 Testing. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, introducing our speaker, JT Nelson. You can find him on his website at SoCalBlender.org, right? Yes, SoCalBlender.org and in association with LA.Blend user groups. Without further ado, let's back up. There we go. Let's check on the volume a little bit here. There we go. Testing one to you. You guys can still hear me? All right. They don't have tape for these mics. Typically, you tape them up so they don't rattle like that. Sorry about that. So, is that it? Yeah, that's why I got it practically. It's squeezed pretty good here. So, all right. Thanks for coming, everybody. I'd like to get a really quick overview of who's in the room. We have programmers in here. Raise your hand. Anybody that programs? Okay. Any artists? Who's the artists in the room? Artist? Couple artists? Anybody actually working for Hollywood or the game industry already? No? Cool. There's lots of opportunity. There you go. Working on it. Good. Lots of opportunity for people who are programmers to work in Hollywood in the game industry. They're dying. There's no real job board or anything. You've got to look at Indeed and if you're the things and just put out the word. If you're local here or even if you're remote, ton of work. Reason I start out with that is because Ubuntu is all about the community. It's all about the people. As you already saw on my second slide, people are the secret sauce. It's one of the things you'll see in this talk as I go through it. I show some slides. You'll see me talking about organizations and it's all about the people that are driving it. It's the same spirit as Ubuntu. I'll jump ahead just a little bit. Some of the stuff that I'm doing and it's being done in Hollywood wouldn't be able to be done with that Ubuntu server in the cloud. Period. The ability to collaborate and network people from all over the world, all over the country is happening because the Ubuntu community has solutions. When you go to the cloud, you've got people. They've got deadlines. They've got jobs they need to do. The reason it's happening is because if me or someone else who's helping out these studios putting up servers in the cloud, if we get stuck, we've got people to go to, if not, we've got the Ubuntu, ask Ubuntu website, Ubuntu community, the answer is always there somewhere. That's the key. You don't want to get stuck. We're really excited about the community and it's just one of the additional things that prove people are in fact the secret sauce in all of this in Hollywood. It's allowing people to tell their stories. That's part of what I'm going to talk about in the democratizing part about Hollywood. Right away, I'm going to go to some of the players since it's all about people. I apologize. I can't really show you a lot of Hollywood clips and things that are being done because this recording is being streamed and it's being put out there for posterity and we're running at a lower resolution. I'm going to give you some stuff to search on. When you search this stuff, look at their media in high definition or high resolution. It is absolutely astounding in their works being done. First one is Artella. They're not really big into open source. They actually promote Maya but they're into democratization of Hollywood. This virtual studio movement is really gaining steam and there's going to be the first few groups that I talk about and some of these virtual studios I'm helping out we're using Ubuntu server and again for what I said just a few moments ago. Artella is awesome. It's out of South America and what they're doing with this virtual studio is anybody who basically wants to be an artist or wants to be a programmer, they're all getting together on specific websites and they're combining their forces to do special animation or video projects or film projects and you'll see that's the current theme in the first part of my presentation. Out of South America they've got this setup to where basically you can have your own virtual Hollywood type studio through a website. So you can be in middle of nowhere, anywhere in the world really, definitely in South America and you can be working with a team of people here in Hollywood, people in South America, people in China, people in Russia, people in Europe. This is really big in France and Germany and it's really exciting. So there's no real limits. You just have to put your team together and they help with the production pipeline. So you can have like a Hollywood type full production pipeline all in one website. You don't have to load software on your computer. It's really exciting. How I know about this gentleman is he showed up at SIGGRAPH and did a presentation on pipelines in virtual studios and remote collaboration. Outstanding, arttella.com. Definitely somebody you want to look at, a site that you want to look at, follow who's doing productions there and again go to their website, look at it on your screen in high resolution and you'll really be impressed of the quality. Now, what are the things with democratizing Hollywood? Well, what is that in the game industry? What is democratizing? Well, part of democratizing is decentralizing. Well, what is decentralizing? It means you don't have to come here to Hollywood and be hired by a Hollywood studio to do Hollywood caliber production. You can actually do it in a platform like this and some of the other platforms we're going to talk about. And now because of YouTube, you get seen or other distribution channels, you get seen. So it's a real even playing field from the bottom up, from general people from the bottom up. Same thing with Ubuntu, canonical and Ubuntu software. You start from the bottom, those people contribute and then they build up towards the top. Much more different. You have a paradigm at Hollywood where you start with the power brokers in Hollywood and they get to decide who makes what movie, who makes what animation and then it trickles back down and if you're lucky, you get selected. The Academy Awards were just on and what did they say the whole time? Oh, thank you for letting me make my movie. Thank you for letting me make my movie. Thank you for letting me make my movie. That's not our paradigm in open source. That's not our paradigm with Linux. It's not our paradigm with Ubuntu. Everybody everybody gets to make their movie and then you share it on one of the social media, your Facebook feed, YouTube, whatever. Hulu is getting really big on it. Crackle is really big on independent film, things of that sort. That's basically what I mean by democratizing and decentralizing. It's not only happening in Hollywood, it's happening in the game industry. Let me show you a couple more players here. Theory Studios, this is one of the groups that I'm directly related with. David Andrade started that. He was with Rhythm and Hughes. A lot of you know Rhythm and Hughes had a massive layoff and then they went and closed shop. So these people were basically let go, basically fired by Hollywood. Hollywood said, we don't need you anymore. So they said, well, what do we want to do? And I remember there was a sparkle in David Andrade's eyes and you know what? I think maybe we'll form a virtual studio and I just kept egging him on and saying, do it, do it, man, do it. You know, it's worth it. It's worth it. This is going to work. This is several years ago. Lo and behold, they ended up doing theory animation, morphed into theory studios, and they're in conjunction with Barnstorm, which I'll talk about in a minute. And now they've got people from all over the world collaborating and they are a Blender house. They use Blender primarily. They use several other open source and some proprietary software and they have a beautiful solution and they're making things happen. What's really cool is the group that they're making things happen with is Barnstorm Visual Effects. Outstanding company, Lawson Deming, he comes to our SoCal Blender user group meetings on the west side, real supporter of our group, very, very ardent supporter of open source and Blender. They have a very good reputation around town. And you see here, I stopped the movie on the clip for Man in the High Castle. Man in the High Castle was nominated for an Emmy and it was primarily this work with the, I think it's called pronounced Volksschall. It's this big building that the Germans and Hitler conceived of where this huge hall where people come in. All those scenes were done in Blender and they were done in combination with Barnstorm Visual Effects and theory animation and Blender was the primary tool on that. They worked with the industry. They worked with Massive. People do crowd sims. So there's a fantastic bridge that's happening between the professional and proprietary community with open source. They understand the value. So they've been really supportive of Blender. Several other professional tools. There's bridges to Blender. I'll talk about it in a minute. And fantastic. These are basically the people we like to support. They're part of our group here in LA and they provide tools that anybody and everybody can use. So people actually volunteer on passion projects that are not paid projects. They get affiliated with the studio and then between Therian and Barnstorm they're being able to be pulled into out of the amateur status and actually professionally start working on stuff in Hollywood. This is community. You know, and this is part of what we're talking about democratizing Hollywood. Just some person who happens to have had a cool portfolio or cool piece gets invited on a volunteer project. They really enjoy the volunteer project that people notice them on the volunteer project and then all of a sudden they get picked for a paid project and then they're working on something for Barnstorm and theory that gets nominated for Emmy. They didn't win the Emmy hopefully next year. So all right. Another group fantastic is again people. Hollywood decided they didn't need them anymore because they weren't making them any money. They closed down the original PDI studio, which was actually DreamWorks up in the Bay Area. So a bunch of the DreamWorks people said, well, we're unemployed. Now what do we do? So they ended up coming up with a game plan, moved to Silicon Valley and got over eight million dollars to start Nimble Collective. Eight some odd million. I don't know. They probably got more. Jason Schiffler, fantastic community, real big supporter of Blender. Blender is their core technology. What they do at Nimble is very interesting. A little bit different than Artella. Artella kind of does the project management, does a platform for viewing, things of that sort. Nimble, basically they have this cute little video if you go on their website where I think it's actually even Jason. He's in a chicken suit on his couch using a Chromebook and editing an animation online through Nimble's platform. And they joke that you can do whatever you want to to do Nimble because you basically need a simple computer. You go on a website and all of a sudden now you have this platform for production. You have an asset store and things of that sort. I think it's still in beta right now. I think you have to be invited or you ask them, they let you in. Eventually they'll figure out a subscription model. But it's all done on the back end. It's all server based. It's all cloud based. Now I don't work with them directly in their technology. I don't know if they use Ubuntu in the cloud. I will tell you most people do. Ubuntu in Hollywood is one of the rock solid platforms that are used. And I help out all the time. CentOS is the other big one. One of the reasons that you use CentOS is because there's a, you can use Red Hat technical support. So a lot of Hollywood studios don't want to get stuck. And that's why they want someone who could basically solve a problem for them. And Nimble Collective does that because they handle everything on the back end for you. You just have to have a Chromebook. Go up to a website. It's very responsive. You run Blender. You can run Maya or anything else. Basically it's a Citrix client is what it is. They're in partnership with Citrix. So you get that speed as long as you have a decent internet connection. You're good to go. They got a full pipeline. Store your assets. Save your assets. Work with the team. You can see here, you can do the same thing as Artella. If you want to start up your own virtual studio, you can start up your own virtual studio. If you have an existing studio, you can use this cloud platform to go ahead and manage your project. So very, very exciting. Again, what's really neat is they don't have to hire employees. If you have a project, even if an existing studio has a project, you find somebody in the community, you really like their artwork. Say, hey, join our Nibble Collective Project and work on this project with us. We'll give you credit. We can't pay you, but we'll give you credit. They end up getting credit for working with people from Hollywood and next time they get paid. So this is what we mean by democratization. With the game industry, it's the same way. I can't show you any of the stuff because it's being recorded. But ILM, there was a gentleman used Blender in my particular branch that I worked with Fraction Modifier, one of the developers. And he goes over to Electronic Arts and says, hey, I'm working on this Fortnite game. We're doing the trailer. I hope you guys use Blender because that's what I'm using for the trailer. And what Fraction Modifier does is you blow things up. You break things up with it. And they found two other guys that use Blender. So there's three guys, and they gave us a lot of love on a podcast they had a while back. And what they do though is they draw this information from the community, from forums. They go in, they go into the gamers. And that's where he found out about Fraction Modifier. And he found out, wow, I can bust stuff up really easy. And I'm talking at one o'clock in the Lever Graphics in Halsey if you want more information about the Fraction Modifier. But it's this bottom-up grassroots for the people in the community is where the information is coming from and going back up into Hollywood. So a guy from ILM is using the Fraction Modifier branch of Blender, and he's basically goes to Electronic Arts in their premiere game that they released to use it and gave us a lot of love in a webcast. Outstanding. We were loving it. The team was loving it. And another group is a group that I'm affiliated with here. It's a local project. We're doing something to where it's similar. We have a simpler production management platform. But basically Rex Vita and another developer has started opensourcehollywood.org. You can also find it on meetup.com. And what that is is basic project management. And you put together groups like Kickstarter and Indiegogo for funding your project and assembling your people. So you have a profile, things of that sort. And it's the same concept. You basically want to find the rest of your virtual studio, the rest of your group, or it could be a local group, all your local people. And what's great about this one, as opposed to the other ones, is this operates on your phone. It's a phone. It's a mobile platform. So not only does it operate on the website, it operates on your phone. So basically, you can go like this. Oh, I think I'm going to produce a video or I'm going to produce an animation next week. Or I'm going to do an audio recording. I'm going to record a concert. Get on your phone, sign in to your opensourcehollywood account. