 How's everyone feeling about the Linux community right now? And Linux in general? Well, I'm afraid to tell you that according to our next speaker, Linux sucks. Linux sucks. And he's going to tell us why. As soon as he gets his Linux laptop hooked up to the projector system. Now, hey, hey, yeah. All right, I'm turned on now. All right, first off, while I'm getting set up here, everybody squished the frig together. You're all spread out like a bunch of spread out crap. Get together. Bring it in. People in the back, bring it in, bring it in, bring it in. I'm not screwing around about this. I'm not starting until you bring it in. You can't sit right there. Ilan Rabinovic, organizer of scale, take a frigging chair. Bring it in. Bring it in. I see you in the back. I like you. Thank you for waving. You guys on the side are clearly afraid of humans. You can stay over there. But everyone, bring it in. I am going to yell at every single friggin one of you in a minute. Oops. You're welcome. You can't hear me anymore. Bring it in. What the heck, people? This thing is cranked through the roof and you guys are still sitting. The guy in the very far back right corner. Yeah, you. Everybody turn and look at him. You are so far away right now. Closer. You don't want to? All right, all right, all right. Let me turn on my display. Beautiful. No. No. No. Better. Hey, that's a thing. All right. So before we jump into this too crazy, is everybody coming here at this exact same time tomorrow night? Yes. I'm going to be very clear about this. The prizes are bonkers and we have free beer. Now, is it possible to turn on the house lights for about 20 seconds here? Thank you. Now, we're going to take a picture because I'm standing in front of all of you guys and you can't do anything about it. I'm up here. This is really unsafe. Sweet. Do you guys just applaud someone for taking a picture while standing on a chair? Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Let's just move to the next slide so we're ready here. Hold on. Hold on. I'm going to bring up Twitter. You guys are watching me tweet on a Thursday night. All of these people think Linux sucks. Hashtag, scale 14x. Tweet. All right, sweet. Now we can get started. All right. This is Linux sucks. Is everybody in the right place? Fantastic. So let's get the disclaimers out of the way right from the start. I don't care what any of you think. That's number one. Number two, I don't want to hear you talking about it while I'm talking because I am the most important man in this room right now. Isn't that right, Ilan Rabinovich, organizer of scale? Ilan says no. All right. Third thing, then the second item on there because I didn't number them properly, is that no one sanctioned this. Scale didn't sanction this. No employers of mine sanctioned this. And as a follow-on, there may be some bad words. I don't have any bad words planned other than that one right there, but sometimes they just happen. With that in mind, before we go further, scale deserves a round of applause for putting on Linux sucks at the Southern California Linux Expo at night. Right? It takes a little bit of guts. I recognize, by the way, this might be a little controversial. I spelled Cajones that way. I looked it up on Urban Dictionary, and there was a lot of options, and so I went phonetic. I am extremely white. Could I tell you a story about how wide I am for a second? I don't need to sidetrack this. Does anyone else use 23andMe or any of those DNA services? Raise your hand if you want your DNA profiled by a database. So I did those, and it tells you where your ancestry came from. Now, I know for a fact that in my mixed ancestry, I've got various Native Americans and all sorts of different things. Apparently, the white DNA has massacred all the non-white DNA in my body because I am 100% Western European white, according to my DNA, which means that my entire family history is really all for naught. So I am literally, as far as I know, as white as it is possible to be, scientifically. Could I have a cup of water over there? Thank you, Kara. Now, this is really important. I am not a very smart guy. I was a software developer at one point. I was awful at it. I was really terrible. Ask anyone who used my software. It was so buggy. It was ridiculous. So being as this is the, I don't know, seventh time I've done a big dog and pony show about how terrible Linux is, I thought, how cool would it be to ask people who are actually smart about Linux instead of just me? So I did that. I asked a semi-random sampling of people. Raise your hand if you know who Corey Doctorow is. Yeah. Corey Doctorow is an author and a general free software and free culture advocate. You brought me two cups? You are righteous. Yes! All right, all right. Now, Corey Doctorow, I'm going to