This is the personal blog of Roberto J. Dohnert. Here we will discuss Technology, anything from Windows, Linux, Mac to Cellphones and the random political posts will appear here as well. All views and expressions here are the views of Roberto J. Dohnert and not the views of any employee or engineer of PC/OpenSolutions
One of the questions I get often is; Why dont we just modify Ubuntu and support that? The reason is Canonical. Canonical owns the trademark on all of their derivatives, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and even Cinnabuntu I think. Either way, we cannot just take Ubuntu, load our licensed properties and sell that to customers. Canonical's policy is you have to sell it unmodified. Its not like with Gentoo and Debian, we sold modified Gentoo for years and never had issues, where they are community based projects and no one really cares. Canonical is a business. Just like you cant sell a modified version of Red Hat and you cant sell a modified version of SUSE and its completely understandable. It's their name. If someone puts out an Ubuntu OS with malware on it people are going to look for that throat to choke and its going to be Canonical's. Thats why you see so many derivatives out there with different names and why Ultimate Edition had to change their name and that is why System 76 came up with their own name and derivative, PopOS is a solid, solid distribution stupid name, but regardless Ubuntu is a trusted name. I get it and Im perfectly OK with it on one hand, on the other though I do think the unmodified bit I think thats kind of silly. When Microsoft sells their Android phones they sell it with Edge as the default browser and they have their own bits in there and they dont call it Microsoft A/OS or something like that. The phone when it boots up says Android. When you buy a new PC its not uncommon to find a different browser, Chrome usually, preinstalled along with other bits and bobs. Hell even some Chromebooks are coming now with Android apps preinstalled. So yes in some ways I find that rule completely silly but in the other I get it. Now with the systems that we sell some people ask for just Ubuntu or Kubuntu and we sell it to them unmodified and we tell them its a vanilla install of Ubuntu or Kubuntu if you want us to modify it we can do it after the purchase and we do support Ubuntu and Kubuntu for customers just like we support RHEL and Oracle Linux for customers. With Linspire and Xandros I prefer to err on the side of caution and just rebrand it.
Some of you may have missed this. I did as I thought this was just a rehash of the SCO wars of the early 2000's. Xinuos formerly known as the SCO Group is suing IBM/Red Hat for copyright infringement, intellectual property theft and anti-competitive practices. While this is similar its not the same. They seem to be focusing on the anti-competitive practices more than the copyright infringement and intellectual property claims. The copyright and intellectual property claims were pretty much scrubbed by Novell during the first court case and Novell is now Micro Focus so I dont know how thats going to work out in the wash but lets take a look at their other claims; Anti-Competitive practices.
Do IBM and Red Hat practice anti-competitive behavior? Sure. But so does every other technology company out there. Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and IBM have long been engaged in that behavior. Giving perks to potential customers, giving free hardware and software to potential customers to squeeze small tech companies out of the picture and making crappy software on other companies platforms so they can sell their solution as "optimized" . Is it shitty? yes. Is it underhanded? yes. Is it anti-competitive? absolutely. Does it fucking matter? NOPE. Look, their claims stem on that they are butt hurt because they haven't sold enough product and they are looking for the bad guy. What I hate is that they are dragging the Open Source community and FreeBSD into this shit like Preparation H to soothe the pain. Look, you want to sell product MAKE COMPELLING PRODUCTS!!!! If you make it, and its good, they will come. Red Hat is going to implode soon enough Im still saying within 5 years. But, you cannot blame IBM or Red Hat for your erectile dysfunction predicament because your products lack sex appeal. You inherited winners with SCO OpenServer and SCO UnixWare both GREAT products for their day. Where are the 64 bit versions? Where is your broadened hardware support? You expect your customers to buy your products, scrounge eBay or Craigslist to find spare parts because SCO UnixWare and SCO OpenServer dont run on any system manufactured after 2002. Oh wait they can purchase another operating system license so they can run it under VM? Give me a break. Now, OpenServer 10 is NOT a bad product. I actually downloaded it when it was released and still have a VM with it. Not bad at all. But its FreeBSD with XFCE. Where are your actual server packages? What is it optimized for? What are your server roles? You cannot just take FreeBSD remove as much as you can and make a couple of web tools and call that a server. You have to optimize performance, you have to give customers the ability to clone that setup so they can deploy it to other systems. Your data sheets and customer docs are almost non-existent and pretty much the worst I have seen. My 12 year old son could write a better documentation on his worst day. Oh and BTW customers would love to know what you are working on. Staying silent for 3 years and popping up to sue IBM and Red Hat one day out of the blue is not a recipe for success.
