Our Hopes for Linux in 2020, Elitism in Linux, Best OS for Raspberry Pi | Destination Linux 155

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Listening to this episode coincided with me listening to the martin wimpress interview with big daddy linux recently.

I think Martin made a good point about Microsoft about how people are over-meming the Microsoft hearts linux thing, and that their truly terrible days were before many linux users were even born. It’s worth a listen because I think Martin was very level headed about it it, whereas I think this show suffers from the over-meming a little bit sometimes. Microsoft seem to be doing some good things when it comes to Linux lately yet the response on the show always seems to be “well they’re benefiting themselves so it doesn’t count, lol microsoft hearts linux”. And Ryan jokes about running arch so often that you almost believe he actually is a bit elitist about it.

Anyway I know this comes across a bit negative so I would finish by saying overall its a really good show and the good outweighs the minor annoyances by far!

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I’m very concerned over Linux unifying under singular projects.

I understand how important it is to have that “one recommendation” and there’s tremendous power in centralizing efforts but at the point of “one” we’re talking about eliminating choice, diversity, competition, corporate buy out resistance and a great deal of experimentation.

You can easily make the case Linux has too many orphaned or totally unnecessary projects, but advocating centralization is also an extreme and a lot worse imho.

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I have three 3D printer each with a Raspberry pi running octoprint. A RPi 1 running volumio. RPiZw that powers a 3D printed robot. RPi 4 running docker containers and an atomic Pi running WireGuard and docker containers. I want to create a personal dash board using the magic mirror project. Oh! I have a PiZw with a relay that I use to open my garage door with too.

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I disagree because Microsoft has only changed their ways since Nadella took over and that’s only been a little shy of 6 years. Ballmer called Linux a cancer and he was in charge until 2014 so no it’s not like it’s some ancient thing people can’t get over.

Yes but this doesn’t remove the horrible stuff they are still doing and it doesn’t change the fact that the stuff they open is to benefit themselves in some way. Yes, they are lightyears away from where they used to be when merely their name conjured disgust but that doesn’t mean they’ve done a 180 and now deserve praise. They deserve applause for the things they are doing right and ridicule for the awful stuff they continue to do.

The Arch stuff can be overdone sure but the Microsoft stuff is fair I think because while we are critical we aren’t attacking them out of historical vitriol.


I don’t think we advocated for complete centralization. We advocated for standards being set and applied by distros. I also advocated for universal apps but that is not centralization. I think the universal app stuff can be limited to just apps not infrastructure so even if there was one of those formats it would not beacentralization thing. So please clarify what you are referring to so that I can address it more directly.


That all sounds awesome! I need to do some more of that stuff :sunglasses::+1:

I agree. I suppose that’s what I’m not seeing in the show. They have done a few good things e.g vscode, teams on linux, but not really any praise from the DL team for it. Acknowledgment that some other people in the community like it yes, but that doesn’t really count as you guys giving credit where credit is due. Its just always caveated with, “but they benefit as well so they don’t really care and the good doesn’t count”.

I mean you guys are dead against Google as a company and strong advocates for not using them wherever possible. But quite happy to use YouTube for your show because it benefits you. Does that mean you shouldn’t be praised for doing a good show? I don’t think so.

Maybe that’s not an exact like for like comparison but you get my point.

YouTube is part of Google? Who knew?

@dasgeek has a particular disdain for Google, and I think it undermines his ability to advocate for privacy, in general. I know I’m not the only listener who’s tried to engage him about how Apple is just as invasive, but sly about it, and that’s like water off the proverbial duck’s back.

Google pays Apple, what, $12 Billion a year to be Apple’s preferred search provider? When Apple first started sending local Mac drive searches in Spotlight to Apple (Yosemite, as I recall), Apple then sent those on to Bing, at the time Apple’s preferred search.

Apple: “What’s on your iPhone Stays on Your iPhone.”

Because Apple’s A series chips contain an AI “neural engine” that’s reading all your texts, emails, tagging photos, watching the apps you use, listening to your music, transcribing Siri, collecting health and location, reading over your shoulder as your browse, read news, check your investments, and turning all that into an algorithmic code that shorthands every important thing about you, and sends it to Cupertino -

Apple Machine Learning Journal

@MichaelTunnell I’ve searched the Internet as deeply as I can to find out some context behind your complaint that Firefox has a single user profile across all users of Mint.

I’ve found in Firefox how to access, edit, and change user profiles.

I’ve found in a fresh install of Mint 19.3 that, yes, Mint has selected Yahoo (bleech) as its default search engine - and disclosed that’s because Yahoo is paying Mint for the placement. Not sure how that’s different than Google paying Mozilla the hundreds of millions a year that (per a Mozilla employee I know) that keeps Mozilla in business.

In the last go-around about Mint, you said Mint’s common Firefox user profile was a “danger.” I can find no source that says anything that backs up your statement or even puts context around it.

Give us details?

And how about reaching out to Clem or another “official” representative of Mint guest on the show and present Mint’s explanation for what they do, and why?

The WastaLinux.org link is wrong

I do not use Mint but I think it is a nice distribution for beginners even though I tend to recommend Ubuntu (Mate) over Mint because of some personal choices and some that @MichaelTunnell mentions but I second your suggestion.

They are the people who made the claim to :heart: Linux . . . until they prove they actually do, I will continue to point out they don’t. Teams is a Business focused Service so that’s for them. VSCode exists thanks to the work done on Atom so they didn’t really do that much work to make it compatible with Linux so it was something easy to release. SQL Server on Linux is great and 100% benefit to them because they needed to do that for Azure since Linux is more popular on their own platform than Windows. The list goes on and on. They do things that benefits them and while some of it is beneficial for Linux users, I will acknowledge that part and also point out how it also a self-serving move on their part. Microsoft :heart:'s Linux is the lie they are trying to tell us and so far they haven’t proven anything other than they :heart: using Linux to benefit their bottom line, and we already knew that.

