LINUX Unplugged - 292: Cheese on the SCaLE

Episode Date: March 13, 2019

A new voice joins the show, and we share stories from our recent adventures at SCaLE 17x. Plus we look at the Debian project's recent struggles, NGINX's sale, and Mozilla's new service. Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, and Ell Marquez.

As we approach the 21st century, a new means of communication is emerging. This technology uses computer networks to link people on every continent. If we are destined to live in a global village, one day we will all be connected to the Internet. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 292. Welcome into Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's in a hot box this week. Getting ready for some podcasting. My name is Chris. My name is Wes.

Hello, Mr. Payne. And joining us in studio this weekend is Mr. Cheese Bacon. Hello, Cheese. Hey, how's it going? Nice to finally be here. It is. Nice to have you here. Well, and it's always been unplugged, which has always been not central time. It's always been when I've been at work.

Hey, that's true. That's true. So, that's a thing. Now you can actually be here live, finally. Coming up on this week's episode of the Unplugged program, we're going to look back at a couple of big milestones, including one from Mozilla, one for the web, and NGINX being sold for $670 million, plus Sway hits 1.0. And then we look at some leadership challenges facing the Debian project.

And then later on in the show, myself, Wes, and Elle will join and get in here, talk about scale. We're going to get into scale. We're going to tell you how 17X went, what we took away from it, and a few stories. And then after all of that, we get to some of those emails. Finally, after what has been ages on the show, we'll answer a few emails that came in. We'll see how many we get to.

Yeah, right. It's not that we're not looking. There's just so much to talk about that we have to make time for feedback segments. No, we read it. We totally read it. But this week, we're going to try to include some of it, depending on how long the scale stories go. Because then we have a hard out by the network. No, we read it. We totally read it. But this week, we're going to try to include some of it, depending on how long the scale stories go. Because then we have

a hard out by the network. No, I'm kidding. We try to keep it to like an hour and change. But before we go any further, let's bring in that Mumble Room. Time appropriate. Greetings, Mumble Room. Hello. Alright, alright. Hello. Hi there. And I hear Elle in there too. Hello, Elle. Hello, hello. So,

we're starting today, and there's one thing that always plagues this episode. This is always the episode where the time zone math messes with everybody's head. So like a good chunk of our virtual lug can't make it because it's like a totally different time for them. Oh yeah, I didn't even think time change. It's easier to just join and be here all day and that way you know you won't miss it. It's easier if we just don't have time change. Yeah.

Savings. I know, right? Wouldn't that be, like, way easier? Yeah, you would think. Whatever. Yeah, I don't understand why they don't do that. Well, anyways, as you probably heard there in the intro, we have a bit of a milestone.

It is at least, if you're to believe the hype, the web's birthday today. The web turns 30 years old today. It's also Linux Academy's birthday, so that's kind of cool. Two things, two great things happening today. You think those were planned? Maybe. You know, I think that's something worth asking Anthony.

For sure. There's a bunch of different things going online, though, to celebrate the anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee's proposal back in 1989 of March to put together. What did he call it? He didn't call it the World Wide Web back then, did he, Wes? He called it like an information proposal or something. Yeah, basically. And vague but interesting, I think, is what his boss described it as, which, I mean, like all good ideas.

Yeah. Okay. Amazon, Google, and others have been submitting like old versions of their websites to Twitter to celebrate the day. We have a link in the show notes. It is actually really cool to see like the old Amazon.com. Welcome to the Amazon bookstore. But he's still shipping books from his garage, right? That's pretty great, though.

It makes me feel a little old and nostalgic at the same time. It seems about as usable as some of their current pages. Wow. Wow, savage, Wes, savage. And actually kind of, in a way, I wouldn't mind it. They sell too many things to organize it in that old way, but

if they could have individual pages like that for different categories, it might actually work. This is kind of a rough anniversary if they could have individual pages like that for, for different categories, it might actually work. So I don't, you know, this is kind of a, this is a rough anniversary, like estimate because it's,

it's today technically because Tim Berners-Lee is going back to CERN to celebrate today, even though it was really in the month of March. And do we call that a birthday? I guess we can call that a birthday. I mean, as long as we can all just be grateful that we wouldn't be here talking without any of these inventions and the hard work over the years. And the fact that so many of us have jobs that wouldn't have exist without it.

It's deep, Wes. It's so deep. Mozilla is celebrating and giving the web a birthday present today. They are moving their send service out of testing to an actual full-fledged service. If you're not familiar, send is a free encrypted file transfer service that allows users to safely and simply share files from any browser. It doesn't have to be just Firefox. And now it's a keeper. And so they're upping the upload limit and giving some more

controls. Looks like it's a full-fledged service now. I was a little confused because I saw, like, announcing, I was like, this already existed. But yeah, everyone kind of forgot about it. It's always been useful this entire time. Especially since it's end-to-end encrypted. And honestly, they've thought a lot about some of the UX here.

There's some command line tools that interface with their system. Reasonable limits, you get a gig-free 2.5 gigs if you have a free Firefox account. And you can set it to either expire on the number of downloads or time-based or both. Yeah, that's pretty awesome. And an Android app is apparently in beta. That's going to be coming down the pipeline too,

which I think, obviously, mobile first, everything these days, right? Sure. Yeah, send is a really simple way for the recipient to get the file too, because they don't have to set up an account. They just can use any web browser and just download the file.

And the end-to-end encryption means that even if it's stored on Mozilla servers, they're not reading it. So that's nice to see them take this out. Sometimes these test pilot programs don't get taken out out of test pilot. They just sort of fade away. Well, I think what's really cool about it, too, is the end-to-end encryption, I mean,

this is something my mother could use and her files would be encrypted when she sends them to my aunt or whatever. And she doesn't even need to know anything about encryption. It's just, it it's it's it's built in here it is go with it you know i think it's cool for mozilla to to to spin up that sort of technology and just forever right it's pgp what yeah oh for sure right and so you just think about tax time yeah tax season absolutely i can tell you right now

it's like either it all gets sent in my email or I get sent off to links to like DocuSign or other services and it's kind of a mess. It's a hodgepodge. Always seems to be. For sure. Well, Mr. Cheese Bacon, that's who you're hearing right there. He's here in studio with me. This is the Texas

studio. What do you think of the old Texas studio, man? It's nice i mean i can't stand a little skeptical here or is it just because your new boss is right next to you in his well i mean there that's that's a thing too but right i haven't seen the other studios right so i can only i'm just going for like uh you know this is just like a you know a podcast studio if you're i like it i like it i mean i like this this the swanky lounge chairs right yeah um i wanted people to be comfortable. Acoustic foam, all the things.

I think the only thing that doesn't have an acoustic foam, light switches. Yep. Which there is a recording light. Right. So light switches don't have acoustic foam. Mm-hmm. That's about it. Receptacles.

Yeah, power outlets. I've got like five or six Wi-Fi bulbs in here doing different colors and stuff. It's pretty great. It is nice. It gives a nice ambiance. Without a doubt. It gets warm, though. Yeah, so Cheese Bacon has officially joined our team.

Yeah, I'm super excited about it, man. This is a dream come true for me. I think a lot of people in the community, I'm sure they've seen me on IRC. Oh, yeah, you've been around for ages. How many years have you been in the community? At least a decade. That's amazing. At least a decade. Yeah. Back and forth. And I've always been drawn to, I think for me, really what it was is Linux and where my heart is with it. And I understand your frustrations, especially when you're trying to depend on it for a production level. Yeah. For those that didn't know, I was just griping

on the live stream about audio issues. Yeah. Mission critical live stream issues, right? And sometimes, and that's why I say, you know, use the right tool for the job. But I'm a graphic artist. That's my day job. I've worked in television and I've worked in screen printing. I've worked in newspaper, blah, blah, blah, on and on. But one of the things that I've always loved about Linux is that you can create Linux and you can make Linux what you want. And that's evident by all the slew of distros we have. That's evident by Mio Linux that just came out recently, right? And anyone that's in the Mumble room, that's in the IRC, that's a student at Linux Academy, anyone can make their own distro. And I think for me, that's what really drew me into it. And then naturally,

you know, I guess to date myself a little bit, we didn't have necessarily YouTubes in those days of learning the Linux. So I had to buy my first copy from a CompUSA bargain bin. Absolutely. Actually, but I enjoyed getting the box copy back then. I did too i like that i did have to go out of my way to get a four megabyte trident video card to support uh my first install of uh i think it was slack that i was having a problem with seuss worked fine you know but but it was slackware at the time that my roommate had got me into that i couldn't run without having another video card.