admit, is kind of an idol of mine. I think he's kind of fantastic in every possible way. So I asked him. What do you think of Linux, Corey Doctorow? That's a good point. So, all right, so he was pretty blind, I felt. He hates Linux. That's fine, but he's just one author. What if we could find another author and see what they think of Linux? Let's get, let's make this scientific, right? Let's get a sample size. Corey Doctorow does not a sample size make. So I asked this guy. Does anyone know who Pierce Anthony is? Of course you do. Especially if you were a boy who was ever the age of 13. Because Pierce Anthony has written 200 some odd books, fantasy novels, science fiction novels. The man is kind of a literary something or other. I don't know. I'm not very good with words. Giants, that was a really simple word that I could have used. It's fantastic. So I got a hold of Pierce Anthony. Who, as it turns out, has been using Linux as his primary operating system for 15 some odd years. Now, before I play this video, I should point out that Pierce Anthony is not a sprightly young chicken. He has been around in this business for a very, very long time. In fact, I managed to track him down, literally, in the swamps of Florida, where he lives with his wife and he is a very elderly gentleman. He was kind enough to record this video, which I think is absolutely adorable. Sorry, Pierce. And he recorded it while sitting on the stairs in his home. This is what Pierce Anthony, literary giant, thinks of Linux. So there you have it. So what we're at right now is a scientifically definitive result. We have a sample size of two, two distinguished and well-known authors. One who says that he hates Linux. The other who says that it's flat-out a disaster. At this point, I decided it was safe to conclude that all authors hate Linux. So we need to move on from there. We need to define someone maybe who works with Linux day-to-day, maybe someone who is involved in the monetary side of it and making it fit for big companies, maybe someone who really knows his stuff. So I reached out to Jim Whitehurst, the CEO of Red Hat. And I said, hey Jim, just give me kind of an off-the-cuff thought. What do you think of Linux, Jim? This is what he sent back. Keepin' me alive is this energy drink. This is a true story, by the way. Last night, I was trying to delete a couple of USB flash drives and I went to the disk utility routine. Forgot to switch over from my main hard drive to the USB and I literally deleted the partitions of my operating system that I was running at the time. Because what on earth were the developers thinking when they would let a user delete the partitions of the machine they are currently running? I spent an hour and a half less like building my whole damn computer. I asked Mark Shuttleworth if he would come on. He respectfully declined. Truth be told, I cornered Mark Shuttleworth CEO of Canonical about three times trying to get him on. He kind of just looked at me like, no, I know what's going on. So, two things. This is a little thing I do. Every time I do some sort of thing like this where I get up in front of a room of people and try to act stupid, I plan it out fairly well. I practice it once or twice. I make sure I know what all the slides are. But I always like to do one thing that scares me a little bit. One thing that I have not planned. So, until about an hour ago, this slide read, what is Linux? Bonus points compare it to, so then I asked my wife this evening, what should I compare it to? She suggested a potato, which means in a moment, I will be comparing Linux to a potato and why that is terrible. But first, every time I've given this freaking thing, I have gotten this exact verbatim statement sent to me in droves and I'm going to read it for you because it drives me frigging bonkers. I'd like to just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux is in fact GNU forward slash Linux or as I've recently taken to calling it GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU core libs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full operating system as defined by POSIX. All of us have seen this. All of us have posted something on Reddit and had this be what someone comes back with. It drives me to the point of murder. I love GNU stuff. I love free software, but the name GNU forward slash Linux is freaking stupid. Wait, wait, wait. I said wait, you guys don't listen well at all. In all deference to my good friend, Richard Stallman. I like GNU, I'm going to repeat this. And free software, I just think the name is clumsy. That is all I'm saying. Now, let's get back to talking about potatoes. That slide bought me three minutes to think about what I thought about potatoes, by the way. And then I drank water and got 12 more. All right, here's the