LINUX Unplugged - 296: Defining Desktop Linux

Episode Date: April 10, 2019

The way we’ve been thinking about Desktop Linux is all wrong. We start by defining Desktop Linux, and where it might be going in the future. Plus we throw a studio party for our new look, and the text editor that’s taking the crew by storm. Special Guests: Alan Pope, Ell Marquez, and Martin Wimpress.

How about this one, Wes? A new way to attack Internet of Things systems is with some sort of wireless Doppler effect? It's not really. Come on, not really. Did you grok anything from this? Yeah, okay, so it may be that there are some attacks here, but it can also be useful just for communication. And the central insight is protocols are robust, right?

So, like, a lot of stuff, think like FM radio, right? You do frequency zone modulations, so you're sort of shifting frequencies, but nothing's exact, right? There's all kinds of interference when you're sending out signals in Wi-Fi or Bluetooth low energy. Oh, for sure.

So the protocols and algorithms have plans for that. They can handle some drift there. So this is a new technique that basically abuses that and injects what looks like valid legacy traffic or repeats valid legacy traffic with slight modifications to the frequency, which bypasses any sort of the checks.

It's with intolerance for stuff like whatever your physical layer, the actual Wi-Fi chipset or the Bluetooth chipset, and then that data once it's in the hand of something a little bit higher in the stack can be coded as actual communication. And one of the problems that they're trying to solve is you have a whole bunch of IoT devices with Bluetooth low energy that can't talk that far,

but you have Wi-Fi that's permeating the area. All the things. With this, maybe you could tie them together. That's your Science Moment with Wes. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 296 for April 9th, 2019. Welcome into Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that has not one, but multiple celebrations this week. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Wes. We really have a great show. So we have some things multiple celebrations this week. My name is Chris. My name is Wes.

Hello, Wes. We really have a great show. So we have some things to celebrate this week. We'll tell you about that in just a moment. But as always, we've got some great community news that will probably spur some discussion with our virtual lug. And then later on in the show, some are saying desktop Linux is collapsing,

that it's in trouble. It has a motivation problem in development, and it has an adoption problem. And some statistics actually back that up. We'll look at these sobering numbers and then get into a wider conversation about the future of Linux desktop and how it might look a little different

than maybe what we're used to, what we're expecting, you might say. We'll tell you more about that in a little bit if we get there, but before we go any further, it is my duty to bring in that virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings! Mumbleroom? Hey, you might say. We'll tell you more about that in a little bit if we get there. But before we go any further, it is my duty to bring in that virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings. Mumbleroom. Hello.

Hello. Hello. I hear an L in Cheese in there, too. Hello to you guys. Nice to have you guys. Nice to have you there. L is our community architect, and Cheese is the designer here at the Jupyter Broadcasting Network. Joined Linux Academy, what, about a month ago now, Cheese?

It's been about 30 days or so? Yeah, the 11thter Broadcasting Network. Joined Linux Academy, what, about a month ago now, Cheese? It's been about 30 days or so? Yeah, the 11th will be a month. Huh. Gosh, and you've already done so much. Yeah, we'll get to that. But Brandon's here in the mumble room as well as MiniMac, and I see NeonPopie, of course, not regular Poppy. We don't want him.

You got PieCrash in there, SocialHappiness from System76 in there, rocking it out, Tats in there as well, Turth, and Wimpy. So we have a great showing. Amazing. We have a great showing. Something that I've actually been really enjoying recently is we've been able to start the show out with some birthday announcements. Yeah.

So this is like now three weeks in a row, right? It's a record. It is. It is. And this is super cool. So first of all, happy birthday to my co-host, Mr. Wes Payne. Oh, thank you very much. Today is Wes's birthday.

We just got done celebrating with a little podcast grilling. We did a great job, too. Killed it. Perfect birthday present. Killed it. Killed it. So if we fall asleep halfway through the show, it's from the meat sleeps. So happy birthday to you, Wes.

It's awesome that you're here today on your birthday. I can't think of a place I'd rather be. Oh, shucks. And also happy 14th anniversary to good old Git. Happy birthday! That's right, yeah. We're super excited here in the studio. We have a lot of people in the studio today.

I have them behind the soundproof door right now, so we've closed off the studio from the rest of the party. Today, we are doing our official launch party on air, and so there's probably 60 to 70 people, more people arriving outside the studio right now. We better hurry up because there's not enough air to go around. There's one speaker out there. We said you can't come in the studio. We're closing the soundproof door.

We don't want to hear you. There's one speaker you can all huddle around if you want to listen and otherwise eat your meat. That's pretty much it. So we'll get to that in a little bit. But I thought maybe, maybe we should start with a little community news this week, as we do here on the old podcast. And we have some interesting data now. You know, you look back at it, it's been a few months since Proton released.

And one graph really kind of sums it up. We'll have it linked in the show notes. Seven to eight months ago, Proton comes out. And now we have some major milestones, don't we? Yeah, we do. Okay. September 2018 was the biggest jump in compatibility by far. And that, I mean, that kind of makes sense if you think about what happened around that time, around announcements and the work that had just been put in on the platform. And then less spectacular, but steady improvements around up until the end of the last year now january and february of this year were pretty calm only only one new proton release basically in all of mid

february march 2019 though is special because they saw a release of proton 4.2 at the very end yeah but it was it was still sufficient to bring enough new reports. I guess the picture here is there's been less hype, right? We've talked about Proton, but kind of because we're all still thinking about it, not because there's been so much movement on their side. It's been like a slow and steady where it's this weird thing where

different aspects of the stack get updated at different times, so it's kind of hard to track from an enthusiast standpoint unless you're really following it closely. But I think the net result of the work is pretty good. The net result is there's a lot of Windows games that didn't formally work on Linux that now are playing great under Proton. Really, from that perspective, it feels like a different world now that we're in. We're in the post-Proton era. Yeah.

That's why I was kind of surprised that they painted this picture this way. It's only really a start, though. I think that's sort of the expectation to remember. We're not even a year into it. I mean, there are still many games, especially a lot of games that maybe are less popular, some niche markets that just aren't well served by any of this,

and there are just some pathological cases where it's not going to work. So it's all well and good to say, like, look at how far we've come. I think there's still plenty of Linux users who wish they could stop dual booting. Yeah, I think that's probably true. While we're talking about games,

not related to Valve at all, but Lutris, which is another game platform alternative, has another update. They've been cranking them out recently. So check this out. This is another great way. They have, I can't remember quite what it's called

because I use Lutris sparingly, but I think it's pretty great when I do use it. And they've recently done really good integration with GOG. Oh, yeah. Lutris describes itself as an open source gaming platform that makes gaming on Linux easier, but basically manage installing and providing optimal settings for games,

which is probably why you like it so much. Yeah, yeah. And they've just, version 0.52 adds the Vulkan ICD, which is the installable client driver, into the system options and adds a sample count option for wine to enable certain types of anti-aliasing. And there's now better detection

about an improper wine setup, and wine and Vulkan setup, like if you have a bad combo. See, that's nice, because that's already making me a little scared to go troubleshoot. That sounds complicated. Like if you have a bad combo. See, that's nice because that's already making me a little scared to go troubleshoot. That sounds complicated.

