 For the audience at home, this is normally our annual Q&A event where people are invited to bring any questions and we will give them any answer. And sometimes the questions and the answers, sometimes they match. Sometimes they don't. So it's sometimes amusing, sometimes informative. We'll see what we can get here. We do have a question and we also have a really packed expo floor, so we may not have many questions, but we'll do our best to answer what we got. So we have our first question here. Thank you for being here. There are these system, there are these pop-ups, system program problem detected that come up seemingly when they start coming up as soon as you do an upgrade of versions. I was wondering how do you get rid of those? So the question is when you do, when you're running it into and you get these system problem detected, what do you do? So, yeah, so you can look for updates. So there are a few different things, one of which, for me, is just really hot. I can't tell. So one thing you can do, of course, is so what that is is a program called APORT. And when a program crashes, it does a stack dump. It kind of gathers a bunch of information. What version of Ubuntu you're on, a bunch of version numbers from different libraries, the version of the program that crashed, all its dependencies, and then gets all collected and ready to upload to Ubuntu to Launchpad. And so if you say report bug, it'll file a bug. Those are actually incredibly useful because we can say if we get like 50,000 reports on one thing and 200 on another, we're going to prioritize properly. But they can be super annoying. So there are a couple of ways to get rid of them. One is when you go into settings, you should see in the privacy tab the ability to choose crash reporting and whether or not that's sent to Ketanical and you can turn it off, that should stop that from popping up all the time as well as if you go to report a thing and there's a check box that says notify me like every time this version crashes and if you uncheck that, I think it's uncheck, then it won't bother you again. Now when you update to a newer version, it'll prompt you if it crashes again. So absolutely if you can send those to us at least the first couple of times and then of course if it's the same thing crashing over, don't do it all the time, save yourself the hassle and turn it off. I have a follow-up question. Do those happen more frequently with non-LTS releases or what I'm saying is are they soliciting, the information is useful for the maintainers, so that's good. But for LTS, using it is also useful. And when it's things like this, the frustration is tell me if this isn't, my frustration is the same as yours, is that there's no evidence that anything went wrong, you're just doing something and sometimes it says this application is quit. While I'm looking at it, it says this says quit, do you want to relaunch? I don't need to, it's right here, I'm seeing it. Yeah, so that's either something that it crashed like during shutdown or during login, something got a little flaky or maybe I said crash during startup, there's the error that it recovered from, so that's still useful, but like I said, if you do that once or twice and you're still not seeing anything different, I mean, the more it happens and the more we get reports, it's useful, but yeah, don't put it, it takes forever, it collects data, it slows down your computer, it does the upload, so don't put yourself out. It gets, I know what they're for and how useful they are and I'm still annoyed by them, so yeah, after a couple of times of that one program, you can say ignore until next version. So the report button is helpful because they see the volume of them. You know, you got a follow up there? Is there a way to find out what crashed? Yes. Yeah, his dialogue mentioned no application name. Yeah, so like you said system application, right? So if you say report, then you have to type in your password, your account password, if you're an admin account, and then you'll get the report, you usually get where it says it was this and you'll see everything that gets sent to us, so yeah. So with that background, my follow up was, is there, I guess, to use a different word, sort of a verbosity level turned up for non LTS releases? Does it happen more often? No, it's the same. So if it crashes, we try to detect that and we try to, yeah, because if it's not on an LTS, it's super important we have to fix it if it's something, you know, general. We have to fix it because it's LTS. If it's an interim release, we have to fix it because it will eventually go into the LTS, so. So we have Brian Lunduk here doing a Ubuntu sucks session. He would say the good news is nothing in my Ubuntu system has ever crashed. The bad news is it's telling me something is crashing every 20 minutes. Yes, he is funny and he is wrong, so. Any other questions? As