not all change is progress
December 26, 2016
Direct download links:
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Ogg
00:01:25 2016 in Review
01:12:29 Thanks, and the Future
01:18:26 Prediction Scorecard
In our last show of 2016 we looked back over the events of the year, plus rummaged through the entrails to see whether the last twelve months had turned out how we’d previously predicted. And whilst one thing we didn’t see coming this time last year was the end of Linux Luddites, we talked a little more about Late Night Linux, the new show that Joe and Jesse are putting together with Ikey Doherty and Félim Whiteley. Have a peaceful Christmas, a great New Year, and thanks for sharing the journey with us.
00:01:25 2016 in Review
In Memoriam
* Ian Murdock, founder of Debian,
died (at the end of 2015) aged 42 in circumstances
thought suspicious at the time, but later
ruled a suicide
* Richard Sapper, designer of the iconic ThinkPad,
died
* Seymour Papert, father of the use of technology in
education,
died
Milestones
* Linux
turned 25
* Red Hat became the first
$2b open-source company, and announced a
no-cost RHEL developer subscription plan
Platforms
* Weak desktop sales helped push Intel into a
restructuring and the
killing off of some Atom chips
* Whilst tablet sales are expected to have
fallen over the year, October marked a turning point as
more people
accessed the Internet using mobile phones and tablets
than desktops for the first time ever
* Chromebooks continued to thrive, for the first time
outselling Macs in the US; Google also announced that the
Android Play Store would be
coming to Chrome OS
* By summer, Steam Machines were declared
dead in the water, and
don’t look like recovering
More Endings, Some Beginnings
* Mozilla
killed Firefox OS, and
told devs to fork Boot to Gecko if they wanted to keep it
alive
* Cyanogen entered a period of uncertainty, and
CyanogenMod is being reborn as Lineage
* The Linux Voice team failed in their crowdfunding of
Beep Beep Yarr!, and later
folded their publication into Linux Magazine
* Solus
1.0 was released, and at FOSDEM Jonathan Riddell launched
KDE Neon
* Frank Karlitschek
left ownCloud and
launched Nextcloud, and had his
motives questioned
Legal
* Canonical’s
decision to ship ZFS with Ubuntu 16.04 provoked ire from
the FSF and
SFC,
and a more measured response from the
SFLC
* The Kernel Summit mailing list became an unlikely venue for
an involved
discussion around GPL enforcement
* Christoph Hellwig’s case against VMware was
dismissed, and an appeal announced
*
Google beat Oracle with a ‘fair use’ defence over Java
APIs in Android, an
appeal will follow
Packaging & Versioning
* Canonical stole a march on the GNOME community by
announcing snaps before Flatpak
got a public airing
* On the versioning front, GNOME attempted to bring
some
predictability to their release cycles
Boards & IoT
* July saw the
announcement that Japan’s SoftBank would buy Arm Holdings
for over £24bn
* The PINE A64
crushed its Kickstarter goal, and the company is now
planning
a budget Linux laptop; this to compete with devices that
mate a smartphone and dumb laptop shell
* In February, the Raspberry Pi Foundation launched
the Pi 3, and later in the year announced that
10 million Pis have been shipped in total; OS refreshes
for the Pi included the
introduction of SLES
* The BBC finally
released the micro:bit to schools, then
to the UK general public, and finally
worldwide
* IoT devices started to get a lot of bad press due to
companies
dropping support and the ease with which they could
be
hacked or even
herded into a botnet; fortunately, Google rode to the
rescue with its wondrous new
Android Things platform
Security
* Linux Mint showed us
how not to run a secure website,
as did FossHub
* Millions of Android users were hit with another
another Stagefright exploit, but did gain some much
needed privacy with WhatsApp taking
end-to-end encryption mainstream
* Mozilla
pitched into the audit funding business, and along
with Apple led the way
in killing off competition to Let’s Encrypt, which has
since seen a massive uptick in use
* Ubuntu got into the
kernel hotfixing business, which was clearly needed as
the kernel seems
as buggy as ever
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
* Google continued to push folks
towards AMP
* The Linux Foundation introduced
more
free
courses and continued to absorb existing projects; they
also
stopped individual members voting in board elections, and
accepted Microsoft as a Platinum member
* Microsoft bought
Xamarin, rolled out
a beta of SQL Server on Linux, and with Canonical’s help
introduced
Bash on Ubuntu on Windows
01:12:29 Thanks, and the Future
A final and heartfelt thank you to everyone who helped support the show over the last three years and ninety-four episodes. Thanks also to everybody who has contacted us with kind words since we announced that this would be our final outing. We’ve been genuinely touched.
And whilst this is an ending, it’s also a new beginning. As we announced, Joe and Jesse will be back, along with Ikey Doherty and Félim Whiteley, in a brand new show called Late Night Linux. With the first episode due to drop 10 January 2017, you won’t have long to wait to hear (most of our) voices once again, so subscribe to the MP3 or Ogg feed to keep the Linux chat coming in the New Year.
01:18:26 Prediction Scorecard
To wrap up the episode, the year, and indeed this entire podcast series, we took a look back at our predictions for 2016 to see how well our powers of prognostication had fared.
Thanks for a great show!
bye (sob)
Will miss you guys badly (from Texas).
I am excited about the new show. Given the focus of Luddites on the Linux desktop, Ikey should bring a lot of good technical perspective, and Felim’s background looks to be well suited to discussing many of the biggest news stories about Linux in the networking/sys admin section. I hope that the chemistry is there as well. I wonder how long it will be before Joe switches from Xubuntu to Solus.
So will Paddy just vanish into the ether? Other than work responsibilities nothing was said about the future, and I don’t know of any social media profile that he actively uses other than responding to podcast feedback. If nothing else, I hope to see him from time to time in the feedback section of the new show.
Thank you so much for these years! Great show until the very end.
I will try out this new podcast in January and I hope I won’t decide that I liked the old stuff better…
Thank you so much for all the work you have put into Linux Luddites. You helped me navigate through the world of Linux and I will miss the show greatly. A special thank you to Paddy, who encouraged all listeners to take a critical approach to FOSS. I feel that I am a much more balanced Linux user as a result. Good luck with your future endeavours!
I listened to this last episode today with some sadness.
I’ve been following Luddites since no.3 and it quickly
became a firm favourite. It was clear that a good deal of
thought and preparation went into making the show, and an
equal amount of time into its production and editing. I
will miss Paddy’s insight and opinions, I hope this isn’t
the last we hear from him.
Having said that, I’m looking forward to hearing Late
Night Linux, and hope it will continue the news, reviews
and generally being grumpy that we’ve all got used to!
So sad we apparently wont be hearing from Paddy from now on but I will always remember the three of you on Luddites fondly for introducing me to the i3 window manager and freeing me from the tyranny of the mouse! The trouble is, after moving to i3wm all the discussions about different desktops and distros ceased to be much more than academic interest to me and I really don’t want to hear about the latest phone so my tastes moved on!
Thanks for a show that was always interesting and thought provoking. Hope we get to hear from Paddy again from time to time!
First Brexit, now Padexit.
What’s this world coming to?
Will miss ya, Paddy – thanks to you all.
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