Im not saying Im the smartest bear in the forest. Im definitely not the dumbest. We do pretty decent business. We make enough to pay the bills, pay the employee's and live. I have no aspirations to be the next Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Google, Red Hat, SUSE or IBM but we have been pretty successful in what we do and we make a damn decent living.
Not a dig at Xinuos but I think its past time for SCO and the like minded to just die. The tech industry has evolved and the old ways of doing business are DONE. You either keep up with the times or you are gone. Personally I dont think this lawsuit will go anywhere. But it wouldn't surprise me if IBM just settled it. My hope is they just go ahead and take a sledgehammer to this case if for nothing more to drive home a point.
So a few weeks ago we delivered Xandros OpenServer 12 which by far has been one of our most popular server systems. With downloads approaching the 6 digit mark and I'd say about 80% of our server customers upgrading lets take this time to talk about what we delivered. That was a solid release but as we listen to customers and users lets talk about ways we make it better because yes, even though we just dropped that release we are currently doing work on the next one. MR2 which will drop August 3rd BTW a little side note ALL releases will be in lockstep for the next release date. Users have told us they want a minimal install and as some of you know we have been making it very modular, so yes on MR2 you guys will get a minimal install option that takes out Apache and MongoDB but leaves the rest of it intact. Next, customers told us they want network install capabilities and that is currently being worked on. The next thing they want; the capabilities to do images so they can mirror systems and we ARE including that with the next release. RPM support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux/Oracle Linux applications; in the first release it was ehhh, it worked most of the time, in the new release you can install those packages or convert them to debian packages using Alien. Those were the major ones of course we have little knitpicks we are working on as well.
What did we get right. Cockpit. The change from Webmin to cockpit has been great. Dont get me wrong, Webmin is a fantastic tool but Cockpit has some features that are just great so that was a winner. The switch from Oracle VirtualBox to KVM has also been well received. But overall, this is a good release. It has some quirks and bugs to work out but overall I am satisfied with how it turned out.
Last year Red Hat was bought by IBM and there were cheers and lots of bottles of champagne being opened in celebration. I have a feeling Red Hat Linux will go the way of OS/2. Now there are several reasons why I think this will happen and it will happen because of IBM. Some will say "Oh its a subsidiary and things will be OK" No. Rot happens from the head down and when it comes to the PC market and Operating Systems, IBM is a bumblefuck. The original PC what happened? They relinquished it to Microsoft. OS/2 while there was a lot of excitement and it was an AWESOME operating system IBM just up and one day gave up. Without warning, without any kind of signals, they just gave up. Apples Copland which was a joint venture between Apple, Motorola and IBM from people that I know that worked in Copland almost all the fingers got pointed at IBM. IBM marketing and management doesnt like work. They want immediate gratification. They dont want to build. They just want to be on the top. If it doesnt happen. They go the OS/2 route and say it was great while it lasted. It happens every time. Look at AIX. Back in the late 90's/early 2000's AIX was going to be the top of the market for Operating Systems. Desktop and Server. Suddenly, sales were blah and the workstations and servers all but disappeared; put in the basement and out of sight and out of mind.
This wont happen overnight and it wont be this year but I suspect in 5 years Red Hat will be gone. I have seen IBM purchase many companies and they lay off half the engineering staff and put in yes men. I would say there is not going to be much to worry about until you see that start to happen. When people start leaving left and right. Find the off ramp. After that happens look for IBM to consolidate Red Hat into their main organization and they will call it IBM OS/Linux, IBM A/Linux or some silly shit like that and then the final destination for Red Hat as a company will be relegated to their mainframe business where IBM has had pretty good success to be fair.