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Okay, boom. Here we go. Here's my project, post my project. Oh, who do I want on my project? Let me see. Yeah, I like that person. Let me invite them. I like this person. Let me invite them. Oh, and I've posted and people will see it and people can say, Hey, can I work on your project and start project? You're done on your phone. So you're producing starting up projects on your phone. That's fantastic. Why? Because it gives all local producers, anybody that's not a Hollywood studio, it gives you that power still from the bottom up. And even the studio studios recognize that the next Spielberg or the next James Cameron basically are the people out here in audiences like this, you know, but they need something that's not a roadblock. They need something that's a facilitator. And with open source and with communities like we have now they're developing, you have those roadblocks removed. It's low to no barrier access to this stuff. I'm also working in conjunction my group. We work in conjunction with Pasadena media. It's three blocks from here. It's a community media TV station. Okay. We're providing the same thing. You can come to any of my classes there. You can become a producer there. I post on our meetup group for open source Hollywood, our training. We give free training and you can get started producing TV programs and then move into film to three blocks away from here. What's cool about that is it's a brick and mortar location that gets attached to these virtual locations. So we have the advantage of we've got places to meet. So if anybody's interested and they want to take a tour, let me know and I'll walk you over there. It's three blocks away. We'll go over, see what they're doing, walking in the studio. It's a TV studio and you'll see brick and mortar and they've embraced this virtual studio concept also. So we've combined with them. So it's really exciting community because they get the vision of we just need to empower people at every level, especially the ground troops, the people right out here in the community. And it's not about somebody often some distant office somewhere making the decisions. You're getting rid of the middleman. You're taking the people that have the talent, people that have the desire and putting them straight up to where their products are done, their productions done, their stories told and people get to see it. And again, I already mentioned a little bit. How are we doing this? Like I said, one of the things that's driving the cloud is open source. You guys know that if you've been paying attention at all, we would not have the cloud if it wasn't open source, period. It's just wasn't going to happen. Every vendor lock was killing the idea of the cloud. The cloud is now open source. What do I use? What do I promote in Hollywood? And what do I see in Hollywood in the game industry? A lot of stuff when it's cloud, when it's virtual, we go to Ubuntu, Ubuntu server, other variations of it. I'm actually working on a device myself with Ubuntu server. This computer that I'm putting this presentation on has never been on the internet and it never will be on the internet. I'm doing an experiment. And because it's a Hollywood computer and there's intellectual property and property rights material on here, I don't want it to be able to be exploited on the internet. So I have Ubuntu server on a Raspberry Pi and it hooks up via direct IP address and it accesses my firewall, my proxy and everything and it isolates me from the internet because it all goes through a hardened Raspberry Pi. Okay. Wouldn't be able to do it without Ubuntu server, without being able to go to the forums, finding solutions, finding answers, a little tiny things that stop you. Getting those answers fixed and all of a sudden, bam, you know, you've got a solution. Next year, if I get asked back to present next year, I'll be able to showcase that. So I'll have that ready for prime time and that'll be basically something I think that's going to gain a lot of traction because when you work here regularly with people in the industry, you know, you find out what their pain points are and if you can fix those pain points, it really helps. So all right. The other distro that I use is another Ubuntu flavor is I love Ubuntu. Right now, you can see I left my window open. You can see I'm actually on Windows. Okay. I frequently run Ubuntu most often, but I'm wanting to give props. The Ubuntu is great. Fantastic. Do some real cool stuff. Fraction modifier development. I develop on a Windows computer, virtual box, Ubuntu, and that's what my development for the fraction modifier is done on for coding. And I love the solution. Very quick, very easy to install and it gets the job done. I'd like to give some love to Ubuntu Studio. I used to be a big supporter a few years ago. I'm going to go back to it now because it's such a good solution. And that's what I'm actually doing this presentation on. As you can see, I'm doing it on a Windows computer running Ubuntu Studio in virtual box. And that's what this presentation is being done on. I will tell you something interesting is when it's set up properly, I actually get faster performance. This is a gaming computer, by the way, with a powerful NVIDIA graphics card, lots of memory, SSD drive and all that jazz. I get faster performance with virtual box and Ubuntu on this computer than native Windows. So it actually benefits me to install virtual box, install Ubuntu, and I get faster performance. It's a faster operating computer than the native Windows on this computer. So pretty much the native Windows is virgin, never been hooked up to the internet, got it all blocked. Then through VBox and Ubuntu, I can access another Ubuntu server directly through an IP connection and provide it that way. Like I said, if I get invited back next year, I'll share that technology or look out for it online. Back to Hollywood. Shotgun was purchased by one of the big players in Hollywood. One of the reasons it originally grew in traction is it had an open source front end. Now this, because of that, it's very fractured, kind of like Android, where you have too many people doing too much stuff with Shotgun, so the interface is like all over the place. So stuff gets hidden, you can't find it, so there's a little bit of a user experience issue with it. But it doesn't matter. Once people nail their intent with the software, they may have to actually hire somebody who strictly uses Shotgun and works with Shotgun. But they can customize their whole front end and Hollywood loves this. So they manage productions, you see some of the biggest names, Wedded Digital is really big, they use this. CBS Digital, really a lot of the bigger companies in Hollywood use it. And anybody, it's Python driven, the user interface is Python driven. Anybody can do their own custom workflow and they're good to go. And this was fantastic. So one of the big players in the industry, bottom out. But the bottom line is they get the job done for the people. Why? Because the people are the secret sauce. And that has to be the concurrent theme. You'll see in this next part of my presentation how I'm really going to drive that home. But it's a very interesting case. Here's proprietary blended with open source. They use Python. So basically if you're a bigger studio and working with them, you can customize your workflow to where you make the job easier for people and they can meet their deadlines. They can go home and they can visit with their family. They don't have to work these crazy 20-hour days. They may still sometimes. But basically they have a tool that does what they need to do, wouldn't be able to be done without open source, wouldn't be able to be done. I mean, vendors are great, Autodesk is great, they do some fantastic stuff, but there's such a lag between what you need and what they, and when they provide it, we're with open source, that lag frequently is gone. I did something for a TV studio, they called me up and said, oh man, we're dying, we need this tool. Three hours later, I emailed them the tool. Three hours later, boom, they have the tool. And that's the power of open source. All right, back to the game industry. This little organization, I apologize, I can't remember the people that started it. If you go to Godotengine.org, this basically is going to give Unity a run for its money. Unity is one of the primary game development platforms. These guys at Godot are going nuts. Mozilla's giving them money, they've got crowdfunding, they do some fantastic development for the game industry. Basically for free, you have a game engine, not only that you can use, you can alter for what you or your small studio wants, and you can basically port a video game to all the major targets, to Android phones, to iOS, to the web, HTML5. Fantastic product, fantastic, and it just keeps growing. Just this last year, they added some tremendous features. What is this? It's, again, democratization and decentralization. You don't have to go to Unity. Unity is fantastic, Unreal is fantastic, Unreal, open source code. It's not FOS, but it's open sourced. It's all great. So organizations like this, organizations like Blender, organizations like Godot, they're basically driving, I think, the industry to open source their software or give away free versions of their software. Again, that's democratizing Hollywood because any of us and all of us can use and learn that software because we want what it produces. And with YouTube and some of these other platforms, Hulu, Crackle, that does independent film, there's ones popping up right and left, you can get your work seen. Now something really interesting with the Godot engine, there's a buddy of mine, Sam Villa. He's a real big advocate of open source. He's one of the people that founded the LA Blend group with me, Sterling Getz and Sean Kennedy. We do Blender meetings out of the west side. Sterling Getz is the lead for that one. I just started up the Pasadena events again, so watch for those. We'll be bringing in Hollywood and studios. We do some free training, free showcase work. They showcase what they're doing. And because Sam is a huge advocate of open source, because Sam is a huge advocate of open source, he pressed this company to start using Godot for their game engine. So you'll see in malls all over the world in here in Southern California, there's one in one of these pods in LA Live. The technology for interactivity, this is in Tomb Raider. This was an interactive game, Tomb Raider game that you could play to showcase the movie that was coming out. That's driven with open source software. Sam's ecstatic because when something needed to be changed, he contacted the Godot developers. He had his developers make the patch and said, hey, here's our patch. We need this. We love your product. We're using it for this cool Hollywood stuff. These movie companies are having us do gamification and we're putting them in malls. Hey, help us out here. What happened? The Godot people said, yeah, sure. They accepted the patch. It's in the software. And this is what you get. You get people playing in a mall, a major blockbuster movie and they don't even know about open sources driving the interaction, the user interface of these pods. To me, that's exciting. To me and Sam's a good buddy of mine. He started out in the industry using open source and he's always been an open source advocate and I'm very privileged to work with him, Sterling and Sean, with the LA blend user groups here. All the major studios come to our events at one time or another. Most of boutique studios have people popping in and out. We have them about every two months and that's just really exciting to see what people are doing and I wanted to give Sam props that he's just really one of the people helping drive open source adoption in the community. All right, one of the other projects that are fantastic, great open source product is Krita. This is cool in your pipeline. This is one of the things that I'm really pushing in Hollywood in a couple other packages is this is a product out of Europe and it's a paint program. More and more Hollywood is using it and why are they using it? Why don't they use Photoshop? Well, they do use Photoshop. Back to the same reason as Godot. If they need a feature, Krita is really cool because Krita does these little crowdfunding things of, all right, let's let the crowd decide what feature we want. So they do these little things where they set it up. I can't remember exactly how he does it. It's bodice, the guy's name. And then when you vote for what you want, the community funds it. That's the features that they code and they put into Krita. And if that's not democratization, I don't know what is. And the fact that we've taken away the power brokers in Hollywood and the people that are the big huge corporations, they get to decide what features we get. We took that away in open source and community based and democratized and decentralized efforts. So it's great because what they did this last year, the people decided how they wanted to use Krita, this painting program. They funded it. They coded it. And it's good to go. And he just keeps doing that. And a fantastic, I'm promoting it a lot in Hollywood, that a couple other things. And it's gained a lot of traction on its own. And then we'll see, if I come back next year, I'll give you a report and tell you how my efforts this year went. I no longer talk just about Blender primarily. I add Krita in there all the time, Blender and Krita. Because I think it's really important. So why? Why is it important to Hollywood? Well, we've already talked about the usability. What if I told you you get to hire 10 new people for a project and that's all you can hire because you have to pay licensing fees for every person to have software? What if I tell you, and I don't know this number, I'm making this number up. What if I tell you, I tell you what, on this project we're using open source. And