LINUX Unplugged - 291: Dirty Home Directories

Episode Date: March 5, 2019

We reveal all and look at the mess that is our home directories. How we keep them clean, back them up, and organize our most important files. Plus Gnome lands a long awaited feature, Firefox gets a bit more clever, and the big money being made on Open Source. Special Guests: Alan Pope, Anthony James, Brent Gervais, Danielle Foré, Dustin Krysak, and Martin Wimpress.

Before we get the show rolling today, I'm wondering if any of you in the Mumba Room are working on any cool projects we can share with the class. I've been playing with some new things this week. Oh yeah? What? Well, an old thing renewed. So I've been working on bringing Ubuntu Mate 18.04 to the Raspberry Pi 2, 3, and 3+. But in doing so, I have reacquainted myself with Systemd nspawn, and I'm having a little love-in with SystemD and Spawn this week. Wes talks about this all the time. This is like a way to kind of do like little mini containers with using nothing but SystemD, right? Yeah, it's a part of the SystemD tool set that is for container management, and it can do most of

the things most of the container tools can do. but what i've been doing is pairing it up with a piece of software called qmu user static which is a fast processor emulator for arm and mips and a whole bunch and power pc a whole bunch of sort of unusual processor architectures and i've been able to create containers of arm 32-bit and arm 64-bit and actually do my build and testing on my intel workstation using foreign architecture containers even taking it to the point where you can bind mount into the container for things like x authority and pulse audio and the display environment variables and the X-Socket, and you can actually launch X applications for ARM inside the container and run them on your host operating system.

So it's really great for debugging and getting stuff tested. Holy smokes. What's the speed impact like? It's negligible overhead overhead this one certainly is but you know i i've done this sort of thing inside ch roots in the past but there's some overhead you have to manage there yourself whereas systemdnspawn does all of the isolation for you automatically and you don't have to like do things like you know binding to dev pts and all that kind of monkeying around it caters for that but in terms of performance um it's brilliant um you know it's from me operating these things and running quite complicated build environments inside them

it's like native performance um a lot of fun when you bring up things like system monitors and it tells you it's ARM 32-bit running on an i9-9900K with 64 gigabytes of RAM. But, you know, it's... Which I posted on Twitter and had a few people looking sideways at the screenshot. But yeah, it's a really potent combination of QMU user static and system DNS born. That is pretty great. That's a hell of a way to start a show.

This is Linux Unplugged, episode 291 for March 3rd, 2019. Oh, hi there, and welcome into your weekly Linux talk show that this week is packed full of community news. Looking at the price of the cloud, has a bit of a rant about our home folders, a few picks for you, and much, much more. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Mr. Payne. And this week, I'm super excited to say in studio, joining me is the CEO and founder of Linux Academy, Anthony James.

Hello, Anthony. Hey, thanks for having me. It's exciting to be here. You've got a nice little spot set up. Do you like what I've built here? I do. Very relaxing. I know. The final piece really was that lamp. That lamp really did it.

Not the giant penguin? That was the first thing I put in here, actually. Got to. Well, coming up on this week's episode, we've got a really special episode Not the giant penguin. That was the first thing I put in here, actually. Got to. Well, coming up on this week's episode, we got a really special episode, because not only is Anthony here, but we're joined by an outstanding cast of characters in that mumble room. Time, appropriate greetings, mumble room. Hello, everyone.

Good evening. Hello. Hello, virtual lug. Yeah, in the room today, we got Bashful, Brent, Cheesebacon, Daniel Foray, Popey, and Wimpy all joining us to gather around the community news, to kvutz about our home folders, and to talk about potentially a realistic, a real possible video editor for Linux. We'll see. We'll give you two different picks that we like right now. You can walk away with at least one of them

that will work. But before we get to any of that, let's kick off the community news with a bit of an update for you Firefox users, which I know is a lot of you out there. Firefox 67 is going to take a new step to help improve memory usage. This has been something

that you could do via an extension for a long time now, but Mozilla plans to introduce a new feature in Firefox 67 that will aim to improve the browser's memory usage by essentially offloading tabs you don't use very often. It's a pretty good idea. Yeah, I think so. Interestingly, the bug's been around for eight years and work kind of just started,

but as someone who does use those extensions on another browser I won't name sometimes, this seems like a great thing to have by default. Now, right now, it's basically going to occur in low-memory situations, and they've got a simple priority list to determine what actually gets unloaded. So first it's regular tabs, then pin tabs, then regular tabs that play audio,

and pin tabs that play audio, which seems reasonable to me. That'll probably unload the things that you're not actually using. Yeah. Yeah, I could see the ones playing audio would probably be, if you're letting them play, you're probably using that tab, like something like a YouTube video or something in the background. It is available right now in Nightly.

Why are we not letting the kernel do the right thing? Because it already knows which pages of memory you're using and which are not, and throws out the things you're're using and which are not and throws out the things you're not using why are we re-implementing this at the application layer as well us platform compatibility well there's that i i think in part because they have to take whatever steps they can to reduce the criticism they get for the memory usage i think they can't just wait around for the operating system to kill because people will look at their process list and go three gigabytes what the heck is going on?

So they're not resolving the issue by reducing the amount of RAM they're using. They're throwing stuff out that they think you might not be using, but you might actually come back and need to use later on, a bit like swapping. Yeah, that's exactly what they're doing. Yeah, I'm not saying it's brilliant, but it does seem like it would functionally fix a bit of the problem. I do kind of like, for the Chrome plugin I use, I kind of like, and maybe it's just an illusion

and it would all work better done in a different way, but it's nice to be able to sort of pick and choose because I can suspend stuff if I know I'm just about to launch a bunch of VMs and I want to keep these tabs, but I don't need anything to do with them right now. And I can unspend the ones I want. That's a good point. Well, it'll be landing in Firefox 67 either way, which is currently

scheduled to be released May 14th, 2009, if you are subscribed to the Stable channel. So, that'll be coming soon. Why don't we talk about Chrome? Seems like only fair. We got to do equal representation. I'm more of a Chrome user. What about you, Anthony? I use Chrome. I've tried to switch back to Firefox.

Have you ever tried to do that? I use that for my cross, my, you know, dual browser testing. I got them both installed. Oh yeah. It feels, I don't know why, this is completely arbitrary, it feels chunky. Yeah, I feel like it's like Chrome scrolls smoother and the pages load in a little smoother.

So like the perception is it's smoother. Yeah. I know that Firefox has made a lot of improvements. So I'm, you know, I like to follow it. I do keep it like it's my next, it's my second browser. I usually have three web browsers on a computer and it's like my second one. What's your third web browser? It depends on the system I'm on.

So if I'm on like Epiphany or Gnome Web, you know, would be a go-to. Or if I'm on Plasma, a lot of times I actually use Opera as my third browser. If I'm on the Mac, I'll use Safari as a third browser. So it just kind of depends on the desktop I'm on. What about you? Are you a three-browser man? Yeah, I use Firefox, Brave, and Opera. Okay.

Brave, huh? Yeah, you know, I should work Brave in. Oh, my God, you should. For about three years now, Brave is my only browser on my phone. So I disable and uninstall other browsers. That's the only browser I've used for the longest time on my phone. And I use Brave on my PCs for anything personal stuff related. So I use Firefox for work and I use Brave for my home stuff.