And so I think back to some of the problems that I had way back then. It was broken. There was nothing there. There were no communication channels or YouTube how-to videos or Linux academies to teach you. It was you just slog through it. Oh, you found IRC, right? And so, and that's organically what brought me to Jupyter Broadcasting is the IRC channel and the support there and lack thereof sometimes. But, you know, all around is a great community.

And I'm glad to finally be not only part of the Linux community and working professionally in the Linux community, but part of the JB family and, of course, the Linux Academy family. Everyone here has just been so welcoming. Isn't that been great? Dude, it's so good. It's so good. I mean, everybody, I'm not good with faces, so I'll probably have to go to the HR page and look at pictures and, you know, kind of associate names that way.

But overall, like everyone has just been hands down super nice. And I couldn't have asked for a better welcoming. Congratulations, Mr. Cheese Bacon. I have a question for you. Thank you. What's your actual role? What are you going to be doing with Chris? My title is a community creative engineer.

So any sort of the marketing stuff that's going to be coming up yeah job one's going to be swag for linux fest northwest swag is is in the works um if anyone just has some amazing piece of swag that they think we should should look at please you know reach out to me i'd love to hear your opinions and your suggestions on that jb engraved laptops you heard it here first yeah branded thinkpads for everyone yeah Yeah, golden Yetis for everyone. Yeah, I'm sorry, guys. Not only that, but we have new logos for all the shows in the works and updates to the website to accommodate those new logos.

And so we've been working on upgrading our look because as an independent operation, I never, ever, ever had the budget to spend on that stuff. It was like a lot of times I'd come to cheese and I'd be like, Hey man, could you bang me this thing out real quick? Cause I'm about to go live tomorrow morning and I need some art for the show that I just launched. Well, and tomorrow morning, maybe it may be, I'm about to go live with this show in an hour and 37 minutes. Can you do something? Yeah.

And of course, I mean, if wherever I can lend a hand back to the community, I was more than happy to do that. I just love it. I love it when we find somebody from the community and we can bring them in. You know, Wes, too. Wes started, you know, he came up for a community barbecue that we held at the studio. You smoked those meats, man. Now I'm hooked. That's right.

He just took my smoked meat and now he's in. So I just love it whenever we get an opportunity to do that. So it's really cool to have you here. Super glad and it's nice to have you in studio for this episode too. Why don't we keep going? Keep talking a little news. We just have a few news items I'd like to go through and probably do some further digging

on some of these in Linux Action News this week. But let's start with this Nginx sale. Oh yeah, that's a biggie. Yeah, man. $670 million. $670 million for an Nginx, and they're being acquired by F5. F5 Networks, which are in your neck of the woods right now, aren't they, Wes?

That's right. They're a Seattle-based company. And if you're not familiar, I guess that's because you don't do anything with a lot of network traffic. They make load balancers, application gateways, all those things on your network that actually connects the important bits with your customers.

Load balancing, eh? What would you say is a common use case for NGINX? That same thing. And you'll see a lot of stuff in this announcement about the synergy opportunities, how they can mesh this together. But honestly, you go look at the NGINX blog from like two years ago,

and a lot of their entries are how to replace your you go look at the NGINX blog from like two years ago, and a lot of their entries are how to replace your expensive F5 appliance with NGINX. And now maybe that was them trying to sell their NGINX Pro, of course. But I can definitely see F5 being like, well, NGINX is by far the most popular ingress controller on Kubernetes, especially compared to our own version of that.

So how do we get our foot in the door here? I think this is a pretty smart move. I think you're right. I think this has a big part of an overall orchestration play. So that way you can snap their technology in. Now F5 is going to be able to have also a community offering

that is going to remain free and open source. Nginx says that additional, their core product will remain free and open source. Which is great news for me since I run it on my personal. Yeah, I don't actually, I don't get a big sense of dread and doom on this one. No.

And I think a lot of times, you know, it's a lot of these doom and glooms are kind of built up by the persona anyway, right? Yeah. That's kind of announcing it. Yeah. I think it's one of those things that we're just going to have to wait and see how it plays out. Exactly.

It is definitely. Anybody in the mumble room have a different take? Anybody concerned or startled by this acquisition? Maybe I'm missing something here. I'm straight down the middle on this one. I've worked with F5 in the past as an actual vendor. I sit on the other side of the fence now with Red Hat looking in at some of the F5 integrations they have with OpenShift.

That's what I was thinking about, yeah. I think there's a lot of people use Nginx for a whole different slew of purposes. I'm going to wait and see how this one plays out. It's not like when GitHub got acquired, I was like, oh no, what's happening here? But yeah, we'll see,

I guess. We'll see. I agree. I don't have the GitHub sensation. I think that's a good way to put it. And I also want to acknowledge you're right. We sort of pigeonholed Nginx as one particular type of functionality. It's a web server. It does a lot of things. It's just a very common use case has been accelerating applications behind it or proxying connections.

Hell, we use Nginx in production. Yeah, of course we do. It is kind of a nice moment to reflect. I don't remember the last time I spun up an Apache server. I just really don't because Nginx, production. Yeah, of course we do. It is kind of a nice moment to reflect. I mean, I don't remember the last time I spun up an Apache server. I just really don't because Nginx, by some measures, is like 67% of web connections. It's just crazy how successful of a project it's been.

Probably a lot of the reason because it's open source. Have any of you seen whether there is any change in Nginx's commitment to being open or not as a consequence of this? Because that would change my opinion. As they say, F5 is committed to continued innovation and increasing investment in the Nginx open source project to empower Nginx's widespread user community.

They're also keeping the CEO and founders on board. Okay, until you all forget in three years anyway. Right, I mean, things got a vest and yeah. But it is a good sign that they're staying on board for now. I think though, for me, the $670 million is, I mean, that's... Seems a little low, actually. Right, yeah, I mean, that's good money, don't get me wrong. It is, it is a good sign that they're staying on board for now. I think, though, for me, the $670 million is, I mean, that's... Seems a little low, actually. Right, yeah. I mean, that's good money.

Don't get me wrong. It is. It is good money, and it's, you know... Or is this the first real software company valuation that we've seen for a while? Oh, there you go, too, Wes. That's a great point. Yeah. This is the first non-overinflated evaluation.

Right. Yeah, there is that sort of hype bubble that we have right now where things are just going for, I mean, crazy prices. Absolutely. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you have projects like Sway,

which probably will never sell for millions of dollars, but heck if they aren't just chugging away and getting more and more impressive all the time. And they have finally reached version 1.0, which is the first stable release of Sway. Now, I guess we should probably back up a little bit.

Sway is, what is a concise way to explain what Sway is? So in the world of Wayland, you need certain new components that in the past were provided by the display server. And now, with Wayland being a protocol, you need to write your own display server and you need to be able to provide certain sets of functionality.

And we spent a while kind of worrying about that, right? We're like, well, okay, the big projects, they're going to make that happen. Sure, GNOME, KDE, but what about all the other wonderful bespoke environments that we all love? Yeah. So Sway is really turned into an umbrella project

of a bunch of other things. You have a tiling window manager that runs on top of Wayland, but you also have Sway Idle, Sway Lock, Grim, Slurp, WF Recorder, a bunch of sub-utilities that manage and take care of stuff in a Wayland setup that in the past you didn't have to worry about as much. And think i3 as well. I mean, if you're going to talk about the desktop itself, it's very much an i3 compatibility. And you noticed in there that they have a particular tool.

