those fonts were fonts that are free as in freedom fonts. There weren't fonts that I just went and got out of some distro repositories. Some of them are non-free fonts that I've had forever for decades. I purchased them and I don't want to lose them. So I always backup my user slash share slash fonts directory. Those of you that want to, you could backup user share themes, user share icons. Now, most of that stuff will be free as in freedom stuff. You can still go get, you know, if you lose it, you can go find it, but fonts, especially if you have non-free fonts, make sure you back that up. Those of you that have some really customized configs for certain programs hosted in slash Etsy, make sure you backup those configs. Those of you that have some programs or scripts stored in slash opt, you may want to back those up. Those of you that do any kind of web development on local host, maybe you have some test websites that you've been playing around with and they're stored at slash bar slash www back all that stuff up. And I say all of this is because I've forgotten to backup all of these things that I've mentioned before. Things that I've forgotten to backup before the fonts are the only one I haven't forgotten about because they're kind of important to me. So luckily, I've always got backups on my fonts, but I have many times forgot to backup my own personal scripts that I've written that are often stored in your home directory slash dot local slash bin. Sometimes I just forget that stuff. Now, if I have get lab or get hub or you guys have get hub or get lab or something like that, anytime you write your own custom script for anything, just push it to get lab and be done with it because it really sucks when you have a really important script that does something for you and then you format the drive and you forget to back it up and take it with you. One of the most frustrating things, and I've actually did this recently, is SSH keys, GPG keys, password databases, back that stuff up, especially the GPG keys. Recently, I formatted the drive on my main production machine, reinstalled a new operating system, and I use the pass password manager, the standard UNIX password manager pass. And I forgot to take the GPG keys with me. So I have all these passwords that I can't retrieve now. So now I have to go to these websites and, you know, reset my passwords, create new passwords, create a new database of passwords. The last thing I want to leave you with on the backing up stuff is in your home directory, those of you that do use Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird, back up the .mozilla folder and the .thunderbird folder. I can't stress that enough, especially those of you that have a million bookmarks in Firefox, it's going to really suck when you lose all your bookmarks. So please back up the .mozilla folder. And that is it for this edition of Unfettered Freedom. This was episode two of Unfettered Freedom. I'm going to try to release Unfettered Freedom every Thursday. Now, one of the things with doing this podcast, being new to podcasting, is getting my podcast listed on all the big platforms. The biggest platform of course is iTunes. I haven't had an Apple computer in decades. I haven't had an Apple product of any kind in decades. And to submit a podcast to the Apple iTunes podcast site, you have to have an Apple ID and you have to have made at least one purchase on iTunes or Apple Music. But not having a computer that would run any of that stuff, that was a struggle. But I finally figured out I do have an Android phone. Apple does have an Apple Music app. So I signed up for Apple Music on my Android phone, even though I will never use it, so I could submit the RSS feed for this podcast to iTunes. So Unfettered Freedom should be listed on iTunes, Spotify, and Google Podcasts now. Before I go, I need to thank the producers of the show. Michael, Gabe, Nate, Corbinian, Mitchell, Entropy UK, John, Devin, Fran, Arch 5530, Chris, Chuck, DJ Donnie, Dylan, George, Lewis, I'm Rep. Robert, Sean, Tobias, and Willie. They are my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, Unfettered Freedom episode two wouldn't have been possible. I also need to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen. That's my full list of supporters over on Patreon. If you'd like to support my work, look for DistroTube over on Patreon, because this channel has no corporate sponsors. It's just me and you guys, the community. Alright guys, peace.