Hello and welcome to episode 81 of Linux Downtime. I'm Joe, I'm Gary, and I'm Amalith.
Good to talk to you both again? We've had loads of emails to show at LinuxDowntime.com,
so let's cover some of those now. Nathan writes, regarding the episode where we
talked about getting started with coding and development. I would love a follow-up,
more along the lines of how to get hired as a software developer, particularly if you've
only ever worked blue-collar jobs and have no higher education. There are likely a lot of people
drawn to Linux and coding who are, like me, not exactly social. For me, Linux code has been
the easier part of the equation while actually putting those skills to work for pay is quite elusive.
So when it comes to my first paid programming job, I actually got it while I was still in school,
and it's because the company came to my school to recruit people. They were looking for people
at new Linux, and at this time I'd already been working on Pigeon and Open Source for a couple
years, and that wasn't exactly the role they were looking for to fill while they were there,
but they asked if anybody does Linux and that kind of stuff. That's actually how I got my first
job was my Open Source experience opened that door for me so that I didn't come in directly
at the entry level, and just went from there. My experience is not exactly normal, but I can give
some advice from a course I took at university last semester, and that professor said that we should
take a shotgun style approach. Just send your resume out to as many different companies as you
possibly can. Make them say no to you. Don't close the door yourself if that makes sense.
My experience personally has been, I was like part of a Linux user group in my area,
and I mentioned that I was looking for a job. One of the guys in that group owned his own company.
He sent me a message. I said, okay, I'd love to help. I only know systems administration with
Linux stuff. I've never actually done any programming outside of Java that went in one year
out the other in university, and he said, that's fine, you can learn it on the job. You'll pick it
up quick, and I did. I think it's been something like two years now. Then in that time, I started my
own company to do consulting for other businesses in the area. I picked up a few clients that way,
and just recently, I picked up another big client that I'm going to be half time for to start off
and full time for in the future. I'm not going to say exactly what it is quite yet, but that
situation was even further from from normal. I sent someone who works there a message asking if
they had any positions. He said, yeah, I already know who you are from your open source work,
elsewhere on the internet. They were familiar with the next net. They were familiar with all the
stuff I run, and they said, yeah, sure, just send me a resume. So I have a better enumeration of
your experience. I sent that the next day, and then the day after they said, yep, you've got
the job. You can start next month. That was a super quick turnaround and an awesome experience.
Now you said that both of those are not normal, but I disagree, man. I think that is very normal.
I think it's not necessarily what you know. It's who you know. It's about getting out there
in the community, establishing yourself as someone who is helpful, knowledgeable, and involved,
and you will get to know people in the community, and then when you are looking for a job,
you put it out there that you're looking, and people will help you out. I mean, I know people
who were laid off relatively recently who have just walked into other jobs because of the community
that they're part of, because they know enough people have enough contacts. They just put it out
there, and they get themselves a job really quickly. It's obviously harder when you first starting
out, but it's relatively easy to get involved with communities and keep your GitHub or whatever
ancient system you use, Gary. That's a great idea.
Esoteric. But just get your code out there and contribute to open source projects and stuff,
and just meet people and use networking to get a job. It's not really any different from
any other industry. If you want to be a plumber, you know, you just put yourself out there,
you make friends with people who are in the construction trade, and get taken on as a plumber's
mate or whatever. Yeah, I'd argue to you that it's probably easier in the software world because
we have meetups and stuff, and yeah, the bad times affected things a lot, but things are starting
to come back, and you can meet people at these meetups, and you know, start networking, and
that's how you can find jobs that aren't listed and stuff like that, and maybe they're not listed
well and so on. So there are kind of two approaches. I'm hearing the one that is more community
focused and connections and networking that it seems like we've all gone through, and then there's
the more university traditional corporate approach of trying to work for a big commercial entity that's
not in the open source space. So I guess it kind of depends on where you want to work. If you want
to work for one of those companies that's not in the open source space, then being very active
in those spaces are probably not going to be a big help. You'd be surprised that because there's
a lot of people who go to Linux meetups and stuff who work for huge commercial companies that
aren't interested in open source, and any networking is going to help you. That lets it,
your scattergun approach of just send CVs out to every single company you possibly can. I mean,
the worst thing that can happen is you've wasted some time and you want to have your CV or your resume
on point regardless because the networking is not going to get you a job, it's going to get you
in the door with someone who will maybe get you the job. And I also want to say, LinkedIn is not
necessary for me. I have never found it useful regardless of how many people harp on the fact
that you have to have a LinkedIn profile. I have one, but it's all full of disinformation.
Nothing on my LinkedIn profile is actually accurate and it has not hindered me in the slightest.
Well, so you put deliberate disinformation on your LinkedIn?