And keeping in mind that this is a tiling window manager, which is usually going to be covered by windows. Why don't you tell us about that? All right. So the last tool that they list here on their post is wall utils, which is a beautiful wallpaper utility that you can set timed. So, say, if you wanted to crossfade two images between 10 a.m. and noon, you know, to basically transform your desktop throughout the day, you can do that. And, I mean, there's just some really amazing other features. They're set up.

You can get your DPI for all your monitors. You just put like, for the background one, you just put the time of day range in the file name of the background, right? Essentially, yeah. Basically. Basically. And then that interprets the range

that you want it to calculate. Absolutely. How does that work though on a tiling window manager when you've got... Tiles. Yeah, tiles of windows. I don't know. You. How does that work, though, on a tiling window manager when you've got... Tiles. Yeah, tiles of windows. I don't know. You know, in the demo for it,

they do show that you can gap the windows, right? So you can have 20, 40, 80, however many pixels, however far you want to reduce your window. But then you're still only going to get the gapped view of the desktop. I mean, I think that this is still a great utility that's going to be used. I think we're going to see this widely adopted

in other places as well. Yeah, that's the great thing is other projects can take advantage of this code. Yeah, absolutely. But I mean, Waybar is also really clean, really nice. That's an alternative panel they've developed. Yeah, that's their alternative panel. They get their own video capture.

Slurp, I thought was kind of a weird name for interactive region. So like hovering your mouse to the corner and viewing your windows and stuff. That's another one with a tiling window manager. Oh yeah, good point. Are most of those going to be present? Invisible?

That's kind of the neat thing here, right? Is there are so many. There's just been this community that sprung up solving all kinds of little problems in the Wayland ecosystem, regardless of how directly useful they might be on Sway. Exactly, Wes. I think that's what's really cool about it because they say here in their release, nearly 300 people worked together for doing this. Over 9,000 commits and almost 100,000 lines of code from version 0.15 to the 1.0 release.

You know, I'm actually tempted to try this out myself, man. I was going to ask the community out there if anybody knows of like a distro that's just sort of set up

with this ready to go so I could get like, I'd love to see it like in the floating window mode and all that kind of stuff. Absolutely. Just so I could like pop it on a live,

like USB thumb drive and try it out for an afternoon. So if you know of one let me know. And supposedly there's improved touchscreen support as well.

So devices mobile devices in the future can also utilize this which you know tiling window manager and a mobile device might be actually

kind of a good use of mobile space. I think so. Screen real estate. Especially like on a tablet. Absolutely. See that.

Absolutely. Kind of want to give it a go. Do like a Sway challenge. A Sway challenge. On any distro you want. But try out Sway. Yeah. I can see that.

All right. Why don't we, this next one's kind of uncomfortable. It's negative in the freedom dimension. It's at least negative. I don't know if it's in the freedom dimension or not, but it's negative. I don't know how to really tackle this one because we don't have direct involvement, but I think it's important because Debian is important. And so we're going to have to talk about this.

This is a post by Michael Stapleberg, I think is how you say his name, but I've actually never had to say it out loud. So I apologize, Michael, if I got that wrong. He's worked with Debian for 10 years, and he wrote a blog post a little while ago about issues debugging software on Debian and some of the workflow frustrations he had. And this week, he's written a blog post about leaving Debian after 10 years. It's a long time. It says, a few weeks ago, I visited some old friends at a Debian meetup

after a multi-year period of absence. On my bike ride home, it occurred to me that the topics of our discussion had remarkable overlap with my last visit. Have you ever done this? Like you go talk to some old buddies and just have like the same little conversation you had like five years ago. And it doesn't quite click like it used to. Yeah. Yeah. So he's thinking, man, you know, I went to this meetup and we had a discussion about the merits of system D, which took a detour to the respect in the open source communities happens all the time especially when you bring up system d yep and then he says it

returned to processes in debian and eventually culminated in a discussion around democracies and their theoretical and practical failings why do we always seem to dig ourselves into this hole? We like, we always, somehow the community manages to hate on itself. I know. We do. We do. And he says, I walked away from this thinking to myself, I think I'm done having this conversation. I think I'm done discussing the same things over and over again and nothing ever changes. And it wore him out. And he went on to point out some other issues

that it sounded are just brutal. Reviews are horribly slow. Publishing packages can take up to seven hours. Anonymous FTPs. Yeah, anonymous FTP uploads. Filing bugs with a bug system that doesn't even have a proper web interface where you communicate over email with it, and it's weird and ancient.

It sounds like, too, that there's an issue where a lot of people can just sort of slow down the whole thing and make change very hard. Even if it's not something like SystemBee, even if it's something simple like, we should change this package so that it meets our requirements. It makes a good point, right? Like, culture needs to shift from this package is my domain. How dare you touch it to a shared sense of ownership, which is as a community member, that's how I kind of thought things would already be thought of.

I don't see how it's possible to create a unified desktop without that. Yeah, he says my canonical example is rsync, whose maintainer refused my patches to make the package use debhelper purely out of personal preference. Personal preference. Do not match the way we do things. For rsync. Right, we're not even talking like systemd

or controversial things here. We're talking rsync. A tiny little command line utility. I know, right. Yeah, he says granting so much personal freedom to individual maintainers prevents as a project from raising the abstraction level for building Debian packages,

which in turn makes tooling harder. Then you have wildly divergent workflows, and he goes on a little bit about that. He talks about the time it takes to build packages. All of this really kind of comes into like a, yeah, I can understand that'd be really frustrating. That would burn a lot of people out, and it's probably going to prevent a lot of new blood coming into the project.

That's the part that I think is important is because we're hearing from someone who's been experienced and a member of the project. And there are some debates, like newer is not always better. And there are sometimes reasons why, yes, it's good to get contributions, but if you get too many contributions

that aren't well-formed enough, that they take so much time, that can sometimes be worse rather than better. But it just seems like when you're hearing this stuff from someone who's trying really hard, putting in a ton of time to make this work, a little modernization, that could grease some wheels here. Yeah, so John had a follow-up.

So another gentleman, John Goresman, I think is how you, I'm probably getting that wrong too, that's not what I do, did a follow-up Defense of Debian blog post. I know you had a chance to read it, Wes. I'm curious what your takeaway from his defensive Debian was. He, like, for example, he spins like the bug tracker not having a web interface as a good thing because it means less people submit bugs. So as a maintainer, you have less work. I don't know if that's quite how I would compare it. I think, I think it's really low bugs that don't have any reproducibility information, bugs that are more work than they're worth fixing.

If you can give me a really good bug case, I want to investigate it. But if it's just like, hey, this didn't work, I don't really know why. So really the case was made for tools that help that. And when you're reporting something online, you don't have scripts that could go gather all that information on the command line.

And really I read this as not Debian's doing everything right, but sometimes workflows are different from either the person on the side accepting contributions than on the side making contributions. And that GitHub might, you know, we shouldn't think of GitHub as like the ultimate workflow for everyone because it's just not. It's a new thing.