And Opera is my, I want to test how things are looking and working in another browser. So what is it about Brave that draws you into it? On the phone, it's because you get basically the same user experience and reliability of the chrome browser because brave is based on that but you get all of the ad stripping and privacy guarding baked into the browser so you don't need to mess around with like ad blockers you know don't need to root your device and put ad blockers on at a system level, the browser takes care of it for you. And you can opt into their, you know, program of actually choosing how you monetize, you know, the sites that you want to monetize based on their value to you as an individual. And the same is

true for the desktop too. You know, it just, it just mops up all of that cruft that you have that is just pervasive on every website that you visit now that okay that's that's a compelling that's a compelling reason to try it out i could add that as a third i could see that i was a fully paid up chrome chrome guy and then i think you convinced me to try out firefox some time ago and i switched to firefox and that's it i stayed on it once they figured out how to do container tabs properly, that's a game changer for Firefox container tabs. Yes, yes.

That was the missing feature that I needed to be able to successfully switch back to Firefox. And I think I've been on Firefox again for just a touch over a year. So whenever that feature got introduced. Yeah, that's one of the great features. And it's the only way I'm even like halfway feeling comfortable ever going to Facebook is because I have a container for it.

So I was actually queuing us up to talk about Chrome OS because there's interesting things developing over there. Two things that we picked out this week. Number one is on Chrome OS 74, they seem to be putting a lot of effort into improving the experience of running Linux apps on Chromebooks. So a feature they recently added is the ability to actually run desktop Linux applications on a Chromebook. We've talked about this on and off. And with the new version, they're making it a little more like a real desktop application. You're going to get audio playback.

You'll get hardware acceleration to be able to watch videos because that was a challenge before. You couldn't listen to music. You couldn't watch videos. Now, don't get your hopes up, Wes, because we're not going to be podcasting from Chromebooks. There's no support for audio in. Oh, but I'd already made plans and bought several Chromebooks.

Whoops. I kind of do feel like it's starting to get time to get a Chromebook, though. So this is 10 years after they come out with Chromebooks? Yeah. Yeah. But now they're finally, you know, running desktop Linux applications. They're going to support sound and audio. I could see that.

I don't know. I could see trying it out. I was thinking about for my wife who who's writing a book right now, and she just needs a system with a keyboard, and she's actually ended up preferring writing in Google Docs. I think she's crazy. I can't stand Google Docs. But she loves it. It's definitely a class of user that would benefit from using a Chromebook

with the added functionality of having a catalog of Linux software. But for me, there isn't a Chromebook that's manufactured that has got the raw processing power and storage that I need to do what I need to do. And I imagine that that's true not just for developers, but for people that are working with video or high-end photography as well. Oh, for sure.

Sometimes you just need a little more oomph. Does that mean that creative professionals and developers are going to become more and more marginalized by their hardware choices in the future? I think that's what's already happening on the Mac side. I think you're already seeing that reality on the Mac side. That's why MacBooks have four ports at best, and they offer them in like three sizes.

And it's a total reduction of choice over there. That's something that my co-host Michael Dominick had to struggle with quite a bit and ended up switching the majority of his workload over to Linux because of the limited hardware choices that he needed just to be able to build software. I think it is a big problem. I don't know if you stepped into an Apple store recently, but they offer workshops in the store, right? Recently, my girlfriend went in to go do a video editing workshop

and all of their stuff is focused on iPad and iOS apps on iPad. They don't have glasses for video editing on their professional hardware in their store anymore. Wow. Crazy. I wouldn't blame them. I'm struck by how often when

I'm traveling and I see people at the airport or in an airplane that are using iPads and the diversity of types of people from young children with these big rubber cases around their iPad to individuals that have got to be in their late 70s to early 80s that are all joining the Wi-Fi network. They're browsing the media that's available on the plane. They're all able to use this device. And I've never really experienced anything like that in my life. In fact, I remember when the iPad first started selling,

one of the things that was remarkable was that Angela's parents hate technology. They have one PC that they have to have to do like business stuff, right? And they've really taken to the iPad. They have several iPads now. And it seems to like cross a barrier for people that don't normally use technology were able to pick up the iPad. And so if I was Apple, I'd be looking at that going, that's a huge market. That is a way bigger market potential than the Mac ever was. Because the Mac fundamentally is a computer with a file system, you know, and computer problems

and accessories that aren't compatible, like all this stuff that you just don't really have. The accessory is either certified by Apple or it doesn't work on the iOS land. I mean, I hate to say it, but if you think about it, the reduction of choice forces simplicity, which for the mass market and what they need to do, specifically now what you can do with the video editing on an iPad.

It's very opinionated on how you do it. It's how, you know, you don't have all the extra applications on there, the extra things that cause issues for the components. And it's more limited, but what works just works, right? What's the major workflow they're trying to solve? And then for every other workflow, that's 10% video editors, high-level video production, high-level graphic production, so on and so forth. Right.

And I think the Chromebooks are eating into another area of this market, like an area that is more like Hadea's workload right now, which her primary thing she wants is she wants a very reliable computer with a decent keyboard that gives her good access to Google Docs, that if she goes somewhere to do a presentation, she can hook up to a projector and it's going to work. And if she comes back here and picks up, she has a laptop running Plasma, Kubuntu, that she can open that up and get access to the same dock. And she can open up on her phone and read the same dock. That's what her main use case is. For her, it's kind of hard not to say, well, that's a Chromebook.

Well, now she has audio in her presentation. It'll work. Yeah. She could install OpenOfficePresenter or LibreOfficePresenter or whatever and give a presentation. You know, what's interesting is, and you probably already know the answer to this, because honestly, I've never been that interested in the Chromebooks to look into it. But for what they're trying to do to get the Linux apps and components working on there, and for as bare minimum and as configurable you can make a similar lightweight desktop for that,

it's interesting they decided just to go a whole route of a whole operating system. Because it's now almost like, hey, all you need is a browser. Except for that's not true. You need these other things. So we're just going to add it in there where it already exists. Yeah. I think that's about reaching the developer market. I think it's about trying to reach a more technical audience and bringing, like they've reached a certain saturation with the Chromebook and now they want to get that market that maybe needs a text editor, wants their favorite terminal maybe needs gimp and wants to be able to ssh into their box that they're working on or something like that right just enough technical tools to keep you placated yeah or maybe android

studio maybe they're targeting android developers in the future make an android development workstation out of chrome os that's true i wonder if the dumbed down devices are going to maintain that hold as the generations kind of move on like looking at the people who've grown up with technology and whether they're going to want to be able to directly access the power versus kind of having that dumbed down experience, which sure, maybe it was great for, you know, my dad who's 70 and a bald cowboy who loves it. But, you know, what about the people that grew up with it? Wait, is your dad really a cowboy? Yeah, that's a whole a whole other story yeah i grew up in the prairies canada has cowboys and prairies oh yeah lots and lots tons can't i thought cow provinces i don't understand this i gotta i gotta

learn the history of cowboys even in british columbia there's a very large cattle industry and then you just start going east all the way to manitoba all the way into ontario it's full cattle country of course it makes total sense can we think seriously about the phrase dumbed down like you look how powerful the iphone and android devices and the ipad is like there are people now being empowered to be able to do stuff like video editing or even just like simple photo editing or full-on design with an apple pencil and ipad pro stuff that was absolutely not possible 10 years ago on a bog standard pc or even high-end pc or stuff that would have been very difficult and out of the price range of mere mortals. I think dumbing down is the wrong phrase because just because we think that we had the capability

to do those things a few years ago, there's a much wider and diverse range of the population who are enabled with these devices and are able to do stuff that they would never have dreamed doing before with a thing that they can carry around in their pocket or a thing they can put in their purse. That's a good point. I guess after having said dumbed down and hearing that context, I actually agree with you.