since we don't have to pay any licensing fees, we get to hire 13 people rather than 10 people because we're using open source software. And if we get stuck and we need something custom, we can have it programmed for us. We can have a custom workflow. How about that? Guess what people are saying? I like that idea. That's a pretty good idea. Well, let's do it that way. So that's what I'm presenting to Hollywood with Krita. We already do it with Blender. Works out really good with Blender. And then I'm just putting Krita in the mix now because whenever you're doing something for 3D animation or visual effects, you always have to paint textures always. So that's why I keep pushing Krita. And again, for that same economy type thing is why pay for more licenses when you can have more people. Why? Because people are what? The secret sauce. You want the people. Why do you want the people? You want the creativity. You want the next Spielberg to pop up. Hey, look at this. Hey, what did you do? How do you do that? What did you do that with? Oh, I did it with an open source piece of software. And that's what's happening. People are getting recognition not because they're pushing open source first. They're doing projects that are, wow, that's stunning. How did you do that? Use this open source software. Check it out. And that's how it's spreading in Hollywood. And then I'll give you another example of how it's spreading in just a minute here. That's one of the big ways. I do live events. I'm actually a senior video engineer and I'm moving back into film and movie production. And I was one of the first people to ever use VLC media player in a live event. So I kept using proprietary software. It kept crashing, locking up. Couldn't get it installed. USB sticks were popular way back in the day. So I stuck VLC on a USB stick. Started using it. Now almost never do you ever see a live event or a live event production company that doesn't have VLC automatically installed on their computers. That's the power of open source. Actually, I heard and I saw in the book that VLC is actually here. I can't wait to go talk to them because I signed up to be one of the developers because I'd like to alter a couple things. If not, I'll have my own branch. Fantastic software. VLC is a media player, but it's very community driven. Same for the same reasons I said before. And it has proliferated now in the video industry. Fantastic tool. So I wanted to give VLC some props. Juice for playback. There's video annotation software that uses it and things of that sort. Excellent group. Now, I don't know it, but I want to check it out. I swear that Cadillac is the 3D model of a Cadillac that my buddy who's one of the fraction modifier developers, Martin Felkey, that he made in 3D and Plinter. I can't prove it. But if it's not, his Cadillac looks so real that they look identical. So I'm going to check out with these VLC people and see where this Cadillac came from. But it sure looks like Martin's Cadillac. If not, props to Martin. He made a fantastic Cadillac model. We'll have to bust it up in the fraction modifier one of these days. So as you can see, Big Buck Bunny's on the bottom. If you go to SIGGRAPH, anything else, Big Buck Bunny is one of the Blender open source movies. Probably one of the most used pieces of software in the video industry to illustrate video hardware. And you'll see this bunny everywhere. We used to do Big Buck Bunny sightings on some of our websites, but it's so proliferated nowadays and everywhere that we don't really do it as much. But props to Blender in the open source movies in a Big Buck Bunny sighting. So all right, here's my team. I just mentioned Martin Felkey. We're one of the people driving democratization with our tool for visual effects. This is Albin Merrill's airplane crash. If you go to YouTube and you search fracture modifier or you search Blender plane crash, you'll see some great stuff. It's a very stunning video. And it was all done in the fracture modifier, which is a tool that's made a real easy workflow to break things up. So the destruction of the airplane was all managed by it and a very exciting tool. You wouldn't find a tool like this being used in Hollywood if it wasn't for the team. So my props to the team because our passion and the fact that we're an open source community, we bring this tool to Hollywood and wonderful workflow. Team is Martin Felkey, the primary coder. And Kai Kostak. If you go to my Blender presentation this afternoon, you'll find out more information about him and his work. There's me and Dennis Fassbender. He actually does a lot of the videos that we have. Him and Kai do most of the videos, do some fantastic stuff. Hollywood has seen the videos and they love the fracture modifier. It's a graph. Our booth for Blender and the fracture modifier was packed all three days of the expo. I think I got to leave the booth twice to go get a sandwich at a vending machine that was close by. Hollywood just in droves was coming to the booth because they were giving a lot of love to the fracture modifier and to Blender. And a lot because of the work by Three Studios, which I mentioned earlier, in our Man in the Height Castle work. So one of the things you want to look up on YouTube also is Man in the Height Castle. And I'll look up the VFX breakdown and you'll see a lot of good Blender work. And then we're giving us a lot of love at the booth. And because Albin Merrill's airplane crash is just absolutely stunning. Just go to YouTube, search Blender airplane crash, and it'll come right out. And he said, basically it's a French visual effects guy. And he said, oh, I had some time. So I took two weeks to learn the fracture modifier. And in two weeks, he created a visual effects masterpiece of a crashing plane. Sorry, I can't play it for you. I don't have permission to play it for it to be recorded and broadcast out. And I wouldn't want to do it in justice and play it in low res. It's kind of a waste of time. But I tell you what, go online, look at, in YouTube, search for Blender airplane crash, and you'll absolutely be stunned. Did a free piece of software did this. So Albin Merrill said, yeah, I want to learn fracture modifier. So he took a week just to learn our tool. And he did this. And we've been riding on his coattails for quite a while now, outstanding video. Watch it in high res though. If you want, let me know later, hit me up, I'll be here all through the conference, hit me up, we'll sit down on my laptop, and I'll play it for you. If not, just search for it. So again, props to my team. Jim's for Weeby. Because this is a community effort, Jim's used to be with the Lux render team. And he jumped ship. He's now working with us, the fracture modifier team. And all these gentlemen are out in Germany. And Jim's does all our Linux builds now, and he's working on technology with us to where we're increasing the Linux build of the fracture modifier, and we're getting some outstanding speed increases. Just the past couple of days, Jim's has been online, we all collaborate on IRC chat. Jim's was online talking about CUDA. He's actually done a hack with CUDA, which is what drives the GPUs and gives you a lot of your power. He did a hack on CUDA, and he uses flavors of Ubuntu also. This is what we develop on his Ubuntu, by the way. And again, because of the stuff I mentioned earlier, he's doing some hacks, and he's getting some tremendous improvements in time. And in Hollywood, if you give somebody three seconds of frame speed up in rendering of a frame, you may have given them 40,000 dollars. In that project. For a boutique studio, you don't have 40,000 dollars to spend. So you can only make Hollywood caliber films with open source software. And when we're giving you speed improvements like that in the industry, isn't the big players in the industry aren't? That's a reason you choose open source rather than paying for the software. It's not because it's free. Your time's not free. Saving your time, saving your 40,000 dollars is one of the numbers I get. I hear about a lot in the industry. Open source or the speed improvement saved us 40,000 dollars. Again, math is all over the place, so it's for different reasons. But it's one of the reasons. And Gens has been a real champion of really giving us some really good speed improvements for the fracture modifier. And it's a great tool. All right. People are the secret sauce. Not the project. The project's great. Fraction modifier is great. I want to give props to my fracture modifier team really quick. In this day and age, it's an all German team. I'm the one American. I am absolutely honored to be part of the fracture modifier team. I'm absolutely honored that this Sony image work project like a limbic collaborate with people from all over the world. We're all on an even playing field. There's no my country, your country. We're all part of a team together. Okay. It's all us. We have a project. We have a goal. Let's work it out together. And I think that's fantastic. I'm just very privileged to be part of a community like that. Olympic Sony image work figured out software is not the secret sauce. So Olympic is an interchange format that they came up with. And they said, hey, there's our internal format. If we give it to the world, I can now work easier with these boutique studios. I can work easier with open source software. I can work easier with transporting a file from this company to this company. So Sony figured out software is not the secret sauce. People are the secret sauce. So they said, hey, let's empower people. And this is a movement in Hollywood that me and other people are really pressuring them to open source all their software because people are secret sauce, not the software. So they open sourced the Olympic a while back. Now everybody can exchange information. What's one of the real cool things about blenders? Blender is basically Hollywood in the industry sandbox. When anybody open source is pretty much a technology, for the most part, blender incorporates it so everybody can use it on the blender platform. And so Olympic, me and a bunch of other people got together. Somebody started us out with a stub. A studio provided some stub of their internal hack to get Olympic to work with. I think it was elf studios, I think. I'm not sure. It's all, if you look it up, it's all out there. And they gave us a stub. A core developer picked it up. And me and a bunch of other people in community jumped on it, started doing testing and just hammering it. We gave bug reports so it'd get fixed. Worked with them for about six months. We're getting demo files from different studios in the industry to get this thing into Blender. We got it limbic coded. Got our first version out. Blender got some money from the industry through the Blender developer fund. Kept developing it. The usability now is right up there on import and export. Olympic is a huge file format. It's a point cache format. But you can now bridge open source software easily to proprietary Hollywood software. And this is one of the tools that we use. Again, why? Sony figured out the secret sauce isn't the software. Secret sauce is the people. Let's enable the people. They gave them a really good tool. Another one is Pixar released universal scene description. Fantastic tool. They released it last year at SIGGRAPH. Hasn't really gotten as much traction as I would like, but it's getting there. Blender's new 2.8 version. Took a look at it. Took some of the concepts and basically is turning it into some of the tools in 2.8. I would rather have had Blender engage it more, but this is one of the internal tools from Pixar. Did the same thing. Hey, people in the secret sauce don't the software. They pushed it out to GitHub, made an announcement at SIGGRAPH. Now people are picking up on universal scene description. What that does is that allows you, Olympic allows you to do a animation of point cache and animation. So figure running, but that animation is set. Once you have that animation, that's the only way it is. You can't alter the animation. You can color it differently. You can put different texture maps on it, make it look different, but it's still the same animation of a running guy. Universal scene description is a little bit different. It's all the objects in everything and then how they interact. So basically, as your scene is composed, you can put that out in the USD specification and now you can alter scenes between platforms. It's only been out for a year. Hopefully it'll gain some more traction. Very exciting. Why? Pixar understands the same concept. People in secret sauce, not the software. Okay, and I'm going to keep pushing that and keep preaching that to him. Brian Savry was with Pixar. I'm going to show you his product in a minute. He's now with AMD with their pro render. AMD was all over Blender from the beginning with their pro render. They work directly with Theory Studios and Barnstorm. Fantastic. This basically gives the power of a brand new renderer that's optimized to run on AMD hardware and they went all out to make sure and they even funded a dev to work with us in the Blender community on OpenCL to make sure the acceleration hardware worked. Why? Because they wanted to empower people because people are the secret sauce. So they got this pro render. Brian Savry was with Pixar. He's now working with AMD. Brian Savry, a huge advocate of open source. Talked about him some more in a moment and they're pushing this with the backing of Corporate Hollywood and a big hardware company. Fantastic movement. Basically wouldn't happen if there wasn't a community. Again, they see the democratization and decentralization happening and they answered. They weren't so friendly a few years ago, but now all of a sudden we had problems with the drivers, problems with the hardware. Over this last year they fixed that. They put their money where their mouth is, paid for development, got some really cool tools, and we're good to go. Brian Savry started Render Man for Blender, which Render Man is a world-famous rendering engine. Has a fantastic Blender add-on. Again, he's jumped to AMD now, but this is a wonderful project. Other people have taken it up. You get one free version of Render Man. So this is what open source software is doing. It's driving the adoption of give somebody a starting point, remove the barrier, get them started. You can't run a studio on it, but you can have one free version of Render Man and you got Blender for Render Man. So you got Blender. You got Render Man for Blender add-on. You got Render Man for your rendering engine. You're good to go. You're putting unbelievable quality work out there. What does that do? Levels the playing field. People from everyday people like us can produce a Hollywood quality