LINUX Unplugged - 282: Wishing Upon a Kernel

Episode Date: January 3, 2019

We start off the new year with our hopes and dreams for Linux and open source in 2019 and beyond. Plus Clear Linux aims to build the ultimate Linux desktop based on Xfce, and it looks like GNOME is closing the performance gap. Special Guests: Alan Pope and Brent Gervais.

Did you know that researchers are now putting fish into augmented reality tanks? That's right, AR for fish. I love it. You're telling me I can get a fish tank that's not real, or the fish tank's real, but the fish aren't. What part's the AR part? Well, so they've attached AR to the fish. They're trying to use it to study how the fish think they can hide.

So they're recording what the fish sees and playing it back and tweaking it to see how the fish responds to different visual input. This is what we're spending our time on? to see how the fish responds to different visual input. This is what we're spending our time on? This is Linux Unplugged, episode 282, for January 2nd, 2019. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that... I was talking about fish this week. My name is Chris. My name is Wes.

And not the shell. Not the shell. Not yet, at least. Although, they did have a new release. Sometime soon. Yeah, sometime soon we're going to have somebody on from the project and talk about the awesome fish shell. But this, this episode, we're doing what I like to call a little hope-casting. If you had a magic wand bestowed upon you by the Linux Unplugged program and you could affect any change in the open source world in 2019, what would it be?

And to warm us up, we're going to look back at some of the major trends that really stood out from us throughout 2018 and talk about those things. The things that bent the open source world a little bit and changed the direction of things. The things that really kind of stick out now that we're on the other end of it. And then that will inform our 2019 Hopecasting. What do you think, Wes? That sound like fun to you? That's a winning recipe. Okay. Did you have a good holiday? Oh, I had a wonderful holiday. Yeah. But we're back here at work because there's just so much awesome Linux news to talk about. That's true. We couldn't be away. Yeah. And I'm excited to Hopecast, right? There's a lot of good things that could happen and there's no ref on this episode.

We can say whatever we like. This one's freewheeling, although we'll probably still hear from that ref if we get it wrong. You know how that works. All right, well, before we go any closer, let's bring in that virtual lug. Time, appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello. Good morning. Hello.

Good morning, good afternoon, and like I always say, time approves. It's just easier, the general catch-all. You know, I did say we're going to be doing our Hopecastings, but I did have a little community news. Originally, when we were planning this episode, I thought, oh, there's not going to be any news with the holidays. Yeah, everyone's taking breaks. Everybody's off. There's no open source getting made.

Turns out there's news. Turns out there's news. And the first news may actually be really good for me and my predictions that I made just last week. You are getting lucky already. I am actually doing quite well. The first one was my Clear Linux prediction, which apparently the good folks over at Intel agreed with me, and we have a pretty big update from Clear Linux this week.

The first is this sort of call-to-action blog post co-authored by Ike and I'm going to say Uke? I think you're right. And they talk about the challenges they're trying to solve with their special get-out-of-the-way desktop version of Clear Linux that's ready for remote desktop, ready for performance, everything you need, just a single command away, optimized around a special-built XFCE desktop.

Oh, yeah, trim down lean and mean. With same defaults as they say. Their philosophy is stateless. And that is enshrined in their operating system. They've also extended this to the visuals of the desktop, using the beautiful ArcGTK theme with elementary XFCE icons, and made it ready for remote rendering to make sure that things like special gradients wouldn't be there to slow down the remote performance,

and that OpenGL applications would work awesome. This is a big push by Intel for Clear Linux to be a player on the desktop. I don't know if it's going to be successful, but I like this angle. I like the XFCE base for the desktop. I like that they're focusing on running it in remote desktops, remote virtual desktops, you might say, which was another prediction of mine. Yeah, I can see it too. I thought some of their verbiage around

you're a grumpy old sysadmin who just knows what a desktop should be and doesn't need a newfangled thing on your server under the familiarity header. That doesn't play well with me, but I can see it. A simple thing that does work well in a virtualized environment,

if you're already using an operating system that basically targets that, yeah, sometimes, especially if you're already using an operating system that basically targets that, sometimes, especially if you're coming from the Windows world or you just want a GUI because using something to edit the partitions is just easier that way. What do you think, Popey, of Intel's play here to base their Linux desktop

around XFCE? Clever? I think it makes sense because you need something, especially for a remote desktop, you need something that's not got too many, uh, effects baked in and it's not too GPU heavy so that you can, uh, scale it up and have tons of these running on one machine if needed, or, uh, you just want to have a super fast lightweight protocol between you and the remote machine, I guess. Yeah, I agree.

I think it's, I think it's cunning in a way that most people might go for flashy and name-grabby, and they went for tried-true and, honestly, one of the better desktops for a remote session. I'm really curious to see where Intel goes with this, and maybe it's me, but I feel like I read kind of iKey's language in this blog post a little bit. I'll give you one of the lines that stands out. It's sort of an IKI line to me. When it comes specifically to targeting the developer or administrators, we see an entirely different set of challenges.

Many of us would like to simplify remote access from the desktop to our deployed machines to facilitate that efficient workflow. As such, we took certain points into consideration when building the developer desktop experience. Reminds me a lot of how he talked about projects in Solus. Right, there's this idea of,

well, of course it should be done this way. And just like, do it right, you don't have to do everything. Right. And those are principles. I mean, in general, he's usually right.

That was the thing about IK. Yeah, that's fascinating. And it was co-authored by him in this post. So we'll be hearing a lot more, I think, from Clear Linux. It'll be interesting to see how that evolves and actually how many people in the community pick it up. Yeah, and of course the other big thing around Clear Linux

is the gaming project, the Steam project that Ike had been working on that he talked on the show about before is being moved over to Clear Linux, it appears. Did you see this? No, I didn't know. Yeah, that whole Steam compatibility thing that he was working on. Popey, did you see this, that this is now a Clear Linux project? Yeah, I saw a fork of it now under IKI's new GitHub account.

Yeah. Yeah. Isn't that interesting? I wonder how Solace feels. I think I know how Solace feels about that, actually. But yeah, I think I'll be watching this one, hoping that my predictions come true. I mean, that's really all I want.

That's the reason I came. Good luck to you. I'm kind of tempted to try it, too. If I could install Snaps. Seriously. Are Snaps available for Clear Linux? Because, nope. That makes it a lot harder to do the,

you know, some of those applications that I use for my job, they're in Snaps. Why would you want that on your professional workstation, Chris? I don't get that. Somebody ought to get on that. Alright. Well, I know something else somebody ought to get on. We got to get collective

and we got to make some collective action on this next story. You're not going to believe this, but a port of the Riser 4 file system for Linux 4.20 is in the works. His wife might be dead, but the file system in his name continues on. There hasn't been a

formal riser4 file system patch released since September when it was ported to the 4.18 kernel. But, via Git this week, there was a port for Linux 4.20 kernel should you want to utilize this once promising riser file system. Yeah, that's right.

Okay, so Edward Shishkin, he's the last main developer. He's got his own kernel tree, and it's not actually released yet, but there is a new branch with fixes, and there are not very many. Honestly, there hasn't been that many changes on the riser side, so there's not a lot of changes that you actually need here.

There's also a new branch for some upcoming feature work, volume-related fixes, balancing work, a new key allocation scheme. So if you're a user, okay, maybe there's some good stuff happening, but why are you a user? Legacy data, maybe? But even then, get a new

RAID setup and copy it over. I don't know, really. We have XFS. You'll be fine. You know, that's sort of been the situation for years, though. Like, some people are still using it. But you think about it. We haven't seen Riser 4 mainlined in the Linux kernel in 2019. We're not going to see it. We haven't seen it yet.

It's not likely to happen in 2019. Hey, that might be someone's hopecast. Well, I'm going to say this right now. Here's my pledge. People speculate. People in the know, people familiar with the matter, speculate that if a corporate backer were to come along and corporately back riser effects, whatever that means, like it's inclusion in the kernel or whatever, then it could be mainline.