Yeah, I can agree completely too in the photography space because I've seen huge, massive swaths of populations getting amazing cameras in their pockets. And my initial reaction many, many years ago was like, oh, as a photographer, like all these people are taking photos that feel substandard to what I'm creating. But now these days, that perspective has completely changed. And I think enabling anyone to be creative in any way, whether it be photography or design or even some audio stuff, design or um even some some audio stuff um it feels like uh everybody can get a voice for much less uh buy-in to this technology it's it's really a huge success for the population it feels like a reset like a like we've gone along a kind of an uphill like a bit like moore's law like it's going

up and up and up and up and up and then we've kind of gone jump down a tiny bit in power in like these devices are very powerful but they're not uh you know i9 um and we've kind of gone down but we've gone up in usability and and up with the the capability the creative capability of these devices and the empowerment that these things give you even if we haven't gone like full-on with power but that will come i think you think every year a new Apple chip comes out, a new Qualcomm chip comes out that's more powerful than everything that's ever been before it.

I think we've just had a bit of a reset for a short period and it will climb again. Maybe. I hate to compare computers to cars, but if you look at cars and you consider how much has changed in the last 50 years on what's accessible under the hood or how complicated they are or how productized they are, you could see technology going that general trend where the hood is a little more welded shut, as the old saying goes. But the consumer isn't disadvantaged to say.

Disadvantaged to say. They're disadvantaged in terms of getting access to those components, but they're enabled by the plentiful accessibility to the technology, the reduction in cost, the market options. Like there's other things that improve when other things are taken away. And I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, but I, having, and I've made this point on the show before, but having worked in education, then taking 10 years off, and then going back, there was a huge, huge gap in the interest the students had. We could fill three labs of students, 30 students each in each lab.

The first time I was in the education system, when I came back, it was a team of five students. So can I jump on this car analogy real quick? I don't know if this makes sense. It makes sense in my head, so follow with me here. Okay. So it's a new baseline, right? So I can talk to this, to the videos. We'll start with the car.

If you think about it, 30 years ago, even when I was growing up, 18, 19 years ago as a teenager, it used to be the coolest thing ever to be able to change an oil or change your headlight, right? Something you would want to know. You get in there like, hey, I can change my oil. Nowadays, you got to take off the first part of the car to be able to change the oil. But instead of having teenagers or whoever's interested in cars, like, hey, I can change my oil. They're now modding their cars from a higher standpoint with this new technology implementation, right? Like, and I haven't dove much into it.

I've just seen some stories on it. But same thing for video. You know, 15 years ago, to see some of the basic iPhone editing stuff, that was professional level, $10,000 to have made, needed giant computers. giant computers, but the baseline of knowledge, the baseline of capability for the upcoming generation starts off with what used to seem impossible for us to achieve. Now that just means what's that next impossible step that seems impossible to them that we can't even imagine. Yeah. Yeah. You're right. To Popey's point, it's more people have access to it. My daughter has an iPad with a 1080p stabilized camera in it she can she has an hd camera in her tablet i i would have i would have loved to have something

like that when i was six years old i always wanted to have one of those game gears that plugged in the tv antenna yeah yeah that'd be great i remember my first car i remember um had to do some maintenance on it and i stripped the engine down and uh reground the valves and i put a new drive shaft on it, and I did loads of work on that car. These days, there's no way I'm going to do that. I'll throw it at a man and give him a small bag of money and hope he fixes it for me.

But there are people out there who still want to do that. I think that's the key, is there are still people out there on Linux, for example, who still like editing their xorg.conf, whereas the vast majority of people don't care about that kind of thing and don't really want to do that. They just want the thing to work. And I think the iPad and these generations of devices service a very large proportion of the population who don't want to put their hands under the bonnet of a car and don't want to edit an xorg.conf. They want to edit a video and this services that need

perfectly. We can have both, right? Yeah. Like we live in a world where you can have iPads and you can go get a Raspberry Pi to play around with. But do you think that Linux can offer both? Like I remember Linux maybe even 10 years ago was a lot more tinkery than it is now. It seems to be getting far more user friendly. So do you think that we can get there and offer both for anybody in the same package? I feel like that's kind of a fair criticism. I think that is true to a degree. I've never installed GNU slash Linux.

But I actually have a story in here about the systemd-free Debian derivative, Dev1. They're planning a get-together this spring. There's going to be a Dev1 conference. They call it the, I think they call it like the Init System Independence Conference or something like that. So, you know, there are still circles. Is Slackware out there, Brent?

I mean, there's still those circles that are fully empowered. When they first started, we laughed at them and said, you know, they're ridiculous. But this is what happens. People laughed at the Marte developers when Marte was first created, and they pointed out, oh, they're just doing a global search for a place on the GNOME 2 code base. But if you get enough enthusiasts who are like-minded and feel passionately about the thing that they're making,

then you're going to get conferences arranged around that project. It's inevitable. And, you know, it's bad on us for laughing and pointing the finger at these people who don't want system D on their distros. Fair enough, they've got the choice and we've given them the tools to make it possible. They're just making use of it. I think something to keep in mind is the nature

of operating systems and computers and technologies are changing so much. Thinking with the car analogy, moving to electric vehicles, where the vehicles do not have oil to change anymore. But the common thread that we really need to care about is things like telemetry and these connected devices and our privacy. And I think those are things that we need to focus on more so than what are the technical underpinnings that make the thing run.

Yes, that's the thing run. Yes, that's a fair point. I think that is something that we as a community are particularly good at. And, you know, we are always kind of asking those questions and kind of watching that kind of stuff. It is kind of hard, though, because there's so much of it now. Like, it's just a full spectrum. And maybe I'm just feeling that way because we just got out of Mobile World Congress, but holy smokes. So let's shift gears for a moment and let's talk about some good old traditional desktop stuff. GNOME 3.32 is just a few weeks away and the biggest feature we've been waiting for for quite a while has landed just recently. Fractional scaling just squeezed in before the big freeze. That's right. It's in the Git branches now, nearly three years after the bug was first open.

And of course, if you're not paying attention or you don't have a high DPI screen, maybe you don't know what fractional scaling is. But I mean, it's really exactly what it sounds like, having scaling that is a fraction, not just two, three, one, whatever. So you can get just the right scaling for whatever size display you might have. It's nice to see it. And it was looking like GNOME 3.2, 3.3.2, as I should say, would be another cycle without it, which would be another lap for elementary OS. But it looks like it snuck in. Yeah, it's just nice to see constant improvements, right? This is GNOME 3.32, is that what you said?