animation or visual effects. Fantastic. Very excited about these people. Again, props to Brian Savry for getting that started. Matt Ebb props to him. He did the 3D Delight, which is very similar to Render Man type render. Matt Ebb props to him. He got it started. Brian Savry gives him a lot of credit for getting it started. Why? It was a person in the community making things happen. That's why we have these tools. That's why we have everyday people making Hollywood caliber film. You can see here GitHub. I prefer GitLab, which is an open source platform. It's actually open source software you can use. But a lot of Hollywood uses GitHub. So GitHub is a real supporter of open source software. And you can see here is Pixar's Render Man that Brian put up and he gives Matt Ebb props on it. And that's what we do. We go to these repos. We find the code. Download the code as a developer. We're good to go. So if you have any interest in Hollywood or any platform, do what you normally do. All you developers, go to GitHub. Search it. Search video editing. Search animation. And do site colon GitHub.com. And see who's doing what. I do it all the time. See who's doing what project and it'll come up. Volunteer. Get involved with that project. There's no reason you can't work with Hollywood. Because here's how you get started. You start submitting patches and then that's how they find you. Then all of a sudden they say, hey, we got this amount of money. We want to work for Hollywood and work with us on this project. Because they've noticed you on GitHub making submissions to their project. Works fantastic. Or they notice stuff like our factory modifier project. Say, hey, wow, you know, we can see the source code. What you guys do. So that's really good. All right. I'm just about done and I want to open it up to questions too. I do want to give props to our organization LA.blend. Stern and Getz had an idea a few years ago about World Blender Meetup Day of, hey, let's go to Hollywood and let's go to different studios from all over the world. Let's get them together. Let's go to user groups. People that are using Blender. And for 24 hours, let's webcast broadcasts from people all over the world and what they're doing with Blender. Okay. I'm thinking, wow, that's a good idea. So I kept egg and sterling on. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. So about five years ago, we did it. We've done it every year, but one, we skipped it. And it's called World Blender Meetup Day. You can search for it and you'll find our website. And it's this 17th, this next Saturday, not this coming up Saturday, but Saturday after. And watch the little video and you can see there's boutique studios all over the world using Blender. There's a couple that will be on there. And that's fantastic. Great for the community. Really excited to community. Last year, we had 3,400 people watching the stream. Hopefully we'll have a lot more this year. But just search World Blender Meetup Day and it should all come right up. It's WMBD.IMFO. And really cool stuff. All right. So what are the takeaways? Well, I couldn't really reveal a lot of secrets since something is recorded. But and I have to pick and choose who I tell stuff with because basically some of this is confidential information. But if you want to hit me up, I'll be here afterwards. And we can have conversations. If you want to get into the industry, if you're working with studios, you want to talk about some solutions, things of that sort. I'm open to talk with you guys. But the main takeaway is the big picture. And it's basically the heart and soul of Ubuntu and even the word Ubuntu. It's about the community. It's about people freely giving in the community. It's about the people helping me when I get stuck when we're doing an Ubuntu server installation for a boutique studio that's trying to make a virtual studio setup so they can collaborate with people all over the world. You know, Juan Paul Buza. Fantastic rigor. Okay. Fantastic. Love the guy. Great. Love chatting with him online. He's in Argentina. He can't fly out here and live in LA to work. But I tell you what, he can work remotely. So the community helping us do Ubuntu server installations, helping us do these open source tools and collaborating from all over the world. Okay. That's what's decentralizing and democratizing Hollywood. Why? Because people out of the middle of nowhere can come up with just as good of a project, maybe even better than Hollywood. And Hollywood knows this. They know it. People even from Pixar and some, you'll listen to their keynote speeches. They talk about this grassroots. They talk about the community and how the community is producing stuff. Why? Because the tool is not a barrier anymore. What's really cool is, and I'll tell you about one of the things we're doing in the future, something that is not for easy electricity. Okay. So here's one of your takeaways. On the cloud, we're trying to get away for Hollywood studios and other studios to sponsor. If you can't fund it yourself like through something like open source Hollywood, you can't fund your own project. We're trying to get Hollywood to pay for the electricity. What does that mean? That means everybody uses these platforms I mentioned. They make their product, but they have to render it. Rendering costs electricity because it takes weeks, months of time to render an animation. What we're trying to do is we're kicking it around Hollywood, figuring out a way to best do it to where Hollywood can sponsor, render time in the cloud. Okay. If they can do that, they pay for the electricity. These boutique studios can realistically render a Hollywood feature film animation. So somebody out of the middle of nowhere can make a feature film animation on par with Pixar if we can get their rendering time paid for. Okay. If not, they have to work it out some other way, but that is one of the stumbling blocks with this. When Hollywood does pick up a project though, they will give the rendering time and it's outstanding to see what happens. The other takeaway is because people are the secret sauce, Hollywood is out looking in the community. There's a ton of work. They just don't know how to connect with developers. They need people working on these open source pipelines. Theory needs people. Barnstorm needs people. Several other organizations are looking for people that no blender, that no open source, that no Python, but they can't find them. Indeed, it's kind of doing a good job, but they can't find these people. So go out and look. If you like doing database work, databases used heavily in Hollywood. They need you and you get to work on film projects. So it's really, really cool. The other takeaway is keep watching. Keep supporting. You can search on the topic from the talk here, democratizing Hollywood. Keep searching on it. My organization, SoCal Blender, is going to launch a new website. And when we do, we have a full blog that's going to be going up and you'll be seeing articles on the subject. You'll be able to search it and you'll be able to track this next year, the development of democratizing and decentralizing Hollywood. It's a movement. Like I said, we've got a brick and mortar affiliation with Pasadena Media, a community media TV station. So we've got a real strong presence here in Southern California. And I've already got other states in the country and other places around the world that are asking about it because I'm really excited because everybody wants their own little baby Hollywood or their own virtual Hollywood. So I wanted to open it up for questions, too. I kind of didn't take questions while we were talking. I think we got a little bit of time still. We have several minutes. Sure. And before we do that, can we get a quick round of applause? Thank you. Thank you. In the many years that New Beacons have been around, we've had some discussions about tools, but not at this level and not about the scope of community. So I really appreciate your time to prepare this and to bring it here for us today. Thank you. So if you have a question, these talks are recorded for later. Just raise your hand. Yes, Michelle Klein has Misagief Media. I'd like to find out if any of these tool chains would be helpful for producing a live action project. Yes, there's several open source video editors. One of them uses a back end of Blender. And you can use Blender's video sequence editor. It does 4k video. You can do proxy editing. We're working on projects where you can store all your media in 4k in the cloud and use Blender in its proxy capabilities to where you can edit it locally, have the cloud render it for you. So that saves you quite a bit of money. You're not struggling with 4k video. So that would be video editing for live action. But yeah, all these tools use 4k work with 4k video. Yeah, because I'm going to be working with a group of people who have a network on what's it, a Roku called OSI 74. Sure. It's there already. And I may be doing a show for them. And the thing is, is that most of the people involved are on the east coast. Right. And it's, you know, there's, there's so many things that, you know, being able to bring the disparate people in OSI 74 together would be very cool. Right. The question was, if it didn't get recording on the broadcast is about bringing people together in a full studio pipeline. You've got these platforms that I mentioned earlier that you can use and Blender with a few other tools, you can cobble one together. But eventually that'll be developed. Eventually Hollywood will want and my group, SoCal Blender, we're working on a cobbled together system. And eventually, because we're right here in Hollywood, we'll probably have a 100% open source version eventually, which will be great. You'll be able to download the whole platform. If not, there's already these existing platforms. They're like $10 a month. And so they're fantastic. Fantastic. You got Nimble and the other ones that I mentioned. And you got open source Hollywood.org. It's really a movement that's not going to die. It's just going to get even better. Brilliant. Awesome. Any other questions? It used to be that Australia had the rendering farms all running Linux. What is that today? And where is it? You know, I, uh, one of the core developers of Blenders from Australia, I don't know, there's a disconnect. I went to American film market, talked to American film makers. I don't know. I don't hear that. That's not the buzz that I hear. But I know there's stuff going on there. I just don't know how to connect with them. I don't know if that's something through the Ubuntu community or who, but I'm not seeing enough of that information. I do know that one of the challenges is the amount of data we pump back and forth. Sometimes the data pipeline. So there's some technologies that are being developed where they're talking about serializing your work, which means as you're doing it at that moment, it's being sent over the internet. So you're not saying I worked for 15 hours. Now I'm going to send 15 hours of work over the internet and it's not going to be done before I have to start tomorrow morning. That's the issue right now is pumping that data. So hopefully that'll get fixed. But that's the issue. And I know going from country to country, that data flows kind of an issue. So I don't know. But I've heard of it, but I can't seem to find them. I've searched on the internet. I haven't, maybe my search freeze is not working. One other question on Ubuntu Studio, they've sunset at that project. So it's still good for another three or four years. What happens after that? Well, that's one of the reasons I'm giving them props again, because I started out with them for a while and they kind of the project, you know, it, like any project, you need the people in community to drive it. It's one of the reasons I reinstalled it on this computer and used it for the presentation to give them props. I'd like to see within the next six months this year and see if I can't gain some more traction, bring in some new blood. There's a ton of people that work in Hollywood that have no idea what open source is. They're learning because they're learning because of Olympics, some of these others. So the question was about Ubuntu Studio being sunsetted and is the project still usable? I think it is. It's still a great distro. It's basically on the new LTS version of Ubuntu 1604. So for a few years, it's still good. I will tell you that I'm going to add it in there with Blinder, Krita, and some of my other stuff. And I'm going to start promoting it again, see if I can get some traction, see if I can get some new blood developers here, face to face with people in Hollywood to jump on. Because I think it's a fantastic project. I always have been, love their IRC chat room, great people. And I think it's well worth people's time. This always raises an idea for next year. So as you run into people and any of you run into people who might be interested in being maintainers for Ubuntu Studio, let's come here next year, bring yourselves together. We'll have a talk about what's needed to maintain it and get attention for it and get some developers behind it and keep it going. Yeah, let's do it because something focused, it's been tried repeatedly, but it keeps failing in the Linux distro ecosystem for some reason. But it just takes people organizing in the community. I think if we get enough people, especially if I can help anchor it here in Hollywood, I think I can get some traction because it's just a one-stop shop. And look what I'm doing. Now I'm showing this to Hollywood. They're going, you're doing what? Yeah, I'm taking Windows computers, putting in VBox, and I'm running Ubuntu flavors. So I think this solution is going to make sense to people. And musicians as well. I have two friends who are musicians. One of them uses Ubuntu Studio for everything. The other uses it in a shared workflow with a Mac. But that's just people I happen to know. Absolutely. So it's quite a capable system. If we get some more maintainers behind it, we can keep it running. Absolutely. Early on in the comment was Ubuntu Studio is used aggressively for audio. That's basically was always this core focus. But a few years ago, I came in and helped out with Blender and some of the video stuff, hung out and chat with them, gave them my two cents as much as I could as a community member, like we're talking about, you know, I was vocal about what I think we needed. So they bumped up the video aspect of it, but I wasn't able to focus in with them and keep working and be a regular contributor to the community. But let's do it. You and I, you're here local too. You and I, let's do it. And I'm gonna, I put it on specifically to use for this presentation to give it props