And if you just want to play a game, that's the last thing you want. And, you know, not too long ago, they relaunched, or not relaunched, but they just updated

their UI to GTK3 like in the 0.5 release. See, that is slow and steady. I mean, we needed that to happen, so that's great. Now, two really great projects out there. Two really great projects out there.

So check out Lutris if you haven't before. It's a great way to bring in a lot of different game stores, including Steam. You can install the Steam runtime stuff and all of that, too. We have a couple of topic experts for our next story in the community news. I wanted to put this in here because I think, and guys, correct

me if I'm wrong, I believe I sort of watched the beginning of this process, which was now a very long time ago when I attended a canonical Snap Sprint, and it was either the first or the second one I attended, and Microsoft was there talking about snapping up VS Code. And that might have been almost two years ago now? Yeah, so you were at two sprints, and those were both attended by Visual Studio Code, So you were at two sprints, and those were both attended by Visual Studio Code,

one in September of 2017, and then the following one in January of 2018. And we'd started talking to them in May of 2017. So that's how long it takes to work with an ISV and bring their already existing Linux software to an App Store type system. I just want everybody to soak that in for a second. So the end result is an announcement, hey, VS Code is available as a Snap now. And you're like, oh, sure. Great.

Years, literally years of working with Microsoft. It's funny too, because almost my first reaction was like, oh, it wasn't there or wasn't there already? Yeah. So this is the thing, right? So there was and I was the maintainer of it. So, yeah,

we did that work in order to sort of, you know, test the system out in the very early days. But then it's not enough just to say, oh, here's a snap of a visual studio code because you know it's available via other means what's interesting with the snap of visual studio code is that if you're using vs code on windows and mac the updates appear in app it tells you there's a new update and that you should restart now and all of those sorts of things. It's all very slickly integrated.

And one of the reasons why this was protracted is that Microsoft have embedded that same capability in the snap of Visual Studio Code to bring it in feature parity with the versions that you use on Windows and Mac. And I think that's something we're going to start to see a little bit more of as we go forwards now. It's important that you're talking about this, I think, because that's a tiny little thing. It sounds like a small feature, but it's one of those things in the product that makes it feel

like a robust editor that you're going to depend on. And developers coming from macOS or Windows expect it. Exactly. And one of the other things that's come out of this exercise is obviously Visual Studio Code has a lot of users. Ubuntu has a lot of users. Ubuntu has a lot of users and Microsoft have been publishing code insiders in the store for, uh, about eight months now. Um, and lots of people are using that. And that was really helpful for us and Microsoft to identify some teething troubles. One of the things you will see cited around the internet, if you look in the right places, is that snaps are slow to start. And certainly, we experienced that and code was one of the applications that had this problem.

So we dug into that with them and we fixed this in the back end of last year. And all of those fixes landed in sort of early January after the Christmas break. But we've recently written a blog post about like how we profiled all of that stuff and used Visual Studio Code across a number of different distributions to understand what the impact was and what was actually causing this problem. And consequently, snaps are faster, not just for code, but for, you know, a whole raft of applications now. And through doing that work, we've got some ideas in the future about how we can improve the performance further still. So it's been a very worthwhile, you know, process all the way through, really. Yeah. Everybody appreciates faster

application startup time. So that's been a benefit a lot of users. And congratulations to you guys for sticking with it and working with Microsoft, because that is the process. That is what it is like to work with large corporations, and

it's totally normal. And so, you know, part of the behind-the-curtain stuff that we don't see is the work that goes down, the in-person meetings, the emails, the months and months of communication. That boring sort of just following up, nothing exciting, but checking in, how's it going? And, you know, something that is totally, you will never see, but there's, you know,

when organizations work together, there's legal process you have to go through. You know you when you've got something in a store and it's a trademarked thing and there are logos and icons and all of that that all needs to be squared away with legal people on both sides of the fence and there's months of work involved in just getting that right you know it's really easy to take a deb of something from with some random place that it's been published and then repackage it up and stick it in the AUR, for example. You know, I did that back in the past when I was involved in the Arch community. It was a real simple thing to do. But when you're doing it as,

you know, two organizations working together, there's a whole additional bit of process you have to go through to do it legitimately. I would imagine. I would imagine that's putting it lightly. Well, that's super cool. And I think we have a couple of boots on the code right here that have loaded it up and tried it. I believe, Mr. Cheese, you've become a VS Code user, correct? Yes, I have. Recently, just kind of trying the editors. I haven't, haven't done a lot of editing, uh, recently or coding recently. Um, so I'd started with sublime. Um, and then what killed me was, uh, whenever I tried to command S and save a file and they prompted me to pay them. Yeah.

Yeah. That is annoying. Immediately. I was like, ah, I gotta find something else. Uh, then I found VS Code, pulled it from Microsoft, originally for the Mac, and then reloaded a Mac with Linux this weekend and then pulled the Snap down and installed it that way.

Super quick, super simple. Just worked right out of the box, man. It's so good. So nice. Huh. Okay. Stay a while and listen. Al, I'm curious about your experience

because I think you said in our group chat, too, that you've recently switched over to VS Code. Are you using the Snap? And why did you go with a Microsoft editor? So I must admit that I'm not as fancy as cheese. I come from using Vim. So I was doing it old school. And somebody turned me on to VS Code,

telling me that it was actually integrated with Get. So when I was doing things like pushing up my notes, I could just write it in Markdown. There was something there already that told me if my Markdown wasn't compatible with what was needed for GitHub. And then I could just push it when I was done. So it just made my workflow a lot simpler. Yeah, that does sound really handy. Yeah, you could do a whole episode on like real top quality extensions for visual studio code that like streamline your workflow or supercharge things but one of the things it did this week which i just loved is i was working on some systemd unit files and i opened

them up and then down in the bottom it said hey there are extensions in the marketplace that know what a service uh extension means do you want to look at them i went okay then and then there was a bunch of tools for systemd units and it i looked at a couple of them i thought that one sounds good install and then suddenly i've got you know tooltips expansions and assistance around system to unit so it's like oh my goodness this is brilliant so now as i open up you know random uh language files because i'm doing some stuff with languages at the moment languages that i wouldn't ordinarily use he says oh hey i've noticed you've opened something in erlang would you like to look at the erlang extension say yes please and then you install some things and suddenly you know this language that doesn't mean much to you is now decorated with all sorts of useful hints and advice.