So I make this commitment right now. If the audience can organize around this and form a company, I will fund it. I'll fund $2,000 of my own right now. If the audience can organize around this and form a company, I will fund it. I'll fund $2,000 of my own personal money. If we could get Riser somehow mainlined in the Linux kernel, it'd be the best thing this show ever did. It would be amazing.

And what is corporate backing really, right? Isn't that just a company that's willing to put their name on something and submit the patch and fight for it? I mean, I don't know. I think so. We just got to get organized. Maybe fund a little bit of development work if there's changes.

Sure. Why not? Sure. If we got extra money. After the pizza party. We form an LLC, right? Something like Axe Murder File Systems Incorporated. No, I don't know what we call it.

But we form an LLC and we collectively raise some money. I'll seed it with $2,000 just to get this going. We probably need to raise a little more than that. And then we submit it to the kernel for inclusion. By the end of 2019,

we get RiserFS mainlined. I think it'd be a massive accomplishment. I'm just putting it out there. It's for the audience to take and run with. I'm just the idea guy. But you let me know.

What do you think? I think it's a great plan. Would you put in $10? Oh, yes. Of course. For Linux? Who wouldn't? What a ridiculous accomplishment that would be.

Like if we somehow had managed to put together enough organization to... Yeah, probably we should use that to fund other kernel features. No, that's ridiculous. This is important. I mean, somebody's got to work on the important things because companies like Google now are focusing on getting GPU support for their Linux apps running on Chrome OS.

This is massive. Chrome OS is in the early stages right now of adding full-fledged graphics acceleration to the Linux apps that are necessary for not only running games, but some other important apps too. There's probably a few that come to mind. Oh yeah, that is right.

Yeah, you can play like non-intense games, a little bit of GPU work, things like that. Sure. But don't go crazy. No. And of course, especially these days, games aren't the only programs that actually use a GPU. No, more so than ever.

Yeah, actually one major application that Google has been hard at work trying to perfect for Chrome OS is of course Android Studio. That'd be good. No, more so than ever. that GPU. Yeah, so that's probably the main driver for this. But we'll see. It is in the source code management system now. There is a new option to enable virtual machine Linux GPU virtual machine acceleration, whatever they're calling it. It's going to be in the beta channels, obviously.

But I don't think you're going to see a super easy user way to do this yet. No, not so far. You're going to have to go to the command line, run VMC start, enable GPU. There you go. And then the application you want to enable. No, not so far. You're going to have to go to the command line, run VMZ start, enable GPU. There you go. And then the application you want to enable. That's not so bad. And then eventually they'll probably just turn it on

automatically once they've got it nailed down. The nice thing about Chrome OS, I suppose, is they've got kind of the Apple advantage. They control the operating system, and it's a range of devices, but it's a limited range. It's not the entire marketplace they have to support. It's devices that they've blessed to run Chrome OS. So they, in theory, know the whole addressable market there.

And in somewhat of like an iOS, same thing. Like they're starting from a more limited platform of support, right? Here's what our device does, and then adding things as they think it's up to stuff. Yeah, I wonder. I wonder if that's, 2019 might be the year I get a Chromebook, I think. I've been pushing it. But you got full-fledged Linux apps on there with GPU support. I wonder if that's... 2019 might be the year I get a Chromebook, I think. I've been pushing it, but you got full-fledged Linux apps on there with GPU support.

I got to at least try it. Got to see what it's like. Yeah, okay. I'm curious, too. Part of me is, you know, nervous that this is the Linux desktop. Chrome OS is the Linux desktop. And...

What if you love it? What if that's true and you love it? That'd be great, actually. I'd be okay with that. Brent, you didn't end up with any Chrome OS experiences on your recent travels. Welcome back to the show, Brent. It's good to have you back. You must have had a mobile computing setup while you were traveling all around the world. A world-traveling man you are.

Yeah, thanks. First of all, it's good to be back. I got all set up yesterday and realized I was one day off. Yeah, well, it, a special day today because of the holidays. I, uh, yeah, I sort of brought my whole production machine down. You did. Wow. Well, I was, um, I was in Chile for like two and a half weeks or something like that doing, um, some really in-depth paragliding stuff. My twin brother does that and I got a free opportunity to learn how to do it, uh, which was really great. But I was also there with a camera. So I was trying to capture a whole bunch of stuff that was going on. And I just thought if I'm going to try to be on assignment without

my production machine, it's a bit of a challenge. So I did break down and carried extra stuff and half regretted it because I had to haul it all. But no Chrome OS. Sorry, no Chrome OS. I bet more than half. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I'm being generous. I didn't know you had a twin brother either. How do I know if I'm talking to real Brent or Brent's twin?

You know, so I'm visiting him in BC still at this point, and I'm sitting at his desk, and he has, of course, the exact same computer that I do because I set him up with it. You're slowly stealing his identity. Nice. That's it, right? Pretty soon I'll be driving his car. Soon you'll be just as good of a paraglider.

If I had a twin brother, I'd keep it a secret, and I would swap. Like today, he'd be working, not me. This week would be twin brother's week, and I'd be off this week. But I'd never tell anyone I was doing it. So most of the time he spends like he's just having to learn, right? You write down all the things you do.

Here's the new facts. Well, we've got to make sure we're eating the same stuff. We've got to buy two of everything. I mean, it's not cheap, but I feel like it's worth the long game. Have you tried? Have you thought about it, Brent? Have you tried that? Well, here's a question for you, Chris.

How do you know it's not me? How do you know it is me? You're right. I don't. I got you there. Okay. Fair enough. And you wouldn't say. You wouldn't tell me, obviously, because I would ruin it. Well don't. I got you there. Okay. Fair enough. And you wouldn't say.

You wouldn't tell me, obviously, because that would ruin it. Well, exactly. All the benefits go away if you say something. Now, let's say Richard Stallman comes down and says, you know what I want to do is I want to give you some of this free software foundation money. Because what's he going to do with it? So he writes you a big old check and says, here you go. Here's $5,000, Brent.

I want you to modernize your mobile setup. here you go. Here's $5,000, Brent. I want you to modernize your mobile setup. Where do you go with that $5,000? Do you go down the route of a ThinkPad? Do you go down the route of a Chromebook? Where would you go at this point? So that's interesting because when you were asking the question, I thought it was like $5,000 to revolutionize the idea of a mobile setup. But you're talking just 5K to purchase one.

Well, if you had to go out and get one today, because the reason why I ask you is, man, I would be thinking that. As I'm sitting there carrying all these heavy bags around and stuff, what would be going through my head is how can I make this better? This is the worst thing ever. But I'm also a bit of a whiner.

It's funny, this trip for me changed something in my mind. And my number one change that I would love to see actually doesn't have anything to do with my computer. It would be a lighter, better camera. Oh, sure. And I think that might be a bit of my own limitation. I'm still using a DSLR, and they've got some wonderful mirrorless cameras and stuff out there. So it's more about me having to buy something else and push the envelope in my own arena.

Right. I suppose that stuff's so heavy in comparison to your computer. The computer stuff isn't that big of a deal. That's it, right? And the computer's slim, so you can shove it in a bag and it doesn't take up that much space. But as far as the camera gear goes, it generally has its own backpack or whatever, right?

Yeah. But 5K won't do it, Chris. 5K won't do it in that arena. No, that might get you a lens. Yeah, that's a start. Oh, boy. Yeah, it's a totally different ballgame. Yeah, well, I guess we'll just have to wait and see if Richard Stallman comes and writes that check.

