Hello, welcome to episode 69 of Linux SoundTime.
I'm Joe.
I'm Gary.
I'm Alan.
And I'm Amalith.
Good to talk to you all.
I hope it's been a while since you've been on.
So welcome back.
And Amalith, this is your first time on Linux SoundTime.
People may know you from Linux lads.
Yes, I've been a host for a co-host for I think about a year now.
So today I want to talk about Generation Z or ZZ, whatever you want to call it, young
people of which you are one Amalith.
You are significantly younger than the rest of us.
Yes, I am 23.
Okay, I didn't know if you were going to say that exactly.
But right, good.
So you are a proper Zomer then.
Popy, you've got Zomer children.
So that's why I asked you to join us.
Yeah, thanks for rubbing that in.
Thank you.
That's all right.
So I wanted to get a sense from you, Amalith, about your generation and their approach to
technology and their kind of ideas about it because I get the feeling that as technology
progresses, it gets more and more abstracted and you get more and more abstraction layers
on top.
And I think that your generation might be one of the first where things have become so
abstracted that most people just have no idea what's going on underneath it.
And that feels bad for ideas of software freedom and digital rights and stuff.
Am I right in that assumption or am I just totally out of touch and old?
I do think you're right.
I think many of my peers just use what they're given and whether that's severely abstracted
doesn't really matter to them.
They just need to get on with their day so they use what they have.
And I've heard stories about people of your generation not even sort of understanding the
concept of files and folders because files and folders don't really exist to them.
They're just within an application.
The way mobile operating systems work in general, that's like most people's first introduction
to computing.
All of that is abstracted away.
They usually don't even use a file browser that was introduced in very recent versions
of Android and iOS.
Before that, it was your file is in the app and you can share that file somewhere else,
but it was a picture.
It wasn't a file that you can share.
Does that make sense?
That does make sense, but don't you need laptops for doing assignments and schoolwork?
Less so recently.
I mean, people do still have the concept of a file when they need to upload said file,
but it's usually they need to upload this word document.
They see the word icon in their file manager.
That's what they drag into the browser.
So is this what you've seen with your kids then, Poppy?
Because isn't one of the more techy and into building computers than the other?
So this is interesting because I'm not sure that I agree that everything's been abstracted
away.
I think you could argue that as a byproduct of how stuff gets more complicated that, well,
the stack becomes more complicated, but from a user point of view, it becomes easier.
And so people like my 15 year old kid can do video editing on an iPhone or a six year
old iPad and my daughter, who's not technical, but studies dance, is able to operate a modern
Mac laptop.
But she uses mostly the browser and most things in the cloud where you do have files, but they're
just an icon inside a web page.
They're not what you would conventionally think of as at the bottom of the stack.
A bunch of clusters on a disk on your machine with a file allocation table and pointers
and all that kind of stuff.
But that's a good thing.
Why should my kids know about file allocation tables and pointers and the fact that there's
only so many I know on a disk?
Nobody cares about that.
You want to type your document and send your document to your professor and you want to
print your thing.
You don't want to necessarily know the nuts and bolts.
And I think what you're aiming at is that's a bad thing.
I'm going to agree with Alan.
I do think things are being abstracted, but I don't think that's a bad thing either because
it makes more complex technology more accessible to the average user.
And that's a good thing.
I think.
And if someone is technically inclined, they can still dig into the nuts and bolts and
find out the I nodes and the file allocation tables and the bytes and all that kind of
stuff.
And if you're aware, it's just kind of hidden for the regular people.
Yeah, I mean, you could kind of even argue this idea and concept has been around forever,
right?
Even if you consider like the 90s when we're talking about geo cities, right?
People weren't worrying about setting up a web server or anything.
They were just writing HTML to make a web page.
It's a similar concept.
Obviously, we're light years ahead of that now.
But back then, it's like, oh, here's the abstraction.
Just build your web page.
We'll handle your hosting and everything for you.
And you can go.
Yeah, which is where we are again now with things like object storage.
You just build your website out of HTML, stick it on there.
Don't have to worry about NGINX or Apache or any of that stuff.
I think the difference is with technology and technology in the broad sense, getting
more complicated, you've got to think that there are people who are interested in using
the technology to achieve a goal.
And then there are other people who are interested in building the technology.
And those are not necessarily the same people, whereas way back, when you look at the earlier
computers, like from my generation, my first computer had one kilobyte of RAM and stored
everything on a tape deck.
And I had to type everything in that I wanted to play.
I had to type stuff in from a magazine or a book in order to use it.
And so I was both the user and the person typing stuff in and eventually the programmer
as well.
And that was great.
It was that hobby hacker thing in the bedroom coder that went through all the 80s of the
8-bit micros through to the 60-bit era and so on.