It's brilliant. Very easy. Yeah, much easier to make it readable. Erlang, eh? What are you doing with Erlang? It's a long story. You don't need to hear it. Oh, I don't know about that.

That was just one example. Well, we have another snapgraph summit as we as we're on the topic we have another snapgraph summit coming up in uh june uh this one's going to be in montreal in canada and uh we're partnering with uh we're co-hosting the event with travis ci so this time around there's a focus on language ecosystems so doing lots of work with languages at the moment oh Oh, neat. I'm sure some interesting developments will come. That does sound cool.

Well, stick around. We have more to talk about. I wanted to give a quick update. There is a distribution that's kind of unique. I don't even know if it's fair to call it a distribution. We've talked about it before on this show and on Linux Action News. It was formerly known as WLinux,

and it was Linux in the Microsoft Store that was optimized for the Windows subsystem for Linux. Right. To give you, like, the best Linux experience on Windows. And to their credit, they've actually been contributing bug fixes upstream. They recently collaborated with the Berkeley DB team at Oracle and the WSL team at Microsoft to solve a bug that was nagging WSL performance.

That's pretty great. They say they detected a bug in Fedora packaging tools and reported it upstream in time for Fedora 30. So they're doing stuff, and that's just top of the iceberg. That is pretty neat, yeah. And regardless of whether you want to pay for an operating

whatever you want to call this distribution set of software tools to run on your proprietary operating system or not, it's neat to show that they're stress testing this stuff, they're working, they're putting in work, so if you want to run some other operating system, there's going to be upstream benefits. And it shows that there's clearly interest on both sides,

they're getting some good support from Microsoft, so people who want to run more Linux on Windows, you're in luck. So there's a big change coming. You ready? They're changing their name from WL Linux. If you want to run more Linux on Windows, you're in luck. So there's a big change coming. You ready? Ooh. They're changing their name from WL Linux. Oh, what? Okay, okay.

And I'm getting this wrong because it's based on a Japanese pronunciation that is probably pronounced pen-gin. So I think that's how you pronounce it, is pen-gin. It's going to be P-E-N-G-W-I-N. So not penguin. But penguin. It's based on Japanese pronunciation. But you got the win in there, which is kind of a hint. And Hayden Barnes was interviewed by the register,

and he said that, well, you know, come on, WLinux was only supposed to be the code name. It wasn't going to be like the main name or anything like that. It was also a massive misnomer as well, because the one thing it didn't have in it was Linux. Right. All right. There's a distribution that's entirely absent of a Linux kernel.

So I guess that's another good reason to rename it. Also kind of invokes Sigwin in my mind. Yeah, absolutely. And they spoke over here, and the register did to another. Isn't it pronounced Penguin? Well, I don't know here. It says he added it is close to the Japanese pronunciation and transliteration of Penguin, it is close to the Japanese pronunciation, uh, and,

and transliteration of penguin, which is pen gin. It's in the, in the register. They spelled it as the pronunciation is P E N G I N. You know, like gin, the drink.

Sounds like the Texas pronunciation. It does. Then you're mixing segway and you get pink, pink, but I don't know. Yeah, maybe I could see it. Hopefully you don't have to say-Ping. I don't know. Yeah, maybe. I could see it.

Hopefully you don't have to say it. You just have to install it. Yeah. I don't, I've never actually tried it. So one of these days I'll get around to it. Get around installing Windows. You never try? Have you tried the subsystem? I think, I think once, maybe, briefly.

I guess this is just a testament to the limited amount of Windows in your life. I don't have a functioning Windows install anywhere. I do have a partition on my ThinkPad that if I wanted to go through the process of setting up Grub to boot it, I could actually probably boot it. So you're close. I think.

But yeah, I haven't been in Windows in a very, very long time. It may have now been multiples of years. It's funny, we were just talking about this off-air, that neither of us are in a position where we have a regular Windows install that we're using, even in a VM. There's actually enough open-source stuff

happening over in the Windows world. There's been stuff we wanted to try but could not. The downsides of an all-Linux lifestyle. I've never installed GNU slash Linux. It's true, it's true. All right, well, there you go. If you have any experience with WL, well, now, PENGIN, or maybe if you have any experience with how you pronounce it, let us know.

Linuxunplugged.com slash contact and send us in a note. Let us know. Please do. We need to go check in on that party. With that door closed, I can't even really tell they're out there. Yeah, that's dangerous. So let's get to a little housekeeping first. tell they're out there. Yeah, that's dangerous. So let's get to a little housekeeping first.

First up on the housekeeping list this week, go check out Coder Radio 352. That's coder.show slash 352. If nothing else, Wes covered his super crazy, awesome run out of RAM setup. He has an Ubuntu 1904 complete working environment where he's editing podcasts and everything, all running out of RAM. And he covered the entire setup in episode 352. You could do it right now.

Yeah, absolutely. It's just using stuff built into Linux. Actually, I was running it this morning. I don't know why you're not in there all the time, dude. It runs as fast

as the speed of RAM. It is pretty snappy. I would live in there. I would live in there. So that was a, I just, it really is a segment we could have done in this show, but you and I just were last minute filling in for Mike, and so we were just talking about whatever, just shooting the S, and it came up. And so go listen to that episode because it really should be a segment in this show.

Yeah, and go give it a try too. I'd be curious. I linked some docs. There's some pretty good documentation on how to do it. But I'd be curious to see if other people find it suitable on their systems. And there's also a really cool opportunity. We'll have a link in the show notes. It's generally like $1,000.

But there is an opportunity for women and underrepresented groups from Untapped Pathways to go attend the up and coming 2019 grace hopper celebration which is a big ticket item to get in there and so if you can get in for free if you're in that group click a note in our show notes i think it'd be pretty awesome to be able to attend that yeah there's lots of good people to meet there lots of good networking and i'm sure all kinds of stuff to see grace hopper was was an amazing... I think she's passed, yeah? Grace Haber was an amazing woman. Some really cool YouTube videos out there.

Some really cool YouTube videos. Go look that up after the show. And then last but not least, we're going through the housekeeping quick because we've got to go check in on that party before they burn the studio down. Last but not least, Linux Academy is hiring for a full-stack

Ruby on Rails developer position. Full-time, remote, with benefits, everything. And they're looking to fill, I think, a couple of them. So if that might be you and you're looking for a change, link in the show notes or go to linuxacademy.com slash careers to find your way there. That could be a great opportunity. And that, my friends, boom, is the housekeeping. So we have so much to get into today. So Cheese, why don't you come on over here. Let's go outside. Open up the soundproof door there. Let's go out there. So we have so much to get into today.