because I love the work that's already been done. And I would love to see it go rather than being sunsetted. Any other questions? We have a couple minutes left. Okay, I'm available too. Afterwards, stop me anytime. Talk to me if you got any specific needs, specific questions about what it takes to get involved with Hollywood. Thanks for coming. Appreciate you guys listening to me. And as I like to say, good luck in your adventures. Thank you. Well, thanks again, JT. We have a 30 minute break, and then we come back here to 1130, where Nathan Haynes will be discussing an overview of Ubuntu and how it's been navigating the changes over the last year and where it's headed next. Okay, we're on. We have sound, sound. We have sound. Before we introduce Nathan, yesterday we had a question about during Jose's talk toward the end. There was a question about building out communities around hardware. Is that person here this morning? Okay, too bad. I discovered there's a bof tonight about that very topic. So what I've learned is take a look at the birds of a feather sessions in the schedule because there are a lot of specialty interests that are really kind of cool. So that's worth looking at. Another announcement worth knowing. Some of you weren't here yesterday when I was plugging this, but it's really cool. Pasadena calls themselves the city of art and science. They pride themselves in a semi-annual event called Art Night. And most of the time, scale happens one week before Art Night. So everyone travels to Pasadena and they don't get to have this wonderful time when the city opens up its best galleries and museums and performance spaces for free for the evening. Well, it happens to be tonight. So from six until 10, and there are venues within walking distance here, we have a lot of museums and galleries and performance spaces all free and welcoming you. So if you don't have other plans, you'll see these brochures in the brochure rack in the corner of this conference center. I put some on the table back here. And if you can't find one at all, at any time during the day, you can grab me and say, where do I learn more? Or you can just look up artnightpasadena.org. But it's pretty fable. If I wasn't here going to boss, I'd be out enjoying the city's finest art. So worth knowing about. Oh, last preview thing today. You know what today is? It's Friday. It's Friday and at noon, something very special happens at scale. They open the expo floor. So we no longer fight that. We embrace that. We know that that's where you're going to want to be. And it's going to be a little longer than lunch. So we have a long break in our schedule for today. Two, two. Sorry, two o'clock that happens. Thank you. So we have lunch after Nathan's talk. And then after lunch, continue, enjoy the time at the expo. Our next talk then is at Nathan. Is that three o'clock? Three o'clock. I believe it is. It's on the schedule. You probably know it better than I do. We've been busy doing other things. But so we have a long break. Just know that we have a long break. So enjoy that long break. Have a great lunch. Enjoy the expo floor. And we'll all meet back here at three o'clock. But for now, we have Nathan Haynes. You're good to go? I think so. Okay. Talking about the change in face of Ubuntu. Yeah, the talk after the break now only is in the schedule, but also in guidebook, which is fantastic. I see the projector is not working. And so I feel bad I pressed the button twice. Third time's a charm, maybe? It's a countdown. That looks ominous. I threatened to do this talk without slides, but it's better with... That is not mine. That's not me. Press the button again. Oh, as soon as I push the button. I'll try one more time. I'm on HDMI, but it's like some... It says it's like a VGA horrible adapter thing. That's from Skel. That should be rotating through their webpage when there is no one attached. Yes. Well, yes, when I when I press the button. There's like 15 adapters. Yeah, it's really scary. Yeah, display for it to... There's one small cable down here and then it's just adapters all the way down. You got that. There you go. Okay, so is that squished? I can't tell. I'm going to set it to what they asked for and if it goes blank, then we know what the problem is. All right, so we were great. Fantastic. All right. Well, thank you for your patience, and thank you for coming to my talk. The Ubuntu is my favorite operating system, and it has been for a very, very long time. And so one of the neat things about Ubuntu is that it's always changing, so it's getting better and improving. And there's some really big improvements and changes in this next cycle. So you may have seen them in October for Ubuntu 17.10, and you might be on the LTS release and happy with 16.04 and wondering what's in store. In 1804, you will have heard that the interface, everything changed, and you may be wondering why, and that's what I'm here to talk about is the changing face of Ubuntu. Now, me myself, my name is Nathan Haynes. I'm an author. You may know me from such books as Beginning Ubuntu for Windows and Mac users. Thank you. Or such books as Beginning Ubuntu for Windows and Mac users second edition. And so having started with 14.04 and now 16.04, and I don't know, that's 18.04, yeah, that's a publisher decision. I was really there for the last bits dug in, and now everything's different and changed, so I'm not looking forward to that. I have to rewrite my book for just the interface, redo all the screenshots. I'm an Ubuntu member. I'm the leader of the Ubuntu California local team and I'm a computer enthusiast, so I've followed Linux for a very, very long time. Back when I was doing dial-up BBSs and playing with DOS and my Windows INI file for Windows 3.0, and I remember those old Linux-y things, and so what I want to talk about today is where Ubuntu's been and where it's going. Now Ubuntu, like I said, has changed over the years. We're actually at the beginning of a big change right now. Ubuntu started off with GNOME 2, which is a very classic interface, and then in 2011 changed to Unity, which got bigger and better and more powerful and more streamlined. So 16.04 was really kind of the pinnacle of Unity on the desktop. When it came time to, Ubuntu was about 11 and a half years old when 16.04 came out, and with the release of 17.04, that was the last release that shipped with Unity, a very beautiful release that was not too bad now. So from that transition to Ubuntu being about 12 and a half years old to 17.10 was the 13th anniversary of the Ubuntu release, and at 13 years old everything changed, things looked different, the textures on the long screen were a bit different. Everything was kind of familiar, but it was a little crankier, a little buggy because of that big transition, and suddenly strange new features were popping up in places where there weren't features before, and so for that 13th anniversary birthday of Ubuntu, things have really changed, and so we said 17 was a very, very, very big change. So I want to talk about where Ubuntu began and how Ubuntu started, what the purpose of the project was, and how those changes have sort of come about, because I think it's a sort of an interesting story. In the beginning was not Ubuntu. Now the world of Unix really stretches back to about 1968 or nine, and I'm not going to go back that far. Linux started in September 1991 and I'm not going to go back quite that far, although if we look back there we have a really cool Unix-like kernel for the 386. At the time a lot of people who were working on computers at universities were using some sort of Unix-like OS on a Vax or a PDP or something similar, and if you're programming and you're working on computers you want something very, very similar. At the time we did a BSD, which for various licensing reasons, it wasn't quite sure if you could redistribute it, and so when Linus Torvald's university student at the University of Helsinki in Finland said I'm going to write my own kernel and just for fun it'll never be anything really big, but I just want to do it. Meanwhile the new project had been trying to reimplement Unix from the user space out and working inwards towards the kernel, still working in that kernel. Everything came into place at the right time and so we had this really great ecosystem where we had this free software user space, we had suddenly from nowhere this Unix-like kernel, the free software guys jumped in and said you know what's the best license ever is the GPL. Linus Torvald says I just I don't really care, I just want people to be able to share it and use it and improve it if it's useful for them because that's what I'm doing, and boom suddenly we had Linux. Now Linux back then was literally you had FTP sites with source code with all the utilities and you had the Linux kernel that you could go and compile and so to be useful, Linux wasn't useful it was just a kernel, you had to get everything else and so different groups because everything was free to redistribute were able to take this and so we had this soft landing system which was the first Linux distro, Slackware showed up very very soon thereafter, Debian showed up about three months later and I think 92 I want to say and so Debian came around and said we want to be a completely free operating system and we want to have lots of utilities and be very very useful. Now so between these different distros Slackware and Debian and Red Hat kind of came about as well around the same time we were able to you're able to actually go in and get a bunch of files and burn them to a disk and boot off of it and make a boot floppy and for as little or for as few as eight floppies boot floppy root floppy and then package floppies you too could have a Linux system at home on your IBM PC so it's a really really cool thing and you'd you'd boot from it you'd you'd switch back and forth you'd enter to not the floppy or you get a kernel panic on the good old days and you'd have an installation screen and you'd have categories accessories communications engineering science math documentation programming compilers text editors graphics games and you'd go through and you'd have maybe depending on the on the release you'd have maybe anywhere from 200 to 2000 to maybe 5000 packages that you could during install you'd be prompted to pick the packages you wanted to install to have a working system you had a good default selection it was up to you to not uncheck things that you needed to install like drivers and the kernel and x and bash so or tc shellard or whatever else you were using at the time as free software gained momentum and Linux became more popular this grew and grew and suddenly we had cd ROMs um I remember when I got back in Linux after the old old old days like the first my first experience was a dial-up shell as a bbs and when I wanted to do it myself uh friend's dad was an engineer uh and so he gave me a five cd collection and my first experience with uh with installing locally was debbie in 1.0 and if you check Wikipedia there is no debbie in 1.0 because info magic took debbie in 0.93 release uh six between the uh eight out to elf transition where the way binaries were compiled was completely different threw that on cd and said debbie in 1.0 and it didn't work and I said well debbie is not so good I'll maybe use slack or red hat um and uh um debbie was fine just uh it that was not what we got so um the first debbie in release is 1.1 um but that was still a five cd set full of different different software and when I got back in to in 2003 uh Susan 9.0 was like four or five cds and you download all the cds and you boot you get a nice uh easy text uh uh installer or graphical installer depending on the distro and you can then choose from like 3000 installs um any of your favorite of 50 different text editors and so on and so uh and then you wouldn't and then would have you swap out disks and you wouldn't use every disk you would have to download all the disk because you didn't know what package packages you had and what disks they were on so back in the days you'd spend um maybe a day and a half downloading like five six seven cds and then um you'd use like two of them maybe like the last one and then you're because the printer drivers like on windows was always like on last disk and so things were really complex you could have any system you want you want it but uh if you were an engineer programmer and a lot had a lot of unix experience you could have the perfect system but if you were like me and you were just getting started you could wind your way through but it was kind of really tricky it was kind of really scary so things changed in 2004 a devian developer named mark shoulder word said you know I'm going to um I think we can do better free software is the future he had built his own company named thought um out of free software because he came from humble beginnings made it really big we're on the first uh when you go to websites and they're the SSL certificates uh that's what thought did um just back before verisign sold a verisign made a ton of money um traveled up to the space station um on his own dime and was on the mirror for a week uh doing cool japanese space agency experiments and probably drinking vodka americans you can't americans don't drink in space it's completely wrong and horrible because alcohol is bad um the russians hide vodka they they they send it with their shipments so they don't drink constantly but you know you're off your shift it's a holiday you know I'm sure new years is a blast on the russian module so he went up and he did that and so he came back says well how can I give back free software gave me all this I I want to do philanthropy so he said let's really take free software and let's just um uh let's showcase it he can be bigger and better and so the idea of um I described Linux for engineers it was really really great and really cool and fun to play with because I love DOS and all those codes and had the time because I was 15 16 to play with it but he had the idea of Linux for human beings and so the concept was let's take uh let's get everything together and let's have one cd that you can download let's make sure it fits in a no more than a 650 megabyte disk because the 700 megs were um not rare anymore but still more expensive and let's get one disk that you put in and you install and installs in 30 minutes doesn't ask you any questions um you get um one best of class desktop environment you get one good office suite one good web browser one good instant messenger and you just have everything there and so the boom two four ten looked like this it was very simple very brown very gnome two and um it wasn't so bad actually uh uh I remember hearing the release on slash dot and I was thinking um uh it was oh so of