Because, yeah, you're right. You could totally redo that whole setup if you're starting with the camera gear. Yeah, that's it. And so having invested so much into one system, it's always a little tricky to move, right? And that's probably true of computers as well. But to answer your original question, I would say just very broadly, the thinnest, most Linux-friendly laptop

I can possibly get that has an IPS screen and just gets out of the way. Yeah, a nice screen is definitely important for what you're doing too. Well, glad to have you back and glad you enjoyed your travels. Sounds like paragliding sounds like quite the adventure with a twin brother. I mean, that's a heck of a story. You should be vlogging this. I'd watch that. I'd watch that. You know,

I'm not as sophisticated as you, maybe I'll start, but I did throw up in the IRC a little gallery, just people can get a sense of what I was doing. So almost all of those shots, at least least the photos are actually of me so there's me in the sky with birds and stuff like that it's really amazing and there's some cool videos there from an expert who knows a lot more than i do but basically we're flying over the city and doing some really cool stuff so uh yeah thanks for for the interest there and uh for sure i missed being plugged into JB for that time. Plugged into Unplugged. It's good to have you back. Well, why don't we do a little kind of looking forward now.

Let's start shifting gears. What we're gathered here for today, and let's start with Wine. Wine is one of those projects that's been around forever now. And they're aiming for their 4.0 release, which could be massive for them, including a lot of the work with the DXVK stuff recently being built back in. Support for querying BIOS data on Linux, Kerberos authentication. What? Open GL core context being enabled in Direct3D. A bunch of Direct3D stuff, actually, including multi-threaded command

streams, all kinds of good stuff. So Wine, I think, this isn't a prediction. I mean, just Wine with the recent Proton work and all this is just going to have a fantastic 2019. But just to kind of get us kicking, I think

2019 might be GNOME's year to lose. So, you know, GNOME shipping on all major commercial and non-commercial Linux distros right now. But just looking at some benchmarks that Michael Larble posted on December 30th over on Pharonix, impressively, GNOME has made significant performance improvements over 2018. And now at the beginning of 2019, in some benchmarks, is performing better than MATE, LXQt, XFCE, and Plasma even. Not in all circumstances, and these are mainly GPU-bound tests. Even in some circumstances under Wayland,

it's under Wayland. It's under Wayland it's still performing better than those other desktops. And this is undoubtedly due to work by a lot of great people on the GNOME project and folks at Canonical, no question about it. This has been a collective effort for them to improve the shell. But we started out 2018 feeling pretty bad about where GNOME was at performance-wise, memory leaks.

I mean, the beginning of 2018, we're talking about memory leaks on GNOME. That's right. Now, they've closed that performance gap and even in some cases, exceeded the performance of the other desktops in certain types of tests. We're not talking about like multi-threaded things. We're talking about certain types of GPU-bound tests. So it's really GN known's year to lose over 2019

because they're addressing the performance issue. If they can start rebuilding parts of the shell over time so we have things That's the question

right there is, okay, well, it's in an okay place. I don't think, there are questions about the future in 2019. Can they keep up

the same level of attention to detail, new features, keeping things stable while going under a major re-architecture? Yeah. All right. So there you go. In old school when we still had ads, that's what we call a tease.

I've never installed GNU slash Linux. Let's take a second here and do a little housekeeping, and then we'll jump into the year in review and the hope casting. So a couple of items I just want everybody listening to be aware of that I think are important. Just I'll be gone for a little bit. I'll be traveling down to Texas in the RV and on my way down, stopping to get married and then honeymooning. So I'll be in and out in a way. We've prerecorded some great conversations that will be rolled into the show while I'm not here. And we also have

some episodes that I'll be on while I'm on the road. And then there'll be some that I'm not on. So it's big. It's exciting. And also I'll be down in Texas. We'll be doing a whole bunch of new content launches for Linux Academy. Nice. So I'll be on the live streams doing that again. Yeah, that's always a lot of fun. And then, yeah,

flying to Cancun for part of that and doing the honeymoon thing too. Ooh, are you excited? I am. I'm very excited. And so on our way down to Texas, we're stopping in the Arizona desert in this spot. It's called BLM Land, which is the Bureau of Land Management. Right.

And it's kind of like no man's territory. The federal government owns it, and they just have no use for it. So they let you just camp on it for free. Particular American West kind of problem. It's so great. It really is the best kind of problem. And it's really, this area is really, really well known for its star watching.

So we're going to do like a 5 a.m. in front of the stars kind of thing. That sounds beautiful. Yeah. We're kind of hoping to track down a photographer a.m. in front of the stars kind of thing. That sounds beautiful. Yeah. We're kind of hoping to track down a photographer in the area. So we'll see. Oh, hey, my hand's up. Are you in Arizona though? Bring it on.

I love it. That's awesome. So we will have some stuff while I'm out. So I'll be in and out for a bit and doing that stuff down in Texas. Going to live down in Texas for like three weeks, basically almost a month. Just going to have Lady Joop's Park down at Linux Academy. That is nice.

This is the whole you live in an RV benefit. Yeah, plus it's winter. So I'm cool getting out of here for a little while. It's good. Not that it's amazing in Texas, but it doesn't rain like it does here. And then, of course, one more thing

I want everyone to know about is I'll be back before LinuxFest, but in April, it is LinuxFest. I'll be back by around the end of January. But April 26th

or the 28th, 2019, Bellingham Technical College in Washington State, LinuxFest Northwest, 20th anniversary of LinuxFest. You've heard us invite you to this before

and extol the many, but this is the year. It's going to be big. So that's about housekeeping I had for you. I'm looking forward to my time on the road. I will be popping in when I'm in Texas. I have a studio down there now, so I'll pop in and do the show thing and all that. So I won't be

gone the entire time, but there will be portions in January where I'm gone. But the show will go on. LinuxUnplugged.com slash subscribe. Now, before we go into 2019, let's talk just a little bit about what stuck with us in 2018. And I got a couple things. And we could toss them around.

But just one I bet we don't have a lot of commentary on. But I think we'll always remember Meltdown was in 2018. Meltdown and Spectre were a huge thing. Yeah, I remember when we found out that a lot of the recent designs of our CPUs was just kind of fundamentally unsound. Yeah. That was great. And even today, we are seeing articles published about the performance penalties.

we are seeing articles published about the performance penalties. I just saw an article about how Linux is particularly taking a penalty right now in a particular area when you have a particular type of mitigation that's much worse than any of the other operating systems. And they're scrambling to try to fix that. And now we're in 2019.

So I think that was pretty big. But for me personally, in my Linux usage, one of the biggest things that happened was the release of Ubuntu 18.04. I rebased my whole studio on that. And I rebased my workstations on that. And some of the derivatives I use rebased on that. Yeah, it kind of took over your whole life.

Yeah, I went all in on 18.04. And I think it's been a pretty great release. I think it's been pretty solid. Especially for workstations, for servers. I mean, I think 16.04 was a big culmination for the project in general, just with all the changes that had happened. And then 18.04 is just a shiny, nice OS. It's one of those releases that you feel really comfortable recommending.

To new people and stuff. It's like, yeah, give this feel really comfortable recommending to new people. It's like, yeah, give this a go. Give this a try. And I felt like at the end of 2018, 1804 still stands out almost a year later now. It really still stands out as one of the best releases that they've had and one of the better desktop Linux releases. Every distro has got good releases, but this, I thought, was a particularly good one. I'm sure anybody in the mom room, if they want to chime in on that, I'm sure you guys probably feel similar. If you don't, feel free to interrupt me.

I wholeheartedly agree, Chris, of course. Of course you do. But I think even, you know, I mean, even as somebody who works for Canonical, you have to admit there's some releases that are good, and there's some releases that seem like they're pretty great. And I think you guys do a pretty good job of nailing it on the LTSs. 14.04 was solid, 16.04 was solid, and 18.04 is solid. But now you've really got it down. Live patching, hardware enablement,

backporting, like the whole thing. Like there's just, it's, there's very little penalty now for using the LTS. And it really kind of all came together. I've long stuck on the LTSs like most normal people. And as I've mentioned here before, the number of people who stick to LTS releases of Ubuntu is an order of magnitude greater than those people who venture into the non-LTSs. And sure enough, there are people who try the non-LTSs, especially those adventurous gamers who want the latest Mesa or some other interesting driver for a bit of

hardware they have. Sure. And that's what that's there for, is to try out that new stuff. But the stability of the LTS is so critical. And 1804 has, I agree, been pretty fantastic. I'm running 1804 on my main machine here, and I have no intention of moving off it right now. And I think a lot of the projects that are based on Ubuntu have benefited from it too. The elementary team released Juno this year, and it is a great release.