It's a proprietary service. It does make sense to try to optimize and make things smooth, but not at the expense of ruining all other workflows. I think the bug tracker one, though, is an interesting one. So it's software that was designed in 94. It had one of its more major updates in

99, and the GNOME project and the KDE project abandoned it in 2002, and they were one of the last holdouts. Debian is the only project using this software that I know of. Besides, I believe there is a GNU version that's used to build a viewer for it. So there is a second project, but again, no one widely uses it at all. And this whole barrier to entry is, I think, maybe I'm wrong, Wes, but

to me, it seems like it's going to turn off new adoption. Yeah, new adoption. And again, like, you don't want to make it, it's not always only about making contributions easy, but you want the whole process to be easy so that it's easy to make a reasonable contribution and that you have the people on the back end trying to play in between all these systems can actually make it work without pulling their hair out. Okay. So here's my other take on this too, is you have this whole people in the project are slow to change. They have their domains that they own and they don't want to do it their way because

of their personal preference. And as a project, there's really nothing they can do about this. Is that actually a good thing? Is it a good thing? Because it's not the only Linux in town. We've got Fedora, we've got Ubuntu, we've got Gentoo, we've got Arch, we've got all these other distributions that are going at wildly different paces that have totally different organizational structures. And we're kind of field testing everything at once in this way. And so in a high-level version of looking at the Linux ecosystem, if you will, and the crazy experiment that is distributions of that Linux ecosystem, isn't it good to have one of them in the market be extremely conscientious about change and be really intentional about what changes make it in and make it harder even to make change because the end result is a distribution that has a type

of stability that goes beyond software stability, but is also a type of change stability, which makes it better for deployments and enterprise. It makes it easier to build your applications or services off of it. I mean, that can be seen as a positive thing. And because it's not the only Linux in town, it's not the end of the world. Yeah, and that has historically been one of Debian's strengths, right? You can trust that if you've got an LTS release, you're running it on your server,

you can probably apply all those unintended upgrades, and it's not going to break. The question, I think, is not to avoid all modernization, but to find the best points to put in the effort so that you keep your old guard while making it easier for new people. And I think that's the message we should take away here is Debian deserves more involvement and everyone should be concerned about its future,

not because it's the only game in town, but because it has a lot to offer everyone. I think it's Debian, man. I mean, that was one of my first distros, right? Slackware, Soos, Debian. Right. Look at the impact Ubuntu has, which is based on Debian. Absolutely, right?

And I think you really touched on something when you talk about should a distro be slow to adopt new technology? And I think so, to some degree. They should. But I also see where Michael's coming from in that, guys, at this point now, we need to, you know, everybody buys their groceries online. Yeah. Right. We can still go to the store and get groceries and fill up baskets and do it that way and bag and bring it home. Or we can, you know, we don't have to jump

the whole distro on board and change everything overnight. But I think small improvements that will help the workflow and that will inevitably help the distribution grow and help the distribution get patches. You know, I know that whenever, just recently, whenever Debian had its issue with apt, right, they were on top of it and they got it patched quick, like the same day, practically. So, I mean, they are there and they are willing, I think, to tackle those problems. But I think that, you know, when you see all the evolution of technologies and how other distros handle things in today's day, that to bring some of that in isn't necessarily bad. But also, you should, you know, have that distro that's... A little more staid.

It made me think of our recent discussion about, Fedora's internal discussion about, you know, maybe delaying release to work on their developer tooling. So clearly they are an example of people that are trying to actively tackle this problem. Okay, I've got a few more thoughts on this, but I want to give the virtual lug a chance to chime in. Mr. Badger, what are your thoughts on this?

So I use Debian as my primary home server, and I have done for maybe seven or eight years at least. And over that time, I found that the actual distro itself, in my server context at least, has become less and less relevant as containers have taken over and other technologies that Cheese Bacon alluded to just now. And I think, for me, it boils down to

how you structure the governance of an open source project. And this is something that we're trying to go through at Linux Server IO right now, is trying to figure out how to structure decision-making processes and not just have it be beholden to one or two people's kind of beck and call, which it's a natural process

growing out of a personal project into a community project. I think Debian's possibly too far the other way for my personal taste. I think it's a fantastic project and a great asset to the Linux community. Don't get me wrong. But I do think that there are definitely opportunities for improvement in the way in which the governance model works. I don't know if the pace of packages and stuff like that could be potentially changed, but then does it need to when you have things like Ubuntu upstream that are a lot more quote-unquote modern and fresh,

and you have so many other distros filling that niche? I would argue that no, you don't need Debian to be completely up-to-date. But I do have another point around the relationship between Debian and its children like Ubuntu I know we work for Red Hat so that's full disclosure but you look at the relationship between Fedora and Red Hat and CentOS and I think there's definitely some room for improvement in just the velocity of the project and trying to make decisions and trying to keep people engaged with that workflow. And I don't know quite what my point is, but I look at the ways in which Red Hat give back to the community via all the open source contributions to the kernel and to desktop environments and yada, yada, yada. And I think that there's definitely room for improvement with Debian in that space.

It's clear that there has been internal conflict that has torn the project up. So it's not just one developer who's rage quitting, which he's not, he's actually very gracious in his goodbye letter. It's a bigger problem, and his leaving is symptomatic of that bigger problem. bigger problem, and his leaving is symptomatic of that bigger problem. The system D debate tore them up. But now in almost an embarrassing statement of the state of the project, they literally could be entering a situation where they are leaderless. Yeah, normally this time in the year, well, it's election season for Debian. Over a six-week period, traditionally, interested candidates would put their names forward, describe their vision for the project as a whole,

answer questions from interested developers trying to vet them, and then wait. Watch. They'd have a voting period, wait for the votes to come in, and, huzzah, a new leader would be elected. Unfortunately, this time around, no one has stepped forward. Yikes. They've missed the first one,

right? So they're on the second round. Yeah, they just go again. They just keep going. Yeah, right. To their credit, the Constitution does have rules. It's just an infinite loop. Yeah, and there's no rule that says the current leader, Chris Lamb, must remain. Absolutely.

Once his time is over, his time's over, he's free to walk. And he said he doesn't intend to run for re-election for various personal and project-related reasons that he's asked people not to speculate about, so we'll respect that. And that leaves them in sort of an awkward position. The Debian project, though, scatters authority

throughout the project, so it's not like they're going to be unfunctional, like they're going to continue on. A lot of it is in the hands of the individual maintainers or positions in the Debian project. I'll give you a couple examples. Individual developers have nearly absolute control over the packages they maintain. Difficult technical disagreements will get sorted out between developers and the technical committee. The release managers and the FTP masters make the final decision

on when things actually ship, and the project secretary ensures the necessary procedures are followed in general. And then there's a policy team that handles much of the overall design for the distribution. So in a sense,

there's not a lot left for the leader to do other than to fully represent the project and go out there. To show up to the conference and be the face, right? Play the politics role, I suppose. Yeah.

I think it also goes back to the last story, right? I mean, it kind of falls back on what Alex was saying about governance and how these things all play in together. Yeah. And are we just seeing a really outdated governance that needs to basically go back and kind of rewrite to freshen itself up. Or just even take a look at how they do things and see where they can improve or where they can modernize. We should compare it, though, right, to other projects that have gotten this wrong. Solus comes to mind.

Not that they haven't fixed it, but, like, governance is a good thing. So while clearly there are some problems, is it better to have this problem than the problem of one person gets hit with a bus and there goes your distro? Yeah. Well, the Debian bunch is super easy to convince and get everybody on the same page, so I'm sure there'll be no problem. What was the one quote

about machine learning in the Debian story? Oh, you're right. I don't know if you, did you see this one, Wes? They put, one of the Debian maintainers suggested that the leadership position could be fulfilled by a machine using some sort of

machine learning program. Oh, that's great. As long as it's open source, I'm all for it. That's so funny. That would be actually kind of awesome, wouldn't it? If they open source

like a distribution management engine that uses machine learning and just watches the mailing list. But it's like taking everything from like pen and paper is where we are guys yeah to robots yeah here it is some developers seem to relish this possibility even one suggesting machine learning system could be placed into the role instead of a human for the leadership position what does that say about the previous leader if anything that does feel like commentary on... Well, and also just the structure, right? Because the leader doesn't do that much.