thing. Every operating system is like a potato, right? I asked you right, like that makes a whole lot of sense. Think about it like this. Windows, Mac, DOS, anything, you get it and it's a potato. You make it your own by adding something on top of it. Some applications, some themes, some chives, some butter, some bacon bits. Maybe a little dollop of sour cream, which is an absolutely incorrect thing to do to a baked potato. It's disgusting, man. Raise your hand if you like sour cream on your baked potato. Fuck all of you, that's a horrible idea. Now that's totally fine. And if Linux were like that, that would be totally fine too, but Linux isn't like that. Imagine if you will forget everything about Linux for a second, but imagine if you will a world in which there was such a thing as a potato copier. It's like a photocopier, except it copies potatoes. Basically verbatim, maybe not exactly. There might be a little bit of different shapes and sizes, but essentially you take a potato and it copies it. Now it doesn't just copy the potato. It copies anything you shove in that potato. It copies the sour cream. It copies the bacon bits, which is always a good thing to copy because it's delicious in a baked potato. Just as an aside, can we raise hands if you like bacon in your baked potato? More people than sour cream, thank you. Now what if, what if you took that bacon copier and you gave it a potato with some bacon bits in it, perfectly good, and you want to get more of those potatoes with bacon bits, you want that. Everyone wants that. You want to distribute it for free. And as you do that, it starts spitting out potato after potato after potato with bacon bits. That's fantastic. And then someone comes along and adds sour cream to one of those potatoes and begins copying that potato. And then somebody adds chives to another potato and begins copying that potato. After a while, there's potatoes everywhere. With all sorts of really messed up ingredients in them. There is potatoes out there with, well, let's say mayonnaise. Someone put mayonnaise in a potato. Would anyone ever put mayonnaise in a potato? You would not. All right, all right, I have, are you serious? You really, you've actually done that. You've put mayonnaise in a baked potato. What sort of messed up world do you live in? Did you not have butter? Do you not have butter? Butter is amazing. Can I have a different butter? Yeah, you're wrong. So here's the problem with that. If you have a potato copying machine and it's cranking out these copies of potatoes, invariably something's gonna go wrong. Have you ever seen the movie The Fly where after the guy Jeff Goldblum goes through the machine a whole bunch of times, like eventually a little fly gets into it and he comes out the other side and not quite right? That's what can happen with a potato copier. And that's really what Linux is, right? It's not an operating system that you slap the ingredients you want on top of. It's a strange potato copying freedom loving mechanism that enables you to eventually get mutant potatoes that have so much sour cream in between the molecules of the actual delicious potato that you can't get the goddamn sour cream out. That really has nothing to do with the rest of this presentation, but I feel pretty happy with how that went. Now, now, I've got a long way to go here. So Linux, we're all here because we agree it sucks a whole bunch, correct? Correct. So, what could we talk about? What are the various things we could talk about? Could we talk about replaced display managers that seemingly will never ship? Now, we're not gonna talk about that. I'd like to talk about this one because this is another display manager that I don't understand why it exists, but it's not shipping, so it's not a big deal. We're not gonna talk about this one. All right, to the booze in the audience. Allow me to just say that I rather quite like Fedora, but the Fedora people are so fun to poke. It's like a hornet's list, but the hornets that come out are rainbow-colored and just delightful, so you just wanna jab at it and then spray it with something. You can't talk, that one. We're not gonna talk about this time. I've made fun of Fedora in the past, I'm not gonna do it. Now, who here would like to hear me rant and rave about Ubuntu for a while? I'm not gonna do that either. We're gonna talk about this. I just by a response that I picked the correct topic. All right, show of hands, or shouts, whatever. Who here among you have legitimate concerns about System D? All right, it's a few of you. So let's step back for a second. I don't care what anyone in the audience has to say. I do a little bit, but if I say I don't, it's funnier. Let's talk about what System D is before we get into why it pisses me off so much. So here's just a little bit of a