And that project is firing on all cylinders in a way that no other distribution is. It's really impressive to watch that. But another 2018 item that impacted me, like in an emotional way even, and now looking back on it feels like, what is it? What is the, not a Tempest, what's the same? Tempest and a teacup. Is that it?

Okay. Yeah, the kernel code of conduct stuff just blew up in a way that was just maybe way, way, way, way too strong. Not because these things don't matter, but because if you're not involved with the project, you know, you don't really have a lot of skin in the game. Right. you don't really have a lot of skin in the game. Right. I mean, if you didn't hear any news, you didn't know about Linus stepping away, any of that stuff, kernel releases,

I mean, they kept happening, work on goes. Yeah, I think looking back on it, what bothers me about it the most is something that the Linux community does more and more as we are more hyper-connected on the internet, and that is we have secondary outrage. We almost, like, we get outraged on the behalf of another individual.

So some other individuals, in this case, the kernel developers, are being oppressed by this code of conduct. And so everyone freaks out and gets outraged, even though it doesn't directly affect them. They're not involved with the project. They won't be under this code of conduct. I mean, you could argue they use the product,

but the outrage just was, it was as if each person was individually affected by the change. We just like to make doom and gloom predictions, too, and it's hard when there are big things announced, big changes, to just be like, take a beat, let's see how this goes.

Well, and not to toot our own horn, but I feel like that was sort of our take on it, was everybody slow down, and let's just see how this thing plays out. I mean, we, you know, we had a lot behind the scenes where we kicked, we voiced everybody's opinions, and everybody, we really kind of had a group discussion, but when we got a microphone, we kind of, in that episode, I feel like, took a more, alright, let's just, let's just everybody slow down, and remember that we need to trust the people that are running the project. The people that are

developing the kernel know more than we do about what it's like to trust the people that are running the project. The people that are developing the kernel know more than we do about what it's like to develop the kernel. But I think we'll always kind of look back at that as, I don't want to say a stain, because there's still valid points that were made in the discussion. I wonder if we'll see any changes or progress in that discussion in 2019. Not our proudest moment, though. No.

Not our proudest moment. No. Chrome OS, Linux apps coming. You know, we watched that go from a rumor to beta to shipping. They really moved on that pretty quickly. And now we have full-fledged

Linux applications on Chrome OS and Google's really signaling, hey, this is a platform for developers now. It's becoming a full-fledged operating system. Yeah, a couple of years ago, would you have ever thought that?

No. Like, Google's making a desktop Linux, basically. It's supposed to be the web browser OS, you know, and they're just using Linux as a detail. I thought they were a search engine. I thought they were an ad company. Yeah.

I mean, now you're thinking that this next year is going to be the one where you do get a Chromecast. A Chromebook, yeah, you're right. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, I mean, because they added that support. They added that support. What do you think, guys? Code of Conduct and the Chromebook, yeah, you're right. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, I mean, because they added that support. They added that support. What do you think, guys? Code of Conduct and the Chrome stuff,

would you rank those as major moments in 2018? Brent, how do you feel like looking back on the Code of Conduct stuff and Chrome OS? Does that stand out to you as something that shifted? Well, I think as you were talking about it, I was thinking, well, okay, imagine ourselves in five years and looking back, what are the things that are going to stand out? And I think certainly those are unusual happenings that really, really shook things. Or at the very least, got tons of people talking. So is that alone a benefit? Yeah, I think so. And we're still talking about it. So maybe they're a good thing. Still playing out, right? The code of conduct is a living document. It's been modified once already. And Chrome OS Linux apps, like we just covered in the community news,

getting GPU support now. So they're getting even more sophisticated. Well, and it played into your predictions too, right? You're expanding on that idea of Chrome OS running Linux apps to Fuchsia and things like that. So it's continuing for sure. Yeah. Hmm. All right.

The other area that just saw rapid development and just blew up in 2018 is Proton. Steam Play? It just went from like, here's 15 officially supported games to oh by the way it's actually more like 2000 you can actually play like 2000 windows games most of them work wine is over 20 years old it took us 25 years to get a handful of games and then it took us not us it took valve and the developers they're paying it It took them three, four months to get us 2,000. It just exponentially expanded.

It is amazing. I mean, it's amazing in some sense like how close we were. You know, there's a lot of fundamentals in wine and the work that's been put in over the years to make this possible. And now we're actually reaping the benefits. And before, I mean, right, there were some games that worked and you could do things, and if you really had all the right bottles set up. But I never recommended that to anyone.

And now, people who I was thinking about converting, they'll be like, well, here, look at this giant database of games you can play. Yeah, and when you turn on Steam Play, you click the play button and it just launches, and it'll come up with a message saying, you know, it's not optimized for this operating system or whatever, but even that's very vague. You don't really, you're like, well, I don't care, just play a damn game. And it'll come up with a message saying, you know, it's not optimized for this operating system or whatever. But even that's very vague. You don't really, you're like,

well, I don't care, just play the damn game. And it works. It works. I've been playing the hell out of No Man's Sky. Oh. In creative mode. They didn't have that the last time I played. The last time I jury rigged it under Wine,

I got it working for like two months under Wine. And then it didn't update because the game was so bad when it launched. And they didn't update and it quit working under Wine. And I just kind of didn't bother. And now, with Prodon, well, let's try it again. And the game's so bad when it launched, and they did an update and it quit working under Wine. And I just kind of didn't bother. And now, with Prodon, well, let's try it again. And the game's way better than it was at launch now. It's way more fun to play.

So I've really liked that. And now that I have that GPU dock, too, it's like, well, I got a GPU, might as well. You know, we got a good guy one. Yeah, that's going to change the discussions, too, right? You can point outsiders to this, people skeptical of, will this ever really work on Linux? It already does.

Yeah. I remember on Linux Action Show, was it a few years ago when you guys were in the wants, like, oh, crazy desires episode, you guys were saying, oh, if only we had games, right? And now it's a normal thing.

That's a huge success for sure. All right. Just a couple more quick ones to get us ready for our Hope casting because we've probably reflected on these enough. But the LVFS project, getting official firmware support by a bunch of vendors. Yeah, right at the start of the year,

there were a couple, but now it feels like most in some quadrants. Yeah, that is massive momentum that they're going to carry into 2019. And WireGuard. WireGuard is incredible. It's going to be a game changer for Linux. The hype, I know it's strong,

but the reason why I say it is, if you use it, you'll know. When a VPN is as simple as key exchanges and upping and downing an interface, it becomes a glue that will hold the internet together. It really will. And we've just seen it get so far in 2018. I feel like it's one of the underappreciated success stories

of 2018 is WireGuard. It's not very often a new way to VPN. It all just went so well. It's almost sort of suspicious. It's like it just works. Everyone seems to like it. There's already commercial providers. If you want that route.

I'm already using it. And it's so good. You're using it? It's so good. I'm using it from an iPad. And you set it up. You did a couple things. Yeah, I was like, yeah, this isn't too bad. And then I got two more.

So in order of, I think, just huge shocks to me. Seriously, Neon. KDE Neon took the year by storm. I watch their groups, you know, their Telegram groups,

and I pay attention to the Reddits and been running it now for a while on a few of my machines and I don't know what it is. I don't know

if it's a meta overlay or if it is a distribution. Some would argue it's not. I was talking with Simon Quigley in the Telegram channel, the jupyterbroadcasting.com slash Telegram,

and he was arguing that because it's really just a matter of scripts and continuous integration and then deploying on that basis, that it's not technically a distribution. And I was arguing that it still takes care and time to put that together, and when they transitioned from 16.04 to 18.04, that they worked on that and were very hands-on, and that makes it a distribution, even if they don't like it. But either way, their user base is huge now.