an end user, I will update software either through a GUI or through the terminal. And sometimes they don't agree. I'll finish updating something from the terminal. And then the GUI says, you've got updates. Do you want to install them? I don't get it. What am I missing? Good question. So there are a couple different ways to install updates. They all use the exact same underlying system we have. So Ubuntu is built on several Debian repositories. So the 4804, the Bionic repository is going to be locked down when Bionics released. That's it's never updated or changed. That was the first release. Bionic dash updates are bug fixes. Bionic dash security is like, yeah, so if you're being conservative, you don't want to change things because you need to make sure that things are stable. Bionic dash security is just like, no, this was the security vulnerability to do this, right? They're all together. They're all aggregated. They're all presented. So what happens is that so apt, it was the command line utility, does exactly what it says on the tin. It gets your list of packages. It manages them. If there are newer versions, it shows them. That's what it's supposed to do. GNOME software, which we've rebranded as Ubuntu software just for familiarity purposes from Software Center, does the exact same. Software Center didn't, but GNOME software does the same thing. New packages, it shows you. So the Ubuntu updater is a software updater. And what we want to do is we want to make sure that when we do an update, there's always a chance of problems. That's why we don't give you LibreOffice 6 in 6.04, right? So we're just little maintenance releases. So what we'll do is when a new version comes out, we'll, what's the word for that? I hate it, and I forget it. We roll it out, basically. So basically, your system will roll the dice, number between 1 and 100, and slowly we'll just kind of have a priority on our updates as part of the package software. So a few people will get it. And then if it doesn't catch on fire, then we'll start rolling out over the next two to three days. So you can go to a software updater or get alerted. You have updates. Run them on all the updates. No more updates available. If you go to the terminal, say app list dash dash upgradeable, you might see three or four more packages or five. That's because we're waiting just to make sure we're testing slowly, rolling out slowly. It is safe, probably, to run the terminal updates. And if you do it from the terminal, you should get all the updates immediately, no problem. They've all been tested. This is just one last little step to be extra careful. Yeah, terminal's most current. We'll always give you things that the GUI might just wait a day or two, just for safety's sake. Next question. Two compliments and a question. First compliment, running 1804 Ubuntu Mate build March 5. I'm running it on a Lenovo laptop live. It now figures out the HD, the high definition from the get go. Oh, great. Yeah, that's a nice feature. Also, it now auto configures the Wi-Fi 802.11ac, where before you had to do a command line and change something. My question is, for us visually challenged children, the cursor is very, very small. Is there a setting or is there an additional program that will increase the size of that cursor? That would be theme, probably. It would be a theme. And I don't know if there's anything by default. Right, on a high definition, yeah. That's one of those HD things where things were really designed for 320 by 240 and 640 by 480. And now we have 20,000 by 15,000. So that is one thing that's lagged a little behind. That would make a really, really good bug report on that. Lynn, do you know something specific? I know there are search packages for cursor themes. You'll find some, but I don't think they're any bigger is the problem. Have you ever seen a package called Nome Tweak? I can't guarantee it's in there. But there is a way to switch themes and to tune aspects of themes. And what you're describing is not limited to children. It's a lot of people just, me, I'm getting older. I need my reading glasses. If I don't have my reading glasses, I can't find my pointer on a 24-inch monitor. I left it over there. So there are things built in that will flash the monitor when you hit the Alt key, things like that. Those are helpful. But a bigger pointer can be really helpful. There has to be some package that will do that that's easy to get in the existing refos. So they're going to tweak, maybe look at something. They're going to tweak. I think in 7010 this is called Tweaks. I think this is called Tweaks now. Yeah, they're trying to because Nome thinks they're the center of the universe. So what else would it be? It's Tweaks. Yeah, but try and search for Tweaks in the App Store. See what you're calling. Plus, there should be in Settings and Accessibility panel that I mean, I know