mock-up. For those who aren't familiar, System D started ostensibly as a replacement for the initialization scripts, right? A new initialization system for the modern age where we can all prance freely in meadows of daisies and sunflowers and everything will work just a little bit better because it's a more modern code base. Reasonable, right? There have been efforts to do this in the past. Plenty of them, in fact, and some of them have worked wonderfully well and some of them have sucked a whole bunch. Now along came System D, which really in and of itself, for being in a niche script that gets your computer up and running, it does the job, right? Does it work? Yeah, it does that. Then the System D creators did something dark, something very sinister. They began adding shit. And to give you an example of how much shit they done added, I recently wrote an article. In that article, I made a joke. And that joke was that System D would, sometime over the coming year, add to its portfolio of functionality a web browser and an office suite. Wait, it was an easy to joke to make because, duh. People took it and may have realized that, yes, this is half a joke, but they kind of saw a nugget of truth in it. In spades. People look at it and they think, by God, you're right. It is expanding to become what is essentially a complete nutter operating system unto itself. Now, why is this a problem? Okay, let's not talk about Emacs right now because we might later. So, oh, John Maddog, you are ruining things with spoilers for the rest of the audience. The Unix philosophy. You make a lot of small modular bits that can all work together, right? Why make one monolithic beast that has way too many pieces and parts all on it that's just not gonna work that well? It's time for a story. How many people did Pinewood Derbies as a kid? It's fun, right? All right, that's quite a bit of you, right? So, I did Pinewood Derbies as a kid. This is not a picture of my Pinewood Derby. This is the only good Creative Commons license picture of Pinewood Derbies I could find. The cars I made as a kid, never, never, I'm sure, performed this well. So, when I was a kid, the very first Pinewood Derby I did, my dad was gonna help me out and make the car cool, right? Sometimes the kids are supposed to do it themselves but it's cool if the dad helps, right? Like, it's cool if the dad helps you carve the little block of wood and turn it into a little car that's gonna race a whole bunch of other cars down the track, that's cool. But I felt like our little car that started out as just this little wedge, kind of like, well, like none of these, but just like a little wedge, like almost like a little triangle. It just didn't look very cool. So, I got the pocket knife out and I started kind of carving little swoops into it and I made it look badass. I wish I had a picture of this. I looked all over for a picture of this. I thought it looked great. Granted, hindsight and memory may not be serving me well. It might have looked ridiculous. But it had like this swoop on the back, right? Not like a spoiler, but like an honest to God like spoon sitting on the back facing forward. If you can imagine a car with a spoon on the back, you can imagine it's not very aerodynamic. I also painted it with more coats of paint than would have been reasonably advisable. It got thicker and it got heavier. But in the end, the paint with the flames, I should say flames, because I think it looked a little funny, but the flames looked cool and it had little headlights on the front. I put actual headlights on the front. It was just like a little things on it. It was cool, right? It was way cool. And it lost that pun with Derby by so much. It was the slowest freaking car on the whole Derby by a landslide. A landslide. I sucked so bad. And the reason I suck so bad is I threw everything in the kitchen sink onto this little block of wood and expected it to go fast and do a good job at what it does. Like System D. They put a friggin' spoon on the back of a race car and expected it to go faster. Now, right now? Is it being horrible? Is it destroying our lives? No. But the promise of where it could go is not fantastic. Remember Anakin Skywalker? Another example of this. Has anyone here, as a kid, you all do this as a kid, who might ask you questions for. As a kid, you draw pictures, right? When you're like, let's say like eight, nine, 10 years old. I know like 10-year-old boys are just a lot of special. They'll draw pictures of like a helicopter shooting at like a building or blowing up a palm tree. You know, some randomly overly violent machismo thing that we did as a child, right? Did you guys all do that? Like, draw like a picture of a plane? You didn't do that? I was a violent kid. So anyway, I did that a lot as a kid. And I found one