So Cheese, why don't you come on over here. Let's go outside. Open up the soundproof door there. Let's go out there. Here we go. Hey, everybody. What up? So this week, we are super excited to announce

that the new Jupyter Broadcasting logos have rolled out. The new Linux Unplugged logo, all of the shows, the new look on the website, and we want to just take a minute here. Hold on. You know what? I can't. This is so loud. I can't focus with that door open. Hold on. I got to get rid of these people, the new look on the website, and we want to just take a minute here. Hold on, you know what? I can't... This is so loud. I can't focus with that door open. Hold on, I gotta

get rid of these people, okay? You guys don't mind, right? No, no, no. The show comes first, right? It does. Hey, guys? Hey, guys? Hey, tone it down. Hey, guys? Hey, guys? You're not listening. Hey, you guys! That's it. That's it. That's it. That's it.

There we go. Wow. I forgot to tell you, I have to leave right after the show. I can't help clean up. So, Wes, about that sous vide meat, are you sure? That's better, right? Sound quality's better now. Way better.

Yeah, that's a little bit better. Now, yeah, really, really super excited about this. And I thought we'd talk a little bit about the sort of our intention behind it. We won't take too long, but people have had questions. I think let's start with what's going to be the most controversial bit of art. And then we'll go down from there and we'll talk about stuff. So this has really been a group effort that started back in October with the Linux Academy core design team

who came up with all of the original concepts. Really good stuff. They worked with us. You know, we were going for clean, readable and we were trying to think about like the next 10 years. And then about a month ago, Cheese came on the team and really took it over the finish line.

Like last Friday, we were on a group call for eight hours with Wes and Cheese and Angela. And like each one of us, like Angela's like uploading something to the website. Wes is tweaking some CSS while Cheese is banging out a new logo. And I'm disabling old WordPress plugins. It was a massively parallel operation. It was really, it was very impressive. And so now we have the new artwork out.

And the reaction's been pretty positive. Some people don't like the new cloud logo for the network, so that's the one I want to talk about first. I want to talk about the reason we did that. It was my choice. All of the art was directed and led by us, and we wanted to go everything clean, readable, and modern. And I was thinking about the next 10 years

and I was thinking about what is going to be mainstream Linux and open source use in the next 10 years. And I mean, besides maybe mobile and like Android or something, it's going to be the cloud. The cloud is made of Linux and free software. And I think we need to remember that. We need to be reminded that this nebulous term is really just made up Linux and free software. And I think we need to remember that. We need to be reminded that this nebulous term

is really just made up of different free software and open source projects that are interconnected together in a way that provides a service. And I kind of felt like that was the future face, in a way, for mainstream users of Linux and free software and open source. And so I wanted our logo to sort of represent that a little bit. And so that was the basis behind it.

But, Cheese, you want to talk a little bit about some of the show logos and some of the ideas there? And we got the badge for people to recognize it. Take a minute. Talk about that stuff. It's pretty awesome work. So, yeah. So, I mean, we went through all of the logos. First off, like Chris said, they would work with Linux Academy.

And I'd like to give a big thank you to those the Linux Academy art department, Ingrid and Alexander and and Censaline and Joel and everybody over there. They've been great. And essentially they, you know, gave me all the logos in a zip file. Uh, we went through them and kind of looked at them and did some tweaking and modifying, um, you know, to, to, to, as best we could incorporate some, some new themes. So you'll see the cloud, uh, like Chris said, um, and that'll kind of going forward as we, as new shows are developed, you'll see that more and more. And, of course, we couldn't get Joe to change the user logo, so that one's...

User error's going to stay the same. Yeah, user's going to stay the same pretty much. The Linux Unplugged one stays pretty close to the original, too. Yeah, that's true. You know, like, some of them are just, like, modifications of the original logo, just to bring them up to date a little bit, with new inspirations in there. Absolutely.

I mean, like, the rocket and the cloud in the Linux Unplugged logo had been, you know, recreated that. And you'll see that rocket in that cloud being used going forward in a lot of our designs. The color palettes, again, were kind of based on we wanted to differentiate all the shows the best we could, but still kind of tie everything back so that whenever you saw it, you wouldn't think that it's not a Jupiter show. Yeah, if you like Linux Unplugged, you'll recognize User Air now. If you like User Air,

you'll recognize the Coder Radio stuff. We didn't have that at all before. We didn't have any consistency across the shows in the brand. Just didn't have the resources. You know, I told Chris that I'll take the heat on the brand just was just didn't have the resources you know i i told chris uh that i'll take the heat on the the color on tech snap um you know the the magenta it's not pink um i'm sure i would i would i would hope that emma likes it um oh yeah but i like it emma she's a big

pink pan fan but it was one of those things where you know guys look i realize red and black is such a cool color combination but we also have to kind of uh differentiate that a little bit and uh bring in some other colors and be able to work work with a wider palette of colors so you'll see that too going forward um you'll also notice that on a lot of our graphics that we have a badge in the top left corner. And that badge is just simply there to remind you without putting Jupiter Broadcasting on every single thing, that little badge is there to remind you what show you're watching. Those colors have been coordinated with the colors in the logos to match the corners. You'll see that across YouTube.

The cast of Plasta that we actually push the shows out with, everywhere you'll see that kind of theme commonly used. I think this really gives us a nice, clean slate. I know that I had worked with a lot of the JV logos before. That's what's kind of awesome about this, actually, is really, I mean, for nearly a decade, you've been on and off in the community creating artwork for us. So it's, it's kind of amazing that the first time we did like a one uniform rollout of a whole new look, you were, you were here to push us over the finish line. Like it's kind of perfect. Yeah. And, and, you know, I think the timing was just, was just perfect. Um, I do wish I had a little more time to spend with them and not that I

think that there's anything I would change right off the bat but you know when you're developing stuff like that the the more time you get the better but then I guess it can also be to detriment and kind of slow you down but it was a mad dash all right well I know that uh you know if we were to just talk about the the color combinations and maybe one day I'll show be able to show some of this other work to you guys uh but just the color combinations that went into coder um in an attempt to you know resemble uh an editor and code highlights if you're not a fan of the magenta i guarantee there's some of those designs uh for coder that you would absolutely not love but if you love uh miami's in the 90s you would you would absolutely love them. There's just a ton of different changes that

we made when it comes to that and different color combinations and different ideas and how do we make snap, snap. How do you visually show that? There's a lot of thought that went into the logos. Absolutely. You've got to tell the people about...

We've gotten a lot of good feedback. We've gotten, of course, some strong negative feedback, but we got probably the most amazing feedback this morning on Telegram. You tell people about that. Yeah, so we got some feedback

this morning from, and I probably am going to butcher his name, Kyrian, I believe is his name. And he wrote in. You're asking me. I know, right? And he wrote in to tell us that he's he's it's he's hard-sided so he doesn't have very good vision and he struggled with the old logos and being able to determine and differentiate the logos and the shows uh but now with the new logos and in the very minimalist look of the new logos, he's able to actually see these better.