Yes. So there have been as many GNOME 3 releases now as there were of GNOME 2 releases. Wow. Soak that in for a moment. Wow, it feels like it's been a long haul to get here. It really does feel like it's been a long haul. Huh.

Okay, I just have one more community news story. So let's cover this one pretty quickly, because I think this is from a big picture pretty important for Canonical. I think Canonical has a good advantage when it comes to Kubernetes deployments, and they have an announcement this week. That they do. Canonical today announced support for ContainerD in the 1.14 release of the charmed Kubernetes and their Micro K8s distributions, which we talked about previously on Unplugged. Yeah, and ContainerD

seems like it gets more and more momentum. Wes, remind me again why ContainerD is the hotness. I mean, really, it's just some simplification to the whole craze that is the container runtime stack. Before you had stuff like, I mean, really it all started off with Docker,

at least in the public's mind recently, right? And Docker did everything. Container D spun off to have a nice, simple, separate daemon that could just do all the container stuff, right? Handle all the container lifecycle events that you need, push and pull images. Now Docker, you can still use Docker

if you know that workflow, but under the hood, it can just talk to ContainerD. So it's just kind of simplification and standardization within the industry, really. Yeah, some much-needed simplification, you might say. That's good to know. All right, well, then, before we move into the meat of the show, let's do a bit of housekeeping, a few items to cover.

Next weekend is Scale. Come say hi to Wes. Popey and I, we're going to be at Scale. Oh, yeah. Very excited about that. We have dinner planned. You can get details for that at meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting. Saturday, March 9th at P.F. Chang's.

We'll be there stuffing our faces and would love to hang out with you. Looks like we have about 20 people signed up so far. So if you're thinking about going, go sign up, so that way we can let P.F. Changs know what to expect. And then when you're over at the Meetup page, check out the study groups we have coming up. Today after the show, we're doing a study group with Kenny on the fundamentals of Linux, some really cool stuff on there.

We recently did a YAML study group. We have virtual Linux Ansible fundamentals coming up, as well as Kubernetes fundamentals just around the corner. We're doing a second study group in March. All of those details up at meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting, including that second one is going to be before the unplugged program. So if the timing hasn't been working out for you, this one might. And then a plug for the seventh birthday of Linux Academy.

Congratulations. That's huge. It's a big day. Does it feel like it's been 20 years or does it feel like it's been three? Approximately 15

is what it feels like. Not as bad. So how did we go from, okay, I'm just curious, like short version, how did we go from hey, it's our birthday

to let's burn Chris's mouth off? How did that, like, how did it go from hey, we got a birthday to let's burn Chris's mouth off? How did that like, how'd it go from, hey, we got a birthday to let's make Chris feel all the pain? I'm happy to say that I had nothing to do with that. Oh, really? Outside of, of course, hosting it.

Yeah. But that was not my idea. Yeah. Okay. Well, there is a video coming up soon. We did a chili challenge where Anthony asked us trivia questions about the company. And of course, because I'm the new guy, like there was like small shot. I had a small shot.

Well, you did know how many podcasts are offered. Yeah, I got that one right. Yeah, it was a good one. And my mouth burned off. And that video will be out soon. Check out the Linux Academy com Twitter account for when that gets posted. And we have a whole bunch of live events

coming up in April too. So linuxacademy.com slash live. If you're listening after the fact or you can remember that long. Meetup.com slash Jupyter Broadcasting though. That's where all the good stuff's going on for scale. I'm very, very excited about that. I think it's going to be a lot of fun. Mostly just because Popey's going to be there.

Since Popey's going to be there, it's solid now. Oh yes. I've just signed up for the meetup. I didn't realize. I thought I'd already done it, but I'd actually signed up for the LinuxFest Northwest one. So I'm now going to two JB meetups. Great. Super fan.

Yep, yep. That's right. The LinuxFest Northwest one is on there as well. All right. So we also have another meetup we should probably mention. Speaking of Popey, Popey and Wimpy are getting together with their audience for the Ubuntu podcast on March 16th. Get-.com or is it gettogether.community for that i'll have a link in the show notes at the brew dog march 16th 3 p.m we've not had one of these before we are we asked um we did a tweet out at the end of last year when we finished our last season and uh asked everyone hey what kind of meetup would you like?

Would you like to have, you know, hacking session on laptops? Would you like like presentations? Or should we go to a pub? And like overwhelmingly everyone said, let's go to the pub. So yes, we're doing that. No way. Surprise, surprise. Yes way, I know.

Yeah, who'd have thought it? English people voted to go to the pub. Shocker. My meetup advice is make sure the payment stuff is clear up front. Whatever it might be, make sure it is clear up front, right? I'm editing it right now. Don't tell anybody this. Don't release this on the internet. But I was somewhere once where I think I watched Anthony get suckered into picking up like a $2,100 meetup tab. Yeah, Texas Linux Fest.

And it was my bad because I brought the crowd. Like it was, we're going to go out to lunch. And it was like, oh, let's go out and do something. And there was quite a crowd that followed us. Plus we had some of the staff and it was just. I just love doing that though. You know what I mean? Like it's.

I know, it's good times. You know, give back to the community. And plus there's nothing better than hanging out and just talking Linux and stuff with people. All right, well, let's talk a little Linux. Wes brought a soapbox into the studio about two weeks ago. Just trying to keep it clean, you know. Yeah, I mean, I'm usually the one that brings these, you know. Usually it's about online journalism and how it impacts open source communities.

That's usually like my favorite one. And it's even got a few treadmarks on it now. But Wes really brought this shiner in. It's one that's been in my soapbox closet for so long I'd never even thought about talking on the show I thought maybe I was a crazy person but have you ever noticed how many damn hidden files are in your home directory you do a good old-fashioned ls it's not so bad maybe you got a few inner case dot you know folders things like that but you do an old ls-a, and all the hidden files are revealed. It's a mess.

I encourage the listener, if you are in front of a computer right now, do an old ls-a on your home directory. It is extremely overrun with directories that applications have crapped all over your home folder, Not following any particular standard. Making a mess out of things. And I've just always thought it was just me being a little precious. You know, thinking that it was my special computer. How dare they mess it up?

But I've seen a few articles. And then when Wes walked in the door with this soapbox, I knew I wasn't alone. Let's see. I'm looking right now. I have 42 directories starting with a dot in front of them, just littered around. And then 27 files up separate, totally separate from that. You're an amateur. Oh, really?

Oh, yeah. Let's bring it, guys. I've got 42 directories, like normal directories in my home directory and 117 hidden. So, yeah. 117. What are you doing over there? You're installing a bunch of software, aren't you? This is the whole point. They're hidden. So, yeah. 117? What are you doing over there? You're installing a bunch of software, aren't you? This is the whole point.

They're hidden. I don't care. Like, I don't see them. Like, why should I care? But they're there because they're there. That's like saying you shouldn't wash your hands. So, bed bugs, but I don't care. They're hidden.

If I can't see them, they're not there. That's good enough for me. I'm surprised to hear this from a man of hygiene as yourself. I agree. Like, just get over yourself. It's unfortunate that there are specifications that you should be adhering to to actually take care of where these dot files get placed. But the world isn't perfect, and therefore there is dot file proliferation.

