 Welcome to another edition of Unfettered Freedom, your bi-weekly GNU-slash-Linux-News video podcast. Packing so much freedom into each episode, it ought to be illegal. There's so much freedom packed into this podcast that those little hairs growing around my neck, I'm thinking about letting them grow out. On this episode of Unfettered Freedom, we're going to talk about the Free Software Foundation and their high-priority project list. They're asking for community feedback on what should be changed on their high-priority project list. We're also going to talk about a new ransomware threat, well, new for Linux, but it was on Windows. Now it's jumped from Windows to Linux. A lot of Linux users think we don't have to worry about ransomware. That's not actually the case. Also, what are the best GNU-slash-Linux distributions of 2020? I'm going to share with you one author's list of his best of 2020, and I may give you some of my feedback as well. GIMP is pushing towards version 3.0. They just recently released a development version, version 2.99.2, and it comes with a ton of cool new features. Also, is a code of conduct really necessary? Is there any code of conduct out there that's actually sane and written for adults? I'm going to show you one. All of this on Episode 11 of Unfettered Freedom. I am your host, Derek Taylor, also known as DT or Distrotube on YouTube and on Library. This podcast, as well as all of the video content on the Distrotube channel, is community-sponsored. Because of the community support that I receive, there are no corporate sponsors or product shilling of any kind in these episodes. And if you'd like to support my work, I'd greatly appreciate it. Please consider subscribing to Distrotube over on Patreon. And the first topic today is the high-priority project list over at the Free Software Foundation. So the high-priority project list is a list of projects, of course, that the Free Software Foundation deems as having great strategic importance as far as the goal of freedom for all computer users. It's all about freedom, right? It's all about free software and digital rights and digital privacy and things like that. And a few years ago, they created this committee to oversee the high-priority project list. And right now, what they're asking is they want to overhaul the current list and they're asking for community feedback as far as what should actually be on the list and, you know, what should take priority, of course, on the high-priority project list. And currently, if I go to the high-priority project list page here, you will see some of the things listed, some of the areas of focus include things like developing a free operating system for the phone, a phone operating system that's fully free as in freedom. Now, you might argue that we already have several of these and we kind of already do, right? Maybe not completely free as in freedom, certainly if we're talking about open-source projects. So, I mean, we have things like the PinePhone, we have the Ubuntu Touch, and there are various free-as-in-freedom Android-like operating systems out there as well. But I guess they don't quite meet the definition of free software according to the Free Software Foundation, so they're really pushing for a fully free phone operating system. The second area of focus listed here is probably the one that I think is the biggest as far as one of the most important things we need to focus on as a community and that is pushing decentralization, federation, and self-hosting. Especially decentralization I think is a very big deal because too much of the internet has become centralized, right? There's like 99% of the web is basically controlled by the same four or five companies, and I don't like that. I doubt many of you guys like that, and for me, I love using decentralized services and platforms and social networks, things like Mastodon, for example. It's a federated, decentralized Twitter alternative, and it's fantastic. It's free and open-source software and anybody can start their own Mastodon instance, and if you get banned from one Mastodon instance, well, just go to another or create your own, and you can set up your own rules for your Mastodon. It's not like Twitter where there's one Twitter, one set of Twitter's rules, and if you break it, they ban you, they kick you off the platform, they can censor you. You don't have any of that when you deal with decentralized software. Also on the high priority project list include the push for free drivers, free firmware, hardware designs as far as free hardware, so not just the free software foundation, but they also want to push free hardware as well, and this is a noble goal. Now they have always been pushing hard for free drivers, and these kinds of projects have been on the high priority project list probably since the beginning, the free driver calls and the free firmware calls, and it really hasn't amounted to much, unfortunately, because a lot of this is dependent on the hardware itself, and until you get people that are actually creating free hardware, open hardware, you know, you're going to have problems getting people to also develop free drivers for their hardware if that hardware is also not free. The next thing on the list is one that makes a whole lot of sense, and one that the free software foundation has really focused on because of the COVID pandemic, and that is we need free real-time voice and video chat options, because people right now are using things like Skype and FaceTime and Zoom and Discord, and you know, all of these proprietary video conferencing platforms that are not necessarily freedom-respecting. Matter of fact, all of the ones I just named are actually licensed under proprietary license. You can't really audit the source code. You really don't know what those services are doing to you. You don't know what kind of information they're data mining you for and what they're doing with that information. I know that the free software foundation here in the last few months has really been pushing people toward some of the free video chat platforms and things including like Jitsi and the big blue button. So I'm pretty sure that's probably where they're going with that. The next thing is encouraging contributions by people underrepresented into the community. So they're