at the very least, I mean, large curse to support the moment you mentioned that. I'm like, oh, that should be there. But it's just a thing where you press control or shit or something, and it kind of does that ripple effect. So that could help you today while you look for the Tweaks or them today. Yeah, definitely. And of course, if you are looking at PopoS, Ian is at the Adventure Boots right now. And if you go over there, you can harass him about that because he works with System76. Yeah, we have those two. Yeah, we'd be happy to look at that and dig around for you at the booth. And in the spirit of ask us anything, the promise is we're going to provide you an answer. May not be the answer to the question you had, but we're going to provide you an answer. Yeah. Oh, no. What's that? I think it's in the rain tonight. Google says there's a 10% chance of rain at 7. Tonight is Arty and Pasadena, and it will not rain on you until after 10 o'clock when they close the last gallery. Otherwise, it is free and open to the public in the city. We're very proud of the good galleries here that all of us can enjoy. But as far as that question, if you poke around and you don't find an answer, hunt me down. Because I think it's an interesting question. I want to know the answer to that. No, and there's a lot of people who need glasses and stuff. And so why would we not have an option for a larger? So I want to know what you find. Let's work on that. I'm just going to say you're using a high-def screen, which by nature is going to shrink anything that is bite-oriented, characters or anything like that that's printing out. And it's also going to shrink the cursor as well. And if you make the cursor that much bigger, it's going to cover up a lot of area outside of what your pointer is now going to become so big, it's more like an obscure as opposed to a pointer, isn't it? Yeah. Now more than anything else. Like if you had an 8 and 1 half by 11 paper, my favorite cursor when I don't have my reading glasses is the size of a human hand. That would be ideal. So it covers everything except the pointer. Yeah. The point comes to the single pixel. But it's a little bigger, though. Like 48 by 48 is some of the largest I've seen. That would render a bit. The main problem is the HCI, HCI, I forgot. Yeah, HCI support, thanks. No, no, no. That's why I was about to say that HCI support, HCI screen support is supposed to enlarge all the UI stuff. The problem is that if you have any idea of what X11 is, X windows, it was written in MIT in 1983 to support like dumb graphical terminals to run a mainframe. So it survived admirably the day, and did a great job at all kinds of things. But there's not a way to say, well, what is the physical DPI on the screen? And how can everything use it? All everyone does their own thing. So you can run an Ubuntu desktop and run, this is using stuff from 86, and this is new, and this is something else. They're all doing their own thing. So it's even in Windows where you have a hegemony, it's really hard for them to control everything. And they say, this is going to be HCI support. So yeah, it's one of those things where it's a hard thing to solve. Wayland should make it a little bit better as things move over to Wayland, because when you're using Wayland, half your programs are still going to be running X windows and running a server in the window. It's surprising anything works, but we'll ship with Wayland, but not on by default. So it's there if you want it. It's just a little too crashy. In GNOME shell right now, GNOME shell is the Wayland compositor, so if GNOME shell crashes, it kills all of your programs in your session and puts you back at the login prompt to restart. So in other words, that's a crash that doesn't put up the dialogue, letting you know. It's the crashes that you can't see. Right. There are a lot of people very strongly interested in making those two separate. So GNOME shell is on top of the crashes, just like Unicrashes, it restarts. GNOME, traditionally, has said that they won't fix it because GNOME shell shouldn't crash, and therefore they just fix those bugs and then there's no bugs and it's not a problem. So opinions on that vary, but that's where we are today. They're looking in Ubuntu's, I think, strongly talk with GNOME how, no, seriously, how do we make this more reliable? GNOME's been very amenable to that. So hopefully by 1810, 1904, we'll have a good strong answer. But for right now, for an LTS, it's just XRG. There's a package in the repos called Big Cursor. Yeah, there we go. All right. Yeah. Problem solved. Thank you. Now we have the answer. Definitely, yeah. And that's the best thing about preferences and options. If you put it on, you're like, actually, this is too big. Because remember when you're pointing, the cursor can go off the edge of the screen and not obscure. So if you find the cursor