Like, KDE Neon has a serious representation, and it's remarkable because in a lot of ways, it's completely inappropriate for a lot of users. It's a way to use the latest and greatest Plasma desktop that maybe shouldn't be fully deployed yet. I don't know. I use it not on all my production systems. On my production systems, I use Kubuntu 18.04,

which to me is a better workstation distribution because it's LTS top to bottom. Yeah, right. I mean, on the desktop, when you get a new feature or something works on the embedded, you're like, oh, yay, change, fun, okay. And on your server or your workstation, you're like, oh, yay, change, fun, okay. And on your server or your workstation, you're like, oh, no, I'm not ready to learn a new workflow.

Or why would you change that setting I was using and relying on? But it was Neon's year. I mean, they went huge in 2018. It's surprising it worked so well, but I think it speaks to that simplicity that we were talking about earlier. And that 1804 base. Yeah, a great base. And that 1804 base.

Yeah, a great base. Yeah, that too helps. And then lastly, you just can't get through 2018 without mentioning IBM buying Red Hat for $34 billion. That's sort of the biggest story of the year. There's just no getting around that. Anything that sells for $34 billion is – If Red Hat sold for $2 billion, that would have been a big story, okay? $34 billion. And IBM?

Huge story. And there's just no getting around that. Like Brent said, I like Brent's perspective. Take a five-year perspective, that's still a big story, right? In five years, that's still a big story. Oh, yeah, right. We haven't really even seen at all

what the outcome of this is going to be. Early days isn't even fair. It's not even early days still. It'll be early days after the merger is approved and it's actually happened, then it's early days. We're in the pre-show still. I look back at 2018 and that is, by the way,

a super brief summation. We have, you know, because of Linux Action News and this show, Joe and myself have been tracking stories, and you have been tracking stories relentlessly all year round. And this is like such a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of what's happened. The pace of development and major things happening, like I didn't even mention Microsoft buying GitHub. You know?

There's all sorts of stuff just on the cutting room floor right here. So there's so much. When you think about what's happened, guys, when you think about what Microsoft's done, about Red Hat, about Proton, about Meltdown, like, almost anything is possible in 2019, even as batshit crazy as Oracle GPLing ZFS. Could happen. Oracle could get bought by a company that open sources it. You know, it could happen. So I thought, let's take some time and do our Hopecast for 2019. And I'll start with that one. I hope in 2019, Oracle just

settles all of this shenanigans around ZFS and just open sources it properly and GPLs it. One of the things that's happening in the background right now is Illumos, which is essentially the master upstream for ZFS, kind of, at least it is for FreeBSD and the BSD projects and a bunch of other stuff. The repo where previously a lot of the main feature work for ZFS took place. The repo where previously a lot of the main feature work for ZFS took place. That's all transitioning now to be rebased off of the ZFS on Linux project.

That will sort of be the master upstream project. We're going to get into more details in a future episode very soon with very specific information. But at a high level, that's a huge shift for the industry just right there. Just sort of all the other projects realigning under the ZFS on Linux project. And it would just be the perfect solution. Like they could own the market. Oracle's file system could dominate the entire market if they just GPL'd it and could get it mainlined into Linux.

That's what my magic wand hopecast is for 2019. I know it's boring, but it would change so many things. It would change so many things for Linux. It would be massive. I have a question about that, Chris. What do you think would be their incentive to have it be run everywhere? You know, that's tough.

And that's why I'm very skeptical. That's why it's in the magic wand section and not predictions. But you could ask that same question about a lot of the actions Microsoft has taken recently, and it usually takes several layers of analysis to really get to the root of how does Microsoft open sourcing XYZ benefit them. And you can usually work your way there, but you've got to really think it through. And maybe there's something there we're not seeing yet with Oracle

that they could, maybe there's some advantage to having your file system be the number one enterprise file system. Maybe there's a way to make money from that even if you're not selling licenses for it because they're not making a ton of money on it right now.

Everybody's just re-implementing the open source free version. They're using the ZFS on Linux, OpenZFS or the Lumos version. There's not like a revenue stream that they'd be giving up on other than people that are buying unbreakable Linux, and all five of those people are not really going to make a big difference. I think.

But I couldn't tell you what it would be. I don't know. What about you, Mr. Payne? You got any magic wand, foo? Yeah, okay. Yes, I do. If I could have you, Mr. Payne? You got any magic wang, foo? Yeah, okay. Yes, I do. If I could have something, I think it would be, well, I mean, there's many somethings, of course.

I know. How about this? A totally open source, commercially available touchpad that works with Linux of MacBook quality. That could be integrated into laptops. Yeah, right. I mean, just like a regular part that you could buy. The driver was solid. Oh, that is such a great one. It'd be a small change, but

I mean, I use this darn thing every day. And it's still not good enough. No, I know. I mean, normally, actually, I don't hate touchpads, but this actively gets in my way. The problem we have, both of us on our ThinkPad, it's like detecting our fan or fan hat

or hand fat even hovering over I swear it hasn't made contact and yet the cursor jumps halfway across my screen and highlights a whole paragraph of text and replaces it with whatever I get stuck where it thinks it's like still pressed yeah

yeah it's not great it's not not great no it's not great that's a really good one I really don't think it's going to happen, but I would love it. Something with like an open source haptic engine in it. Maybe like a RISC-V processor or one of those new open source MIPS processors to do the management inside there.

It could even be an Arduino, I suppose. You know, you could go the keyboardios route. Something that could be integrated into a laptop or a standalone trackpad. Oh, yeah. That could be fun, too. That'd be really nice. I'd like that one a lot. What about you, Mumbroom?

Anybody in the Mumbroom want to jump in with one of their hopecasts? I hate the word, but I don't got anything better. Okay, I'll start with the small one and this is where you can have an effect. It also includes Linux Fest, Northwest actually.

So one huge thing that I think everyone would benefit from and I personally would absolutely love, if realistic, I'll put that in there is to be able to listen live in real time to the shows being recorded. I think that'd be really awesome. Oh, like the audio

stream again. Get the audio stream working again. Do you have that wand? We actually are assembling that wand right now. Yeah. So the audio stream was working at the last Linux Fest, but there's some there were some delays last year, so it didn't really make sense. So either if you can cut that delay or if...

Anyways, if you need some help, I'm totally willing to help with that. And if anybody else is willing to help, I think that'd be really cool. I feel like that could happen. That may be one magic wand. That's what I like to hear. All right, all right. So is there another one I can help you with, or is that it? Is that where all my leverage is?

This is where Chris grants everyone's wishes. I have many more, but I think one that's more sort of open source community, a little on the outlandish side, which is always fun to chat about, would be I know that GDPR sort of is encouraging services to open up data so you can share between services, so you can get in and out easily. I would love to see that for OSs, so to make it much easier to get people out of certain other OSs, say Apple, and into OSs like Linux. I try to help a lot of people do that, and the most frustrating part is getting their data

out of their proprietary systems. So that's a big one for me. Like a standard export function that collects up the documents, the photos, your desktop icons, your settings, and puts them in an easy-to-read file that any other operating system could then import, and then it would put the information

where it's supposed to be in its relevant applications. It's crazy talk and I like it. I think that. Yeah, right. I mean, you could even have like a, yeah, make it easy.

Like, oh yeah, these applications are installed. Here's where their data lives. Yeah. That should be a thing. Just like Google's, Google Takeout. Yeah.

Like the hardest thing I've run into is trying to get even the simplest data out of iOS, for instance, like notes. Yeah. Oh, no. It's crazy how difficult it is to get out in a just bulk export way. You can't even do it.

So I know that they're not incentivized to help you get out of there. Right. Yep. That's the biggest problem is that they use that as a lock-in technique. Well, yeah, that's it. So that's a crazy outlandish hope that I would have to make the planet a better place. I like that. All right.