And to me, that man, that is the best feedback I've gotten out of this whole turnaround with these logos and with this rebranding to where someone actually gets, makes it more accessible for them. He's seen the logo for the first time, essentially. Yeah. And that's great, dude. I mean, it literally made, whenever I saw that comment, it made the

hairs on my arms stand up just reading it. And it kind of speaks to the purpose, too, right? We want to connect people. I mean, the logos are good on themselves, but the whole point is to bring you to the content and get to listen to us. That and swag. So, ladies and gentlemen, Wes Payne has the first round of stickers

that we will have at LinuxFest Northwest. I really hope you're playing the bongos. I am. Go for it. Wes is opening the sticker box right now. This is our first reveal of the new logos as stickers. There you go. Oh!

How do they look? User error. First out of the box. User error coming out sharp. The new user error sticker looks really good. Now we've got a Coder Radio. Oh, man. Nailed it, cheese.

Don't worry. We'll take pictures and send them to you. Nailed the Coder Radio sticker. Well, of course we needed Linux unplugged. The blues are perfect. Yeah, they're popping. Oh, every one of these is nailing it so far. This is so great.

Okay, boom, tech step, keep it coming. Look at that. Look at that. That looks great. And those BSD brethren. Man, that's fun. This is the BSD one. Even the BSD one looks good.

Wow. And perhaps the piece of resistance. Linux Action News. I love the cutout. That's really nice. That's die cut and fancy. That die cut following the red box is slick. And the network.

The network logo, which is a circular badge-style sticker. Man, these are top-notch. These are top-notch. These are our best stickers. I mean, these logos were sort of designed around the idea of being able to do this, but that is, we'll be giving these away starting at LinuxFest Northwest, and then down the road, we'll make them available to the community via various means, including the Linux Academy Gem Store and other places.

So stay tuned. That's all coming down the road. But for now, at least initially, these stickers are only going to be available at LinuxFest Northwest because we've just ordered a small batch. And this is the first time I'm seeing these new logos. This, for me, is... I'm disappointed that I haven't saved enough space on the back of the ThinkPad.

I know, I know. We've got to just stick her over it. This is a somewhat emotional moment, and I haven't had a chance to talk to Angela, but I bet for her, too. This is just something we never had the scope to pull off where, you know, you could have a designer sit with you on the phone for eight hours and crank out the different stuff as you upload a Twitter badge and it looks like crap. So you want a different version or you upload something to WordPress and it's too big. So you need a different export and just sit there and

bang all that stuff out. Like it just wasn't something that was on our grasp before. And so that's one of the great things about being part of the Linux Academy team is that we have a little more reach now. And we've been able to put together a pretty great team. And so it's great to have you. She's great work. Thanks, man. And boy, I can't wait to send you a picture of those things.

I'm super jealous, dude. Those look good. That looks so good. Another round of applause, guys. Come on. Those of you left, another round of yeah, thank you. Really, really well done. Man, that's great.

You know what? We've got to do another one of these, too. We've got to do a little. Man, that's great. You know what? We got to do another one of these, too. We got to do a little. Man, we did it. In one day, we rolled out all the new art. It feels good. It took us like six months to roll out the new TechSnap logo. It was atrocious.

Why, yeah. Okay. So there is an article out that proclaims that the Linux desktop is in trouble. And it uses recent statements by Linus and recent statements by Clem from Linux Mint and kind of comes together on a theory that Linux desktop is in decline. So I'll start with Linus' comments and then we'll start talking about this. We'll discuss it. SJVN writes on ZDNet, even Linus Torvalds is tired of

the fragmentation in the Linux desktop. In a recent interview, Torvalds said the Chromebooks and Android are a path towards the desktop. Now, why? He implies it's because we don't have any standardized Linux desktop. Torvalds wishes we were better at having a standardized desktop that goes across distributions. You know, like Plasma, you know? Torvalds thinks there's been some progress for software installation, but at the same time, he is disappointed in the rivalry between Red Hat, which supports Flatpak, and Canonical, which supports Snaps. It bugs Torvalds. He's annoyed how the fragmentation of different vendors has held the desktop back so far.

But he's not the only one that's grumpy right now. Clem from Mint is a little grumpy as well. He's been having some issues. Clem writes, it's not always easy to achieve what we want. Sometimes it's not even easy to define what we want to achieve. We can have doubts. We can work really hard on something for a while and then question it so much. We're not even sure we'll ship it. We can get demotivated, uncertain, depressed, even by negative reactions or just normal interactions. And it can lead to developers stepping away from the project, taking a break, or even leaving for good. Yeah, I believe they're one of their main mutter,

or no, it's muffin. It's muffin, isn't it, for Cinnamon, is basically moving on. And then there's something we've touched on in this program before, right? That especially in the open source world, oftentimes this is volunteer labor. And so any extra emotional baggage, that's hard. And Clem seems to indicate in the blog post over on the Mint site that it was really the community's strong negative reaction to logo changes and other changes on the website that were not actually related to the distribution per se.

Wow. And that began the process of demotivating the team. So it's kind of funny that here we are doing a big art rollout. But it also, I mean, it does, it kind of talks to you about, there are things other than technical, right? We've got a great kernel. We might even have some great desktop software, but that's not necessarily what determines our success.

So is desktop Linux collapsing, as SJVN writes? Because now that Mint's having trouble, it must be collapsing. I think this would be a good moment before we go any further. So we're all on the same page. We're all in alignment, as they say.

Perhaps we could take a moment and define what desktop Linux actually is. Because we may be talking about different things and not even realize it here. Mr. Wimpers, would you like to take a crack at your definition of desktop Linux? Yeah. So, you know, quite often some people will cite like Chrome OS, for example, as desktop Linux because it uses the Linux kernel. And that doesn't fit my definition, and here's why.

the Linux kernel. And that doesn't fit my definition. And here's why. I think of desktop Linux as a desktop Linux operating system where you are able to download the source code for the current version of the kernel, compile it, install it, and reboot and boot off that kernel that you've just compiled and built. And if you can't do that, then in my mind, it's not desktop Linux. That is not what I expected you to say at all. Why is that ability important to you? Is it something you actually use? Well, not these days, but it's the very, we talk about this general term of Linux, and that's the basis upon which this whole platform you know sits on top of and things

like android and chromium are the productization of the linux kernel and this is great for linus because all he cares about is the kernel and it becoming more dominant and more widespread but from our point of view it's's usually the Linux kernel with embedded versions of user space. And, you know, that whole, the thing that we like because of its flexibility and all that we can do with it is being taken away from us. So I think, you know, unless you've got compilers and the tool chain and the ability to compile, build, and then reboot your desktop operating system off the kernel that you've just built, then it's not desktop Linux. It's something else. I could accept that definition for the purposes of our discussion today.