But just, you can't, outside, out of mind, just get over it. So you're saying there's no validity to the fact that there is an XDG desktop standard that says, clearly, that developers should put their configurations in the.config folder and go to town in there to keep the user's home directory clean. Right, and even the XDG specification doesn't say put it in.config. It says use this environment variable declared by your operating system that will put your.files in the right place as prescribed by that OS. So it's not even like randomly make it in.config because on other platforms that may not be the right place to put it. That aside, does it matter?

I think what it is, is it's a result of the unix and linux permissions model where the developers have no other guaranteed place to safely write something that the user will have access to that won't get destroyed on a reboot and so out of a lack of a better design they've had to just crap these files everywhere i I think it's a bit of a shame. I can think of two more reasons why. Like one, the application, let's look at Vim, for example, predates the free desktop spec. Sure. And so they can say, we're grandfathered in, screw you guys.

So Vim is in.vim in my home directory. But what about developers who put stuff in the home directory because that just looks like the right place to put it. And they didn't know about the free desktop spec. Maybe the free desktop spec isn't as well publicized. Maybe it's because we don't have rock-solid APIs like Apple do that people just go free-for-all, oh, that'll do, and dump it in your home directory.

Like, I'm looking at you, Thunderbird, that's in my home directory. Yes, I'm looking at you, Thunderbird, that's in my home directory. Yeah, that's another one. Thunderbird doesn't even ship a.desktop file, does it? Or at least Firefox still doesn't. Yeah, they do. Did they start adding one? Because I remember it had to be patched in in Ubuntu Archive.

Yes, you're right. Yeah, it was vendor-patched, wasn't it? Wasn't this because of the branding debacle and now that's all gone away? Ah, that does ring a bell. That does ring a bell. I'm pretty sure they don't carry a.desktop upstream. Dan, you must agree with me.

This is a mess, right? This is a mess. This should be tidy. There should be a platform solution to it and it should be all in one nice clean spot that is easy for the user to back up, that doesn't make a mess of the root of the home directory. Please tell me, Dan, you're on my side.

Yeah, I kind of feel like the reason that we need developers to care about this stuff is platform features. But if you're not actually providing those features, there's no real incentive for them to follow the spec. So I don't know, maybe containers will save us and will force developers to do things more cleanly. I have no idea. No, the container file system will just be a horrible mess.

It'll just be inside the container. Dang. Alright. Wes, I tried to represent the soapbox for you as best I could. I'm sorry I for you as best I could. I'm sorry I failed you. No, I mean, I think ultimately it doesn't really matter.

It's just one of those small inconveniences. And really, I only notice it when I'm trying to teach new users. And it's pretty far down on the list, you know? I kind of just incidentally manage it. And really, if you manage your backups or systems at all, you've found the few files that you might actually need to care about already. Okay, now, I stood definitely on the I don't care bus as I was

traveling down the road, but ding ding, I want to get off. I'm now looking at the things that are in my home directory, and it is now starting to piss me off. I love it! I love it! I can see a.mumble overlay pipe, a.mumble socket,.pulse-cookie,.selected underscore editor.

What the hell are these things doing in my home directory? Messing it up. They're messing it up. Disrespecting your home folder. It's the one spot on the system that's truly yours. And I go to great lengths to organize my home folder. It's just very disappointing. Are there any tools to clean this stuff up?

I found a good one. Dot light works, dot there can be only one. It's a zero byte file as well. Wimby, don't you have a dot file manager that backs these things up? And does it clean these things up too? Well, potentially it cleans them up if you, you know, reinstall your system and then you restore your.files. So yes, I use a bit of software called Yadim, which is yet another .files manager. You can find that at yadim.io. And it's basically a wrapper around Git with a

means of expressing these are the dot files or dot directories that i want to put under version control and as you move between machines you can you know check out and check in your configuration files so that your you know carefully curated configurations follow you everywhere that makes it worse surely you're like spreading the virus far and wide to every machine well these these dot files are going to exist whether you like it or not you know dot git config dot ssh dot bash rc you know the list goes on so i may as well have my versions of those files you know i don't get to choose where they get placed but i can choose what gets placed inside them so that's why i use a dot file manager and i use it for more than just the dot

files now i actually have you know there are common directories you see in your home folder you know downloads music videos i have a couple of my own my favorite being Cruft and another one called Development, for example. And those are in Yadim. So when I go to a new system I've just installed, I pull down my Yadim config and it stands up all of my common directories and even a folder called scripts, which is my tool belt of common stuff is in there. So it makes the folders too. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I've got a whole heap of stuff in there, you know, you know, all of my useful scripts. So I never have to worry, Oh, where's that file that, you know, magically does this thing. It's all every computer. It's all the same. It's very

fast. In fact, I had a, a disc fail earlier today, uh, about lunchtime. That is no biggie. I mean, I've got good backups and because I've got these dot, and because I've got these.file things, I'm now up and running. So not going to name names, Popey, looking at you, but I was able to log into Mumble and move into the on-air channel because all of my Mumble certificates

and everything are all in my.file manager, and I was just back up and running within 20 minutes. Yet another.file manager? Yeah, that one's pretty good. I follow Martin too, except I did mine with Ansible scripts and all of my configuration software installations

and everything are done by a Git check-in. And then the script self-installs a cron job that uses Ansible pull to suck the configuration down to each machine that's configured. Very good. I don't think we're ever going to, we're going to fix this stuff and make it sane

until we have like a free desktop cloud storage portal and like a cloud settings portal so that users are complaining like, hey, GIMP didn't sync my settings to my next cloud. Use the sync portal and then it'll stop littering everywhere.

That'd be a nice service that somebody could offer, really. That'd be good. That'd be really good. I'd be a nice service that somebody could offer, really. That'd be good. That'd be really good. I like having a junk folder in my home directory. I like having a build folder in my home directory and a bin folder. So if I download something

that is just like something to execute directly, I always move it to the bin folder. Or if it's something I have to build, I usually will do the git checkout in the build folder, build it there, and then move it to the bin directory. And then I'll create a.desktop file for it and actually integrate it into the Plasma launcher or something like that. I have a source folder that I use for downloading stuff that I'm compiling from source. And then development is my own projects that I have tucked away.

Nice. It's a good setup. And that's why I care. I know I shouldn't care, but that's why I care so much. People have been tweeting me and telegramming me their pictures all week. It's been really funny to see the different junk in people's folders and you get an idea of what kind of programs they run. I kind of enjoy looking at it. You can see those directories, though.

You know, downloads, music, in your case, junk, in my case, cruft. But you can't see the.files, you know, unless you want to your case, junk, in my case, cruft, but you can't see the.files, you know, unless you want to turn it on your file manager. And why would you do that to yourself? See.files every time you open the file manager, you know, you don't see them. What's the big deal? Yeah, it's not really so much. It's just sort of the principle of it. And every now and then, like, it strikes me. And, you know, I had an opportunity to really think about it when Wes brought that soapbox into the me. And I had an opportunity to really think about it when Wes brought that soapbox into the studio

and I was just sitting there looking at that shiny box and I thought, you know, you're right. That's my home folder, Wes. He likes to get me fired up like that. Wes will go in there and switch out an editor to Vim, maybe alias nano to Vim. You're just so fun to troll. It's not my fault.