If you have more, hold on, and we'll come back around. What about you, Bruce? Do you have any wishes or hopes for 2019 if you could snap your fingers and make it happen? Well, I didn't have too much time to think, but one thing that came to mind was something that might be in the crazy idea territory is a non-distribution- specific public Linux repository of software. Hmm. Free software?

Sort of like old SourceForge or? Well, no, you just like, you normally have your apt get and your yum repositories connected to the distribution that you've chosen, but you know, you like the EPL kind of sort of thing where you subscribe to another repository, one that is just kind of universal. I'm not even sure it's a good idea, but this is what I come up with on short notice.

I like it, though. I can see it. I mean, really, part of that could be that one of those takes off because I feel like there are some of those things, and I guess in some ways you could think of snaps as those, but it's not quite the right fit. The other thing that I was thinking of was just the hardware support thing of Linux. One thing that's a pet peeve

of mine is when I go to the computer store and I look at a box and it says, supports Windows and Mac. And then I pull out my phone and I look and see if somebody else has managed to get this thing working. I wish hardware companies would at least check and see whether their stuff worked in Linux and put it on the box.

You're reading one of my hopes. I have one about that if nobody else calls it. Yeah, I agree. Some branding, some marketing. Just really quickly, that's mine. Just like an organized group comes together. Like a moderately well-funded organized group could come together and do some marketing. Yeah, right, you hear like ads about like from the USB people.

So we could have Linux ads. What's that foundation doing? Dude, the Dairy Association got milk. Like if we could have our own got milk, it would make a huge difference. Got uptime? Got freedom. My hope for this year is one of positivity. I

would like to see us, and by us, I mean the wider Linux community and people who are spectating and commenting on the Linux community. I wish we could focus on some of the positive things that happen and the new applications people are developing and new features and freedoms that people are enabled with free software rather than focusing on all the drama.

We have a tendency in the Linux community to eat ourselves alive and the rest of the world looks on and makes us you know thinks we're some kind of amateur our idiots who just argue with each other constantly and it'd be lovely if we could you know count to 10 think and maybe put out some positive messages rather than constantly making articles and YouTube videos about the biggest drama in Linux. It gets tiresome and it doesn't get us any further forward. It does get tiresome. And I'll also say this

too. We can't afford all the, what did you say, we're eating our own tails? We just eat ourselves? We are so far behind in market share when it comes to the desktop area and desktop adoption and getting the market even recognized as a viable platform for even web applications and Unity games. That's where we're at still. We're getting better, but that's where we're at.

And so anything that really is effort that isn't spent in fixing that, anytime we're spending effort on tearing each other down, even when we think it's super justified, like going back to that code of conduct thing, like everybody on both sides of that, even now, as I say, this still feels like they were completely justified in their behavior and on their, but looking at it from the outside in the rest of the industry, like a code of conduct is standard operating procedure and it's normal. And so while you can argue if that's good or bad, when they look at it, they see what we're doing and they go, what the hell are they freaking out about? What is their problem? And meanwhile, we're really not focused on the core issues and the core problems. And it really changes.

It really changes things. So I completely back that up. And as much as we can, I hope we can contribute to that. I feel like we've been trying to. You know, we try to walk the line. We don't want to come on here and sort of sugarcoat everything. And we also want things to talk about. But also, and you guys know who watch the shows live,

we'll intentionally not run with a title that we think is extra clickbaity. Even though we'll even have the conversation many times. We'll say, hey, that title would definitely get us some clicks, but we're not going to use it, right? That happens all the time. And so it's a line you have to walk, and it sounds stupid, but we hope that in part it can be our contribution back as trying to direct the conversation in a positive way as much as appropriate. So I agree with that one, Pobi, and I really do hope that one comes true.

Well, let's go back around the top. Brent, I think you said you had another one. You had another prediction, or actually, I guess, let's not call it a prediction, but a hope. Yeah, I mean, hope is an interesting word because you can just make up whatever you would like or you can make it a little bit more realistic.

Right, yeah. So I'm going to move to the realistic side, maybe. But I think Wes touched on this a little bit, but just to expand it, I think an open source mobile OS that's actually usable for almost the everyday person would be really great. I know we're making strides towards that, and it's coming very slowly, and we have some cool projects working on it, but just to see it become a bit more mainstream would be a real treat.

If I could piggyback off that and, again, make it a little more real-ish. Please do. I would just say, I wish for the Librem 5 to work out. Yeah, yeah. I like that. There's a lot of skeptics, but it would be so great, wouldn't it? Oh yeah. I mean, I'm one of them.

I really am. But I'm not hoping for like a realistic, I'm hoping for like, it's just great. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'd be okay within the year if it was, I can make calls, I can look stuff up, maybe I can send some messages on Telegram or something. Some real just basics, usable, MVP-style product. I'd be okay with that.

That would be a success in my book. That would be a success, honestly. It wouldn't be ready to replace iOS or Android, but something that isn't crashy, that's usable. Something to build on. And free would be a massive accomplishment. And it's weird to think it's, I mean, it's within striking distance. It's possible, you know.

We'll just see. So I like that one, Brent. You still sound so skeptic. It's just, you know, I think 2018 was also the year I kind of gave up on the idea that we're ever going to replace Coke and Pepsi. And it's like bumming me out a little bit because we've watched so many cool ideas over the years kind of go nowhere. So, you know, it seems almost impossible at this point,

because there's so much, even if you built a great operating system with good apps and great security features and a fully free hardware and software stack, nothing says it'll have any market success in any way that makes revenue. There's still nothing that says you're, because the mobile market isn't a regular, you know, products win

on their merits market. It is a market where there's deals made, there's ecosystems, there's carriers, there's middlemen, salesmen, there's just so many factors at play that dictate success and so many entrenched interests that want the current Android and iOS normal ecosystem to be the thing because that's what makes the money. Like it's just those entrenched interests aren't really all that motivated to sell some new unheard of product by some company that has no brand. Nobody knows who Purism is. They know who Apple is. They know who HTC and Motorola is. But even the phones by those companies, like LG and HTC.

There's already way too many phones to pick from. It makes it pretty hard to distinguish. And they don't make any money. It's Apple and Samsung making money, right? And probably Googs, I don't know. But I just, whew. Yeah, Brent, I mean, that is a magic wand one. But, oh man, am I right there with you.

All right, well, I got something that's a little more down to earth than you want. Just something I think that actually could happen. All right, all right. Last year, I saw that Fedora set up with Flickr-free Linux boot. I hope 2019 sees that just widespread. Yeah. It's a small thing, but it's just polished, right?

So nice. And I'll say too, I was thinking one of my hopes is that we finally finish off high DPI support. Oh, yes. Come on! You and I, towards the end of 2018, had an opportunity to buy new laptops, looked at it, and decided to go with 1080p screens. If they had 2K screens in these laptops,

I would have gone with that. But they had 4K screen options. They probably would have been better screens, you know, but we just didn't want to fight with software issues, especially with some of the production software we use that isn't using like GTK3 or Qt, which maybe there's just nothing that can be done there. But I would love to see it because compared to the Mac, it's embarrassing. Oh, it is. Now, compared to Windows 10, we're doing all right. We're doing okay. But compared to the Mac,

like the Mac has had, quote-unquote, retina support like since 2012 or something like that. It's been, they've had that locked in now for multiple releases of multiple operating systems, and they've iterated on multiple screen technologies in multiple laptops. They've destroyed their keyboards, but they nailed high DPI.

You can only do so many things, Chris. And I would love to see that. I'd love to see a macOS-level high DPI. And you can get close. If you live all GTK3 or all Qt, or you're on elementary and you're installing all the elementary apps from the App Center, you can get there.

You can get there. But when you deviate out into applications that don't use the native toolkits. When you take advantage of that open source diversity. Yeah, that diversity we love so much, it does get a little wonky. And especially some of the more commercial applications. All right, well, does anybody else have a hope they want to toss into the mix before we wrap it up? One last time to get on the record for 2019, Bruce, you want to try?