thing. I could draw planes and spaceships very well because there was a lot of sharp angles and I could manage to do that. Anything that had more to do with than that, the pictures were kind of crappy. Now I did what you kind of expect a 10-year-old boy to do. I'd draw a spaceship or an airplane. I'd do an okay job of it. It was recognizable. Then I'd add some buildings. Then I'd add a dinosaur. Then I'd add a guy driving the dinosaur, like on the back, holding like a gun. And after a while, the picture was so filled with barely legible crap that it was a terrible picture, just like System D. Now there are exceptions there. We'll talk about that later. I'm gonna change topics away from System D for a moment because we're gonna talk about it more and I need to take a break. Let's talk about stats for a second. This is gonna have very little commentary for me, so let's just look. That's the last 10 years of searches of the word Linux on Google. It kind of highlighted December of 2011 because that seems to be when it kind of leveled off. That's down, right? That's a lot down. That's not a little down. That's a lot down. What does Google search trends track? How interested people are in something, which means they don't care about Linux. What do they care about? They care about iPhones. A lot. A whole hell of a lot. It's like a stegosaurus. They care about iPhones a lot. What else do they care about? You guys, this is Google. This is the truth. Now, there was a moment. There was a moment you'll notice. Where at the end of 2014, beginning of 2015, it looked like Linux might be more important than Justin Bieber for just a moment. That moment is gone. Are there any believers in the audience? That guy in the back, or were you just stretching? He put his hands down so fast. Gonna leave that right there. Now, let's come back to numbers for a second. I love numbers. But finding numbers, hard numbers, for how well each version of Linux does, each Linux distribution does, is harder than hell. What is the only real way to compare it? DistroWatch. This graph, this horrible, disgusting graph, is the last 14 years, I just did the math, of the top, the current top eight distros on DistroWatch. It's interesting, isn't it? There have been changes over the years. Changes aren't bad, right? Changes are good. We all like changes. I like a lot of changes here. Let me actually pull this together a little bit. I'm gonna remove the bottom three. My apologies to Arch and Slackware and Elementary. You guys are in the top eight. That's pretty good, but we're gonna cut you off for a second because I can't handle that many lights. So let's look at this for a second. This is a lot of change in a little over 10 years. That's five different organizations, volunteer organizations and companies, kind of a mixture of the two, doing a ton of work, a ton of work to package, develop, and test. These four awesome Linux distributions. Well, awesome in the Linux sense of the word. How much time could they be saving if they actually work together on one? Probably a little bit among you. And I'm really curious about this. How many of you have had the conversation with your friends? Boy, it sure seems like we fork X an awful lot. Wouldn't it be better if we all worked together? Come on. Sheepish, sheepish, up, up, sheepish, proud. I like it. Everyone here hates you. But it's true. If we all worked together, if Ubuntu, Linux, Mint, Fedora, OpenSusa, and Debian all worked together on the singular distribution, they would have more manpower, significantly more manpower, to throw at many of the same problems that they're solving over and over and over again, instead of this crazy back and forth trepidating for positioning. Now, this really is just measuring interest, right? This measures interest on a website called DistroWatch of each individual platform, right? So it tells us interest over time. And other than it's showing both Ubuntu and Fedora slowly sliding into oblivion now, I'm not really sure what else it shows. So I'm gonna move on. You know, I'm gonna come back to this for a second. Because in fact, it kind of pisses me off. If you look at the non-free software world, there was a time when Mac OS X and Windows were really behind some of the things in free software. It wasn't that many years ago. Free software and Linux gave you virtual desktops first. Right? Virtual desktops. That's badass. Now everyone's got them. Close store software has them. They've been able to catch up in so many ways that it is, I think, definitively showing that both Linux, open source and free software simply isn't functional at the current point in time. To the point where giving up on free software probably makes the most sense at this point. It's gotten absolutely friggin' ridiculous. And I honestly don't think that it