Could you accept that definition? It's an interesting bar, but I think it's a fascinating one. If you can't stand it up yourself, it's not really a free desktop environment. I mean, there are a lot of things I think that's an important philosophy in our community in terms of being able to tinker and explore, and those are often cited concerns about playing and learning from Linux, right? Like, you can get your work done on Linux or Windows, but if you want to go learn how to build computer boots and be able to play with that and teach yourself, you probably need Linux, or at least something approaching Wimpy's definition.

And I would say, however, that, you know, if I find myself compiling a kernel from source and having to boot off it, I am reconsidering my life choices at that point as well. You know, this is not something that I think, you know, you need to be doing on a regular basis unless you're a kernel developer or, you know know working on some new hardware device but i think that it's that kind of flexibility that really expresses what distributions are and and their you know their heritage their legacy i think i'm inclined to agree because otherwise it's just a black box like it's no different than a set top box that's got like a tivo that's got a pre-compiled kernel yeah it's an appliance and that's got, like a TiVo, that's got a pre-compiled kernel. An appliance. Yeah, it's an appliance.

And that's what a Chrome laptop or a Chrome box is, whereas something where you can go and get an ISO image and install it on the hardware of your choice with choices you make at the software level is a completely different experience than buying a box that is non-modifiable. See, this is interesting,, Chris, you and I, we've been talking a lot about, in the studio, appliances.

So it makes me question, like, okay, that does seem like a very reasonable definition of Linux desktop, but does that mean I just don't want that much Linux desktop? If we're okay with things like Chromebooks or tablets that we do think are useful, or some do, does that just mean the Linux desktop wasn't the thing that was right? Yeah. I mean, I think Linus, as Wimpy very well pointed out, is completely happy with Linux

being an implementation detail because it's still using his kernel. Right. And that's a great observation. And Linus has said as much himself. I've actually heard Linus say as much himself in an interview. So I think that's very astute. And for the purpose of this conversation, I'm going to accept that definition. And I'd love to hear the audience's definition too.

So please do send it in. But okay. So that version of the desktop, is that a failure in a sense? So that's what SJVN's point is with these distributions struggling. He writes, also he points out in this article, like a lot of popular desktop distributions are getting by on a shoestring budget, barely holding it together, operating sort of like, you know, month to month almost in terms of revenue. We've seen issues with some smaller distributions recently. You look at projects like Manjaro Linux and others,

they're not making a ton of money. You know, they're barely getting by, essentially. And so he says that that doesn't set him up for long-term success. And then, you know, you look at other numbers, like the Valve market share numbers for Linux, we're still sub 1% after all of this time. We're still sub 1% after all of this time. In February 2019, we had a decent size, like 0.77%. And now it looks like in March now, it may be edging up to 0.82%.

0.82. I think those numbers are actually impressive because that's against a backdrop of a rapidly growing Steam user market when you take into account Windows. So the fact that we're actually holding that slightly under 1% is actually growth in real terms. I'll agree with that, actually. We have some more descriptive statistics, ideally, but that's a great point. I've gotten the Steam hardware survey once ever. Ever. I got it three times in one day,

and it was brilliant. Wow. Yeah, I got it twice over the weekend. Really? Yeah, I got it on my Linux PC, and I submitted it, and then got it on my Windows PC and said no. Good man. If you're curious, and then got it on my Windows PC and said no.

If you're curious, Mac OS is at a healthy 3.27% market share. Windows coming in at 95.91%. Okay, so I don't think that Linux is screwed. I mean, I was kind of trying to get a little distracted a little out of you guys. I don't think it is. I think it's in pretty good shape. I think citing those smaller projects as

it's all wobbly because those smaller projects are struggling is looking in the wrong place, right? Because it's unfortunate that those smaller distributions are struggling, and I hope that they continue to go from strength to strength, and they get the funding that they need to continue.

But that is not where the majority of Linux users are. The majority of Linux users on the desktop are running Ubuntu or one of the derivatives. I mean, Ubuntu is by far and away the most widely used Linux desktop operating system. And second place is Mint. And Mint dwarfs most of the other Linux-based operating systems. Right. And in that article, Ubuntu is sort of dismissed out of hand.

Oh, Canonical is worried about the server. I've got thoughts about that, if you want to dig into that. I was curious. I was curious what your thoughts are about that. Right. Okay. So on that point about we only care about server, certainly there's a lot of investment of time and energy in server and cloud because yes, there's a lot of money and business opportunity there. But as a company, we care about the desktop. And also personally, desktop and also personally mark shuttleworth also still cares very much about the ubuntu desktop he has limited time to spend looking at individual products within the ubuntu product family but one of the products that he spends time personally looking into is the ubuntu desktop so you know

within canonical it's important to us so I don't buy that at all. That is somebody from the outside speculating. Also, those Linux distributions, those tiny Linux distributions that are cited in the article as having trouble, one could argue, why do they need to be super successful? Because a lot of them are a couple of guys who are making something as a passion project for themselves. They don't necessarily need to make millions, and for the majority of them that are based off of Ubuntu

or based off of Debian, they're not even hosting their own archive, so they're not even having to pay out. Like, if in the real world they were a real, proper any vertical, Linux desktop distribution, they would have their own having to pay out, like if in the real world they were a real proper, in inverted commas, Linux desktop distribution, they would have their own archive

and they would have to host gigabytes and gigabytes of packages and they'd have to find somewhere to build all of that software. But they don't. They rely on Ubuntu or Debian to do that for them. And so I think they're doing pretty well. Any rando on the internet can spin up a distro and manage to sustain it for probably years with very minimal investment. And thanks, Mark, for paying for that hosting and the build system.

Thanks very much. And the security team and the kernel team and all the rest of it. So the argument really is a bit of a straw man. And that's where I was going with this. I think Linux desktop is doing just fine. It depends on which lens you're looking at. In fact, Emma, you were kind of pointing out, like even Linus himself,

if you get him at the right time of day or you ask him the right question, he kind of has a totally different opinion, doesn't he? Yeah, and I think that the ZDNet always kind of sensationalizes and draws weird conclusions that aren't necessarily the real situation. Yeah. Yeah. Linus takes a long-term look at it. He says like long-term,

unless something major changes, I think Linux is going to own the desktop. It's just going to take a while to get there. And I think part of it too is in a weird way, our fragmentation is actually going to save us here. Stick with me for a second. I actually think the fact that, and I use fragmentation very broadly here. My definition of fragmentation is multiple distributions, running all different kinds of architectures, running all kinds of different form factors. In that sense, Linux is sort of always being built

for all of these different edge cases. You combine that with the ability to compile it wherever you want and run it where you need it, and it can be the first thing in whatever next computing factory exists. That's what I'm saying. It's a universal operating system that's generally available, that's great,

that if there's the next hardware platform that takes off, if it's not, you know, whatever's after x86, if it's ARM or whatever, that becomes like the mainstream that we have in our laptops and desktops. Linux is there already. It's going to be there already. Anything that's in the market, it's going to have great support for it.