talking about people that maybe have been disenfranchised in some way and they want to bring some of those people into the fold as far as the free software community and just briefly some of the other things that they're mentioning. They want to focus on accessibility, internationalization. So they want the free software movement to be more than just an American thing and a European thing. They really want, especially in areas like South America and Africa and Asia to get more people involved in free software to start spreading that message. They also want to focus, of course, on security. They also would like people to focus on maybe developing intelligent personal assistance. So things like Apple, Siri, Google Now, Cortana, the Amazon Echo and the list goes on and on. They want people to get away from those services because those services especially are extremely dangerous because you're basically, you've bugged your own house when you have a device that's always listening for your commands and because that's not free software, you don't know what these things are doing to you. So if people need to use these things, we really need a free as in freedom alternative to things like Siri and the Amazon Echo. And finally, one of the things they of course want to push is they want to push more GNU slash Linux distributions that are 100% committed to freedom. So we're talking about the FSF approved distros. So we're talking about distros like Geeks and Parabola and Trisco, the ones that actually use the Linux Libre kernel, the kernel that's got all the proprietary blobs stripped out of it and though it's 100% free software and the FSF wants more of those and those that are actually 100% free, the FSF wants to spend more time promoting those distributions to hopefully make them rise in popularity because the more people that use the free distributions, the better those distributions become and maybe eventually we can start weaning ourself off of some of the proprietary bits that are in 99% of our GNU slash Linux distributions. For those of you that want to give your feedback on the high priority project list, you know what is important to you, they do list an email address here on this latest blog post here. The email address is HPP-feedback at GNU.org and they ask you to email your suggested changes by January 8th of 2021. And our second story is a new ransomware threat on Linux and it's new to Linux but it's been around previously this particular piece of ransomware but it was previously on Windows, now it's jumped over to Linux and increasingly ransomware is becoming more and more prevalent on Linux and we really need to be aware of this and we need to not be so complacent. A lot of Linux users, especially when it comes to security, we think we're so much better than Windows and Mac and many of the mobile operating systems as well. We don't have to worry about this thing. We don't have to worry about ransomware. It's never going to touch us, especially Linux desktop users and that's not necessarily the case. For those of you watching the video portion of the podcast, I'm showing you guys an article from Forbes. This article was written by Davey Winder and he talks about how ransomware has really plagued Windows users for years and that's true. If you run Windows you know about ransomware. It's plagued Windows since the beginning of time, well at least since the beginning of the web for sure and I've got to share a story here. The reason I run Linux as my daily desktop driver is because of Windows ransomware. So I've been a full-time Linux desktop user for about 12 or 13 years now and the reason is because the version of Windows I ran at the time, Windows XP, was taken over by some ransomware. My computer was held hostage by this hacker and I had to pay a ransom for him to give me the quote antivirus that would get rid of the ransomware. And of course I'm not going to pay a terrorist, you know this hacker that put this ransomware on my machine. No, no, no. What I did was I formatted the hard drive and I was so mad, formatted the hard drive and I installed whatever version of Ubuntu was around at that time and I never looked back. I was a Windows user since that day and it's one of those things that's just incredibly frustrating. There is nothing more frustrating than ransomware because you know that your machine didn't just break because of an update or something dumb you did. It's this guy basically holding your machine hostage and wanting you to actually pay him to release your machine and it's just a really sick kind of attack. What's unfortunate about ransomware is it is extremely profitable for the people that do it right. Ransomware is such a profitable business. The Ryuk threat that happened a little while back is said to have made 34 million dollars from just one successful attack. They were targeting I think business enterprise at the time and that's really what ransomware. They're typically not after you or me. There's a lot of that too but the ones that are in it for the big bucks they target large corporations and governments right. They want to infect their machines. They want to take over their machines. They want to steal their data and hey if you want it back pay us this money and apparently Ryuk the people behind that particular threat made 34 million dollars in one attack. So I don't know if they did multiple attacks or not but in one attack they made 34 million dollars. One of the highest profile ransomware operations is the group behind R Evil. There's a R Evil cyber criminal group that allegedly made more than 100 million dollars a year from extorting ransom payments through the ransomware that they're spreading. So that is just incredible amounts of money and it really makes ransomware probably the most prominent cyber security threat that we face today. What's really crazy is that so many governments and big businesses, big corporations actually do pay the ransom so these cyber criminals they're trying to extort this money because they have your data back to you or in some cases they find scandalous information on these machines right and we're going to give it to the public this confidential data that we stole what you better pay us or this crazy stuff we found on your computer we're going to release it and many people do