Yeah, one thing I just came up with is I'd like to not have to fiddle with video drivers just to be able to depend on them to do it there. I've always been an NVIDIA guy, but lately I've run into problems with that, and it's always been a sore point with me with Linux systems, just getting the video to behave and not to do flickery things

and crash games and things like that, so I've been hoping that one for a long time, but that might be Magic Wand stuff too. It seems to be kind of like a one-armed bandit kind of thing, whether you get a setup that works flawlessly or not. You know, I like that one, especially for those out there that are trying to use the NVIDIA cards because that is still an area where I have a little bit of issue.

My Intel-only systems are so solid. They are really solid. They're literally the definition of zero hassle. It's so, so nice. I'll add on to that. I'll pile on. I'm going to say audio. You know, and I have had really good luck

since we switched to Plasma and 1804 in the studio. I have had really, really, really good systems. However, over the last couple of weeks, and especially today, I have had significant audio problems where when I open up Mumble or OBS, in Pulse Audio, it changes the input and output devices to just different devices, even in some cases, devices that are actually disabled. And my applications don't have audio. I could open up, say, a web browser and play a YouTube video just fine, but maybe that one

application got the audio swapped. And there's other deficiencies too, where Pulse Audio gets confused if you have multiple audio devices with the same exact name. We standardized on a couple of audio interfaces. So some systems have three audio interfaces plugged into them because we're doing multi-track recording and whatnot. And Pulse Audio will just kind of randomly mix them all up. So in one day you boot up in the dropdown, it's one unit, but the next one day you boot up in the drop-down, it's one unit, but the next day in the same drop-down, in the same slot

in the drop-down, it's a totally different audio unit. And there's no way to tell them apart. So I'm really hopeful for Pipewire. I'm really hopeful

that we finally nail this because, honestly, we were 15 minutes out from starting, I'm already on the live stream and I can't talk to the mumble room

because, even though I've been using this computer literally all day, since 9am, non-stop, making shows with Wes, because we're recording some content while I'm gone, so we've been in the studio since 9am recording, without issue. But then we close one

application and open up another application, and the whole audio system's all screwing up. We walked away for 20 minutes, I came back, and nothing worked. We took a 20 minute break. And then across the table from me, a separate rig, same software stack, but we're using OBS instead of Mumble, same problem. And it's just the weirdest thing. And I just completely lose confidence in the equipment when that happens

because we start having a weird audio issue on the audio stream, and now I don't know if it's something wrong with pulse audio, if it's something on the encoder. I've lost confidence in the entire stack and these are static systems that get minimal important critical updates and minimal reboots except for about once a month and

yeah right I mean that kind of plays into the pipe wire hope of and kind of that's been the problem too with what we're talking about clear desktop and other things it's hard sometimes a really good desktop operating system or some of the goals, the dynamic nature, the usability, make a pretty poor workstation, right?

We didn't want things automatically changing because we want to set it up once. And leave it. But we also don't want to have to rip out Pulse and then put Jack in or do something complicated, right? That's a lot more work. So if we could have one system, just made it all work together.

Mm-hmm. All right, Brent. I think you got another one in there. We probably get the last couple ones in there, so I'd love to hear what you got. Sure. I was just wondering, for your audio problem, is not Brown Bear playing some New Year's tricks on you or anything?

No, I don't think so, because if there's one thing he doesn't want me to do is rage quit using Linux. I don't think he wants that. So, I have a JB he wants that. So I have a JB related one. It's actually more of a question and then a Dell related one. So if we have time. So for JB, my

question is, do you have any hopes for JB in the new year? It's been some major changes in 2018. Do you guys hope to see anything in 2019? Well, yeah. Yeah, I have a lot of really big ambitious things. I haven't really thought about how much I want to talk about. That's a good question. Because we've been, now that we to Texas quite a bit, meeting with the leadership team down there and just kind of getting involved. I've taken on a larger role where I'm getting involved with other projects in the company, just advising. You know, it's one of the reasons they

wanted to bring me on is just for other skill sets that I have that don't really come out on mic, I guess. I don't know. Maybe it's the hair. And that's been really interesting because it's given me a much broader perspective. It's given me insights into the larger industry as well. And I'll say in broad strokes, we want to do a lot more meetups that we could stream and have maybe an educational angle on them. I want to release some of the Linux Academy content for free to the community and then build study courses around them, or videos, not full courses. I probably shouldn't use the same language they use because they're not, you know,

it's our version of those things. They're not like the multi-month projects that the Linux Academy training architects go on. But something to introduce you to that. Something, you know, something that we can contribute back. So I want to free some of that up and release some of that and then use some resources to build videos around that.

That's sort of a secondary thing to what we do now. But I want to grow our team a little bit. And I hope by the end of 2019, JB shows are like tap water. There's a release every single week, light clockwork. And we're really close. We almost never miss a week on any of our shows, but I want it to be universally true on

all of our shows, that every week there's something there. Even if it has to be a week where we do something, we say, hey, we don't have a regular episode for you, but, you know, and we just update you on what's going on and what to expect. So I want to get really good about that now that we've got a full-time team. I feel like there's really no reason

we can't achieve that. So we, because we nearly got there when we were all doing it on our own time. And now I feel like that we have a full-time team should be achievable.

So I want us to be a very reliable podcast network that's releasing on schedule. Yeah, right for you guys. And then this is the year, one way or another, that the website gets replaced.

I have been done with the Jupyter Broadcasting website for three years, and now we're not even living in the same home anymore. Me and the website are not even speaking to each other anymore. Oh, you make me be the intermediary. Wes, will you tell the website that I want this show posted? That's true in a lot of ways. Don't you love having a Wes? It's pretty good.

It's pretty good. So replacing the website, and then obviously we have a couple of, I think, our most ambitious show ideas that we've ever done. And now we have more resources to pull some of those off. And I'm not talking like in production, but more like the host that will be joining us.

And that's really exciting. Like, should we, we could probably, I mean, we kind of teased it, what's happening on TechSnap. But TechSnap, for example, will be the first show that's seen some changes. Some shows aren't going to have anything change. Some shows are just like, you know, really like our plans for the show are just mostly keep doing what we're doing and see if we just can't, you know,

always just get better at it. Yeah. But for TechSnap, we're going to replace me with Jim Salter, who is an author and writer over at Ars Technica, and he's also... Previous TechSnap guest. Previous TechSnap guest,

a WireGuard expert, and a sysadmin by trade. And he's going to be joining Wes, and they both have practical hands-on experience that's very current. They're both really sharp and both have strong opinions about this stuff. And so we want to bring those style of hosts and quality to our show. So we want to really kind of raise the bar as much as we can in terms of production quality and host quality. And now we can,

you know, now we can afford to like buy, you know, recording remote recording kits and send them so people sound better and things like that. So we'll be doing more of that. But really it's, it's for us,

it's sort of getting to just take the leash off and just go full bore at something that we've always wanted to be able to do, but never could quite pull it off. And now it's like, okay, well, let's pull this off and pull this off. We're trying to break it down into quarters. So that way we don't overdo and overbite. And it's hard to decide, right? There's so many things you're like, oh, we finally have some resource and time to do these things. What do we do first? So we've got quarter one goals and we're building the quarter two goals right now. And we're trying to think about things and what can we pull off? And we had a new person join our team today.

I'm going to wait to announce her and talk about her until she can join us, but very excited about having her on. She's a course architect also at Linux Academy and involved with the Docker community and super sharp, funny, nice, just great to work with. So we're able to grow the team a little bit

and things like that. So those kinds of things I'm really just great to work with. So we're able to grow the team a little bit and things like that. So those kinds of things I'm really looking forward to in 2019. And then just kind of seeing where this whole VP of community role takes it, because it's already inclusive of a lot more than I originally expected. And I think it's just kind of getting started.

Because I'm a maniac. You know, they bought my company and then I'm going to come in and take them away. Yeah, that's right. From the inside. That's how we do it. Okay, so that was the JB one, but there was a second one there, Brent? Yeah. So, anyways, thanks for that answer.