Yeah, because like bots will come in and scrape LinkedIn for all of your personal information,
and that all eventually shows up on the stupid people search sites that lead people directly to you.
Not to mention feeding the large language models as well.
Also that, yeah. Putting false information on LinkedIn is a great way to
obfuscate what personal information is online about you.
That is a novel approach I must say because I am led to believe that having your LinkedIn
be totally up to date is basically part of your resume at this point. It hasn't been for me
personally. A couple of months ago when I was looking for work, I updated my LinkedIn to say,
you know, looking for work and all that. I've gotten less messages about jobs now that I've
said that than I did beforehand. All right, we've got quite a lot of feedback about our CLA
episode, the Contribute and License Agreements. One from Augustine.
Yeah, Augustine gave us a couple of links to it's called a fiduciary license agreement,
and it's basically exactly what we talked about wanting in that episode.
It's a legal construct created by the FSF Europe and used by KDE
among others to solve a lot of those concerns. The FLA transfers economic rights,
not moral rights. So moral rights are basically your right to be identified as the author.
In many countries such as France, your moral rights are inalienable and non-transferable.
But in the US, for example, you can relinquish your moral rights and many social media companies do
that. So whenever you upload your artwork or pictures of yourself, you relinquish your moral rights,
so that social media company can do whatever they like with them and claim that they're the author,
for example. But an FLA only addresses economic rights and it transfers those rights to a trustee,
the new holder of those rights. But it also places some restrictions on that trustee to ensure that
your contribution remains free software. Well Richard said, the FSF is doing something similar
to the concept that was discussed on the show. The FSF requires copyright assignment for projects
under their copyright. Their agreement limits the FSF to only distributing the code under terms
that allow anyone to redistribute the code under the same terms. So it seems like the FSFE and FSF
have got two slightly different approaches but are doing essentially what we had talked about
wanting. Personally, I do very much like the fiduciary license agreement and intend to use that
when I need to. Well, as usual, the FSFE who at this point I think should probably change their
name because they seem to be much more switched on than the original FSF in America. And much more
relevant, I guess, and less of an object of ridicule at this point. I think that's a fair assessment.
But yeah, the bottom line is that we're not lawyers and this stuff is complicated and it kind of
just goes to show that as a developer, you've got to kind of try and have a bit of legal knowledge,
but it always comes down to the fact that I'm not a lawyer and you've sort of got to seek proper
legal opinions when you have to. I mean, what do you do about that, Kerry? Do you just model through?
Pretty much. It'd be really nice if there was, I don't want to say like a lawyer you could just
talk to about this stuff, but basically if there's a lawyer you could just talk about this stuff
or even that they just had like a real quick checklist of like, hey, here's some things you might
want to know. Like most of the stuff I've learned over the years has been from FSFE or Knew
or whatever. It's like, you know, or the choose a license site that get up runs. I don't remember
the exact domain. You know, you just pick up stuff as you go from there, but like at the same time,
it's just like I shouldn't have to worry about this kind of stuff. Isn't consistency supposed
to help with this kind of stuff? I think so. I don't want to talk ill of people, but when we're
talking about software freedom conservancy or software freedom law center, there are two entities
in a huge pool of open source, and they get overloaded a lot. So like trying to get an opinion
or response from them, if you need it in a timely manner, it's not going to happen. Yeah.
At least that's been my experience. It may be completely different for others, but that has been
my personal experience with it. Yeah, if you're a major project, maybe you might be able to get
a quicker response, but for the smaller projects, yeah, it must be difficult for them to
assign the resources because there's only finite resources, right? Yeah, right, right.
Tricky. Okay. This episode is sponsored by HelloFresh. With HelloFresh, you get farmFresh,
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Quick bit of admin then. First of all thank you everyone who supports us with PayPal and Patreon.
We really do appreciate that. If you want to join those people you can go to linuxdowntime.com
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of either just this show or all the shows in the late night Linux family. And if you want to get
in contact with us you can email show at linuxdowntime.com. All right Patrick says the discussion about
a mutable file system distros on episode 74 was good but there was one area I was hoping you would
explore a bit more. That's the confluence of a read only OS and containerization. There's really
no reason why they should be connected. You mentioned it in passing but the macOS system integrity
protection method of a mutable desktop absolutely does not rely on containers protected directories
or files are identified by an extended file attribute or by presence in the rootless.com file.
I think that the immutable desktop has a chance of being the best way for people who don't want
to tinker with their OS to use desktop linux but to me it has to be more like macOS SIP and less
like android. Do you guys see that as a weakness to the same degree that I do or is the android model
really the only path forward for an immutable linux desktop. So there's kind of a couple points
that I think are getting a little complicated. There's the you know how do you install your software
and then the core OS right to be honest I've never been a fan of the way that android updates.