is too big, you can switch it back. But more choices are good. I had the opposite problem where too many times the arrow would hang out where I'm typing. So there's a letter under there, but I can't see it because my arrow's covered in there. There is an extension you can add. And I can't remember now because I've been using it too many years. But if your pointer idles, while there is an active insertion point, after a second or so, it'll stop rendering the cursor so that you can type, yeah, it changed everything for me. And I was a little surprised when I started using it, though that's not the default. So canonical, there's the camera, or anyone on the design team, think about that. It's really, really helpful to see what you're typing. And as usual, if you don't follow a bug about it, no one sees it, it does not exist. That's the thing, like I'm assuming the encoders that they've typed. And some of their work is done in GUIs. I think they're all using a nano on the command line. Maybe that's what it is. Slacker's with nano. That's right. Next question. See, here's the thing. We're going to be here anyway. You're already sitting down. You don't think of anything. Anything that comes to mind. There you go. Yay, thank you. Elizabeth Krembeck, Joseph, and harass her and get her answer. Or ask a boon to you might be a good way, actually, a good place to find out more. But unfortunately, yes, IP tables is being deprecated. And I have no idea what's coming next, because I try to avoid that. Databases are good, but I do my best to avoid working with databases. And firewalls, rules are kind of the same way. OK, that's it. That's right. I said you were next. But it's kind of like in support of this question. With the investment in UFW, is there anything IP tables does that UFW does not handle? All kinds of things. UFW is like, let's not listen to this port anymore. And IP tables is like, let's look for this, or that, or this pattern, or these blocks. I am ignorant with IP tables. So the question, I'm looking at UFW, and I know there's a lot of options I haven't used. But they don't cover IP tables. Or so Liz said in her talk. So I'm repeating. Right, right, right. But the, yeah. Say that again. NF tables is what's next? NF tables, so. Are you with IP tables? No. Yes, OK. We have an authority here. Rather than my random guessing, we have somebody who can speak. So the IP tables, even though they're trying to get away from it, it's like X11. It's not going to go away anytime soon. They're going to have to support it for a long time. And the next iteration is going to be called NF tables or whatever they decide to call it. But that's going to be more of an iteration of performance. They're seeing some pretty interesting games as far as like using Linux as a routing type system for 100 gigabit and higher. But if you start writing IP tables today, they're still going to be usable in the next four or five years at least. So we still have hope. Thank you. One of the best things about Linux is I was camping up in your right wood and I was like stuck. It starts snowing and I was like stuck up there with my friend going to work. I was all by myself. And so I said, I'm going to drive down to the right wood and maybe not jump off the mountain because I'm so poor. Because I only have like one bar on my phone if I go like this on the ridge. So they were getting ready to turn some books to the library at the Friends of Books for Library. I got a UNIX guide from like 1986, I think. And I can look it up. And almost everything in there other than like some mail stuff is like completely applicable. Even tells you how to try to quit VI. So it's like, you know, a lot of the Linux stuff really wants you to learn it. You get to keep that knowledge. It's good forever. Small detail. When I had you the mic, what he's hearing is what I'm hearing. Is this mic is not that sensitive? So closer is better. Yeah, does that, yes, I can hear it. Yes, good feedback. Thank you. Okay, this is a comment you made and also what you made. I use Remedia all the time. And I'm usually already peeing into news boxes either locally or online. The comment about 1804 being a Hyper-V with Redstone 4 or 5 isn't canonical getting a little bit closer to Microsoft. And is there something that we're not seeing? Yes. Because I'm just going to follow. I think they're using an RDP also. They are. Yeah, and so, and you can do copy and paste from one environment to the other. That's pretty interesting where you would not have thought of this five years ago. So, you know, if you're a window shop, everything you have is windows. And if you're going to try and use Linux, you have to be able to get that in there and work together and work with things. Now, when Linux came up, I mean, it was some pet project with some Finnish guy. And basically, and so, early on, so if you have windows and you're