And I think that's still possible.
You can still do that.
You can still code if you want to.
But you're also a user, like someone who writes code probably also plays games on Steam
and probably also listens to music on Spotify.
It's not that they are enclosed in a box and only code and don't use.
But now we have people who are able to use and not have to think about coding.
And I think that's a good thing.
I think it's okay.
It's fine not to be a coder.
But if you want to, you can.
But would open source have come about if it had been as abstracted as it is now back then
when open source started as a concept?
Maybe not because you had to understand the lower level stuff to get into it.
There was that high barrier of entry.
Whereas now the barrier is so much lower, it takes someone having a real interest in
that.
And Amelith, you do have that real interest in it all.
And you are relatively unusual then among your peer group.
Even among computer science students at university, most of them are in it just because it's
a stable job that pays.
They're not interested.
They don't have the passion and the curiosity to dig into things.
They just kind of learn what they're given, go into a job and apply that knowledge and
learn some more stuff on the way.
But I think having abstractions does not exclude curious people from digging into things.
Right.
You've got walled garden platforms which make it harder so that you can't quite easily
poke around.
But you can learn on more open platforms.
There are plenty of people out there who learn Python, HTML, still now.
And they don't need to know how the Python interpreter actually works under the covers.
And they don't need to know how an HTML renderer works or how the style sheet is turned into
this object model that's then rendered on a page.
You don't need to know that.
There's always been warning car analogy drivers who don't know how the internal combustion
engine works.
That's fine.
That's perfectly reasonable.
Now, sure, there are car enthusiasts who do.
And I remember when I was just learning to drive my first car, I replaced many parts of
that car.
But I wouldn't do it now because the car's way more complicated.
And it's a lot harder to do this kind of thing.
So you throw a bag of money at a mechanic and get them to do it because they're the expert
in that domain, just the same as I don't know how to write a web browser or an HTML
renderer.
But there are people out there who do.
And that's their expertise.
That's their domain where they know how to do that stuff.
And that's fine.
Historically, I've supposed to most of my stuff just because it's easier gives me control
stuff like that.
But as I get older and I start taking more responsibilities on stuff like that and I
have more spending money, we'll say, it becomes very convenient to just let somebody else
handle it for me.
Right.
Like, Oh, here's the money you can take care of it.
Right.
There's a part of me.
It's like, yeah, I know I can do this.
I want to do this because it'll be easy.
But then there's also the part that's like, this is too much work.
I've got other better things to do.
I think you're right.
It is possible for you to self-host.
I have a HP micro server at home and it's running Linux and it's got stuff on it.
And I spin up servers doing stuff at home.
But equally, I ain't nobody got time to run a mail server.
So I'm not doing that.
I'll outsource that to people who know how to do that.
And I know, Joe, you've had plenty of conversations with other luminaries of this domain who will
say don't run your own mail server.
Yeah.
It's a hiding to nothing because things have got so much more complicated with anti spam
measures and all the other things you have to do in order to just get an email from one
place to another.
It's just not practical to do it.
I'm sure there are people who do and I'm sure they beat themselves up in order to get the
thing working.
But that's just one tiny thing being able to send email.
There's too much stuff to learn in a lifetime.
And I don't think you should have to do that or have to try to do that.
I find it funny that you picked email is the thing to focus on because that is the most
recent thing I've paid somebody to handle for me.
Same actually.
So when it comes to Linux and open source, then, where are your generation?
Amalith, do they even know what it is?
Do they care about concepts such as software freedom?
Is that just a laughable question?
I actually had some of this conversation in my seminar course yesterday.
Regular people have no clue what Linux is.
Computer science students also have no clue what Linux is until they are forced to interact
with it as part of the curriculum.
And even then, the commands they use to interact with the Linux system, they're just magic
incantations.
They don't know what the commands actually do.
They just know, I want to do this thing so I have to type these letters in this sequence
with this space and these flags.
And it's the same way with Git.
That is, everyone has so many issues with Git and I have to help them all the time because
they don't understand the fundamentals.
And be fair, I know the fundamentals and I do not get Git at all.
Plus one.
Yeah, Gary, let's not get you on your soapbox, your anti-git soapbox.
That can also be applied to things like licensing and software freedom.
What I was specifically talking about in my seminar course was licenses.
No one knows what licenses are.
They don't know what GPL is or MIT or even what proprietary means in the sense of the
source code they're writing.
So they don't know and if they don't know how can they care.
Yeah, I tried to explain this to my niece when she was about 14, 15 and she just glazed
over and she just was not interested because she wanted to know what I did.
What do you talk about on this podcast?
And so I said, right, okay, so software, apps and everything.
That's made of code, right?
Someone writes that code and just instantly just glazed over.