That was awesome. And all sounds great. The other one is a bit more maybe on point for what we're trying to do. And that's just, I hope that Dell, instead of having their Linux laptop offering be a little bit hidden, I would love to see it offered on all of their machines on the website, anywhere. Really more prominent on the site. Well, yeah, make it a standard option. Wouldn't that be great? Yeah. If only we knew of some wizard that could, something like a Barton George style wizard. Oh, yes.

I really, it's driven me so crazy what you're saying right now. It really makes me disappointed that they haven't fixed it by now and I wonder if it's because they have

such a tight relationship with Microsoft or what but or maybe they just feel that there's there's no reason to do it. Maybe it'd be

confusing for their customers or whatever else. You wouldn't have a strong sense that they have some really solid Linux offerings. Of course their

website's hard. And they're already shipping it right if their website's hard. They may have one of the worst websites in the computer industry. I mean, really, HP's got a bad one too, though. I find browsing their site, just for a few different reasons, I actually found it very difficult to find the Linux offering, even though

I knew it existed. Just go to Barton's blog, and then he'll link you. I either go to Barton's blog, or I Google search for Dell developer laptop. Yeah, that's exactly the only way to get there, right? Yeah, it's not good. And the fact that it hasn't been addressed is a little embarrassing at this point

because it's a good product and it should. It works really well. They're doing it well and they just don't, won't let you have it. No, but people, the word's getting out there. The word is getting out there about it. You know, the folks at Linux Academy, that and the System76 rigs too. People at Linux Academy are talking about getting out there. The word is getting out there about it. You know, the folks at Linux Academy, that and the System76 rigs too.

People at Linux Academy are talking about trying out some. Oh. So people find out, even though it's not front and center. All right. Well, you're on a roll, Brent. Anything else, or was that it? Was that your last one? Yeah, yeah.

I got one more fun one. All right. Let's do it. All right. It's another question for you. Do you have any hopes for Lady Jupes in 2019? Oh, solar. Solar. Solar. Solar, and I want to replace the batteries. I want to go full off grid. And then, and I don't think it's going to

happen in 2019. If I could really go crazy, I'd like to replace the really stupid old school sensors I have, like in the tanks and for like the propane sensors, I'd like to replace it with like Arduinos or Raspberry Pi or something that would give me a dashboard of like my tank levels and my fuel levels. Oh, that would be neat. Yeah. And the water heater and all that kind of stuff that has dumb switches and dumb toggle lights to tell me like, you know, if they're working or not. And it's just contact leads that like generate an electrical signal back to an LED, right? So I know there's some way I could intercept that and have it feed into something. I know it's within my range to conceive of it, but like how to put it all together, I have no idea. And I'd love to address all of that stuff. But first I got to

get better batteries and solar. Well, on that note, this was a lot of fun. I enjoyed hearing what everybody thinks. And I think a lot of us were kind of thinking along the same things. Everybody had like another idea after somebody said something. I think that was some good stuff. I enjoyed it. And you know what just crossed my mind as we're wrapping up? Just looking forward, like the next time I'm on this show, I'll be a married man again. Isn't that weird? Wow. That's weird. That is a weird, starting 2019 out with a bang, you know? Congrats. That's awesome. Thank you. Thank you. It is very exciting. I hope everybody had a great New Year's. I hope you do have a great year.

And if you'd like to get Hopecast in, I'm sorry for the name. If you got something better, I'd like that too. There's no going back now. Linuxunplugged.com slash contact. We can read a couple more. Oh, yeah, sure. That'd be fun. Get a couple good ones in here and read them.

I'd love to hear yours. And maybe consider joining the show next week. I'll be out so the guys could use a little extra coverage. Help the guys out. Show up and... Come join. It'll be plenty of fun. Yeah.

And then also, go catch the last Ubuntu podcast maybe ever. You just don't know. That's the thing. We don't know yet. You can't know. You can't know. They don't know. They don't know until they have the curry.

UbuntuPodcast.org. The last season's episode is out now. I think technically there will definitely be two episodes next year because we've committed to doing one at Joe's event at FOS Talk. And we've made predictions for next year. So we've got to do one at least at the end of the year. Got that one wrong. Got that one wrong.

All right. Very good. It'll be very fast. Well, all right. I look forward to those two episodes at least. But something tells me. Something tells me we may see another season. Either way, UbuntuPodcast.org. And go check out what's coming to TechSnap.

Very excited about those changes. TechSnap.system. Systems or system? Systems. System? TechSnap.systems. Systems. TechSnap.systems.

See if you say it a few times, it might stick. And you can go to TechSnap.systems slash subscribe to get that. We just did my final episode. That'll be going out later this week where we kind of reviewed some of the crazy great trends we've seen. Yeah, we'll talk about the things TechSnap's seen and where it's going to be going.

That show has seen a few things, Wes. That show has seen a few things. And you can find links to whatever we talk about, although there wasn't really much, but we do have the community news and things like that linked at linuxunplugged.com slash 282. But that does bring us to the end. We're back to our regular Bat-Time and Bat-Channel.

Tuesdays, you can go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar to get that converted in your local time zone and hang out in the mumble room. Join us there. Tell us your thoughts. Or the IRC room, always going during the show, always watching it. It's a really great community. Some of these people have been around for a very long time. It's great.

Some folks are just showing up. You're welcome. You could be next. You definitely could. Thank you so much for joining us. You can follow me on Twitter at Chris Elias. He's at Wes Payne. The whole network at Jupiter Signal.

Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program. Here's to a fantastic 2019 and the guys not me but the guys we'll see you back here next tuesday unplugged program I just thought of another hope I hope I get open hab home assistant unplugged program. I just thought of another hope. I hope I get OpenHAB, Home Assistant, something set up

in Lady Joops in 2019. Let's do it. I think it's going to happen probably early 2019, really. I got that new Raspberry Pi. The whole thing with the kids. Lukewarm.

They like the switches way more than they like... Okay, so we've got the hardware. I've heard the software might be free and open source. I was a little... So for people that don't know, I got the new Raspberry Pi that came out, you know, the smaller one.

It's a little cheaper, but like a lot worse, but not too worse. So like this will run RetroPie just fine. And I looked it up first, and yeah, everybody said it's going to run RetroPie just fine. Super proud of myself. I got a case. So we assembled it like Legos.

That was fine. Then we got all hooked up, and you know I got the CRT television, right? So, so backstory. I bought a CRT television. But anyways, I'm like, well, let's go hook it up because you're going to have a whole day at work with dad on, this is on Monday. And, um, because they're out of school. And so, and I'm doing Coder, so why not bring

the kids, right? Yeah, right. You got some games for them. I go up there after thinking, well, this will keep them busy for an hour. Within 10 minutes, they turned it off and instead busted out the Legos and decided to build

like a Lego castle around the TV. And I mean, it looks cool, but they just were like not interested at all. Wow, that is disappointing. If it's not Mario, they're out.

So the retro Pi experiment didn't go well. So now we have a free Raspberry Pi to use for our home assistant or home bridge or whatever we want to use. We'll see how many we can set up on one machine. The whole chat room wants me to talk about this Ethan

tweet where, so this, there has been a real I guess you call it a tweet storm? I don't know what you call it. There's been a lot of upset on Twitter today because someone named Ethan, not Ethan from H3, but a different Ethan, a game developer, tweeted out a very poignant picture of how game developers will claim that Linux is too niche, but meanwhile, they're building apps for Fire TV, Tizen, Apple Watch, the Nvidia Shield, the Jump device. And there's so many.

There's so many more. We all know all these crazy devices that people will make their games for, their applications for. But Linux, it's too niche. And man, did that not just kick off the biggest back and forth between developers who claim that Linux is horrible to write for and others say that Linux is the only one they can stand writing for. It's all over Twitter today.

It's really, it's kind of a thing. If you just go to Twitter today and search for Linux, that's all anybody's talking about. Everybody's really upset. I don't have anything to make them feel better. There's nothing you can say.