makes... I'm sancting Knusius of the church of Emas. I didn't call you a god. What? My name is Lesserby. Okay. You've been letting non-free programs flush that looks like Mac OS. Whoa. It's almost as nasty as Windows. There's not a... Brace all that, user shackles. Could I use BI? Using a free... I don't... I mean, I guess I could, but I... You're making progress will be a saint. Okay. There's no system. That was weird. That was a weird thing to have just happened. I don't know if you could really see it, but as he faded in here, he was like, Brian, Brian, and it was a little creepy from up here. So that was Richard Stallman. And Richard Stallman makes some pretty good points. Maybe not in that moment, but in other moments. Maybe I've got this all wrong. Maybe I need to look at this from a different point of view. Maybe Linux isn't a crappy potato copying machine. Maybe it's an amazing paid potato copying machine. Maybe making a Frankenstein potato is the best possible kind of potato. If you think about it, if you came across a potato sitting on a counter somewhere, fresh out of the oven, wrapped up in tinfoil, what do you immediately think to do with it? You've never seen a potato before in your life. What do you do with it? The first response was put sour cream on it, which just shows you how fucked up the human race is as a people. I mean, really, you don't think put sour cream on a, like if you think, I pulled a root out of a ground, I'm gonna make it warm and put curdled milk on it. No, that's a stupid idea, but it works for some people. You don't think I'm gonna put bacon, now you do think I'm gonna put bacon on it. Yeah, that's just a given. But some of the other things, chives. Who would put chives on a potato? That's stupid, but it worked. What if there's a combination out there of ingredients so preposterous that no one has ever tried it on a baked potato before? If you have yogurt, has anyone ever put yogurt on a baked potato? Is it good? This guy says it's good. I went to a restaurant once and they gave me a potato filled with macaroni and cheese. It was amazing. It was good. Chocolate syrup? He just made that up. No one's ever done that. That's a thing. That's a thing. Here's the thing. We don't know what sort of combination of craziness and collaboration is going to produce the world's best Frankenstein awesome mutant potato, right? So why not get a potato copying machine so we can make as many friggin' copies as we want and keep trying over and over and over again and keep doing that sort of thing? Which means, and it's very clear, if you don't like potato copying machines, you're against progress and you're against flavor and you're against deliciousness and you are clearly a very stupid person. Clearly. Which means ergo proctorhawk, that was probably Latin, Linux, people who don't like it are stupid. I think that's a fair statement to make. Would anyone else go so far as to make that statement? Nope. Fair enough. Moving on. Let's come back to system D for a minute. Now, the structure of these sorts of things that I do is that in the beginning, I tell you what really pisses me off. I tell you what sucks. And in the last half, I tell you why I was absolutely wrong and why whatever I told you sucks, it's really truly amazing. Which means I'm about to tell you the most unpopular thing possible to tell this room right now. System D is incredible. All right, four of you agree with that. And here's the reason why it's incredible. It's kind of monolithic-y. It's not that great that way. It's not modular in any way. Which kind of sucks. And it does seem like they're gonna build an office we didn't do it at some point. I don't really know if I want them doing that. But I like that they have the balls to try. Seriously. Back in the 1990s, there was a point in time when a lot of desktop environments that we use today didn't exist at all. They didn't exist. Did KDE and GNOME, which came first? KDE or GNOME? KDE? GNOME came about a year later, something like that, right? So for about a year, there was KDE, but no GNOME or GNOME or however people who can't speak properly say it. Did they think we shouldn't create that because it does things differently? No, they created it anyway and it turned out to be kind of awesome. Did canonical stop and not make unity? No, that was a bad idea. Really sorry guys, it wasn't like that. All right, we'll go off of that. That was the slide of system D. I just put it up there again momentarily to point out that, hey, it's a little bit wacky. And yes, it is trying to do an invasion of the body snatchers and take over your entire lives, but let them, let's see what happens, right? If all the distros don't like it, they're gonna stop using it. If the GNOME people don't like it, they're gonna stop using it. And that's totally