like, let's start plugging in disks. Windows supports Fat12, which is the old floppy disk, Fat16, Fat32, VFAT, which is long file name support, NTFS versions, probably one through six, and then X, yeah, I'm going to say XFAT, which is they asked what if we could have large disk support with some of the NTFS technology, but still be kind of used as a file, like LHTPS of Fat and for their Xbox console and dare to live the dream. That was a weird driver to support. Because you can never have enough file system. That's right. Well, when it should, you need a different one. Well, Microsoft doesn't think so. It's Tuesday. Every file system I just mentioned is, oh, of course, Samba, which is a super set of the common internet file system. We finally got a standard, and then we're like, well, that was their standard, let's standards. We can do better. So every file system I just mentioned is a Microsoft file system. As far as Microsoft's concerned, nothing else exists. At least if you plug something in a Mac, it supports Fat and NTFS and so on. Linux never had that luxury. Linux had to work with everything else. So if you have a Linux system, it was all this great Unix stuff. Well, right from there, it was all Unix stuff. So it had to be compatible with all the Unix stuff. The cool Linux stuff that grew in Linux community is kind of expanded. It supports all the Unix stuff. It supports all the Microsoft stuff. It supports all the Apple stuff. Linux works everywhere with everything because in the beginning, it didn't have that luxury of just saying, we're gonna do our own thing. So if you're a Windows shop and you just have to go back and forth, you have to have things interoperate. And if you're a Linux shop, but now you need like one service on Windows, you need Exchange. You need a way to communicate that machine so you don't have to switch to Windows for everything. Things have to interoperate. Now what, Microsoft tried really, really hard to capture the server market and they failed completely. So everything's on web apps. Everything's servers. Everything's running on Linux back end. So if you wanna learn, deploy, you know, Node or Kubernetes or cloud computing, all the documentation assumes you're running Linux. So that's why if you have Windows 10, you can go into the Windows Store, type in Ubuntu, click the thing, 120 megabytes later, it's like, yeah, you have a shell. You go turn on Windows Substance for Linux and Windows runs native binary Linux services because that's the only way Microsoft can be assured that every developer doesn't just use Linux every time they're developing. And if they're running Linux on the desktop just to develop, but almost everything works and it's free, what are they gonna do? So it was in Microsoft's best effort that they made that super easy for developers. At the same token, you know, people, the complaint was, well, now that we can run, get a Bash shell, Ubuntu Bash shell on Windows, now no one needs Ubuntu, which is a valid fear but kind of silly because what happens now is that if you work at a Fortune 500 company and IT says we pay Microsoft for support, you can only run support of software. Now Microsoft supports, publishes and supports Ubuntu officially. Now you can install Ubuntu and use that and get your stuff done. You don't have to worry about putty. And likewise, you know, if you are a Windows shop and you're like, oh, now we need a web server for something, are you gonna go find Gentoo or are you like, oh, Microsoft supports Ubuntu. I'm using it here. I can run it on the server for free. The more things- I'm like, why would you bother with PowerShell? Yeah, which apparently also runs on Linux, my PowerShell fan friend keeps telling me. Yeah, I mean, embrace, extend and extinguish is a problem but embrace isn't. The more things work together, the more you can pick the right tool for the job at all times and the easier things happen. A VHD or VHDX of Ubuntu 18.04. So it'll already be pre-configured so there's nothing the user has to do other than boot it up. Yeah, click, click and then RDP works and you're all set and you're ready to go. It can be scary to say, well, what is Microsoft doing? What's in it for them? Because they're a corporation, that's what everyone has to ask the agent to canonicals corporation, what's in it for them, right? The answer is that the reason Azure is so popular because anyone who just runs Linux stuff can use any cloud ever. As far as virtualizing Windows servers, no one really needs that. But if people need Windows and Linux servers, then it's all set. When they added first class Linux support to Azure, suddenly it exploded because they're like, well, Microsoft knows how to keep services up even if blue screens are down. But they get that trust, oh, Microsoft is doing this, we can get the bean counters to, that was majority. If we get the accountants, then right