Does this mean Red Hat technology will be dead as well? No. You have Fedora which is community maintained and they will continue to drive forward and keep putting out excellent releases and developing new technology. They will continue to be supported by individuals and companies and more importantly IBM doesnt really have a big presence. Rocky Linux and Oracle Linux will still be around. But Red Hat the company, Red Hat where awesome Linux engineers are born and nurtured and Red Hat the main driving force in Linux mainstream adoption will be GONE.
People have noticed I started using GNOME as the default interface for Linspire and Xandros and have asked why. Didnt I use to hate GNOME? Yes I did for a long time. This doesnt take away from the other two. I love XFCE and will always be an XFCE fan as well. Plasma is good too. If you are a Windows interface lover you will love Plasma. In fact Windows 11 took a lot of design pointers from KDE. The Windows engineers can deny it but you can see it. There is a lot of KDE influence in Windows 11. But GNOME. Why did I hate it and why did I change my mind?
When I first started using GNOME 3, I made the same mistake that a lot of people did. I used a ton of extensions, 12 to be exact, to try and make the experience better and instead I made it worse. Whenever I would get sent a new copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux I would always go grab XFCE right after install. Then Red Hat sent me a boxed copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. I was so busy working on my other distributions I just did what I normally do. Install it on a test machine but instead of working with it though I just left it alone because honestly I didnt have the time to deal with it at the time. One weekend as I was setting it up for deployment and I started using the standard, vanilla GNOME interface. The more I used it I started to notice the fluidity of the desktop and then I started to get it. I started to see why the GNOME team made the decisions that they made. Now this is not a gush fest over GNOME there are still a couple of things that drive me crazy and to fix some of those I use extensions but instead of 12 I only use 3. An extension to get rid of that stupid spring board animation in the app grid view, one for user themes and coverflow alt-tab. Now I havent even looked at GNOME 41 yet. I probably wont for another year. This will allow time for bugs and quirks to get ironed out.
But if you had the same experience I did and felt like you needed every extension on the planet to make GNOME more usable go back and disable all the extensions and take it back to vanilla GNOME. Use it for awhile. It will take some getting used to. You may even have some frustrations for a minute but give vanilla GNOME a chance and I can almost guarantee that you will see the beauty is in the simplicity and design. I never thought I would ever say this but I have to say I am a fan. I'm now a GNOME guy.
Some people have asked me what the difference is between Linspire and Xandros update cycles and how does Freespire fit in. Freespire, Linspire and Xandros are all based on the LTS versions of Ubuntu. We dont do any of their incremental releases. Freespire typically gets a base update about a year after Ubuntu releases their LTS. When 16.04 was released we didnt update the base system until 2017. When 18.04 was released we didnt update the base system until 2019. When 20.04 was released we didnt update the base system until 2021. With Linspire and Xandros the base update cycle is what causes confusion. Linspire being the consumer release gets the base updated 1 and a half years after the release. With 16.04 we didnt update until late 2017, with 18.04 the base system got updated fall of 2019. With 20.04 we didnt update the base until July 2021. Xandros is the longest supported release that we have. The base gets updated every 3 years. With 16.04 we didnt update the base until 20.04 because we skipped the 18.04 base completely. It did use the 18.04 kernel but we didnt update all the base packages. Xandros is supported for 10 years. Linspire is supported for 5 years.
This update cycle will be a little longer because we are switching the base system unless something really drastic happens. Which we will talk about later. But the current systems will be updated to the 22.04 kernel. Freespire will get new kernel November of 2022, with the new base about April 2023. Linspire will get the new kernel January 2023, with the new base around fall 2023. Xandros will get the new kernel winter 2023 and the new base in 2024.
Xandros gets updated later because its our Enterprise release with incremental releases every 6 to 9 months and major releases every 3 years and we do that because enterprise customers don't upgrade quite like consumers do. Consumers tend to upgrade every year to year and a half and Enterprise customers don't usually upgrade for 5 years with some of them waiting out the 10 years.
So why do we wait so long before we do base updates? Testing takes up a lot of that time. This also gives time for bugs to get ironed out and any security issues to be patched. When we change the base whether its to Fedora or Debian the upgrade cycle will follow the same timetable that we have established
Today I was sent a video that Old Tech Bloke did on Freespire:
What are my thoughts? Not bad. I thought he gave Freespire a pretty good going over. There are a few things he did bring up that I do want to clarify and at least one point that he didn't bring up but was in the comments.