course this is based on uh Debian let's take Debian every six months um Debian is going between two and three years every release the stable version had all added eight software so let's take Debian and stable and every six months we're gonna freeze it polish it knock all the bugs just pick specific software that we can really showcase and make really better contribute upstream and we're gonna showcase this now when this first was released I heard I read it on flash dot which is what I read uh at the time now it's Reddit but the flash dot and I said oh um I read the article I said some self-made millionaire is making himself a vanity distro and it's gonna be all around community I'm like community yeah I I'll pass um six months later when um when uh 504 came out there was a uh the new release was coming on flash dot there's a ton of buzz and I said well it's free uh they wouldn't still be buzzed if there wasn't something to this so I said I'm gonna try it out and I did and it was amazing because everything just worked um and I didn't have like five text editors and like three versions of solitaire and you know everything so like this is pretty cool actually and of course um I at that time I could go in and install everything and start tweaking text files and changing um I should have the xkcd in here like changing uh x for 86 config at the time um but I don't I never really wanted to do those things I just wanted to get to work so um I had a pdf view or everything installed so it was really really really really great and on the community side um at the time uh it's hard to remember a time now when when you went to a Linux forum and every they're they still exist today but every single forum you go in and you're a beginner and you don't know where to begin because everything's you thought Windows works with computers and no surprise uh Unix stretches back to the fifties in heritage um the seventies in actuality and um it does everything completely different because Windows had well didn't exist and VMS didn't exist um and so on uh so and cpm didn't exist that's where Windows gets its inspiration so you go online and you get asked a forum and say well uh I have some questions and they'd say you know they call you noob you'd say they wouldn't bother to type it out say rtfm if anyone remembers that stands for for those of you don't it means read the fine manual and and the world was a different place back then um you were expected to um start looking through source code to find your answers before you went to um uh went online and it's reasonable to expect to do some work for you in online but there was no forgiveness at all whatsoever um so the Ubuntu project was founded and Ubuntu is an ancient African African philosophy um uh of humanity towards others um so what it means is um that if uh you know we're all we're all human we're all in one community and if I help you um I don't just lift you up but I lift our whole community and lift myself up as well which is the best most succinct definition of free software I think I've ever heard so when I realized that um um this wasn't just a line that they really actually did uh expect people to be kind and polite and they they lived by this philosophy on the Ubuntu forums there was a code of conduct I said you know this is something I want to be associated with the software is wonderful the people are great I Google problem put Ubuntu at the end I get the answer I said this is this is great Ubuntu got better and browner uh this here is Ubuntu six of six um after a couple releases we said you know everything's going great we we haven't missed any deadlines um we have really good first class desktop use it's getting really popular let's um no one can use it on on servers or in business because it's every six months let's take a release and let's let's sit down and focus on making it really super stable um and let's support it instead of just for 18 months which is a year and a half um let's let's support it for longer let's let's go with three years so you can install it on a on a server and um not incur the wrath of IT um and so we spent about six extra six or eight extra weeks working on uh Ubuntu 604 and because the date slipped from April to uh to June it uh became Ubuntu 606 LTS and this was the first uh version now by this time we see that um things a little more shiny at the time uh glossy shiny textures were the big things the title bars a little shinier a little browner um it's a little more Ubuntu and we have two years later 804 we on time did our second LTS and this is where Ubuntu um really started classic Ubuntu really started to take shape and and got a lot of uh a lot of buy-in I think we're starting to uh look at cloud technologies like eucalyptus um which is sort of a cool thing and um and um now it's all open stacked but we got in on that too um an extra lease or two and of course use comp is so if you took that window and you got your mouse and shook it the window would wobble like a like it was made of jelly um which is fun but if you took two windows um and move them side by side um to line them up they'd stick um you know so they didn't overlap for a little bit but they would squish a little bit so you get a little bit of feedback when you did that um I miss I don't miss the spinning desktop cube which was awesome but I never really used by dooms more wobbly windows now Ubuntu at this time had really made it name for itself and it got more popular and so what happened was that um we had had this really brown look this really that harken back to uh Afka in the desert now humans all come every human here if you trace back came out of africa um maybe several times actually it's really complex but we all came from one place we're all shared humanity uh free softwares of shared community and so that was a really great way to focus on as Ubuntu came into a more professional type of uh uh look it was decided that Mark Schodler said it's time to rebrand and leave the brown behind a little bit and the tans and the rich uh deep browns and oranges and let's go with a brand new look and so Ubuntu had a new look a new sleek look that really focused on lightness and uh dependability around reliability and um so Ubuntu went from from brown to purple and orange mostly orange and so we got a new look that was slightly refined but we had a brand new look on the desktop um and that was the beginning of some major changes now Ubuntu by itself uh was still going super strong at the same time GNOME 2 that Ubuntu was built on GNOME 2 is a fantastic desktop environment that survives a day in uh mate and I forget the other uh fork that is also excellent I think once the budget maybe um I knew this when I got up here but anyway um uh at the same time GNOME was starting to look at its vision for the future and it had some very strong ideas uh as to how it wanted that future of computing to look and how to sort of revolutionize things and Ubuntu and Kodanakal also had some really strong ideas on how they wanted computing to work and they wanted to change things and make things faster and more connected. Now as it turned out at the time GNOME um has always had strong opinions and Ubuntu has sounded let's take Debian and make some very strong opinions um so that you have um um we had to ship VI as a text editor for example because um if you don't um then uh you get your lending license taken away um and uh of course it shipped with nano which is the best text editor uh ever um thank thank you nano is a new edge if you ask me who here uh who here uses VI and so keep your hand up if you it's because you tried it and you uh years ago and you still can't figure how to quit. Yeah VI has two modes beep repeatedly break everything um Emax of course wasn't shipped with it because it's giant and huge Emax stands for escape meta all control shift um um but the philosophy was we'd make one good choice VI's and everything nano's good for beginners we'll ship that um but if you want Emax you can go get it super easy one command is you have it you make your best that system and so Ubuntu was founded on strong choices and GNOME also had strong choices the problem is um even to say you know we've been we've been lost up we're shipping the newest version GNOME GNOME comes out in March and we come out in April so uh we're always on lockstep let's work together and make something really cool uh you have GNOME shows interesting ideas we have some good ideas to make it more user friendly and little more powerful and GNOME well in my unbiased opinion let me just say GNOME uh decided that they had a strong opinion and didn't want to bother with collaboration and working they wanted to get their own ideas out and focus on that which is valid um but they weren't too friendly to uh ideas for enhancements and so on and so their vision uh was different than what Ubuntu wanted and so Ubuntu decided that they needed to uh go ahead and and take their vision because GNOME 3 wasn't looking so good at the very beginning uh not as far as user friendlyness goes so in 2010 we had a brand new feel and um as netbooks started becoming the big new thing screen sizes not smaller and we had more and more connectivity and so on it was decided that we needed a brand new look and so um so in uh Ubuntu 1104 Unity was released now in uh 1010 if no one remembers uh the netbook remix but uh there was a very simplified sort of early proto unity that was just perfect for really uh tiny little screens uh on netbooks and that simplified things and so we took that and applied to the desktop now the good news is that um over the years it's got bigger and better um the bad news is 1104 is a little rough it worked out you could work around the um learn how things worked and work around the changes it wasn't that bad um the better news was that 1110 was really good and 1204 focus was saying let's make this really polished really good for power users um but this was the new look of Ubuntu the launcher on the left to uh reduce space um one top panel uh at the top if you maximize the window uh the title bar disappears into the top panel so you're not wasting space uh rather than um playing a game of uh what happens when I click this uh notification icon this tray icon um if I click or right click do I do I get a menu do I activate feature do I open a window do I close the window do I run a program do I you know make a uh a change rather uh we had these great menus that um had a networking menu that gave you a network status your uh sound menu that gave you uh volume sliders for your uh speakers your mic if you're recording um uh play and pause and status of your uh rhythm box or VLC players um everything all in one place and so that did get refined this is 1204 this is the first LTS got refines a little prettier a little sleeker and the other thing you need to really did very very well um this was the first stand alone where they said we're gonna make this a power user interface where you can do everything from the keyboard and so sure enough there's a great feature called HUD uh where if you're in Libre office or GIMP or some other uh uh uh program with really powerful complex arcane menus um if you're a power user you probably know if you tap uh uh alt key you get a little you highlight the menus you use the arrow keys move or alt F goes to file alt E and so on if you just tap alt you get a search bar um then that you can just type in what you wanted to do and it filters through searches the menu options and shows you them along with the breadcrumb trail to where it was so one um you can just tell the computer what you want to do and two if you actually did need to find that in the menus later it already taught you how to do that you could go through and pick one run it right from there best thing ever in 1210 um the uh idea was was made to have web integration and so um for example if you went to Gmail or uh Google Play or Amazon music you could go in and um so the nice thing about the launchers is you had you could see what was open and the cool thing with the launchers here is that if you had like a new email for example you'd have like an icon and you'd have like a little badge number when new emails or new messages came in you'd have progress bars um and so the idea was uh was uh made to let's bring web pages and let's have a Firefox extension if you go to Yahoo Mail and a mail comes in you get a notification on the screen and you get a little uh icon there uh Yahoo Mail would be a separate icon in the launcher if you click it it switches to your browser and the right tab if you listen to music um you can actually play and pause and do the next track and Spotify and Pandora and so on from the sound menu and that was a beautiful beautiful feature that only was around for about a year because unfortunately um it didn't catch buy in um Ubuntu was a little too early and uh the uh W3C had some ideas for web integration that weren't quite compatible and uh also nobody nobody adopted those changes themselves which I thought was a really really good change um but as we got closer and closer to this idea of accessing information everywhere um the idea became that Ubuntu could be a single platform for many many different devices already Ubuntu through Unity could bring in if you had uh lots of programs running you had um lots of features through sound menu and so on where you could in one place in your shell uh control all of them like I said works perfect for music and so on um through the Unity launcher you could also search online so for example if I searched um music I could search not only my library but the Amazon uh mp3 music store I could search um uh you know my audio tracks on uh I don't remember the services anymore I think Google Play was one of them um you could actually you could actually search for music online get listings and you could preview the music so if you didn't have an album if you didn't have an album you could go through and hit play preview the tracks if you didn't but it was on Amazon you could actually you could actually take a look and see and you could you could actually hit play right there in your shell uh and and if you liked it you could click buy you go to the web page and you could buy it there um Ubuntu launched its own uh web service called Ubuntu 1 that had file syncing as well as well as a music store and did the exact same thing so um so the evolution of this was let's have let's make Ubuntu a platform where you can write a program once use these services once and you can run it any device and that was really really really cool so what we have in 1604 it's the last version of Unity where it was really really powerful and we had this ability to uh about 1504 actually about a year before where we could have a phone and we could have different