He's mostly a figurehead. There you go. Although, I don't know how it would work at the conferences. You know, we sit here and we say, oh, modernize governance, improve this, do that. But the reality is, that is way easier said than done. And time they spend on fixing that stuff is time they don't spend on

shipping Debian. And that's going to be a constant struggle. But it's important, though. Without the governance, you won't have a Debian going forward. I completely agree. But if you're using technology from the 90s... That's the trick, right? It's a balance. And so there's no, like, we're not going to solve this right now.

It's going to be a lot more work. Yeah, I suppose so. All right, well, how about I pick us up with something? I found a couple of clips to celebrate the World Wide Web and the Internet, and I went and, you know me, I love pulling clips, and Cheese Bacon here said, you've got to go get some from the Computer Chronicles. So this is just a real quick little, let's just pick us back up.

Let's just change the mood a little bit with this one. Marshall McLuhan said that one day we would all live in a global village, an electronic community interconnected by communications networks that would shrink the Earth. Well, the global village has arrived and its main street is called the Internet, where people from around the world

do meet electronically to exchange ideas. Today we'll surf the net, we'll explore the Internet on this edition of the Computer Chronicles. The internet. Yes, and then we built these communities and then we created operating systems and, well, I think

we all remember what happened after that. I think we all know. There you have it. There you have it. I hope the Debian project, I hope things sort out. I think they've been doing a lot of things the same way for a very long time, so it's a difficult thing. But you know what? Enterprising people over there. How about a little housekeeping, gentlemen?

How about a little housekeeping? Now, there's a couple of things to cover. First of all, I was going to introduce you, but I already did. So, hi, Cheese. Hey. Welcome aboard. Thank you. We published the Linux OS Fundamental Study Group that we did last week.

That is now up on YouTube. We have a link in the show notes. So, if you were not able to attend live, you can go watch the recorded version. Thank you to Kenny and Elle for putting that on. You will find that in the show notes or on our YouTube channel. And speaking of YouTube videos. Oh, boy. So they have, today's the birthday for Linux Academy.

It's their seventh anniversary. And to celebrate, they did a trivia game where they took a few contestants, including myself, and asked them trivia related to Linux Academy. And then if you got the trivia wrong, you had to eat a bowl of chili. And there was five bowls, and they progressively got hotter and hotter until they were eventually on fire. And being the new guy, I didn't do so well. I didn't, like, I didn't know all this stuff,

you know, like I'm new. So I really bombed and I had to eat a lot of hot chili and they've posted that video today. And it's a lot of me being tortured. There's a lot of me getting tortured in that video. It's bad. You learned a lot about the Scoville unit that day. I did. So that'll be in the show notes as well. It's up on the Linux Academy Com YouTube channel, Linux Academy Com. And it's great.

It is a really good video. Jacob, the editor for that, managed to cut down an hour and a half into eight minutes. He did a killer job. Yeah. He really did a killer job at it. Impressive. did i burn my burn my face off holy and let's and and you know it and people will see it's not like uh like here's a whole bowl of chili that you have to know this is like condensed it's hot and like the peppers came out of like special jars and a special liquid and he added more peppers with gloves yeah yeah removing

peppers with gloves yeah oh yeah and that was after it cooked in it and then he added more so there was like fresh peppers in there too it was really you'll see in the video there's a couple there i think where richard uh complains about chewing yes yeah he made the fatal mistake of uh chewing the peppers up i made the mistake of licking my lips. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That's not good. Absolutely. Now, we've been taking your feedback about these study groups,

and I think we're going to rework them into something bigger and better. I don't know, because we don't have it finalized yet. So we're going to cancel the study group for next week, and we will relaunch study groups again. We have the Ansible one, I think, on the 7th.

I think we're going to leave that one on for now while we're reworking this. Is that right, Elle? Is it the 7th we're doing Ansible? First Tuesday of the month. Oh, yeah. There you go. That's easy to remember. First Tuesday of the month.

That's much easier. And we'll hopefully have our secret plans completed by then. We'll see. I think people will like it. The feedback's been super good on the study groups, and I think we could do it, make it an even more consumable way, because the reality is,

and this is going to be a big shocker, everybody, there's more people that can download it than can attend live. What? I know, right? I know. I know. It's crazy. It's not like we would have ever had metrics or anything else from anything we do that would suggest that. No, no, no, no. So we're going to, but there'll be still a live component of that.

But yeah, we're going to rework it with some of that in mind, make it a little more easier for people to consume because the one that we just published was, it was a hit. Well, I think it's fantastic, you know, and I'm sure Elle will go into it more. And yes, I'm here. I can finally like take part in these things. I'm so excited. yes, I'm here. I can finally like take part in these things. I'm so excited.

But, you know, just what Elle's done just since she's recently joined the network too and the study groups and rallying people around to help teach and to help create a more positive community. And I think that's just, that's fantastic. She killed it at scale too. Well, that's what I hear. That's what I hear. Hey, which bell was that? Here we go. Here, that's what I hear. That's what I hear. Hey, which bell was that?

Here we go. Here we go. There you go. It's a real bell. Yeah, there were some things in the way on that first attempt. We got to find swag bells. We got to find swag bells. That'd be so great.

I'm looking, man. You know, but so far it's been like bicycle bells, right? Yeah. I think we need the singular ding, not the cha-ching, cha-ching. Yeah, we don't want cha-ching, cha-ching. No, you just want right? Yeah. I think we need the singular ding and not the cha-ching, cha-ching. Yeah, we don't want cha-ching, cha-ching. No, you just want ding.

Yeah. Yeah, we're going to have some good swag at LinuxFest Northwest. And scale was great. In fact, we'll talk about scale here in just a moment. But before we get out

of housekeeping completely, go check out the meetup page, meetup.com slash Jupyter Broadcasting. Ange is always over there keeping the details up to date for the LinuxFest Northwest meetup. And so you can track it there.

We got a lot going on. It's going to be a lot of fun. Meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting. Future study groups also on there. And when we do meetups at things like scale, those are also on there. So there you go.

All right, there's housekeeping. Let's talk about scale. And it was a great scale. Scale 17x in Pasadena, California. Heck of an event. I never got a final number on the attendees, but I'm sure it was way over 5,000. But I don't know for sure. I know they had 33,000 registered attendees.

33,000. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? You guys can't see in the studio, but I'm like giving Chris the holy cow eyes but this wasn't my first rodeo so I'll go last I'd love to hear, I don't know Wes

I know you cut off a little bit on Coder but I'd love to hear a couple of highlights from you and takeaways from Scale you know I was really impressed with one just how welcoming and friendly it was my first Scale it was great. It's kind of in that perfect middle ground between a conference that's big enough that you can really see the people you want. Like, Chris, you and I got to see Brendan Gregg talk, and that was awesome. But, you know, people afterwards could just go right up and talk

to him. He wasn't totally swamped, really friendly, plenty of time to talk to whoever you want, and it doesn't feel like a sales push at all. It's just a bunch of people who love Linux and open source. Brandon Gregg's talk might have been one of my highlights. Right, yeah, let me just steal that from you. Especially the part where he was live debugging Minecraft but had never played Minecraft before. Yes, he didn't even know how to mine.

That was amazing. It was great. Using eBPF in real time, he's like capturing performance information about Minecraft and figuring out like where it hangs on the CPU. And he builds a fire graph of the different performance metrics. And it breaks down like in red, like the biggest performance issues.