So they have to prove their claims and when they do I will applaud them for it but I am not going to ignore all the awful stuff they do especially when they are doing those things in parallel.

I am open to them proving they :heart: Linux but until they actually prove it, I’m not going to just believe a mega-corporation (with one of the worst histories of hating Linux) just because they tell me they do.


You missed a very important piece to Ryan’s argument of Android vs iOS and that being they are both awful but one is more awful than the other. Apple has some benefit of keeping personal info on your device locally. Android takes every morsel of data it possibly can and Google is gleeful when it does. That’s the difference. He isn’t saying Apple is good for privacy, he is saying it’s better than Android about it.

He doesnt say everything stays on your phone but rather more stuff stays on your phone. I think there are some things about having to tweak permissions and such but with Apple you can apparently vs with Android we all know we can’t. Android takes whatever Google wants and we can do nothing about it. That’s the difference.

Install Linux Mint, look at Firefox profile ID . . . reinstall Linux Mint and then find same Firefox profile ID. This means the profile ID is the same.

This is not relevant to any of my points.

We’ve already asked Clem to come on our show well over a year ago but Clem has made it clear that he has no interest in doing an interview for any podcast because to my knowledge he’s never done one.

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@MichaelTunnell I loved the quick come-back, it’s a “space-age” stool !!!

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Yes they did something good but… Yes they did something good but…

That seems to be gist of it and I the impression I get is you will always find a “but” to add on at the end of it. And that can be done for almost anything if you are always searching for it. Whether or not it is mutually beneficial in the majority of cases shouldn’t really matter.

I’m not quite sure I understand the Mint “Firefox user profile” deal. Is that about the Mint branding they put all over it and the disabling of Google as a search provider? (which is an instant turn-off for many new users, I might add…)

They have to prove they :heart: Linux because they made the claim. I am not going to just believe them. As long as they continue to do awful stuff I will provide the contrast to the good things they do. I am not going to make it seem like I support Microsoft because I do not.

Decades of hating and actively trying to kill Linux is not going to be made up for by making a Slack clone and a Atom clone on run on Linux . . . or by using Linux to make their services get them more money. They actually have to do something that is not self-serving before they can dig themselves out of the massive hole they made for themselves.

no it is because they take a shortcut in the setup so the profile id for every Mint user is the same. This is bad for a variety of reasons but as I said in the show, it’s not catastrophic just an example of corner cutting.

[quote=“MichaelTunnell, post:11, topic:1177”]

He doesnt say everything stays on your phone but rather more stuff stays on your phone. I think there are some things about having to tweak permissions and such but with Apple you can apparently vs with Android we all know we can’t. Android takes whatever Google wants and we can do nothing about it. That’s the difference.

I’ve been deeply in the Apple ecosystem for two decades, supporting a good number of Macs in my own workplace, at a public library, and also my own and the usual friends and family.

Apple is simply disingenuous about privacy. The company marketed itself a pro-privacy reputation while deeply mining its customers’ data. Install the Little Snitch application firewall in macOS and watch as the Mac constantly exchanges encrypted telemetry with Cupertino. Add a bunch of photos and watch as photoanalysisd, which can not be uninstalled or even disabled, pegs the CPU as it tags faces and objects, and uploads to Apple not the photos but the shorthand analysis of what’s in the photo.

Apple, China, privacy?

This is deeply geeky, but Apple’s iOS chips are designed to run AI as users interact with their devices and on user content. Perhaps your exact words don’t go to Cupertino for analysis, but it’s already been done by the AI chip on your iPhone, then minimal size AI tag that says everything important about you is uploaded.

Apple analyzes every photo uploaded to iCloud,“looking for child abuse.” Who can object to that? Still, the takeaway is Apple is running AI analysis on every photo uploaded to iCloud -

Some years ago Apple (which can be quite prudish) was found simply blocking any email with the phrase “barely legal teen.” Which, of course, was only possible because Apple was scanning all emails and analyzing content.

Android? It is possible to install “real” Firefox then add uBlock Origin, EFF Privacy Badger, Canvas Blocker, and more. To Disable Chrome and other Google Apps. To install and run apps from F-Droid, including local-only applications and a keyboard that doesn’t send all your keystrokes upstream for analytics. None of that’s possible on iOS. Doesn’t make Android more private than iOS because in both cases we don’t really know what’s being up-streamed -

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@MichaelTunnell

Again, perhaps you didn’t mean to do it, but I think you bundled Mint’s “single over all Mint users” Firefox profile as a security issue.

Is it a security issue? Or is it like @DannyBoy and I seem to agree, a problem because it is annoying? It is a PIA (not the VPN) to take control of Firefox in Mint, but it is possible.

That is interesting. Thanks for the answers.

@MichaelTunnell I just saw you now say the “unitary profile” is bad because it is corner cutting. Again, I find the way Firefox is setup in a default Mint install a PIA, but they’re doing it (I think) to urge users to search through Yahoo which pays money to support Mint. Still like some clarification about the variety of reasons its bad. I can suggest one. We need Firefox, and while I’m a fan of Mint, I’d say we need Firefox MORE than we need Mint. Thus Mint diverting FF users from clicking Google that pays Firefox to click Yahoo that pays Mint isn’t good.

Alternative Mint insider to Clem?