actually pay that ransom that extortion money and that's dangerous to do for a number of reasons mainly you can't guarantee that the person behind that ransomware attack is actually going to give you your data back it's dicey either way but sometimes corporations and governments have no choice like if it's critical stuff that was taken and it's going to cause massive amounts of problems for you sometimes it's better just to take a chance and pay those guys and hope they give you that data back but oftentimes it's simply you're rolling the dice on that you really can't be sure that they're going to give you that data back now we have seen ransomware attacks targeted for Linux machines like the Drovo rub which was I believe a Russian hack that was a piece of ransomware so we do see these kinds of things on Linux the latest one though is called ransom EXX and what this is it used to be a prevalent Windows attack so they saw this attack all the time on Windows it has since been ported over to Linux and specifically ported to Linux like it's a very specific piece of ransomware and it actually is so specific that it actually targets specific Linux users with these ransomware attacks which is typical like the big players in ransomware they typically go after specific people specific corporations ones they know have deep pockets so how do you go about mitigating the threat well it's standard no matter whether you run Windows or Linux or what operating system you run you have to do the basic security stuff you have to get the basics right so that's how a lot of people get into these machines is a real life human being drop the ball somewhere so some of the things especially in business enterprise you got to get right really you got to make sure you have multiple intrusion prevention layers things like spam filtering to DNS protection that kind of makes sense also passwords password management once you start letting people in just a little bit that's all that takes to really get things snowballing and to the point where they have complete access to your system they can put that ransomware in and then that entire company is completely hosed the next topic I want to talk about is the topic of the best GNU slash Linux distributions of 2020 because I'm starting to see a lot of written content about this and a lot of video content everybody's coming out with their videos articles are writing the best Linux distributions of 2020 and the reason is because 2020 is about over right we only have another five six weeks left of 2020 and most of the big Linux releases have already happened right so especially the really big players in Linux have already done one or even two huge releases already this year we're not going to see any other really big releases I wouldn't think in the next six weeks I'm going to see any other release of this I'm going to go into one list and one such article I came across is over at tech Republic the article is by Jack Wallin and he lays out his I think his top five distributions of 2020 and I believe he's focusing strictly on desktop Linux which is fine because I'm simply a Linux desktop user as well you get into the server space I don't know anything about what I'm going to say so let's check out his best Linux distributions for 2020 and oddly enough he starts out with Ubuntu 2010 now I say oddly enough because Ubuntu 2010 is an interim release for Ubuntu now Ubuntu 2004 that happened in April of 2020 was an LTS release and that's typically one that everybody runs everybody that runs Ubuntu typically runs the LTS releases supported for up to nine months you have to move to the next version anyway where the LTS releases are supported for many many years up to five years actually up to ten years now I think with some extended support contracts but that seems strange that he went with Ubuntu 2010 rather than 2004 on his list but hey I do think Ubuntu 2010 was a solid release I did take a look at both Ubuntu 2004 and 2010 on the YouTube channel I thought both distributions had a really nice look they both look clean polished and look professional as you would expect because of course Ubuntu is supported by a large corporation Canonical and Jack here he talks about why he went with 2010 over 2004 and he says it was strictly because he likes GNOME 3.38 more than I guess the previous version of GNOME so if it comes down to what you like about GNOME or Ubuntu 2010 I'm not a GNOME fan either way so I probably would prefer the base system of 2004 being a long term support release his second top distribution of 2020 was PopOS 2010 now I personally have not taken a look at PopOS 2010 but every time I have taken a look at any version of PopOS I do admit it is a very well put together distribution PopOS is from the guys over at system 76 they put out great desktops laptops they even do servers and the system 76 guys have their own custom Linux distribution called PopOS it's based on Ubuntu it uses the GNOME desktop and it has a lot of good hardware support especially for those of you running system 76 hardware that's probably the distribution you want to try first his third top distribution of 2020 is one that's not a surprise to me but it is a solid release I actually did download the ISO for Fedora 33 I didn't do anything with it on camera but it is a solid release I actually downloaded Fedora 33 their KDE ISO and took it for a spin and it's not bad I didn't take a look at the traditional the mainstream Fedora 33 release which of course comes with the GNOME desktop but kind of like Ubuntu 2010 Fedora 33 comes with GNOME 3.38 that's definitely an improvement on some of the previous editions of GNOME his fourth top Linux distribution of 2020 is MX Linux and he specifies the KDE spin now that is interesting because the flagship edition of MX has the XFCE desktop and I actually install MX Linux a lot like on friends and family computers that's typically one I keep an ISO of as far as I keep a USB stick of MX and I throw the main edition with the XFCE desktop with that weird bar on the side that's got the stuff at the bottom it's kind of laid out a little differently but it's not bad and typically the people that I put MX on their machines they love it they never had any issues it's rock solid stable of course it's based on Debian so you would expect it