I think this is a slippery slope. Next, you'll be one of these nutters that is refusing to run a Linux desktop environment if there's any Dbus in it, and you'll be compiling out Dbus from every application imaginable. I happened across one such blog this week, and I was just looking at it thinking, why would you do this to yourself? Why would you go to these links to remove a useful technology from the Linux desktop? Were they on Dev one by chance?

No, no, they were not. But, you know, I was just reading it thinking, God, there's a lot of effort to go to. And I'd love to know the rationale as to why you would want to do that. Yeah. Yeah. Some people like the challenge. Is there a desktop environment that doesn't use Dbus at all?

I don't think there is. I mean, doesn't XFCE, they use Xconf, but I don't know if that's using Dbus behind the scenes or not, or if it's their own Xsettings sort of overlay. What kind of system can you run without Dbus? Well, I know, right? This is

why, you know, sitting there and removing it from, you know, build options and what have you, it's just crazy to me. You know, modern technology requires a means for inter-process communication. Yeah, we could have actually used a lot more of that. I find it curious that throughout this whole blog post, they didn't actually give the rationale for everything you were reading. No, that's just an assumed. Yeah, no, it was just describing the length they'd gone to to remove it.

It was astonishing. Did it work at all afterwards? I mean, were they happy with the results? Well, they had to make a number of compromises in the applications that they were prepared to use because, as Dan points out, there's a whole catalog of software that is a hard requirement now. Right. Including like Network Manager and...

Even like system level stuff like DNS Mask wants to use Dbus by default now. You know, as our buddy Richard says, I think it's wasted effort. I think that is some wasted effort there, my friends. All right, well, I'm glad Anthony's here for this story. This is our last story of the day before we get to the picks. And I'd love to get your perspective on this one. So Lyft is doing an IPO.

And as part of that, it has come out that they are paying Amazon at a minimum of $8 million a month until the end of 2021. It's all buried in there. They're contractually obligated to pay at least $300 million to Amazon Web Services. They're committed to spending between $8.33 million and $8.57 million a month to AWS. Really what struck me is that, I mean, they're committed to this, right? If they don't hit or exceed that $300 million threshold, well, they're going to have to pay the difference. Yeah. Is it based on a commitment or is it based on something like reserved instances or something silly like that? Yeah, it's like a price deal they got.

Yeah. So what's happening, and we got to experience this with one of them as well. So what they're doing is they're locking in these contracts and they're contractually obligated to hit a certain amount of revenue as part of the contract. Now, there's things that they do in return. Sometimes they're partnerships. Sometimes it's just access to stuff. Or they'll come in and help you with their infrastructure. It just depends on what you negotiate with the cloud provider, but it's contractually obligated to hit it. This is really remarkable because the information recently reported that several companies have found that their AWS bills are getting surprisingly high. Dropbox notably recently switched off AWS to their own on-premises infrastructure due to monthly run costs. on-premises infrastructure due to monthly run costs. There was another startup that announced that they were also contractually obligated to make a certain payment level, like they would

have a certain level of usage. And it strikes me, well, I guess the first thing that strikes me about this is what an intense amount of money to use what is essentially hosted free software at the core of it. Like what a striking amount of money. That is really, really something. Per month, $300 million is what they have to pay total, which works out to be almost $9 million a month. It's good to be AWS, huh? I mean, there's companies that don't even get close to making that much money in an entire year.

Yeah, but it's not unfeasible, though. Think of what Lyft, at least Uber is, but Lyft's a global company. Right. Okay, they got to run at scale. They got to run it high available. I mean, you don't want your Lyft application going down. Right, especially when you're driving somebody.

Yeah, just to manage all the servers and application and development, all that. The salary alone to run all that in-house and all the infrastructure and everything starts getting up there to be expensive versus AWS where you can offload a lot of that. You still have a lot of control, but you don't have to own the hardware, worry about the scaling, and you can do it quicker.

So sometimes for that convenience and that kind of safety net, it's what you're paying for. It's almost a little security versus. Right. And it's the core of their business. It's like what they do. They're a service. They have to be online. Oh, yeah.

Well, and they got to be able to scale, too. And, I mean, you got to be able to scale up and scale down. And, I mean, I guess at the end of the day, that's one of my favorite questions. You know, are they a hardware company? Are they an engineering? What do they specialize in? And then offload the stuff that you don't specialize in to somebody who does. Even if it costs a little bit of a premium, you need to stay focused on your core business. So it sounds like they're doing that. But I'll tell you what, I feel a lot better about our cloud bills. That is good news. Yeah. Well, that's what gives you an idea of where they could go though. Yeah. Here's another way to look at it. Like even

when you're not the size of a lift. So I'm going to speak from experience here at my last company. When I started, we had 11 it people. We could barely keep up with the engineers. We shifted everything into Amazon. Our staffing cut down to four people. We still kept up and we were saving about $700,000 a year based on salaries, benefits, and everything like that. Sure. Well, if it wasn't for the cloud, we wouldn't be here today. We couldn't offer, I mean, when Linux Academy started, I had nothing. Like I had dollars to my name. I wouldn't be able to do anything if it wasn't for the ability that you pay for what you use.

If you would have had a pre-provisioned co-location space or hardware, dedicated hosting or something like that, it's too expensive. Were the first systems on a dedicated box? No. It was all AWS when we first started. Now we're across lots of different stuff. It was all AWS. If your bills are getting expensive, it's because you when we first started. Now we're across lots of different stuff. It was all AWS. Yeah.

If your bills are getting expensive, it's because you're not managing your costs. Because there's always going to be that discussion and evaluation of what your business requirements are. And if you have to accomplish X, you're going to have a cost. And if you're outside of your budget, it's because you're not watching it or there's been a variable change in your business. And it's an evaluation. It's constantly changing. You constantly have to evaluate it. And if you need to stick to that hardcore budget, well, then you need to make some decisions on what you're going to cut to stay there. Yeah, yeah, I agree. And in a past role, we actually took a decision that it was cheaper to re-architect the application that we were deploying to use microservices and stay on AWS and manage our AWS instances better than it was to like bring everything

in-house, so to speak, and stick it on our own metal and continue operating our application in the way it was currently architected. So you do have to think creatively when you use Amazon and, or AWS rather, and it's not a replacement for, I have a big server in the corner and now I want a big server in the cloud. That is not what these cloud providers are designed to offer at all. That's a whole different scenario. Like I even had a VDI deployment where our hardware aged out and the cost of replacing that hardware alone, we would have paid it off using the cloud in about four and a half years. By that time, you're almost ready for a hardware refresh again. You know, it was a break even, but then you get all the management capabilities that you're not even

breaking a sweat. Right. Yeah. I remember this story a few years ago, it came out and I just looked it up again. And it turns out it's now a case study on AWS website, but it's from Zynga or Zynga or however they pronounce it. Z-Y-N-G-A, the gaming company. Zynga, I think. Zynga. Yeah. And so what they did was, was when they, you know, Farmville or whatever on Facebook was huge and they ended up thinking, hey, it's going to be cheaper for us to just host our own data center. And so they started on AWS and they moved it onto their own data center.