It'll take commercial vendors years to turn that around. So Linux has that. And you can see it, like, think about it even in the form factors. Mr. Wimpy here has a pretty big update for people that have the GPT pocket. Dr. Wimpy here has a pretty big update for people that have the GPT Pocket. Yeah, so I did some work back in October to make some initial images for the GPT Pocket and the GPT Pocket 2 for Ubuntu MATE 18.10. And since I released those, I had some feedback from people that have got those devices to further improve them and because 1804.2 has come out now which shares its hardware enablement stack with 1810 it meant that everything was in place to create a fresh image based on the LTS now because all the requisite hardware support was there so I've uplifted those images

and then taken some ideas from the community contributors to improve them further still. So I'm really very happy with them. So I've got each of those devices and I have to say it's transformed them. I'm really very pleased with them. All right, be honest though. How's the performance? The GPD Pocket 1 is okay. It's fairly decent. It's not going to set any world records or anything. It's okay. The GPD Pocket 2 is actually very good.

It's got the same hardware specs as a MacBook in terms of CPU and RAM and all the rest of it. So the eMMC storage is a bit lackluster. But in terms of everything else, it's actually very, very usable indeed. They're quite nice little devices. They're what I pack in my bags when we go away at the weekends to visit family, because I've actually got a full boy Linux desktop literally in my pocket. With a QWERTY keyboard. Yeah, yeah. It's got a proper keyboard and a touchpad and touchscreen and HDMI and USB 3 and USB-C. It's got everything you need to get stuff done. So I really like them. And it's not like the Raspberry Pi where there's tens of millions of these things. Maybe there's tens of thousands of these in the wild. But they came to prominence because their initial crowdfunder offered Ubuntu and Windows options. And subsequently, they've not offered a Linux operating system by default.

But since I've made these images, Softwin, which is the parent company, have been in touch with me. And they're now supplying me with engineering samples of their upcoming devices and they now list ubuntu mate as a firmware option on their website so beautiful um you know it's it's a small group of people that would ordinarily be running windows and now they have an out of box you know because you you can install any linux on these devices but then there's a dozen really quirky tweaks you have to do to you know rotate the screen and the touch point you know resolution on the touch screen and all the rest of it so just having them pre-baked so you can just install it and it all just works as you accept it uh means that there's a there's

a group of potential users out there who are going to have a decent introduction to Linux and not think, why is everything rotated 90 degrees and why does audio not work? That's amazing. Internet strangers have made your device work. This is case in point right here. You see, this is the home turf advantage that Linux has on all of these future form factors and platforms.

I mean, there might not be tens of millions of GPD pockets one day, but if there ever were something like that to take off, Linux is going to be there. It sure would. It's really making me jealous I don't have one of those, too. I think that might be one of the coolest devices. I want that with me all the time in my bag. Yeah, yeah, I think that's really cool.

Well, great work, and 19.04 as well is on there. Yeah, so it's the beta. It's the 1904 beta. And so when the final images drop, I will have 1904 final images available for those two devices as well, ready to go. Hmm. Hmm. I don't know, man. I like it.

I'm getting tempted. I'll have in the show notes a link to a SlashGear article that also covers reasons to abandon Windows for Linux. And what I liked about it is i had a bunch of oh yeah right that is a thing that is really nice like uh software catalogs that are nice and curated and everything's free in there smooth operating system updates that don't nag you like crazy a highly customizable interface which feels like total freedom when you're a power user coming from windows um And of course, less tracking, free updates for life.

Like one of the things about Linux and free software that I think could be more and more a selling point as all of these large tech companies go more and more towards subscription revenue, you know, it's only a matter of time. I mean, more, I mean, I actually do think there are subscription options now for Windows, and there's just going to be more ways like Office 365 is another subscription. Free software is subscription free.

You get the operating system and you've got it forever. But the reason why I'm leaving the article for you to read on your own in the notes is because I got a couple of really cool picks. I've been reading these articles about the old web disappearing. And, you know, we just changed up our website. Totally, finally dark theme.

Hey, hey, dark theme. And, you know, in a way I was kind of like, oh yeah, but now the old site's gone. You know, like that's a, that's a history. And so I started thinking about ways to archive web pages because we also have a problem where sometimes we're researching something for a story and the website goes away. It doesn't happen a lot, but it's happened. So I was looking for ways

to completely archive websites, even ones that have like JavaScript in them and, you know, that gets rendered. So I was looking for more than your average bear of an archive. And so I found a couple and I got like a quickie and then I got like a really cool complicated one. Okay. So the first one is simple. It's WK. I don't know what it, you know, HTML to PDF. It just, it's a series of scripts.

It doesn't do what it says it does. Yeah. And it just, it creates PDFs from webpages, GPL3. It's actually pretty cool. Like it uses YouTube DL and a bunch of other stuff to, like, get all the images and run the JavaScript and render it out headless so you don't have to have a browser up. It can do it scripted in a cron job. And then it can just jump websites out to PDFs. Yeah, I mean, right there they have kind of an example. You could use it to back up a wiki. That would be a perfect thing printed out as documentation.

You can run it entirely headless, and then you just have the PDFs in a folder. You wake up, and there's your morning edition. I hope that you don't want a bunch of PDFs, but if you do, this seems like a great way to get them. You can also do it as images. I suppose. I don't know. A PDF just seems to be the default. And yeah, it's using a cute

web kit rendering engine, so it's got a real web render, so that's pretty nice. Alright, but let's say you wanted to go like full pack run. Check this thing out. This is some super cool free software. It's called Archivebox. It's the open source, self-hosted web

archive. Archivebox takes a list of the website URLs you want to archive and creates a local, static, browsable HTML clone of the content from those websites. It saves the HTML, the JavaScript, media files, PDF, images, videos, all of it. Videos? Yeah. It's really cool, Wes. You media files, PDF, images, videos, all of it. Videos?

Yeah. It's really cool, Wes. You can use it to preserve access to websites you care about. Like, say, you just give it your bookmarks file and just have it go archive it all for you. Yeah, you know what really stood out to me, though, is it can import and export links as JSON, and they've explicitly added some stuff to make it easy to hook in with an API. So maybe if you want to have some sort of interactive bot or scripting engine that you go crawl out and find the stuff you want to archive, hook it into this. It's got the rest taken care of.

That's pretty cool. And it's a little more capable because it's using Chrome Headless and YouTube DL again. Wow. I don't think I need this. Set it up, let it go. But you know,

a lot of people do really care about archiving the web and there's some good research there. So it's nice to have tools, because sometimes you just need documentation. Yeah, it's really easy to do, too. It's pretty great. So we'll have links in the show notes,

in your podcast catcher of choice, or linuxunplugged.com slash, was it 296? 296. So people have been doing the math, and they've been like, hey guys, you know, like, LinuxFest is when episode 300 lands. That's just crazy. I don't know what we're going to do, because we won't have as many people in town.