1. How did the acquisition of Bridgeways Linux properties come about? and being based on Ubuntu
Back in 2016 we were contacted by a friend of mine who worked for Bridgeways and was told they were leaving the IT industry. I was interested in their Linux properties specifically the old Corel Linux codebase and being a former user of Corel Linux, it had some unique properties to it that I wanted to see if we could utilize. As it turned out there really wasn't. All the new file-managers, Nautilus, Caja, and Thunar all pretty much filled that gap with easy networking and file management. We were actually thinking of dropping everything that we had with PC/OS and Black Lab Linux and go with OpenSUSE (Some of our beta testers still have the OpenSUSE build). But we decided to stick with Ubuntu. So yes, LIKE A LOT OF DISTRIBUTIONS out there we decided to base our releases on Ubuntu. Most distributions these days are based on other distributions and that's the beauty of the Linux world AND by extension the BSD world.
2. Is Freespire, Linspire and Xandros now a money grab?
He didn't bring this up but from some of the comments alluded to this and the answer is NO. Back in 2006 when we started making Linux distributions, we wanted something long term. What the LTS turned out to be. Before 2006 we actually started supporting Linux company wise in 2002, we were supporting Red Hat Linux and when Red Hat decided to go the RHEL route a lot of people were stuck with Fedora and Fedora had no support whatsoever. So, we were one of the few companies that supported Fedora for customers and offering the level of support these customers were used to getting from Red Hat before the switch over to pure RHEL. So, in 2006 we started making our own Linux distribution. We started out with Gentoo and while yes it was great and fun for us, we were hosting our own server to where people had to download and compile everything, we wanted something a lot easier that customers could just download and install while also being fast and simple. Ubuntu met our criteria. So, we started doing an Ubuntu based distribution. The first one that we released was in 2007 and as stated we wanted something long term. At the time Ubuntu releases were exactly 6 months apart. We have always worked in the desktop Linux space so making an argument to paying customers that you had to update every 6 months was a non-starter, so we were supporting Ubuntu's releases a lot longer than they were. So, when you purchase a support license from us, you are not buying Linux. You are paying for the support option for that software while we pay the licensing costs for some of the proprietary codecs and code that we include in the supported releases. We are an operating system company. We also do custom BSD builds for customers and we have been in business for over 20 years in the state of North Carolina. If people want to consider it a grift, it's probably the worst and longest grift in the history of grifts.
3. Our unique selling points and Google Integration
It's all about the base. We aim to offer a stable, long-term option for customers and users. We thoroughly test and prototype before we ship. When Canonical released 20.04, it was 2021 before we shipped the 20.04 LTS codebase in our products. The Google integration as well is a strong selling point for us. It is known that we see Chrome OS as our main competitor to our market. Education customers and enterprise customers make up a broad percentage of our customer base, over 80%, over 260 different school systems, education facilities, government and businesses. We started working on the web centric focus back in 2019 because our customers told us they like the idea of Chrome OS, but they also wanted the flexibility of installing traditional desktop applications. Crostini really wasn't a thing at the time we started, and our business customers wanted a native Linux environment for development and running inhouse apps. Crostini is container technology and it's not really that great right now. I myself have run into several issues with Crostini. Now he does say that anyone can take Xubuntu and do what we do and go with it. But that's the point. We do it so they don't have to. If people don't want to purchase the support options Linspire or Xandros OpenDesktop offers. If they don't need the support Freespire and Xandros CommunityDesktop are free to use, free to distribute and free to install on as many systems as they like.
4. Why Freespire, Linspire and Xandros?
When we first started shipping Linux distributions, I always said I wanted to have a free distribution for users. Something that was free to use, free to distribute and that users could put on as many machines that they liked. Why dont we ship the codecs with Freespire but kept the option to download them in Ubiquity? We wanted to stay as close to the FSF definition of free software as we could and make the distribution usable. But we also wanted to keep the option in there so if that's what users wanted, they could still get them. We believe it's the users' machine and they should be able to do with it what they want. With the supported release, Linspire, it does ship with all the multimedia codecs, Steam, Wine, multiple filesystem support i.e. XFS, JFS full ZFS and comes with 12 months of support. Xandros being an enterprise offering has more in terms of enterprise features and comes with 5 years of support and other support options. So, it's all about the users and what they want. We are a services-based company. We make distributions, Linux or BSD, for other people so we do what our customers tell us to do and what their needs are. We don't just make distributions for ourselves based on our own needs or wants. If that was the case, I would probably be still using Gentoo full time.