to be stable the author here has stated that he decided to go with MX KDE on the list rather than the standard MX Linux XFCE really don't have much difference as far as performance anymore as far as system resource usage he says he really didn't see any benefit of going with XFCE when KDE plasma really doesn't use any more system resources than XFCE and it's a more fleshed out desktop environment which I can understand I actually can respect that opinion I'm not sure if I completely agree with that because XFCE is a little slimmer than plasma desktop environment so pick and choose whichever one you want I think the base system MX Linux I think is a fantastic distribution and rounding out his five best Linux distributions of 2020 is Manjaro Manjaro of course is an arch based Linux distribution and I've run Manjaro a lot over the last few years and I think is a fantastic distribution Manjaro their flagship edition is an XFCE edition and they do one of the best Manjaro played a little bit with Manjaro's KDE edition and it's a really good looking KDE desktop Manjaro all their desktop environments they really spend a lot of time customizing them and making them look good and clean and polished for those of us that like more minimal desktops I will say that some of their window manager only spins things like I3 awesome DSPWM open box and they make pretty good and their I3 edition is probably the best I3 configured out of the box of any Linux distribution as far as the programs and the theming and everything if you really are looking for an easy way to get into tiling window managers maybe you've never run a tiling window manager and this is your first time checking one out maybe check out Manjaro I3 edition I think you will be really impressed with that particular distribution now of course the only thing that kind of surprised me is he did not have any release of Linux Mint on the list because Linux Mint did release what version 20 in 2020 and I actually did take a look at that on the channel and if you're talking about you know just standard desktop GNU slash Linux distributions I think you probably had to find room for Linux Mint 20 somewhere on the list now for me would these be my top five GNU slash Linux distributions of 2020 well if you're talking personally no I would probably have a completely different best GNU slash Linux distributions of 2020 and I might do a video on that in the coming days or coming weeks because I think that would be interesting you know I'm not going to try to pick distributions I think or for everybody but just strictly for me I might do that because I've taken a look of course at a lot of distributions here in the last year in 2020 and some of them really impressed me some of them impressed me you know like it really changed my mind like I don't know if I would ever run this distribution and then I check it out and I'm like man I might throw that on one of my laptops you know so check out that video coming probably in the next couple of weeks I'll probably get to DT's personal top five of 2020 or whatever I decide to title that video and the fourth story is going to be the development version of gimp 2.99.2 so this is a development release beta release basically and why is that important who cares about a development release because this development release of gimp has a ton of new features and it is really a preview for those of you wondering what's coming down the pipe when gimp finally releases version 3.0 now I have not installed the development version of gimp gimp 2.99.2 yet but I may if it seems stable enough I use gimp a lot so I don't want anything just wait for the official release of gimp 3.0 but it does come with some interesting features that some of you may need right away I don't know if I necessarily need some of these but the big highlights from this is that it will be GTK3 based so you're going to get the GTK3 based user interface which is going to give you client side decorations a lot more client side decorations for the various windows that pop up and everything also you're going to see is huge news for some of you guys not many desktop Linux users of course are using Waylon but those of you that are especially if you're on something like Fedora and you use Fedora with Genome with Waylon because they kind of push that a lot of you guys are on Waylon IDPI displays are becoming more and more common so that's great they're focusing on that they've done some major refactoring and cleanup again API and plugins are now possible with Python, JavaScript Lua and Vala so pick your favorite scripting language you can now make a plug-in with it I think all of that is huge I really that is they're just the highlights there the reading of the highlights those are gigantic improvements for GIMP if we just spotlight some of those and they talked about the multi layer selection so the layers on top of each other in GIMP I don't know if a lot of you guys work with GIMP and work with layers but when you do sometimes it's hard to manage all those layers now you have the ability to select multiple layers at a time and do things on those multiple selected layers I think that's awesome we have the plugin API and really that's one of the great things about GIMP is the extensibility there's a ton of GIMP plugins out of software at least the stuff I use I love extensible software I love software that comes out of the box kind of bear and then I get to pick and choose exactly what I want what plugins I want what extensions I want and the switch to GTK 3 is big because you know that lets developers now they can create new CSS based themes for the editor and you can take advantage now of light dark mode system settings and things like that by the way I think that's pretty important for many users for those of you wanting to check out this development release of GIMP you can install it by using a flat pack so it's available on any Linux distribution that can use flat pack which is most every good new slash Linux distribution and the fifth and final story I want to talk about is really just a topic I wanted to talk about and that is codes that can be used to create a code that is really just a topic I wanted to talk about and that is codes of conduct because I've talked about codes of conduct a lot on my YouTube channel and