And he's like, oh, need a little more information. Let's go do this. Oh, let's go load this library I've built. And he just does it all right there while he's giving a presentation. And it never gets boring. Doesn't miss a beat, isn't flustered at all. Really impressive. And that's like, that's the kind of caliber that you can get at scale, but you don't have to go to something like OzCon or reInvent and really just hate yourself while you're there. I was also impressed that like, I just, I just kept seeing organic meetings,

like people who had no idea, never talked to each other and were helping each other solve problems. Like I met a great guy, David, who was working in HPC and scientific computing. And we were checking out the Open Power booth, which was fascinating in its own right. He had had some trouble with Open Power trying to get some complicated old fashioned Fortran programs to compile. I'm sure many people can sympathize. Yeah, sure. And then the guy at the booth just offered like, oh, you know, I know another researcher who struggled with that. Let me get you in touch. He solved all those problems already. So I don't know. I was just really

impressed by how friendly and easy everything was and just the great caliber of people. And the range. So here he is using the open power architecture, which we don't talk about very much, solving Fortran issues. That is definitely a, that's a wide range of scale right there. Well, so Elle, this is also your first scale and I'd love to hear a couple of your highlights and takeaways from the event. You know, I think I had the same experience as Wes. I tackled it a little bit differently being my first time. I turned to my Twitter family and just tweeted out, Hey, first time at scale, how does this work? Within an hour, I was already invited to lunch

with a group of scale people who had been there multiple times. And throughout the conferences, I'm walking by, I have people walking up to me and going, hey, Elle, are you finding what you need? Do you have any questions? Can I get you a hold and get you in contact with anyone? So that kind of community was amazing.

I had another speaker that spoke at the same time as I did. And I just randomly tweeted out, you know, I'm really sad that I'm missing your talk, Justin. Is there any way I can get your slides? And he tweets me back and says, I'll be waiting at this table at this time. Come and ask me all the questions that you have. So that's the biggest small or the smallest big conference I've ever been to, if that makes sense. It does. And that guy was great. He was from opensource.com and he had some great questions that, or we had some questions that he had great answers for, I guess is the way to put it. It was really, it was really special to get to talk to him. It definitely was interesting because my takeaway, which I think I told you guys, which is funny, is I learned that when I grow up, I need to be an avocado. What's the story behind that?

It was so funny to see that community of community managers coming together and sharing what information that they've learned about what it means to develop an OSPEN source community and understanding that, you know what, avocados are expensive. It's going to cost a lot of money to build a community, but in the end, it's worth it. That's pretty great. That's pretty great. That is pretty great. So I think you both would recommend going. I saw in the chat room, people were asking if that's maybe a way to get a job by going to scale. Saturday night was the Bad Voltage Live Night, which we went to.

It was fun. But at the same time, there was a job networking session going on where people that were looking for a job or had a job were getting together and giving each other tips on resumes and cleaning up their online profiles and maybe giving better pitches. So there's a whole range of stuff. And so I would say yes. Also, a lot of companies are there to recruit. Right. Because if you are going to an event like that, you're probably in the demographic they want to hire from. Yep. I believe talking with an individual I won't name, but Texas Linux Fest last year, three individuals from Texas Linux Fest now work here at Linux Academy. I'm one of them.

As am I, right? The third person is a mystery? We don't know who that is yet. Well, I don't know who that is. I'm sure someone does. I do, yeah. But I think that is. I'm sure someone does. But I think that it's, you know, it's definitely a good avenue to go and just to be yourself and ask questions and not be afraid to ask questions. Yeah. It is a good environment for that.

It's not the hokey, I'm on a terminal on the other side of the world and I'm going to give you some snarky answers. It's generally someone who cares and is willing to help you out. With that though, I will say if you're attending, you have to be willing to go up and talk to people. The job isn't just going to fall in your lap. So it is a little bit of vulnerability of just walking up and starting conversations and doing a hallway track. That's a good point. And I think the nice thing is with the caliber of people, sure, that can be really nerve wracking and scary,

but everyone there is basically like you. They're all interested in the same stuff and really friendly. Even the speakers. Like, you know, we had, Wes and I had a moment of celebrity with Brandon Gregg because we've been following the incredible work he does as a Netflix performance engineer. And you get a real sense of the gift that Netflix has given to the community

by allowing him to open source his work. Because it's amazing. Watching him do that with Minecraft using open source tools that are available to all of us, and the functionality and features that eBPF is going to bring to Linux, incredible. And to watch him go through it, and you realize he is a geek about this.

He is super passionate. He gets excited about finding performance issues. And he's just somebody who's gotten over the fear of talking to people. And now he's at a point where he's a great presenter. Absolutely. And I think, you know, to Al's point too, is that if you're at one of these conferences

and you see somebody that maybe might be an outlier, you know, bring them over, you know, you never know who you're going to meet there. And, and, you know, it's not always easy for someone to socially interact, you know, um, not everybody can just, you know, jump right into that. And if you see somebody, you know, bring them into your circle and try and, you know, strike up conversation with them. And who knows, you know, what impact you're going to make on their life just by reaching out to them. So I think, you know, you definitely need to consider those things as well. I think Chris and Wes will speak to you. If I'm at that conference, ping me. I will definitely bring you along and introduce you

to people. It's one of the great parts of being part of this community. Just follow the hair. Yeah, that is. That is so many times I found Elle in a crowd because of that hair. Mr. Popey gave a talk, which we attended. That was great. Try to link that in the show notes. The way they did it, it's a little complicated for getting the content after the fact, but they had YouTube channels for each room that was streaming live. It's like Ballroom A, Ballroom B, Ballroom C, D, E, F.

And so not all of the talks were live, but a lot of them were live. And in various production states. But you can go back to those YouTube channels and skim the days and find some of the talks and stuff. But Popey's is linked in there, and it looks like he got that in there. So we'll try to put that in the show notes.

I had a great scale. I really focused on the hallway track, which is a silly thing. I always thought the people that did this were being lazy and wasting an opportunity because the talks are very valuable. But over the years that I've gone, I've realized it's the people and it's like the only time I get to see some of these people. And that has become more and more important as time has gone on. And then the talks are kind of secondary to me now. So I didn't go to as many this year. Also, I felt like not as many of them applied to me. It felt like if there was a theme,

which they don't have themes, but if you were to grok a theme by looking at all of the talks and aggregating it, it would be the cloud. Scale was really about the cloud. I mean, there was people giving talks about desktop stuff and applications and hardware. So it's not all cloud. It's not like it's 100% cloud. But if you were to abstract an overall theme, it would be the cloud is everywhere from the exhibition hall to the talks, cloud, cloud, cloud. In a way that kind of gave me a little bit of pause, like, oh man, we are really watching an era. This is a changing of an era now. Yeah, right. I mean, the keynote was the founder of HashiCorp. So that kind of sets the tone. Yeah. Now, of course, there was a lot of open source in there.

So don't think it's just like cloud corporate side, but still. Right. They managed to strike that balance better than any other event that's like one of the commercial ones, like the cons, LinuxCon, OSCon. They weigh heavily on the commercial side because it's for enterprises, people in IT. The tickets are like $1,000 for some of these events.

Where with scale, the community is the one submitting the talks. So they're the one setting the theme and the tone. It's what the community contributes is what the show or the expo becomes. So it is just a reflection of where the market's at now. That was fascinating. I got to go hands-on with a couple of pieces of hardware that I wanted to try out. And that's what I was going to ask you about. The conferences, the few that I've been to, I've gone to the talks,

but I'm always the nerd for the floor, right? Like what's there hardware-wise. Oh, the expo hall? Yes. And so I'm really curious, how does scale stack up in their expo hall compared to, say, some of the other conferences? I like it.

They generally have, along the outlies of the expo hall, like the open source projects, your Inkscapes, your OpenSouses, your Foundations. Your NextClouds, OpenClouds, whatever. Yeah, and then in the middle, you've got high-end commercial booths. I'm talking like high production, like booths with beer taps. Right. Plush carpet. VRP lounges.

Did you see that mirror picture I tweeted of a Tux Penguin made out of Optron cores? Yeah. Yeah, made out of Optron processors. There is like the Microsoft booth, which is one of the booths I stopped by. Super swanky lighting, great comfy carpet. And they have the Azure Sphere OS DevKit devices there. So I got to go hands-on with the little Azure Sphere OS, which is Linux-based, and some

example hardware where it was like a, this one I think was like a washing machine interface that was actually controlled by an Azure Sphere OS. And, I mean, not only were we getting a spiel about it, but we were interacting with one of the developers who's been working on stripping Linux down enough to make it run on those kinds of platforms.