5. Basics and oversimplified
That is by design. I hate it when things get overly complex. Customers and users don't feel overwhelmed and everything's neat and tidy. If you have any ideas to where you think we could do better don't hesitate to write me or the support staff and we will consider it. Now this may sound a little bit like being an asshole but its not. The Linux community is not our target audience. We do have customers who are very active with the Linux community and we love them too. But our target audience is the consumer market. We will soon start shipping systems with Linspire and Xandros OpenDesktop preinstalled. We already do for certain customers. We want to introduce Linux to as many people as we can who may not have considered Linux as a viable desktop alternative before. Thats another reason why you see a very basic and simple touch to our marketing and to customer approach. We have been successful with that so far. Now if those users start to explore other options and want to experiment with other distributions that is perfectly fine.
So, to OldTechBloke, sorry man I don't know your real name, I want to personally thank you for the review. Much appreciated. The entire team has watched the video. Thank you very much. The high order bit is this. I love Linux. I have loved Linux since 1994 (UNIX since 1989) and even if PC/OpenSystems LLC went out of business tomorrow I'd still love Linux and would probably go work with a Linux company or start another one the day after.
So, a few days ago someone sent me some video links to Linus Tech Tips and his Linux series. I watched them and while a few parts of it were cringeworthy the problem here is that Linus's criticisms were legitimate.
There is no ONE perfect Operating System in the world. Whether it's Windows, Solaris, MacOS, any flavor of Linux or Unix there is not a one size fits all offering out there. Now, I'm used to Linux and I have used Linux for decades at this point, so I am used to it and every single-issue Linus had I have an answer for it, but we have to look at this from his perspective. All the common problems Linus had I have heard them before. I work inside the desktop Linux market. I have had to deal with how-to-do-task-x a lot to the point I sometimes find myself repeating a lot. Do I think Linus was trolling? No. I think some of the other YouTubers and some of the commenters are the ones guilty of trolling. I tell people this a lot; Linux is not Windows. It is different. Everything from startup to package install is different. There are some use cases where Windows serves a lot better than Linux. There are some cases where Linux serves a lot better than Windows. Quick question, how many of you that criticized his series reached out with solutions? Judging from the comments and video responses not many and THAT is one of the main problems with the Linux community and why companies like ours and others exist. People don't want to be called stupid because they are trying to learn something new. They don't want to be called TROLLS just because they have legitimate issues with using Linux. Hell, some people just will not like Linux and will go back to Windows or macOS. Ask any Linux distributor. It's happened to all of us at one point or another where a customer has called us and said "Look, I'm moving back to Windows because of X Y or Z" and that's fine. Once again there is NOT a one size fits all distribution out there. One of the issues I had with the series was that they read one of those stupid fucking articles of "Best Distribution <insert year here>" Those types of articles do a great disservice to the Linux community and Linux adoption in general. Why? Because EVERY Linux distribution is the best. These distributors do a lot of hard work making these distributions. Some are better than others, yes but those articles are goddamn insulting to every single distributor out there and yes that includes Red Hat, SUSE, Oracle etc. etc. Once again, its personal preference. Title it "Best Linux distribution(s) I have tried <insert year here>"
As for Linus and Luke. Hey if they want to stay on Windows that's great. Windows 11 is a fine OS. I tried it, I liked it. For me, my entire workflow is on Linux so while I dabble with Windows 11 for my Windows programming, Star Trek Fleet Command and Star Trek Online games (Two titles I can't use on Linux) but I digress, if Linus and Luke want to stay on Windows then that is perfectly fine. There is a lot to like. If they want to go to Linux there are plenty of resources out there for them to use and there is a lot to like about Linux. I watched the series, I didn't have many complaints about it, and I even took notes to see if some of the gripes they had I can fix in my own distributions no matter how cringeworthy I thought some of the complaints were.
