Yesterday I listened to Late Night Linux podcast episode 358, where the hosts were at a recent Ubuntu summit and they got to interview Mark Shuttleworth.

A lot of what Shuttleworth said resonated with me – he mentioned he’s fascinated by the small things self-hosting and IoT stuff. He also discussed the merits of Snap packages, which made me less hostile to the fact that Ubuntu prioritizes them over regular .deb packages.

Shuttleworth seems like a pretty cool guy. Hopefully he stays that way.

Another thing that resonated with me in the podcast is that the hosts talk about how the big players in the FOSS ecosystem – Ubuntu/Canonical, Fedora/Red Hat, Suse/Novell – all raise the tide for the smaller community-oriented distros and projects. So it’s like a symbiotic relationship in that regard. It’s not so much a zero-sum game for distros, even though there is some nominal level of competition among them.