And got to talk to the Visual Studio program manager and got a little bit of back and forth regarding the new Windows open-sourced calculator. Gave him a hard time about that. So it was actually one of my favorite booths because they had a Linux running device they were showing off. They were talking about some of the new things they're doing and and they just open sourced the calc.exe app. So it was kind of fun. The other booth I really enjoyed, I mean, there were so many, but the other one that I really enjoyed was Purism. Got to talk to Todd Weaver a couple of times, bumped into him in the hotel as well. and bumped into him in the hotel as well.

And I talked to their chief security guy. His name's Kyle. And he went over how they're using the Purism Secure Boot system, how it uses your GPG keys to sign things. So things are signed with your GPG stuff, how the hardware token works into that. And we talked a little bit about their convergence efforts. And I got to hold the development kit

for the Librem 5 in my hands. Which was like a brick. Yeah, it was a brick. Yeah, it was a big, big brick that didn't power on. Did you have, and this is, you know, kind of one of the things that I was curious about at CL2. Did they have like Pine64 there with their quote unquote? I didn't see Pine64, no.

Device? But there were some other hardware devices there, but I didn't see Pine64. More mobile hardware devices? I'll tell you the one that impressed me the most was the one Wes was talking about a little bit earlier, the OpenPower architecture booth. We talk a lot about future desktops

that are based on ARM processors or what RISC-V might develop into one day. But these guys have PowerPC-based desktops that are modern processors with, as he puts it, just monster I.O. And it was just like a real Linux desktop running right there on a Raptor workstation, which I'd never seen one in person. It was really cool.

Yeah. With like a real video card, like an AMD video card in there, and like PCI slots, and memory slots, like a desktop tower running the open power PC architecture. That's awesome. Yeah, it was actually really cool. It's something people don't talk a lot about. Part OpenPower PowerPC architecture. That's awesome. Yeah, it was actually really cool.

It's something people don't talk a lot about. Part of it's the price. I'm sure. It's a little expensive. Like that rig he had there was like over $3,000. Yeah, I mean, but if you look at that and say, look at a specced out Thelio or something. Yeah, yeah, that's true.

You know, I forgot to ask about the fan noise because boy, wouldn't that make a nice studio machine? Yeah, no, I guess the, unlike RISC-V, like the whole architecture isn't open source for open power. IBM, though, he seemed to think maybe one day IBM might. So there was, I mean, there were so many cool booths. Got to bump into Jordan from Linux Gamecast. That was really cool.

Got to meet him in person. And they were at the Lutris booth. Lutris had a booth there. So that was really cool. I saw Jill from their, from their weekly show that they do and got to chat with tons and tons of audience members. And we had a great meetup over 30 people showed up for our dinner,

which PF Chang's left me with the bill. We go up, we go there. This is actually, I don't think you don't think emma would mind me telling the story because it was so it was so badass she's awesome yeah so we get there and we asked the waiter like can you split the check oh yeah yeah we can split the check okay well how we can split it two ways well i'm looking there's like there's like 32 of us there right i'm like that's not gonna work and emma's like oh no i'm not having this she's like computers can do this i'm gonna go talk to the manager so she she gets up and she's gone for

like five six minutes seven minutes long enough that you know she's having a conversation with somebody she gets back and she kind of has like this little frustrated look on her and i'm like what because it's like didn't go well like what's the matter it's like no it's they'll only split it four ways now like okay so I'm sitting there doing the math. I'm like, well, which four suckers get stuck with the bill? Like, how are we going to spread around cash? Like, how are we going to do this? Right.

But as the night goes on, when you've got a big group of people, we're getting taught, we're getting, you know, we're drinking, we're talking loud. We're taking up a lot of space. They have a shift change. And the new waiter, he's not having any of it. He's, he, because he has inherited a mess. The old waiter was great. Like he,

he was, he was playing a long troll on us on one side of the table. He'd have an accent. That took us way too long to figure out. It was like, what is going on here? Yeah. And the other side of the table,

no accent. I had that happen here at a Duncan. Really? Yeah. A Duncan donut. Yes. Well, it was pretty funny.

Like it, it had us, you know, we were, we were, we were like, everybody's like listening every time we come up. But he got shift changed. New guy came up. He wasn't having the bill split at all. I wonder if the new guy came up because he knew that he wasn't going to get the gratuity level of the original waiter guy. Yeah. Right?

So he's like, no, guys. Yeah. Yeah. That guy had invested. He invested in it. Or the original waiter was just smart enough to get out of there before he had to deal with any of our unhappiness about the bill. Ding. I had a lot of good fun, though.

It was a good night, and it was good to see everybody again. I do think four days is a lot for scale. You know, I think they could do it in two or three, cut a few talks, do it in two or three days. Maybe two days would be perfect. Boy, by the end, yeah, it really feels like a slug. Even though you're having fun the whole time,

it's just so much. Yeah, now our attention turns to LinuxFest Northwest. LinuxFest Northwest coming up. So excited. Texas LinuxFest coming up. Yeah. All of the LinuxFests coming up.

Yeah, you're going to be there for LinuxFest Northwest. Mm-hmm. About damn time. Oh, that's awesome. About damn time. I know. I'm super excited.

It'll be my first time in washington state as well so wow and well uh one of the things that i did want to note that i noticed because i'm so jealous man following you guys on twitter you know and like seeing all the things that are going on i guess one day you guys decided to take l to the pacific ocean she'd never seen the pacific ocean i thought that was great uh but you know i'm looking forward to getting up there in washington and checking it out, too. So the amazing part of that is I don't think there was a decision made. It's we're all headed back to the hotel to go to bed.

And I'm like, oh, I've never seen the ocean. And the next thing I know, we're in a car headed to the ocean. I like it. You got to do that, right? Absolutely. I also think when she comes up to Washington and you, too, we should go like visit some mountains. Real mountains. Real mountains. Yeah mountains, yeah.

I called the hills mountains in California and I'm never going to live that down. I wasn't having it. I wasn't having it. I mean, California has a few mountains. Don't get me wrong, but not where we were. Not in LA, not where we were at in Pasadena. Yeah, good times. And if we didn't get a chance to see it scale this year, maybe we'll get to see it at LinuxFest Northwest.

I know. I don't want people to feel like they scale this year, maybe we'll get to see it at LinuxFest Northwest. I know. I don't want people to feel like they're left out, but it is a lot of fun. And if you ever have the opportunity, I encourage you to take it. What do you say we do a few emails before we get out of here? All right, one comes in from Ken about trying out software. And I wanted to read this one on the show

because we've gotten variations of this email over the years. And I can't quite remember if we've ever taken a crack at actually answering it. So he says, hey, Chris and team, I've been a regular listener now for over a year to a number of the programs. I'm intrigued by many of the software picks, but even though I'm tempted to try it, I'm always concerned about how easy it might be to delete or clean off my system after I'm done with it. I don't want a lot of leftover junk. Can you give me some insight about how you usually handle this? I'd rather not have to nuke and pave the OS over and over

to ensure a stable system. Do snaps insulate you from the main OS? Does this solve this problem? I'm inclined mostly just install things inside a VM or using GNOME boxes or VirtualBox and play with it there. On the other hand, I'm guessing I'm not really getting a true sense of the performance of these apps. So I thought maybe you could discuss this on the show. We do install a lot of software for this show. And we all know that feeling of, oh, my system's so gross now. Well, and what was it last week?