And there was a whole bunch of stuff that happened. The technology changed that they had to do. The popularity of their games went down and they had this complete overall cost commitment. Now, this kind of goes back to the article, though. If they would have had a contract like this, would they still have the cost commitment? You know, does Lyft have that cost commitment? Or is there something in the contract that says, hey, maybe if the business starts going south? Because if you start removing the benefits of scaling up and down and paying for what you need

and being tied into obligations, that's when it's potentially you start losing some of the advantages of the cloud. I think what's, to me, very clear is for a very, very long time now, and this really bears it out, the actual cost of the core software itself is a very minor factor in enterprise deployments. And so the way we're seeing that bear out here is the fact that AWS is often implementing open source software and then providing that as a service, the fact that the very similar functionality

is available for completely free, and that's not acting as sort of a backstop to these costs, the costs seem to be independent of the fact that they're all based on software that's absolutely free. Like, that does not seem to be impacting the cost of AWS at all. All AWS is doing in these cloud providers is they're taking something that exists and they're putting their wrappers around it.

You know, Postgres, MariaDB. They're just wrapping RDS around it and writing some code to manage it on their end. I think it really underscores, like, the cost of software isn't a huge deciding factor for businesses because otherwise they'd be using the free stuff. It's everything else. It's the staffing, it's the implementation, it's the maintenance, it's the future proofing, it's the scaling, it's so many other things that go into it. Cost might be a factor, right? It's one of those, but you can't ignore that.

So you might not go with the premium Oracle database because Postgres is free, but yes, you still have to pay to keep the thing online and do your backups. One of the big sort of commercial avenues for Ubuntu is Bootstack, which is where we manage and operate clouds on behalf of organizations. So, you know, it's all the same open source stuff that, you know, everyone's familiar with. But they want professionals to just look after that. As Anthony said earlier, if IT is not your core business mission, then why would you do that? Pay somebody else to look after that bit for you

so you can get on with the business of actually running your operation. Yeah, you got to focus, right? You got to choose only a few things to focus on as a company because if you got to focus on and be experts in a lot of different things, it's just, that's a staffing nightmare. That's an expertise nightmare. That's an institutional knowledge nightmare. It's a risk. Yeah. Yeah. It's something to see it though, just to see it in hard numbers. You get glimpses because this stuff is usually all private, like how much people are paying and stuff. But when you file an IPO, these things come out. And so now we're seeing it.

Now when Uber goes for their IPO, we'll get an idea of what they're spending on this infrastructure cost too, I would imagine. $300 million by 2022 though. That's significant. I'm really curious what that lock-in details. The Business Insider article says that Lyft still has to pay it even if they don't reach that usage level. But you never know, like there could be something else in the contract that says, hey, if we go completely bottoms up, this is over. Like, who knows, right? And what did they get in exchange? Because when you look at the traditional model, it's simply like the only way they lock you in on anything as far as a duration is reserved instances. That's your largest cost savings. That's your contractual obligation.

Outside of that, it's consume what you use and pay for that. So speaking from experience, what I can say is they try to entice you with some stuff like you can have access to some of our in-house developers to help you solve some of your big technical challenges and you get priority attention and you get access into product managers and they help, you know, those are the type of deals that actually help influence the feature roadmap inside of services.

Yeah. Where you're a big enough customer that can come to you and say, hey, you've showed up on our radar. Let's talk. Or if the customer goes and says, hey, we have this problem, we need this. They will prioritize it in terms of development for them internally. It's not even size driven though. So I work for an MSP. We resell a managed Amazon service. So we manage Amazon for customers because they don't even want to do that. Amazon for the smallest deals throws us a huge amount of credits to hand off to the customer.

Like I have a new customer that's three servers. They just issued me a 5k credit us for no reason other than to entice them to come in because they know full well that once you're in there, you're going to spend. And that's just all there is to it. So they will go over backwards with architecture help, uh, that you get access to product managers. Like you can walk into their office and sit down and meet with them. They just want to get you hooked in, you know, because they know you will spend it. Simple. It's almost like the entire Amazon business model. Go in for market share, get them on there first, worry about profits later. But AWS is exceptionally profitable, actually.

Well, market leader, they're just there first, right? It's like anyone who gets there first, you have an advantage. there first, right? It's like anyone who gets there first, you have an advantage. Yeah, and it's everybody else's game now to catch up. Well, so I think, still, there's something about it, though, that strikes me, just to conclude our thoughts. Just something about it strikes me that you could build something similar with free software yourself. It's a very interesting time where something very similar is achievable on your own if you have the right time, the resources, and the reasons.

Or you can go flip a switch and have it on this almost what seems like infinite scale. But it's the same essential free software underneath it all. Don't reinvent the wheel. Spend time inventing something new. Yeah. Yeah. And there's occasions when, depending on what you're working on, the focus of the business, you can't use the public cloud. You know, you may be the custodians of data that you simply don't have the agreement to put somewhere in a public instance.

And one of the companies I worked for in the past, we created our own data center, effectively our own cloud. And we operated it because the customers that we were servicing, they all had sensitive data. And there was no way we would be successful as a business if we were using public cloud infrastructure. So, you know, we had to build our own. Right, this is stuff like VoIP comes to mind, or the things where you have latency guarantees that you have to make. Yeah, I'm not going to mention the nature of the business,

but yeah, there's a lot of different strata of organizations where you simply cannot put it in the public cloud. The other thing that strikes me is it's harder sometimes to build those private clouds these days because people are using so much cloud infrastructure. Unless you're giant and can pay top dollar, those people go to build the public clouds and they're not going to build yours. But even look at what Amazon's doing with Outposts, if you're familiar with it. build yours. But even look at what Amazon's doing with Outposts, if you're familiar with it. It's basically Amazon in a box in your data center that they fully manage from the same console using the same APIs. You know, when the cloud first came out, I was sitting here thinking, like, it really, I don't know why it popped in my head, but I'm sure it's popped in everybody's head. They're just going to get rid of everybody's job, right? And then, you know, if they just spin stuff

up, you don't have to worry about stuff. And then every year that goes by, every year that goes by, I would actually argue to say that architectures these days are more complicated than they were 10 years because of the cloud. You have a hundred and some different AWS services, an infinite number of combination of things, awesome architectures like event-driven architectures that you're empowered to do, and now you can't even, you can specialize in a specific component of expertise

and just that in the cloud. Yeah, you're right. It really has been it's a continuing expansion like there's, we were talking on Linux Action News this week about these little microcontroller devices for like valves and whatnot that are now getting connected to AWS

and getting managed by AWS. Like it's really everything. Not for everybody, like Wimpy just very much pointed out very clearly, like there are still plenty of use cases, but yeah, and you're right. It's getting even more complex now and it gets even crazier

when you start going multi-cloud or you have some on-premises, some on-cloud. Like, it can be really complicated now. Well, Chris, if you were ever going to start a high-speed frequency trading software company, you would for sure have to have your own on-premises environment. I do know that. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Because speed matters. That makes sense.