off we get the sign off from people who don't know any better, right? They can, oh, I know Microsoft, they can get that plus if everything works. Yeah, Microsoft's making tons of money, which is why they're investing in like VS Code and Windows Substance for Linux. One last comment, evidently, you do think? Only Linux is on Windows 10. Oh, Windows 10. So, the way that works is that it's how you can keep the tool investigating the problem as close as possible to the problem. Yeah. So I believe Microsoft, I don't know, but I believe, because I wasn't there, but I believe Microsoft approach canonical says, hey, there was a Unix subsystem for Windows way back in NT, NT was, the kernel was designed to have different subsystems. So, I believe Microsoft approach canonical said, hey, we're doing this, like you guys are huge, let's work together, we'll turn, they basically had to take their command prompt, which is a terminal, and add Unicode, ANSI, and I think VT and Ncurses support. Like it was actually a huge deal, and now, you know, 16 million callers support. Actually, it's a really nice terminal now. It was barely functional for DOS virtual machines earlier. They said, we'll put all the support if you help us, and like, yeah, we'll ship a cloud image. Ubuntu basically had to do almost nothing extra. And it took about 15 minutes with the text file, these are the packages, the seeds, done. And so, I think he put it into a filter to go from XML to YAML or something. So, once that was done, Windows subsystem for Linux is emulating Linux services, and so kernel services. So now, anyone who wants to package their distro, put it on there, and just for command line usage, can. There was no restriction, so we worked hard, and now there's that freedom for everyone, if they want that. Pop OS on Windows. I know, I'll talk to him about that. I'm sure System System 6 will love that suggestion, Paul. I just wanted to make a comment about the state of remote desktop, in that. Little closer. Like you were saying, Microsoft is investing in open RDP to make their virtual machines. You know, you'd be able to, basically it goes back to the loopback on the NIC, and that's how you can display graphics. What I would suggest, if you're interested in that type of stuff, take a look at, I don't know if you know this, but there's a company called NoMachine. They give a free client away that does this for X11, and it works really well. I use their terminal server product, which acts like a Windows terminal server, but for Linux, and an unlimited license is only like $1,700, and you can have as many clients connect to a single Linux box as you want. NX, or NoMachine, if you go to NoMachine.com, they have a free server and client for your desktop, and they have a workstation version. What they do is, I don't know how much you guys know about X11, but it's not so transparent anymore. If you were just running regular motif, yeah, it would send the commands over the network, and it would draw it, but everything now is custom bitmap. So you're sending bitmaps over the network, and it's like just launching Firefox, makes over 6,000 X11 calls, and it's very inefficient. So what NoMachine does is it removes all of the X11 protocol calls that it knows it doesn't need, and then it compresses the rest, and it makes it where it works really well. For example, I maintain a NoMachine server, and I have about 170 people connecting to it to an XFCE desktop environment at any given time all around the world, and it works really well. So to get back to what Microsoft's doing, the OpenRDP project is actually a very good solution, and I would encourage everybody here to go and find out more about it and encourage development of it, because it is a path forward, and we need something for Waylon. There's nothing like this yet, and obviously there's a lot of stuff we need for Waylon, but the more people talk about it, the more exposure it gets. Get on Reddit, go to the Linux sub-form, talk about it. If you guys are not already listening to podcasts like Linux on Plug, you should be listening to that, because Chris just went to Microsoft, and he basically confirmed what I had thought for a while, and that is the guard is changing. All the young people, yes, when you go to university now, they don't teach you on Microsoft Windows, they teach you on open-source software, and it's been like that for a couple of decades now, and so kids are getting out of college, and they're getting hired at Microsoft, and they're looking at Windows, and they're going, what is this registry thing? This is totally ass-backwards, all right? And so they're coming into Microsoft, and there's a change of guard. People are realizing, I want to use these tools, and so Microsoft's management is kind of throwing up their hands and saying, let's just build the tools that people want, and we'll try to sell it. You