Dot file nightmares? Yeah, yeah. Right? Yeah, I know, right? Sort of. And I mean, this kind of really plays into that. Damn it, you're right. So I'm not going to

lie. I don't tend to uninstall often unless it is a real flop, then I uninstall it. But because disk space is cheap and it's generally using shared libraries that are already on my system, once I've got the bulk of things installed, the cost of leaving it on there is generally negligible other than it's an entry in my software package database, which then has to then get updates and things like that, which is kind of annoying. Usually when I'm doing updates and I notice a program go by that I never, ever, ever use, I'll usually contemplate removing it. But I will admit I kind of err on the side of just not bothering with it. What about you, Wes? These days, mostly I'm using Docker. It's pretty easy to pass

your Xsocket, or you can do it with Wayland, too. So there's really no reason not to use Docker. If you're already familiar with that you want to try something out, especially if it's on a different distro, that's really handy. Sometimes you'll get little weirdnesses with toolkits and stuff. So if you're going for a really visual app, okay, maybe not.

But that's one step. And Ken, to answer your question, definitely go behind our show notes, watch Popey's Talks because yes, snaps can help. Of course you have to depend on that package being snapped, but once it is, and if it's not a legacy app, yeah, you don't have to worry about your system when you install it.

Yeah, that is, that's a great plug for the old talk there. Nice call there, Wes, nice call. I was curious about you, Brent. Do you try to avoid installing software? Do you install it and then leave it? What's your approach? I certainly don't try to avoid installing software because that's the best way to discover new things.

But I'm like you. If I see a piece of software scrolling by weekly when I'm doing my updates that I never use, I tend to lean to try to take it off. And if you're running like an Ubuntu based distribution, they make it pretty easy to at least like purge packages and stuff like that. And I haven't had too many problems with the package manager uninstalling something useful in that process. So it's been actually fairly smooth to kind of install stuff, uninstall stuff, and just try to keep things

down to only the programs I'm using. But I would say I've never run into a real problem with anything getting totally messed up because of trying software. One thing too that makes me think of is it's often handy to have a good idea of what your base is, whether that's in something like Ansible or just a bash script or just a list of packages that you want on every system. Because then whenever you are back to nuking and paving or you just want to try another distro, it's not as much work to get all set up.

And backups, everyone. Good backups. Yeah, backups do help. And your package manager should warn you if it's about to do something that's going to uninstall the GNOME desktop or something like that. Yeah, it really pays to pay attention to what it's trying to tell you right um i've been caught a few times when it's trying to install like 400 packages just for a simple application or something and so yeah read read things it's really important yeah read it and i might say last my last bit of advice would be um give it a go because this is how you

learn yeah you know this is how you learn. You know, this is how you, and if you do break it, just like Brent says, make sure you got good backups. Yeah. And you probably won't ever make that mistake again. Maybe not that particular one, but you will most definitely make more mistakes and break the things in the future. Hopefully, if you're having fun. Yeah. It is okay to fail sometimes.

I think that's a future topic that Elle suggested at scale that I like. It's like we should tell a few stories where we tried to do something and it blew up horribly in our face like try to learn something new and it just didn't work out um in fact i'd love to get that as a feedback item too i'd read a couple of those if you want to share some with the class go to linuxunplugged.com contact and send in your training fail. And I think especially the early day fails. What were some of your fails in the early days? And maybe even in the 90s, right? Or early 2000s, when there wasn't really all that documentation. And you failed miserably.

Where did you go? How did you fail? It happens. Super interesting to hear those stories. I remember having to go into school and look up stuff on the internet and take it home with me for the next day. He printed it out. Yeah.

I love it. Man, you know what I used to do back in the late 90s, early 2000s, before we really had great search engines? We had search engines, but nothing to write home about. And we had a monthly book trip that we would go on and we would each get to go. And there was an it budget for books and we would go pick out a book. Wow. That's where you acquired all your nutshell books. Oh yeah. So many, we had, we had so many shelves of books back then. It was, it was really crazy. Of course,

when I left, there were all the company's books and I don't know what they're doing with all the, probably firestarter now. All right, last email of the show comes in from Paul following up on our home automation topic. Paul writes, as always, like the show, the bit about home automation I thought I would mention. There's something else you could look at. It's called Node-RED. It's a great way to self-document all your automation using a GUI flowchart. It's very

powerful. I've only recently started to use it on my Ubuntu box at home. I connected it easily to my Echo, and I also connected it to my Broadlink IR blaster. This is neat. So this is something else to put on our list, Wes. Yeah, I haven't played with it before, but looking at it, gosh, the GUI looks wonderful. It's just very intuitive. You can tie things together. And turns out, just Googling around for some examples, a lot of people are using it. It's really popular as part of the home assistant community. So, like, there's a couple of YouTubers.

Dr. Z's is a good one that has some stuff on it. So, take a look at that. Ah, when I get back, we're going to get that home automation system finished up in the studio. We'll have to call it studio automation. Yeah, it will be. I'm really looking forward to it. Well, I'll just mention, I meant to mention earlier,

if you want to see a picture from our meetup and stuff, I have a link in the show notes to the picture that System76 tweeted out of the meetup and a good group there. It's just so much fun. So much fun. But it's good to be back. Good to be back in the studio and back to regular shows for a bit,

at least for a little bit. We'll see. I'm going to be hitting the road soon, actually, studio and back to regular shows for a bit, at least for a little bit. We'll see. I'm going to be hitting the road soon, actually, and traveling back to Washington. Yeah, what are you talking about normalcy? You don't have that. I know. Actually, yeah, next week I'll probably be on the road for the show.

It'll probably be a road show. So, yeah, nothing normal. Nothing normal about that. It's going to be crazy. But you should join us live and find out if we managed to pull it off over at jblive.tv. We do it on Tuesdays. Go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar to get it converted

to your local time. It's 4pm Central, 2pm Pacific. Those are the two that I follow the most closely. Mr. Wes, where can people go get more Wes Payne? At Wes Payne or check out techsnap.systems. Ooh, what about you, Mr. Bacon? You got anything you want to plug?

They can just go to atcheesebacon on Twitter. Boom. Check that out. What about you, Bacon? You got anything you want to plug? They can just go to at Cheese Bacon on Twitter. Boom. Check that out. What about you, Elle? You want to plug your Twitter handle? I'm at L underscore O underscore punk. That's L-O punk. Owning those underscores there. Owning those underscores. And me? Well, thanks for asking. I'm at Chris L-E-S. The network

at Jupiter Signal. Our website, LinuxUnplugged.com. LinuxUnplugged.com slash contact for your feedback. Let me know your training fail. Maybe we'll cover that on a future episode of the Unplugged program. And maybe consider joining us in our virtual lug. You can Google, probably the easiest way to do it, Jupyter Colony Mumble.

You'll get all the information, the setup guide, how to get in there. We just ask that you have a headset, some microphone that works, and a way to hear us. Pretty simple to participate. And then you can get your opinions in the show. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of The Unplugged Program, and we'll see you right back here next

Tuesday! Thank you. All right. Now we just got to name this thing, and we're done for the day. Hey, Brent, what's the name? Yeah. Come on, Brent. Amazing. I got a few entries in there. Oh, did you? Good. Good. Brent's back, everybody. what's the name? Yeah. Come on, Brent. Amazing. I got a few entries in there. Oh, did you?

Good. Good. Brent's back, everybody. He's back. We miss you so much when you're gone. Today, we'll surf the net. That's not bad. It's not bad.

Debbie and his children's also pretty good. Oh, let's see. We talked about scale, too, so we could have scale in there. I can't wait to step out of this hot box. I cannot wait. It's going to be glorious. We should go outside for a solid five minutes. We should make a couple of laps around the building here.

Yeah. Yeah, there is a possibility of tornadoes happening, I think, tomorrow morning. Oh, my gosh. I think tomorrow, Chris and I are going to, because we're staying in the same hotel right now, I think we're just going to scrap all this and go tornado hunting. Be safe now. That would be awesome. That would be so great.

New podcast. Yeah. Jupiter Broadcasting's Tornado Hunter. It's very windy for the podcast, but if you can listen through that. Yeah, audio not so good. Yeah, audio not so great.