And I suppose you probably had the same reaction from your peers then.
Some of them are interested in licensing because they're going into software.
They're going to be interacting with open source.
You can't really get away from it nowadays.
But that's all the interest they have in it from a professional.
How do I not get sued perspective?
Yeah, but I don't think licenses is kind of what I was talking about.
More just like the pragmatism of open source, just the benefits of it that you can use a
bunch of pieces of software from all different places.
That's why they would just do that anyway and just not even have a concept of a license.
Yeah, to be fair, many projects now are just MIT or BST license, which pretty much lets
you do whatever.
So much so that when somebody pulls in your GPL code, you got to be like, hey, you can't
do that.
And then they get mad at you.
But what about as a user, just the benefits of the Linux desktop, for example, being so
configurable, your son seemingly isn't interested in running Linux, presumably because all of
his games don't run and therefore that's just a deal breaker.
Yeah, my son has a gaming rig PC and it's running Windows 10, I think, maybe Windows
11 these days.
And he does play some games, which absolutely do not run on Linux.
Don't at me about Proton.
They don't work.
And he's familiar with that.
And he's, you know, if I, if sure enough, he's played with my Steam Deck, which is running
Linux, but he's only played with it a little bit because the games are on it and not the
games he wants to play.
And the games he wants to play are all on his computer, which has a ginormous GPU and two
screens and a nice keyboard and mouse and all that kind of stuff.
And the stuff that he wants to do only works on Windows.
Why would he even look at Linux?
The thing he wants doesn't work.
So it's just the same as he wouldn't have a Mac.
He actually got most of the components to build that computer at Christmas just gone.
And I bought them the first components for him as a bit of a Christmas present surprise.
So it was nice to unwrap them.
I can imagine he would not be delighted if under the Christmas tree and you may call him
various selfish names.
But if there was an I-Mac under the Christmas tree, he would not be best pleased because
the goal of playing games would not be achievable on that computer.
And the same would go if I bought him a prebuilt Alienware laptop or something and shipped
Linux on it, he would ask me for Windows.
And so you can't force these things down people's throats.
And there's a certain type of user who needs that kind of stuff.
And it's not him.
Amethyst, do you know anyone else who runs Linux then?
Yes.
When I'm saying that no one knows what Linux is, even in the CS department or other forced
to interact with it, that is a very broad generalization.
There are of course some individuals who run Linux every day as their daily driver.
There is a Linux club at the university.
And for a time it was the biggest computer science club that time has passed because
COVID killed basically all of the clubs.
But yeah, there are a number of people who use Linux.
That's encouraging then.
So it might not be the majority, but there certainly are people of your age using Linux
and enjoying it.
For those people who are technically minded, it's there.
I do think they will find their way to it.
Incidentally, my son's computer science teacher at school is a massive Linux fanboy and talks
about it to the class.
So they do get exposed to someone who talks about Linux, but every single one of the kids
in the room has an iPad.
And the laptops that they're using are all running windows, the school supplied laptops
and school supplied iPads.
And so they're not going to use Linux as part of their education.
They might get some guy, that weird teacher who keeps talking about Linux for sure.
In fact, it was quite funny when Sam told him when I worked at Canonical that I worked
on Ubuntu and he was like, what?
What?
How?
Like there's kind of a gog that someone else had heard of it.
One of the students had heard of it and even someone who worked for them.
So it is still niche.
I mean, the numbers show that.
We know we are a minority.
Accept it.
Well, yeah, so I accept that we are a minority and in some ways I think that is good because
it makes us, it makes me feel smug.
It keeps the trash out, doesn't it?
Yeah.
But my thesis was wrong then because of what you've just said, I'm left about there being
a Linux global, at least there was before COVID killed it.
And I'm really happy to be wrong.
So even though things are more abstracted and there's less and less reason to care about
files and folders and file systems and all the rest of it, there is still a minority
of young people who are into Linux, keeping that flame burning.
And so when we're all gone and you are the gray beards, Linux and open source and ideas
of software freedom and digital rights will actually be represented.
You and your small group of peers will be there flying the flag.
So I'm feeling much happier coming out of this conversation than I did going into it.
So well done.
As another example at work, my boss runs Linux, I run Linux.
It's a very small company.
There are three other people that run Linux, two Mac users and one Windows user.
Wow.
So you even outnumber them.
That sounds like a cool company then.
Well, we'd better wrap it up.
So thank you very much, Amlith, for joining us and bringing your insights.
It's been very valuable.
And thank you, Alan, for joining us again.
If you've got any thoughts on this, you can email show at linuxdowntime.com.
We'll be back in two weeks, but until then, I've been Joe.
I've been Gary.
I've been Alan.
And I've been Amlith.
See you later.
Bye.
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