fine. Because if we don't take risks, we don't do anything cool. Let's come back to this. Let's talk more about Pinewood Derby's really quickly here. My car sucked. My car lost the Derby, but my car looked way cooler than any of the other cars. The car that won was a stupid wedge. Remember when I said I started with a triangle? Their car was just a triangle. There was no creative flair in that car whatsoever. And that's stupid. My car was awesome and pointless, but awesome. There are many Linux distributions that I would classify as pointless. Many of them. In fact, there are many Linux distributions that are jokes that were literally created to be a joke. Someone earlier today mentioned Hannah Montana Linux. That's a friggin' great example. How great is it that that exists? That's a wonderful thing. That's part of our cultural lexicon as a people now. The Hannah Montana has her own operating system. Does anyone use Hannah Montana Linux? Has anyone here ever, one, anyone besides that devilishly handsome man ever actually installed it? Just to see what it was like, you actually downloaded it and put it on your computer. And was it as pink as I thought it would be? Awesome. Is it pointless? Yeah, it's pointless, but it's so cool that someone reached out and tried. I really drew crappy pictures as a kid, and earlier when I said that I drew good planes and spaceships, I was lying. They were so bad. All by themselves, they were bad. In fact, the only thing that covered up that I was the world's worst artist is that I filled the page with things that almost looked like dinosaurs and people riding them. That was the only thing that convinced anyone that I might have been able to draw one good thing. I still can't draw. However, if I could, and I could draw truly well, I would draw something like Chuck Norris riding a dinosaur holding a machine gun, because that's awesome. Should I just draw a dinosaur? No, everyone's drawn a dinosaur. Let's draw something different. Chuck Norris with a machine gun. Okay, that's not that different now because the internet's here, but you add enough things to it, and eventually it gets awesome. Let's look at this for a second. Sorry about the... Yeah, you can mute that for a moment. Be ready to unmute that a little later. So this is it. This is, actually, this is real. There's nothing about this that isn't real. This is real. I say lies all lies, but Google's kind of telling the truth about these stats. But there's one thing here that it doesn't take into account. Over this period of time, there's been an absolute explosion in the popularity of multiple specific Linux distributions. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSusa, Arch, a wide variety of things, and people have begun searching for those instead of just Linux. So if you start adding together, and I found this really hard to do in a chart that made any sense, so I gave up because I'm committed like that. You can see it. Actually, over time, the interest has grown because there's more to it that people are searching for. Now, it does mean that interest in the Linux kernel itself in terms of what people are searching for, that's going down, that is going down because it is, because it is. And this still friggin' holds true. But there's one other aspect that this doesn't really take into consideration. It's the old wisdom of if your friend's all jumped off a cliff, do you? And I think that applies pretty goddamn well right here. Linux popularity, in terms of search results on Google, has dropped precipitously over the last decade, whereas there has been an explosion of iPhone searches. Why is that? Because iPhones are friggin' popular. But it doesn't mean they're cool. It just means they're popular. Justin Bieber is popular. He's popular, right? That guy in the back, where'd he go? There you are. You put your hand down fast, but you're a believer. He's popular. I'm gonna move on because actually these numbers are really depressing. All right, let's move on really quick. Now let's come back to DistroWatch. So sure, sure, Google search trends, not great, not fantastic, but these DistroWatch numbers, these are fantastic. These are really fantastic. And here is why. Multiple things. First, it shows interest over time, skyrocketing. Skyrocketing. Now this is again just on one single highly flawed website. But it shows interest over time going way, way up for Linux as a whole. That is incredible. That is an incredible thing. And not only does it show that, it shows an incredible diversity of ideas. Crazy. Arch and elementary. Those are two projects that almost don't even seem like they're based on the same thing. They are two fundamentally different frigging beasts, right? And yet they're sitting up there kind of pretty close to each other, almost neck and neck