I haven't been a long-term linux user with package managers I'd much rather have smaller
more frequent updates than the entire image right so that's basically where I fall on the
immutable OS stuff but you know use what you want but like Android packages are essentially
containerized themselves right they they can't access other stuff everything has to be done
permission-wise stuff like that so like the android model is basically what you'd get with like
silver blue or you blue or any of that stuff where you know the recommendation is that your
applications should be containerized but that's a recommendation right it doesn't have to be that
way so I think with the linux world like we normally get right we kind of get the you know do what
you want thing so like your home partition on an immutable distro is still your home partition
right like when you update the core OS that updates your home directory stays the same so there's no
reason why you can't install something directly to your home directory and stuff like that so
I think that's kind of where I stand on it right just with the linux way you pick which way you
want to go with and go from there you only have to look at the success of the steam deck though
to realize that maybe this approach is potentially very successful for other distros that's slightly
different because they're selling an appliance but then most people see a laptop as an appliance
these days don't they not the kind of people who listen to our show necessarily but most normal
people just want to treat a laptop as an appliance and it just so happens that the steam deck is a
gaming appliance but you know I'm hearing from hardcore windows users who have no intention of
replacing steam OS on there because people just stick with the defaults and at the moment I mean
I'm starting to sound like George Castro here but at the moment desktop Linux is a bit flaky
for normal users isn't it yeah I agree with that especially the the application point of view
like I have a couple Chromebooks around the house that are just a internet browsing machines right
like I'm not going to go and throw Debbie and Adam so I can have a full distro it's like no this is
just here to watch a YouTube as I'm going to sleep or something right so the the appliance nature
is really nice for that matter but I think the when it really comes down to especially with the
case of the steam deck is the default out of the box experience is good enough that there's not
really a reason for them to install windows as well right there's no they're not going to go
through the hassle of trying to get windows running on it for a couple games when they already
have so many games that do run on the steam deck now obviously there's going to be exceptions to
that but I think that's where the steam deck stuff really comes through I'm kind of conflicted
I can see the benefits of having an immutable desktop for average people
but I also believe that there are a lot of benefits to containerized applications
that you just can't get with uncontainerized applications and it does seem to me like the two
of them going together is is kind of perfect especially when those containerized applications
are being integrated at the OS level like you get with Ubuntu or Fedora or something like that
when you're on say arch for example you have to do all that integration work yourself and it's a
pain in the ass and I don't want to do that but when someone else is making it a pleasant experience
I think it's okay how would you know about arch I'm gonna oh I don't know I don't have any idea
all right yeah I'm surprised you made it this fine to the episode of that mentioned in it
I try to avoid that you don't do a very good job I'm afraid but all that said the macOS
approach does work very well I mean I do not care for macOS I'd love the hardware that it comes
with and I wish I could run Linux on it and I know it's our here and everything and they're
getting better blah blah blah but it's not as much of a first class experience so I wish I could
have just a flawless experience on it and maybe one day that will come but anyway I don't care
for macOS the interface just the weird stuff about how Enter just renames files and just the
fire managers terrible and I've talked about this loads of times elsewhere but it does work as a
solid experience and you know as a slightly different approach to an immutable OS I think it could
work but it's about momentum with Linux isn't it that the bottom line is that we've got the
momentum with silver blue and its derivatives and similar projects we just seem to be going down
this flat pack route and sure someone else could make something more like macOS but you can't fight
the tide flat pack is how software is going to be delivered to users on Linux I mean it already is
for a lot of people I would imagine a good chunk of the audience get most of their applications
as flat packs these days and give it another 10 years maybe and they pretty much won't be much
other choice I wouldn't have thought and they'll always be choice it's Linux of course but mainstream
destroys will all be using flat packer would have thought in about 10 years I think the direction we're
headed is the immutable containerized desktop that that silver blue is sort of pushing forward
that that's one route and then the other route is going to be the more DIY everything
uncontained approach and I think that's what we're going to end up with eventually yeah just like
we've ended up with Dev1 Dev1 still exists for people who don't like systemd but like Linux and
you know they're going strong they had a release based on the recent Debian release it was only
like what a month or so behind the Debian release and you're going to have people who will
come on to this old traditional method we might all end up being one of them but I doubt I will
somehow I think I'll just go wherever the wind blows me and I'm sure a bunch will go that route
eventually I'm going to keep trying them and see how they work for me periodically yeah but I do
think the momentum is just with this Android style model yeah for better or worse yeah unfortunately
I agree with that but I'm gonna you know hang on to my Debian install as long as it can but I do
use flat pack for a couple things but you know it's more picking choose for me than an entirety I do
have some apps installed that are only officially distributed as snaps or flat packs but the way I've
installed them removes them from that container and installs them natively right well we've
better get out of here then we'll be back in a couple of weeks but until then I've been job I've
been Gary and I've been Amalus see you later
you