programs we had a really nice Unity dash that because of the phone gave you your weather right there it gave you all your applications you could you could run um uh you could you know sort of play music um through edge swipes you could pull up the launcher just like you had in Ubuntu um you could go through your task list and we went um we developed Unity for the phones and kind of worked backwards and sort of um let's let's work back we are we know the perfect desktop is Unity so let's make sure everything works really great on phones and tablets and work backwards and so while work on that never finished um it was we could take these exact same programs if you look on the right there uh uh the dash music web browser and a terminal and on a tablet you could turn on uh stage uh or turn on uh uh computer mode and you could get the you could switch and get the exact same thing in windows that were movable this is on the Nexus 7 but what the exact same thing on as on a computer these same programs um automatically adapted to the form factor you're using so you could have a phone and you could be on there and you could get your information and then you got to the hotel room you get scale you go to the hotel room you don't need to bring your laptop you go to your hotel room you get your HDMI adapter plug into the TV and automatically adapt to this it was there it existed it was a great idea it was working um and unfortunately after several years of working on this um there was just no industry buy-in we had several uh we did have a BQ in Spain and Meizu in China that had actually shipped devices and were working um cells were iffy the software wasn't quite there um you could really see see where it was going and if you we had them here at scale if you've been here you've seen the devices um people read them on the web on the web and say that sounds really weird I don't understand and then they get to the booth and say so I heard about this thing and it was really weird I don't understand and so we'll hear the tablet try and the moment someone swiped in from the left edge and saw the launcher swiped in saw the apps clicked we go to switch desktop mode and everything came up the the light bulb turned on uh touching was believing it was really great and fortunately after several years it didn't catch on and so it didn't make sense anymore to focus on this because the the the traditional desktop was kind of stagnating and um this vision um sort of uh was really really expensive and catch on and so unfortunately uh just uh before 7 we've been to 1704 was launched it was announced uh last about a year ago that Unity uh was canceled and was no longer going to be the future of it and so um a lot of people were really happy a lot of people were really sad and so the future of Ubuntu then was in question because Unity had defined what Ubuntu was for six long years and so we know that Unity was built on Ubuntu has always been built on Davian always been built on GNOME and even when we used Unity um we still used GNOME um just we just didn't use GNOME shell we put a Unity in as a shell and we worked on that uh but we still used all the great GNOME apps like uh Mines and Solitaire and Calculator and the Settings and the Soccer Center so it's all all you know we've always been close to GNOME um but not interface wise so the answer was obviously return to GNOME but GNOME looks like this and so it's pretty and clean as that is um that does it's not very Ubuntu-y um for one thing everything is giant um two the launcher is gone so if you go from now any of you here who are an expert uh who use VI but put your hand down when I said who who couldn't figure out to quit you could figure anything out for yourself and customize it and you probably already know the 20 extensions you need to make GNOME shell usable um for you on your computer but if we go from 1604 um to to this surprise 8204 update in July and you get this a lot of people are going to be really upset because nothing works the same way everything's completely different um they're going to be lost so um while the idea was to go back to GNOME it was clear that we needed to do something else and so um what happened was after the transition was announced canonical sent some employees to Gwadec uh which is a GNOME conference and they were sitting around saying you know we really want to just make some just slight customizations um GNOME has GNOME really expects the distro to do a lot of customization and uh GNOME sort of hardcodes a lot of things so for example if a distro has if a session has a default uh plugin um you can never ever disable that plugin ever it's just not possible GNOME doesn't allow it um so uh the question was well if we if we ship a plugin um it can't be disabled and all plugins uh GNOME automatically updates the plugins so we can't we can't ensure uh that our uh soft recycles respected and we can't support things what do we do so a couple bold decisions were made and so um at Gwadec um I think Olivier Thiloid was uh and uh someone else I can't remember Ken Van Dyne we're talking to some GNOME people and they said you know we just want to make some changes we want to have them separate so that we can kind of put all our changes here so we're not changing everything GNOME but we're we have we have a way to customize and said well we have this feature called session support why don't you use that and I said ah tell me more so sessions GNOME is a way that you can um sort of ship with uh a profile that uh then sort of um uh has some defaults um but you can you can have different sessions and different profiles so if you look at 1710 right now actually this is 1710 this is actually bionic this is 1804 as of yesterday um this is what it looks like now and this is what really 1710 looks like um so this is a default if you upgrade uh to the newest version of Ubuntu it's gonna look like this now you'll notice it looks a lot like uni it's very familiar um we didn't bother to re-implement unity um so there's no big friendly button um the panels uh the indicators are mostly gone um times in the center um but we put the icons back to a human size which is I think very nice we have a launcher on the left and while it doesn't do a lot of the things that Unity did um it is that still still same familiar look and so uh rather than go and do our own extensions there was already a fantastic extension called dash uh for GNOME a plugin called dash to dock it was a fantastic plugin and it did pretty much what we wanted did more than what we wanted actually um so we said well let's maybe we don't want to support this forever and all these changes um but we need to support what we ship so maybe talk to dash to dock and see what they say about um well what if we sort of um uh fork the plugin so it gets a different um a different uh a fingerprint uh ID so it's not constantly so when dash to dock can do their own thing and we're not Ubuntu users aren't getting updated without a warning or a recourse and let's maybe reduce some of the features make it very very simple change the defaults ship with something you know friendly um and then maybe think about how we can work with dash to dock so the dash to dock the developers were like this is a great idea let's work together and so um a fork was made it's in the dash to dock uh the Ubuntu dock is um in the GitHub repository for dash to dock the subset doesn't have all the features um any specific features we added specifically for Ubuntu um has a different namespace and so what happens is that um when you make changes to um to the Ubuntu dock and you say you know I've been using Ubuntu now for a couple months and now I'm an expert and I just want more and I want dash to dock you can go and install dash to dock Ubuntu dock cannot be disabled GNOME does not allow it it's impossible so when Ubuntu dock detects that you've installed dash to dock and it's active the Ubuntu dock automatically hides itself so it gets out of the way any settings you've changed that are common um are reflected in dash to dock because it's the same thing and when you go in and you change like the launcher size or or other uh more advanced dash to dock settings that we don't necessarily support if you uninstall dash to dock and you so Ubuntu dock pops up automatically so you you so you're never left without a way to like without a way to to launch programs all those same features um we don't support them we don't expose them but um Ubuntu dock respects those features so you can move back and forth try it out and and and it's this really great uh symbiosis and in fact when I in uh uh canonical is kind of a semi to uh New York in uh end of September to work we just before 1710 came out we were already thinking about 1804 and the first thing I did was find um I'm not a GNOME shelf fan so I'm still on I was still on Unity and I installed uh got new swapped out my hard drive installed it played with it for a couple weeks flew there and immediately found a bug in the dock so it said great follow bug here launchpad follow bug upstream I hate filing bugs because it's hard work to follow a good bug but I only found good bugs um 10 minutes later upstream said uh one of the uh developers said oh hey uh that's odd yeah you're right that's shouldn't be that hold on and 45 minutes after that um said yeah I fixed the problem this was the problem this the patch there's a pull request against uh it was fixed upstream and there's a pull request uh in uh our fork against our our fork so um there's a really lovely uh upstream relationship where we're working really hard so that um we have a really good experience but you can also customize it to your heart's content um at the same time uh you can definitely uh so say say you love GNOME GNOME shelf and you want to run a bone too for all the other reasons um the support lifetime uh and so on um you can take it into 710 or 1710 or 1804 open up a terminal type app install GNOME dash session and you get this you get uh well you log out you go to your username you click on the gear icon you pick GNOME and you get this you get uh minus the wallpaper you get um you get vanilla GNOME so we have a really great uh transitional interface for GNOME shell that we're continuing to improve and iterate on and then we'll do so more in the future but if you go from 1604 to 1804 users are gonna it's gonna be different but familiar and easy to to to learn and if you really wanted GNOME um you get it in fact if you were running a boot to GNOME 1604 and you upgrade this is what you get by the by default so we worked really hard to um to uh work with GNOME and in fact um GNOME back in 2010 when we were thinking about Unity and the new the face of uh desktop was very hostile um towards uh external ideas and contributions that's since changed now I didn't know this because I said well uh I'm not a UI developer doing other stuff but meanwhile uh GNOME has changed so when we went back said we're gonna go back to GNOME we want to work together how do we how do we make our changes maybe how give you improvements how do we work together GNOME said that's great we want to work together and so um if you are used to the acrimony between uh the GNOME project and you're doing to um it's not there anymore um well sort of feelings always linger a little bit here and there uh the GNOME project has been incredible and so for example we used session support to enable you to have either our great defaults or um GNOME's defaults and um so we said well great how do we make this even bigger and better so it's stronger and every distro can use sessions and ship default vanilla GNOME with very little changes but have their own customization GNOME said great let's let's talk about that we're talking about indicators we're talking about uh ways to share technology so that um and and help improvements so when Ubuntu says well we need this and we're gonna do this own thing we say how can we implement this in a way that's not gonna interfere with your plans and so that relationship is new but very encouraging very strong and still continuing today so the present today is we have GNOME we have GNOME shell we have a really nice way oh if you want unity by the way if you've upgraded you'll get that GNOME shell uh interface interface on login prompt you click your name you click the gear icon you can pick unity and you can go back to it or just like I said you can say apt install GNOME session and get perfect GNOME GNOME GNOME GNOME you can do apt install unity session and it'll pull in unity so that's still gonna stick around for those of you who still want it um like myself uh it's not going anywhere as long as it's kind of mainly maintained canonical still keep it working with the XOR drivers um and so forth so we're working really hard on a really solid stable desktop now the thing about LTS's and and and software these days is that you have um lots of great applications and the Ubuntu guarantee of stability is that we're going to ship applications we're gonna maintain them you're gonna get bug fixes you can get security updates for up to five years in the desktop remember uh 606 I've said three years um it was five years on the server three years in the desktop now it's five years for everyone um so if you really love unity in 604 you can keep using that until 2021 uh unity is also still in 1804 and then you can use that until 2023 so there's lots of options the problem is is that we have these all these great applications LibreOffice is the best office suite out there for general purposes uh VLC for example isn't shipped by default but it's like the best media player out there um I love Calibre to manage my ebook collection I'm an author as I said in the writer um and so uh I use that for my Kindle but it's an older version and so we the question is how do we um you don't want to have a you know five thousand desktops deployed across your enterprise and wake up one day and then you have LibreOffice 17 and also it's saving a new file format and it doesn't read any of the other file formats it's all it changes all the funds to windings you don't want to wake up and deal with that so that's our guarantee you get the same software but sometimes you want that new software if you you can use 1604 um like I said till 2021 that's a long long time it's three more years um but you may but LibreOffice 6.0 is out and so um you're still stuck on LibreOffice 5.3 I believe it is um in in 1604 so the question is how do we deal with having a really solid base we have we have great relationship upstream um things are better than ever um how do we keep these applications if people if you're gonna use Ubuntu and rely on it for a long long time how do you keep applications fresh because remember the goal of an operating system isn't to use