S10E42 – Tangy Orange Chairs

This week we get confy in a new chair, conduct our Perennial Podcast Prophecy Petition Point and go over your feedback. This is the final show of the season and we’ll now be taking a couple of months break to eat curry, have a chat and decide if we’ll be returning for Season 11.

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It’s Season Ten Episode Forty-Two of the Ubuntu Podcast! Alan Pope, Mark Johnson and Martin Wimpress are connected and speaking to your brain.

In this week’s show:

• We discuss what we’ve been up to recently:
  • Martin has bought a Secretlab TITAN chair. It is very comfy.

We review our 2017 predictions:

Alan

• Multiple devices from Tier one vendors will ship with snappy by default (like Dell, HP, Cisco) “top line big name vendors will ship hardware with Ubuntu snappy as a default OS”
  • No
• GitHub will downsize their 600 workforce to a much smaller number and may also do something controversial to raise funds
  • No – 723 according to wikipedia
• Microsoft will provide a Linux build of a significant application – possibly exchange or sharepoint
  • No?
• Donald Trump will not last a year as president
  • Sadly not.

Mark

• There will be no new Ubuntu phone on sale in 2017
  • Yes
• The UK government will lose a court case related to the Investigatory Powers Act
  • Yes and Yes.
• This time next year, one of the top 5 distros on Distrowatch will be a distro that isn’t currently in the top 20.
  • No

Martin

• Ubuntu 17.10 will be able to run Mir using the proprietary nvidia drivers and Steam will work reliably via XMir. It will also be possible to run Mir in Virtualbox.
  • No
• A high profile individual (or individuals) will fall victim to one of the many privacy threats introduced as a result of the Investigatory Powers Bill. Intimate details of their online life will be exposed to the world, compiled from one of more databases storing Internet Connection Records. The disclosure will possibly have serious consequences for the individuals concerned, such as losing their job or being professionally discredited.
  • No
• The hype surrounding VR will build during 2017 but Virtual Reality will continue to lack adoption. Sales figures will be well below market projections.
  • Maybe?

We make our prediction for 2018:

Alan

• A large gaming hardware vendor from the past will produce new hardware. Someone of the size/significance of Sega. Original hardware, not just re-using the brand-name, but official product.
• Valve will rev the steamlink, perhaps making it more powerful for 4K gaming, and maybe a minor bump to the steam controller too
• A large government UK body will accidentally leak a significant body of data. Could be laptop/USB stick on a train or website hack.

Mark

• Either the UK or US government will collapse
• A major hardware manufacturer (not a crowd funder) will release a device in the form factor of a GPD pocket
• I will specifically buy (i.e. not in a Humble Bundle) and play through a native Linux game that is initially released in 2018.
• Canonical will go public and suffer a hostile takeover by the shuffling corpse of SCO. (bonus prediction)

Martin

• Give or take a couple of thousand dollars, BitCoin will have the same US dollar value in December 2018 as it does today.
  • 17205.63 US Dollar per btc at the time of recording.
• A well established PC OEM, not currently supporting Linux, will offer a pre-installed Linux distro option for their flagship products.
• Four smart phones will launch in 2018 that cost $1000 or more, thanks to Apple normalising this ludicrous price tag in 2017.

Ubuntu Podcast listenrs share their predictions for 2018:

• Simon Butcher – The Queen piles into bitcoin and loses her fortune when bitcoin collapses to 10p
• Jezra – Someone considers open sourcing a graphics driver for chip that works with ARM, and then doesn’t
• Ian – Canonical will be bought out by Ubuntu Mate.
• Mattias Wernér – I predict a new push for SteamOS and Steam Machines with a serious marketing effort behind it.
• Jon Spriggs – I think we’ll see Etherium value exceeding £2,000 before 1st December 2018 (Currently £476 on Coinbase.com). Litecoin will cross £1,000 before 1st Dec 2018 (currently £286)
• Eddie Figgie‏ – Bitcoin falls below $1k US.
• McPhail – I saw the call for 2018 predictions. I predict that command line snaps will run natively in Windows and some graphical snaps will run too
• Leo Arias – Costa Rica wins the FIFA world cup.
• Ivan Pejić‏ – India will ship RISC-V based Ubuntu netbook/tablet/phone.
• Sachin Saini* – Solus takes over the world.
• Laura Czajkowski and Joel J – Year of the (mainstream) Linux desktop 😁
• Adam Eveleigh‏ – snappy/Flatpak/AppImage(Update/d) will gain more traction as people realize that it solves the stable-for-noobs vs rolling dilemma once and for all. Which of the three will go furthest? Despite being in the snappy camp, I bet Flatpak
• Marius Gripsgard – Ubuntu touch world domination
• Jan Sprinz – Ubuntu Touch will rebase to 16.04
• Ian – Canonical will IPO
• Simon Butcher – Bitcoins go to £500,000 and the whole brexit divorce bill is funded by a stash of bc found on Gordon Brown’s old laptop
• Conor Murphy – Linux Steam Integration snap will get wide adoption. Over 30% of all steam installs on linux
• Jon Spriggs – RPi 4 with either with MOAR MEMORY or Gig Ethernet.
• Mattias Wernér – I’ll predict that bitcoin will hit six figures in 2018. To be more specific, the six figures will be in dollars.
• Jon Spriggs – I predict there will be an OggCamp ’18 😉
• Laura Czajkowski – Microsoft will buy Canonical
• Mortiz – Pipewire will be included in at least two major distros.
• Daniel Llewelyn – Snaps will become the defacto standard and appimages and flatpaks will continue to be ignored
• Jezra – Samsung ports Tizen to another device that is not a Samsung Phone.
• Badger – Sound will finally work on cherry trail processors
• Justin – Ubuntu Podcast to return for an eleventh season 🙂

• And we go over all your amazing feedback – thanks for sending it – please keep sending it!

• This weeks cover image is taken from Wikimedia.

That’s all for this week! If there’s a topic you’d like us to discuss, or you have any feedback on previous shows, please send your comments and suggestions to [email protected] or Tweet us or Comment on our Facebook page or comment on our Google+ page or comment on our sub-Reddit.

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