figure out how to do that. Yes, exactly. And so, all the new guard at Microsoft, they're on our side, right? Now, of course, it's a big corporation, so who knows what's gonna happen, but the Linux space is moving so fast, there's so many things, you just get done rolling out virtual machines, and all of a sudden they have this thing called containers and all this stuff, right? You gotta learn that. But that's just the industry we're in. We're not plumbers, we can't just sit there and go, oh, I know how to do plumbing, and you can make a career off of that and have that for 50 years. We're in computers, and computer science, and it's constantly changing, so we gotta keep learning. But with the RDP stuff, realistically, that's a solution that we can go forward with. We just gotta push people and say, hey, this is something I need. You gotta voice your concerns and say, hey, I need remote desktop type of stuff for my Linux boxes, and for all of us that don't really code that much, we just gotta be loud enough to let other people know that, hey, this is something we could use, you know? Yeah, very much, thank you. Yeah, and that is one important thing to remember is that, I mean, I don't forget what Microsoft has done. That's held the industry back. On the same time, it is, everything changes, and there are new people there, and for example, Microsoft owns Skype, and Skype, two or three people from Skype went to the Adventure Valley in New York in September last year, and they were literally talking there to talk about how do we package Skype as a snap, and how do we make that happen, and what does that mean if we're pulling in dependencies or are we, and what are the license requirements, and what does legal say, and what's the technologies, and what works, and what needs fixed, and I didn't talk about it because I think it was not public yet, but yeah, I was looking at Skype, and in fact, I tried to run the preview, I didn't have to snap the preview, it was what they were snapping, I ran it, and it came up in blank window, and Jonas was there, and he said, oh, let me just log into the web interface, and it says, oh, I see what happened, this is a crash report, well, this is a problem, you see if he used to old, I'm like, really, they got reported, you can see the crash, so that was kind of fun, but yeah, they were really generally interested in like, we're trying to package Skype for Linux because people use Skype everywhere, and we don't want to package this 20 different times for like three or four times for Ubuntu for all the support releases, and then for Arch, and for, if we could do a snap, we could do it once, and so it was a very productive conversation, they were very open, and all the people who touched open source at Microsoft are really great people who are trying to do the right thing, so well, Windows will never be open source, probably, a lot of the programs can be, there's interesting stuff afoot there, so skepticism is always good, but open might as good as well. I just, to add to that, I was just at the Microsoft booth down the hall, and I've been looking for different, I've been looking at different text editors, and they've open sourced Visual Studio code editor, and it's really, really lightweight, so I downloaded it to try it out, and I haven't used it very much yet, but it's a pretty decent product, and the guy I was talking to at the booth was saying all through high school and college, I was a Mac guy, and I hated Microsoft, and once I interviewed and talked to the guys that are on, the people that are on the team, and he said there's a lot more freedom for open source and stuff internally now, too, so that's anecdotal for what it's worth, but. Right, yeah, when they support, and Microsoft, I think is the, I don't get it, one of the top contributors to the Linux kernel actually at the moment, I knew the number, I want to say top five or something that sounds ridiculous, but there, that I remember, well probably IBM, this one, Red Hat probably, yeah. That's the power of the GPL, is that when they need to fix things, but if they can fix things and maintain it and keep it secret, and their customers can request a disk or whatever, but if they fix it, and they contribute upstream, they don't need to maintain it anymore, like it's just fixed for everyone, they can move on to the next thing, so yeah, as it turns out, like I said, Microsoft wants to make money selling their spare computer usage to people, and the only way cloud works is if it runs Linux, so Microsoft will then, we're gonna make it the best cloud for Linux, and so some of that included drivers, some of that included making their site better, and literally everyone wins. Linux is a little bit better, their cloud's a little bit better, so. Bit by bit, they've got the shell, they've got other parts coming on board. When will the Windows kernel be the Linux