the operating system it's to have a platform to run other programs and get out of your way so you can interact with those applications so those need to be there as well the answer came out of the phone um when you have a phone you can't install things and have broken dependencies and then everything's broken and you just reflash your phone that doesn't work and so while we didn't stick with the phone we worked really hard to uh to have technology that is reliable and um super super super um uh dependable and the answer uh grew out of the phone um we had click packages to the phone we kind of made a super click package click two point it was called SNAPS we knew we could run on embedded devices which again can't be upgraded can't have dependency problems can't have failed installs it can't be reflashed if you have like 15 of them out you know across the state or the country um so SNAPS are a way to develop things now the cooling of SNAPS and is that it's made of different modules and so um uh even to 16 and 4 shipped with SNAPS support 18 and 4 it's even bigger and better on the desktop uh with a SNAP you have a core SNAP uh that is downloaded and installed and it's even to 16 and 4 it's the tiniest it's little uh uh seed system drivers and libraries and so on rather libraries and then when you have a program it's compiled for 16 and 4 because that program runs against that core SNAP that program that you can power 16 and 4 and you've released now runs on any platform that supports SNAPS so that one program runs so if you if you take a program and compile it and then copy the files over to different Linux distributions it'll break unless all the stars align the plants line and all every library version is exactly different because we have a core SNAP as part of the uh SNAP experience that one program uh runs against um even to 14 and 4 even to 16 and 4 16 or 17 uh 10 uh radio rim as well but um they're not supported so 14 and 4 is 6 and 4 7 10 18 and 4 without modification it also runs uh on arch open SUSE Fedora uh we're working on Debian um that same program runs basically everywhere everywhere that supports SNAPS and so for uh for free software you can always recompile you have the source code um but it's a lot of work and a lot of um if you've never packaged software for a distro for Debian and for Ubuntu and Fedora and for you know RPMs and everything good because it's really hard and they're all different and it's a lot of work and you got just a mall with a SNAP you do it once it works everywhere so not only is it easier uh for uh smaller uh developers but also for proprietary software where you don't have uh source code and where the vendor doesn't want to support 20 different Linux uh platforms SNAPS provide one single platform and so with SNAPS software can come directly from the developer and what that means is that instead of waiting for it to hit the Debian repository get pulled into Ubuntu then it gets polished and then so some uh 6 to 9 months down the road it shows up in Ubuntu um that program can show up right away it gets pushed the developer compiles it tests it real quick pushes it to the store um promotes it to the stable channel and your computer is checking three times a day to make sure that um it finds a new version it updates automatically the updates are atomic uh when you install a Debian package every single program you've ever installed on Ubuntu through a Debian package through Ubuntu software however however maybe uh double clicking on it you put in your uh your uh uh password and you get that package root access to your computer because uh there's install scripts that takes your files sprays them all over your file system puts them in user bin and puts them in uh user shared and at sea and so on um every single program is decompressed takes up more room you have the original archive you got all the decompressed stuff you've given the package maintainer root access to your computer now the way it's not works it's one file it's a squash of s file it's compressed it's downloaded to install it's mounted in place so it's still compressed it doesn't take up any extra room than the download and it doesn't it never gets root access um and plus uh applications are actually sandboxed so that they can't go off um the program itself sees if it looks in route it sees that core snap not your actual system uh many programs to be useful have access to your home directory that's a plug that can um uh that can be changed like on a cell phone you can give access to networking or home or so on and an H204 there's gonna be ways to um to really um a couple couple plugs or a couple uh access to things are granted automatically if they're requested um some programs need extra things and so software even to software is going to give you an option uh when you install it uh here's some additional things it can have access to and you can just decide whether or not you want to granted access you get that cell phone security on your desktop for the program that can always be the freshest software from the developer and um and you can control the access so snaps can be uh confined to enhance security uh Skype for example is not confined uh for esoteric reasons it almost works confined not quite uh microsoft's working on it cononicles work on it um but a lot of programs are are confined so um they're really safe when you're getting software from uh third party developers most of them are trustworthy um but all it takes is uh is our credentials to be compromised and someone else can swoop in and compromise that PPA uh or that software project and so um with snaps you you don't have to worry about that um the the uh uh vulnerability surface is far far far far less and snaps run out like the different versions of Buntu so the Buntu's always had this goal to be a complete solution for the computer to always be up to date to be entirely uh assisting a free and open source software other than drivers where you don't have a choice and so as we move from Unity and as we go to GNOME shell we rejoin that community I made a joke at the beginning that Buntu turned 13 and suddenly a strange new features you know popped up where there weren't features before um and we all remember I'm sure very very fondly um puberty but um puberty also is adolescence and adolescence is where we not just suddenly get way bigger and become an adult um but where we adolescence is where we reevaluate our relationship with ourselves and our peers and parents and our community and so as Buntu um heads towards the 3.5 year mark in April um that's exactly what's happened we've uh we've gotten closer upstream we've uh we're shipping uh you know more vanilla packages we have better ways to um if I told you 10 years ago that Microsoft was going to specifically package Skype for Ubuntu and ship it uh and that's the exact same code that's running on the phone and on Windows and on Mac is running on Ubuntu in a container that Microsoft supports everyone would look well everyone looked at me like I was crazy and because of the work Ubuntu did with snaps that same program should work I don't know if it works on 1404 but that 1604 package works on 1710 and 1804 with no extra work on Microsoft's behalf which is the way they like it and no extra work really on our behalf on end users behalf which is how end users like it so uh as we continue forward and we start charting a path of what's new for Ubuntu we have a really really strong stable uh basis to make that so um I hope that gave you some context as to where we've been where we where we are and where we're going thank you very much and um so um we are actually of course Ubuntu has a booth uh at the access floor which uh starts in I don't know what time it is in one I can't read in one half hours will be there will be Saturday and Sunday uh we do have computers with uh the development version of 1804 um running uh on system 76 hardware thank you so much system 76 we have um 1710 and we are prepared to answer any and all questions and uh I think I have five minutes so if anyone has any questions now I can answer them here as well although as regards questions yeah we have at three o'clock when we come back here we have a whole session the annual tradition of the ask anything you want it's ideal if it's about Ubuntu but it could be about anything but it's the Ubuntu Q&A ask anything you want we'll do our best to answer it if we can't answer it we'll try to find it but that's what we're doing at three o'clock here after our extended lunch yeah so yeah we definitely so while it's lunchtime we you know we know the expo expo floor does open at at two so we're not making anyone come back here to give a talk you don't have to feel guilty go look at the floor get an hour you can come back if anyone has questions about uh Ubuntu or GNOME or anything like that right now I'm happy to answer them um if you need some time to think as you want to the expo floor maybe look at the Ubuntu booth you can come back and ask those same questions as well at three so uh yes question I was just curious about um maybe other platforms um my daughter uses um you know Linux Mint um and I use you know Ubuntu you know so I'm just wondering what I know it's based on um you know the packages are based on uh Ubuntu what you know what kind of support or will she need or will say I mean what do you I mean what's what's the plan forward for other distros for you know and I'm just trying to figure out what you know what I should do for that uh you're working a little so you use Linux Mint now right we have we have both we have both uh you know Ubuntu 1404 and then and then Linux Mint and then we have a Windows 10 and whatever else so uh Linux Mint I can't speak to they go out they take Ubuntu and they go off and do their own thing and have their own security updates and so um I usually don't recommend people use Linux Mint unless they really know what they're doing um and are willing to say um that some security updates uh and fixes may not be available and and they're gonna I think there's a backwards thing or something that you can enable them but um um Ubuntu just does it for you so I said uh when it comes to Ubuntu support um if you have 1404 you can definitely upgrade directly to 16 uh .4 .4 which is the newest version uh I don't know if I gave the booth I said well I'm gonna give me a booth later I think for a little bit um we're gonna have ISOs if you bring a thumb drive we can give you an ISO 14 16 .4 .4 which is 1604 with all of the updates rolled in um since April 26th 2016 as of March 1st was when it was released so less downloading once you install um you can go from 1404 to 1604 um then you have three years to determine whether or not you're gonna migrate to 1804 um I said we work really hard to make the interface very similar so that uh even familiar so that um we're gonna reduce documentation uh load as far as teaching new users and training as well if that didn't answer your question uh see me after this or at the booth um I was you talked about the snaps and of course the new unity desktop how much have you done turns of performance drop offers or even better performance because it's been better optimized um compared to the original you needed well it's both it's two parts it's snaps um compared to you know native packaging versus running the snaps because there's compression and all that's involved with it is there a performance loss at all when you're packaging an app like that? Good question so uh is there a performance loss with snaps um the answer is that the first time you install a snap and you run it um the app armor uh uh profiles get compiled and then so you click and you know in 20 15 10 seconds later snap opens up and then you click and two seconds later it opens up every other time right um that's something they're working on now as far as the snap being entirely compressed and then having um being needed be constantly decompressed uh I don't know if they're using hardware acceleration for that but in in practice uh computers are so fast and we have multi cores that um I certainly haven't seen any performance changes uh in snaps myself I haven't run benchmarks but it's um uh it's it's comparable you can't tell um of course I I run my home folders encrypted and everything's being decrypted on the fly too so um that's the kind of thing where um luckily computers have done so fast that that is easy stuff for computers um I'm not aware of uh performance problems related to that. Oh and then also about the uh the Unity desktop with the newest uh switching to GNOME is the I guess the the back end for that is that is there a performance loss there or is it faster compared to the old? Um the lenses are a little bit faster in GNOME um but they have uh they have a uh uh a daemon that runs in the background that constantly indexes your files. We have it turned off by default uh in 7010 and 1804 you can install I think tracker D and then just it's running so it's a little heavy when you first log in we're looking at enabling that in the future by default and making that less of a performance problem. Um you will find that um I think many of these GNOME shells a little bit faster actually um uh I love Unity I'm happy to wait but uh a little I've used GNOME shell it's been very snappy. Alright um you want to bring it to 3? Oh okay. Will snaps become the um are becoming the default in 1710 too? Or is it 1804? Where where does that start? So they've been packaged will never go away because that's how Ubuntu gets made. Um snaps are an alternative in fact the great thing about snaps is um because they're modular they're all self-contained they're automatically updating and they're completely sandboxed um in location if not uh in what they can access although several are um so Ubuntu ships with LibreOffice and if you want the new LibreOffice you can install the snap version and if you don't want to abandon LibreOffice 5.0 for 6.0 instead of going out and getting the PPA installing and everything else gets uninstalled and reinstalled right? Um the Debian packages and snap packages run side by side there's none is there no conflict there can't be conflict because snaps are separate so you can literally test drive it see how it is and actually in 1804 will be a new option during a fresh install is a minimal on a desktop image minimal install which is actual full completed Ubuntu install uh but without um you get a desktop web browser a couple games utilities you don't have LibreOffice you have all these other things so if you know you want the LibreOffice snap you can install a lighter slightly lighter version of Ubuntu and just go for the snap so but yeah the devs will always be around enjoy your lunch and enjoy the opening of the expo floor and we'll be back here at three