Or what about Bitcoin? No, probably not Bitcoin. No, not Bitcoin. No, not Bitcoin. You can spin up all the GPUs. Well, before we get out of here, why don't we do a couple of app picks? I promised you at the top of the show that we would give you not one, but two different potential video editors for the Linux desktop this week. Both have brand new versions that came out just this week.

First off, the one, the only FlowBlade describes itself as fast, precise, and stable. It's a GPL3 licensed video editor based on the MLT framework, which just got a brand new update. And one of the big things in here is composite, mix, filter, and animate. My review of this is it's still in early days but it's getting better when i mentioned that in the pre-show mr wimpers jumped in with shotcut yeah i'm deeply deeply in love with shotcut i'm by no means a well-versed video editor but um i did some research

uh the middle of last year to choose a video editor that i was going to learn and and use for projects in the future and shotcut came out as my preferred choice uh and the guys behind shotcut this is dan dennerdy he's uh got a long history in the sort of video post-processing and video editing industry and and is also the guy behind MLT itself. So Shotcut is kind of like the reference implementation of what Melt can do on the back end. And there's lots of killer features, but the things that have really started to stand out in recent months in Shotcut

is the keyframe support. You can now have multi-point keyframes, so you can move effects and transitions through multiple curves. Color grading is excellent. And the thing that I really love is first-class encode your video, render your video out on the GPU, which for listeners at home, you only want to do on NVIDIA GPUs because the quality on AMD is particularly bad. It's quite bad on Intel.

On 10 series NVIDIA cards, it's acceptable. And on 20 series NVIDIA cards, it's excellent. Ah, good to know. Yeah. And conveniently, snap, Install, Shotcut, you'll always have the latest version. Oh, I love it. Also, the new version not only updates to a new version of Qt, but it's got some feature in here, a new feature, Added English Great Britain Translation.

I don't know what that would be. I don't know what that would be. I don't know what that would be. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's excellent now that we have the text appearing in the application in traditional English rather than simplified English. Well, thank you for the pick. Shotcut and Flowblade, we will have links

in the show notes, linuxunplugged.com slash episode number, which insert episode number here, which is 291, or the links will be in your mobile podcast player. Guys, good luck. I think we have one more week or two before the meetup, but good luck with your Ubuntu meetup. And Popey, looking forward to seeing you at scale, sir.

Oh, yes. I cannot wait. Yeah, it's going to be good times. All right. With that, we will begin to wrap it up. Go follow Anthony on Twitter, Anthony D. James. I'm at Chris LAS. Go follow Wes at Wes Payne.

Go check out Wes on the TechSnap program, TechSnap.Systems. I was hanging out with Jim Salter this week talking about proper passwords, right? Is that what it was? Oh, yeah. How to do proper password storage. Not plain text. Never, never plain text. No, it was do proper password storage. Not plain text. Never, never plain text. No, it was a really good episode.

It was a good take on a topic that we've heard before. I really liked it. A lot of good information in there. Hey, coming up in just a little bit, if you're listening live, is the study group. But if you missed it, there may be a YouTube channel. In the meantime, come back here next Tuesday! Yep, plug program. All right, let's do a little post show. Get out of here.

Do our titles. We didn't have the votes going this week, so we've got to figure out what the heck we're going to title this thing. Brent's doing some great work working the doc with some titles maybe you should read those out here, propose them Brent oh really? good job Brent you're gonna win this one

well I'm not up against very many people here although some of the best I must say what do you like the best though? is there one of them you like? hmm lifting the clouds flipping the switch on FOSS dot or dash like the best though? Is there one of them you like? Hmm. Lifting the clouds. Lifting the clouds. Flipping the switch on FOSS.

Dot or dash. I like that one. And clouding out open source. Clouding out? Clouding out? Like crowding out? Like that kind of thing? Like crowding? That'd be what you want. $8 million a month in AWS.

What? Really? Oh, oh, oh. I thought you meant that was, I was like, no way is that. I thought you said that. You think that was our bill? Yes. No way, I was going to say. Isn't that what it was from Lyft in an $8 million?

Yeah, it was $8.9 million a month, I think. All right. So, daughter dash, clouding out open source, lifting the clouds, flipping the switch on FOSS? What about flipping the switch? What was that about? That was about ease of use. You mentioned it for you can just turn the switch on a server now

and concentrate on something more interesting. But if you had to ask, maybe it means it's not right. Hmm. All right. Well, that's horrible then. That's horrible. What are you guys doing for the rest of the evening? Assuming you're not listening to the study group.

Nobody's going to tell me what they're doing tonight? Yeah, my wife just came in to give me my daughter's passport. Yeah, sorry. Good. Keep that handy. I also, I'm building up a packing list for scale. Oh. Making sure I'm bringing along everything I need to bring along.

Because otherwise I'll forget. I'm terrible. My memory is awful. What's the most important thing on there? I can't tell you. It's a surprise. Oh. Oh.

Oh. I bet it's for the bad Walter thing. Yeah, loads of stuff. Just like, just in case. Because you know when you run a stand at an event, you've got to have like everything just in case. Right, right. Like all the extra bits and bo usb keys and like a raspberry pi and like sd cards and like hdmi cables and usb chargers and all that crap always feel better with a pie in your pocket

yes uh hadia got pulled over by tsa for traveling with my microphone. This happens a few times. Yeah. I meant to take the bag with me, but just the way it worked out. I guess it looks like a pipe bomb. Oh, I've had that. I, when I was flying to the States once, they, they said, uh, he unpacked the check at the gate just before I got on the plane. He emptied out my laptop bag and I had my zoom microphone in there and he said, what's

this? I said, it's a microphone. He said, uh uh what's that for and i said interviewing people and he goes you're a journalist i was like no because if you were a journalist you wouldn't be allowed into the states on like the visa you've got i was like uh what no i'm not like ah shit that's crazy i always get stopped both for the microphone and then a bag full of just photo gear that seems like no one would ever carry that much and then a glass jar

full of oatmeal they always give me a strange look for that one I love you you're so great what kind of glass jar like a mason jar I'm picturing it's gotta be a mason jar with a metal lid though does it have a handle

no handle it takes up too much room. Of course. But you get hot water on the plane and throw some chocolate in there, you're all good. Oh, my goodness. Clever. This is a travel hack we're getting. So you're getting the advantages of a dry, packable meal that you can then get hot water on the plane. You add and you are also packing

chocolates. This is huge, Brent. This is mind-blowing. You can add nuts if you'd like. I am totally doing this on Wednesday. Why not just have a granola bar? Oh, because it's hot and comfy, and the look on their face when they see a glass jar full of who knows

what is priceless. Is that not considered, I guess, oatmeal's, I guess it's, I guess it makes sense. It's not like it's made oatmeal when you're going through TSA. Right. It's not like liquid, right? I could see them thinking it's pretty weird. How far can you push the boundaries on taking stuff that is not liquid, but very clearly is made much better with hot water on the plane? How far can you go? Poby, you do know that we have food in the States. You can just eat here. You don't have to pack the food.

Well, yeah. So that's a big thing. You know, all your filthy chlorine washed chicken and like beef pump full of barbiturates and stuff. I don't know if I can eat that. I've got to bring some oats. That's what I've got to do.