kernel? Yeah, probably never, but I do have to say the NT architecture is very nice, was very advanced for when it came out in 93, and kind of a shame they didn't stick with that, Windows could be something really fantastic, but then Microsoft was making MS-DOS more and more Unix-like, because their plan was to switch everyone to Xenix, and the restrictions on Bell Labs was lifted in 84, and they said, well, we can't compete with selling Unix against the creators of Unix, so they abandoned that, so that's why we have pipes in MS-DOS, because they were like, we're just gonna make it more and more Unix-like, and then everyone will be using Unix. So they decided to stop that, and they worked with IBM, and that's why we all run LIS-2 now. Well, when IBM finishes their project, with Apple and ships Copeland, that's what we're all gonna be using. Right. Yeah, the fifth week video is all about raw talent, and just sheer force of will, but also luck and timing is much proportionate. How far back could the Windows subsystems for Linux be back ported? Could it be back ported to the deck alpha version of NT, and then we could run up or two on the edge? Probably not. Good question. Yeah, what they really did was they took the Unix subsystem for Windows, and they brushed it off, because they had retired it like two releases before, brushed it off, added in something like micro thread support or something, so they could intercept calls, and so I think it really literally needs Windows 10. So they did some magic stuff there to make it really work. And to my astonishment, when it works fantastically, in fact, they do not support graphical applications at all whatsoever, there's no support, it's only for text things, there's no other utility for this, it's not for servers, they just want you to be able to learn how to deploy things, write your scripts, and then push it out, right? But they have done nothing to stop you, so sure enough, they're like Windows Insider build, beta, Linux subsystem for Windows, two days later, there's screenshots of, there was horrible problems with getting debuts to run apparently in some other sockets, but that's why it took two to three days, but yeah, there's pictures of, here's the Windows Taskbar, and here's the full Unity shell, and there's like LibreOffice running, and fire, it just, yeah, it was no time at all before you could, you can literally run a full complete, you have to provide your own X server, you just get Xming from SQL, but yeah, Uncompiled, everything works, because the compatibility is so strong that they would have to cripple it to keep you from running graphical programs, and they don't have any interest in doing that, they don't care, they just want the service stuff, the text stuff to be there, Linux is cohesive enough that makes everything work, and when Microsoft interviewed me two years ago, I think here at Scale, they just announced it, they said yeah, we love it, it works, we love seeing those screenshots, we're not gonna support it, but you know, they thought that that was really, really cool, so it was fun to have that shared interest in doing things that things weren't intended to, that's half of computing really. Well, and speaking of things that nobody intended, this is a segue for a question I have for you. We are at the hour mark, right, four o'clock, so we're at the hour mark, and it's been a good time, right, we started off with a great question, it's been growing since, there's a lot of give and take, it's just like friends hanging out at the crack of barrels down at the corner store, this is good, so normally we would take a break, and then we have a scheduled speaker, or so we thought, yeah, because it's Ubicon, every year something really weird has to happen, or it wouldn't be Ubicon, and so we have our closing speaker, who is currently in the air, descending into Burbank, I have not yet, I've been checking, he told me he would text me when he arrives, and I have not yet received that. If you're familiar with LA traffic, so once the plane touches down, and they park it, and the luggage shows up, and he gets the cab, and so the question for us is, should I tell him, dude, relax, we're good, we're fine, we wanna see you come party with us tonight, but for now, for the conference, don't sweat it, just do your luggage and do what you need to do, and we can hang out here and do some of this more, where we just chat like old friends, you guys wanna do that? Yeah, yeah? You know, he's like, he's enough, he had the microphone all the time, he's done. Yeah. You were taking it away. Well, I gotta spread it around here. Sam, we're gonna hang out, we're not gonna hang out, what do you wanna do? Yes. All right, well let's take a 30 minute break, I'll contact our speaker, let him know to relax. We'll see you guys here in 30 minutes, and we'll pick this up again, and hang out some. Yeah.