in terms of interest through this website, right? How awesome is that? They're entirely different. And yet they're doing so astoundingly well and it's all within the same family of us, of us as Linux users, as Linux developers, it is within that. Now a lot of the top ones all kind of have a common lineage and a common heritage, but not all of them do. And if you look at all of the hundreds and hundreds of Linux distros out there, this chart gets even nuttier. It gets to the point where it is absolutely indecipherable. And if you narrow this down to just those top five, what I kind of consider to be the granddaddies right now, like plus Linux mint, who's a little bit newer. But these are the most popular, the five most popular versions of Linux in the whole world. And they're kind of jockeying for position. I mean, look at Debian with its massive swoops up and down and look at, I mean, look at Ubuntu there, Ubuntu shot to prominence in 2004 and has really stayed pretty consistent despite the fact that there's, how many Ubuntu spinoffs are there? I don't even know. I didn't even bother to look because it sounded so boring, there was so many of them. But that's just it, despite Kabuntu and all these other derivatives, it's still holding its own, still doing well. Sousa has been sitting there, OpenSus has been doing steadily well for a long time. The same is true with Red Hat, doing steadily well, declining into oblivion a little bit, but that's not too bad. All of which means that all of the things about Linux that are the worst things about Linux, the things that give us system D, the things that we love to hate are also kind of spectacularly awesome. And if you took away the thing that would create system D, you take away the thing that create anything else, anything else beautiful. So I want to revisit some of our dear friends that we heard from earlier. Make sure we got audio for this because it's beautiful. This is Corey Doctorow, author and totally awesome dude. That wasn't easy. I actually have been using Linux every day as my only operating system for more than a decade now. Yeah, you have. Yeah, he has. How many people here have been using Linux as their primary operating system for more than 10 years? Okay, three hands up for a second. Who of you have been using Linux for less than a year? Less than two years? Less than five years, let's go like that. There we go. So probably more than half of you have been using Linux and primarily Linux for over a decade, over a decade. How awesome is that? Let's hear from Pierce Anthony. Here's freaking Anthony. It's a disaster if you're a commercial software and you're squeezed, it's kind of fulfilled. Well put, Pierce Anthony, who is so adorable. All right, Jim White here. The years of selling free, the only thing keeping you alive is the synergy drink. Linux is awesome. Even though I totally blew up my rig last night, within an hour and a half, I was able to reinstall it all and I didn't have to pay anybody anything for a proprietary piece of software. I love Linux. When you need something that may not even be packaged for your version of the operating system by simply compiling a module if you can make it work. I'm Jim Whitehurst, President CEO of Red Hat and Linux is awesome. He had to get that in there at the end. I'm Jim Whitehurst. Awesome, right? So if I've got at the end of this ridiculous period of time that we've spent together, if there's a message, if there's the moral at the end of the Scooby-Doo episode, it is this. If something comes along that is system D-ish, should we make fun of it? Should we belittle it? You're absolutely right, we should. Hold your applause. We should. We should criticize the holy living hell out of it with love in our hearts. Because the reality is that the people that make things like system D have their hearts in the right place and are trying something a little different, a little new. But if we think they're wrong, we yell about them. We fork our distro and we go the frig home. And that's totally, totally okay to do. Thank you. This is Littic Sucks. Go, go away. Go away. Go, go, you go, here you go. Go, go tomorrow. All right, so once again, a big round of applause for Brian Lunduk and the wild ride he just took us on. What a wild ride. What a wild ride. It was a wild ride. It was a wild ride. All right, so that concludes our evening events in this room. We look forward to seeing you guys tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. for Corey Dockrow's keynotes. Remember, he hates Linux. He does hate Linux. If everybody could find Corey Dockrow over the next day and remind him that you have him on record saying how much he hates Linux, that would be choice. Yeah, GNU4 slash Linux, right. All right, thanks everyone for coming. Have a good night. Thank you.