how they're not really something I like I don't like people feeling the need that they have to insert a code of conduct into their open source project that they need to somehow regulate people's behavior I've never thought codes of conduct are really a necessary thing I think people should treat somebody this is the incorrect way to treat somebody no one needs to be told in writing this is the way you should treat somebody that writing doesn't even matter anyway as like because everybody kind of knows how to treat each other anyway it's kind of pointless to even put this stuff down in writing and then some of the people that are putting out codes of conduct like the GNOME project have these insane codes of conduct that have a lot of them and it's just there's some disgusting codes of conduct out there so I was wondering are there any sane codes of conduct out there are there any codes of conduct out there that are actually written and directed toward adults because I'm not seeing that many of those kinds of codes of conduct and I came across one the other day and I wanted to share with you guys I found this code of conduct over on GitHub it is the NCOC or the no code of conduct and if you read the code of conduct if I actually read the Markdown document here this project adheres to no code of conduct we are all adults we accept anyone's contributions nothing else matters that's the code of conduct and I love it that's perfect hey this project has no code of conduct we are all adults we accept anyone's contributions nothing else matters so all that matters is the software if you have something to contribute oh well but other than that that's all that matters and I think that makes perfect sense I don't understand it's basically not having a code of conduct but if you're going to have one I like it put that way I'm just letting people know hey if you were here looking for some kind of divisive political rhetoric in a code of conduct you're not going to find one we don't have one we don't care what do we care we're all adults there basically we're all adults we accept everyone's contributions nothing else matters there's three points right and I think every single person on the planet could agree with those three points and it's just perfect now for those of you that want to implement the no code of conduct on your project how do you do that well you copy the code of conduct dot md here you put it in the root directory of your project so you have just because I think the no code of conduct is very sane and rational doesn't mean everybody in the world you know there's a lot of irrational people out there and they do address some points of hey what if these irrational people come and say things like hey what if this makes me feel discriminated what if the fact that you don't have a code of conduct because the no code of conduct is basically not a code of conduct what if I feel discriminated against because you don't have a code of conduct what if the fact that you don't have a code of conduct is basically your problem simply because we don't babysit people on our site and make sure they treat you with respect we hope that doesn't mean you feel unwelcome but if that's the case hey bye and I completely agree like that's not the point of a free and open source software project is not to sit there and babysit people and make sure they treat each other right and make sure feelings are special and important if you have issues with that sort of thing then you actually need to go see a therapist right you don't need to be spending your time with this open source project you're working on anyway and of course many people will tell you that not having a code of conduct is the sign of a project not really being serious because you have to have a code of conduct of your serious because you're going to lose so many places to work in that's simply not the case these codes of conduct are kind of a recent thing and before codes of conduct did we have a problem developing software no like millions and millions and millions of people have contributed code and documentation and artwork and everything else to open source software projects and it wasn't because there was a code of conduct it wasn't going to get that now in all seriousness say you do implement the no code of conduct for your project what if somebody has a problem with another person because that's going to happen somebody's going to feel like they were treated unfairly or they were discriminated against or you know somebody made some remark they should have made to that person what do you do in that case because your code of conduct says nothing about the person that offended you in some way hey email that person you know talk to that person let them know that what they did made you feel uncomfortable or whatever it is and talk it through chances are if you have a one on one conversation with that other person you guys are going to work that out very quickly because probably the person that offended you didn't even know they offended you and when you tell them hey you know what you said make these things a bigger deal than they have to be and I kind of like what the author gives his answers to some of the questions that some people in the community may have about something like this and that is it for this edition of unfettered freedom this was unfettered freedom episode 11 I tried to release a new edition of unfettered freedom every other week because this is a bi weekly podcast and bi weekly means every two weeks it emailing me asking me where all the other episodes of unfettered freedom are alright now before I go I need to thank the producers of the show I need to thank Michael Gabe Corbinian Mitchell Devin Fran Arch 5530 Akami Chuck Claudio Donnie Dylan George Gregory Caleb Devils-Lewis Paul Scott and Willie these guys they are the producers of the show they're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon also want to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well those of you watching the video podcast all these names are seeing on the screen right now these are all my supporters over on Patreon because this podcast and the distro tube channel is sponsored by you guys the community if you'd like to support my work consider doing so you'll find DT over on Patreon alright guys peace