Because everyone will just be leaving after the fest. Well, and we'll be, I'm losing my voice today. Maybe I won't even have my voice, right? And we will be hungover, for sure, without a doubt. So it's probably going to be a horrible episode, I would imagine. Probably one of our worst. You know how you could help, though, is come join us live. That's true.

Hey, nice. Turned that around, didn't you? Yeah, you can get in the mumma room and go over to jblive.tv and stream it. When we fall asleep, you can make sure there's no dead air. We've been using just a super quick thing, then we've got to get out of here. We've been using Jack the last couple of days on our OBS machine to do inline processing to add

a little compression and limiter and sort of bring the volume up a little bit on our live streams machine to do inline processing to add a little compression and limiter and sort of bring the volume up a little bit on our live streams, which were a little low before. Yeah, so hopefully that's sounding better out there, dear listeners. You piped it all together pretty well. And it's like using compression and stuff inside Jack, right? So it's all inline. Nothing too fancy.

And then OBS just has a Jack input source, so that works no problem. So OBS is Jack-aware. Oh, yeah. It's Jack jack input source so that works no problem. So OBS is jack aware. Oh yeah. It's jack smart. Jack smart. Go get more West tech snap dot systems and that code radio I mentioned

but and also at West Payne. Happy birthday Mr. Payne. Oh thank you. You can go hear more Popey and Mr. Wimpy over at the

Boon 2 podcast. It's back baby. Great first episode guys. I really enjoyed it. It was nice hearing. I really like that you just sort of well I don't want to give it away but I like the topic it was nice hearing I really liked that you just sort of well I don't want to give it away

but I liked the topic decision you made I know that was probably kind of a hard choice to make potentially because it's I have a hard time doing that but you guys did great I really enjoyed it I won't give it away

go check it out UbuntuPodcast.org welcome back gentlemen it's nice to have you amongst us again thank you very much and let's see what else go check out Emma

she's at Social Happiness on the Twitter. Nice to have you here today, Emma. Thank you for making it. Thanks for having me. And hey, Elle, why don't you give the folks your Twitter handle? Maybe they're going to be somewhere where you're at and they want to get a hold of you. Give them your Twitter handle. I'm at Elle underscore O underscore Punk.

Hello, Punk. Hello! Oh, really? Amazing. I never really put that together. Bacon, do you have a Twitter over there? You tweet? Yeah, yeah, punk. Hello. Oh, really? Amazing. I never really put that together. Bacon, do you have a Twitter over there? You tweet? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just Cheese Bacon. All the places.

Is it C-H-Z or, right? Yeah, okay. You got to get the spelling right. Well, I mean, it's C-H-Z-B-A-C-O-N. But nobody has time to actually spell out cheese. Like, really? Nobody does. Too busy eating cheese.

It's too hip. Yeah, it's too hip. It's too hip. And, it's too hip. It's too hip. And then last, and absolutely least, you know what? Let's give a plug for our editor.

Go check out old dad Joe Rez. Joe Rez. On the old Twitter. There we go. You guys just had your own birthday celebration. That's true.

We just had LAN 100. Congratulations. It's a great little show. Thank you. Yeah, we've had moments where I was almost dying and you stepped in for me, but otherwise it's been, I mean, I've been there for a lot of them. It's a great little show. Thank you. Yeah, we've had moments where, like, I was almost dying and you stepped in for me, you know, but otherwise it's been, I mean, I've been there for a lot of them. It's the consistent source of Linux news you need to start your week.

Yeah, it's nice. It's nice having a team, you know, and one of the things that's cool behind the scenes is we've got somebody doing more research full-time on that. Well, not, I mean, that's his full-time task. So it's pretty great. We can have more reach, just like you said. Yeah, absolutely. All right, well, last and absolutely least, I am at ChrisLAS.

The network is at Jupiter Signal. There's now Twitter accounts for all the shows, too. Which can be handy, like, if something big's going on. Like, if we're doing, like, a live stream of a barbecue grill session. So just go give those a follow. I think it's at Linux Unplugged. That it is. Go take it over.

Go be, like, one of the first. Go own that thing. And last but not least, please do join us next Tuesday. You can go to jupyterbroadcasting.com slash calendar to get it converted to your local time. You can hang out in our IRC room, irc.geekshed.net. Hashtag. Hashtag. Jupyter Broadcasting.

And of course, that mumble room. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program. And I hope to see you right back here, not Monday, next Tuesday! so so so why the why the people vote i thought in-show here, we could have a little fun. How about a second unboxing? Is that ridiculous? Isn't that ridiculous?

Do it. So jbtitles.com. Everybody go vote while we do this. jbtitles.com. You got to go vote right now because we got to get a good title and we can get out of here. Oh, man. I really wish you had a video feed because I wanted to see the stickers so bad. I know.

They do look really good, too. I'm really happy with how they turned out. Good, good. I think they turned out probably better than I was expecting, I think. I think they probably did. All right, so Mr. West, in front of you right now is something that I ordered just, I believe, last week. Yeah, didn't we talk about this last episode? Yeah, I ordered the Raspberry Pi keyboard,

the first Raspberry Pi dedicated keyboard. So, Mr. Payne, do you have anything to cut the tape? I guess we should have thought of that. Yeah, we should have. We need a shot, Bob. The unplanned unboxings are not as smooth, I got to admit. Hmm, you got anything sharp? Mr. Payne, now open the Raspberry Pi box.

All right. It feels light, right? It does feel light. It's a nice flat matte box with a good Raspberry Pi design on it, bold logo. Securely packaged. Good branding. It arrived quickly, I got to admit. And it comes, can you meet open that? What's going on over there? Let me see this thing. There's just more tape. Oh, no, I got to admit. And it comes...

Can you meet open that? What's going on over there? Let me see this thing. There's just more tape. Oh, no, there's more tape? The snare drum player's getting tired. I know, right? Okay, I almost got it.

You got it. I almost got it. Here we go. Okay, Wes, here you go. Now you can continue. Now, what do you think? Oh, okay. It does feel pretty light.

Yeah. It's handsome. Now we are bathed in a red glow, so it's hard to get a real good... It does have red trim, though, too. It has like a... It looks kind of like a sports keyboard. A cute little red cord to match. I'm going to rip it open.

I just want to get at it. Did you say it was handsome, Wes? Mm-hmm. Okay, so my first reaction is, is if you're familiar with what the Apple Magic Keyboard, their external keyboard, feels like, that's sort of what the keys feel like, and they're about that shape. But the font is much more readable, much larger. It's got a nice set of that little hub right on the back there.

I mean, this is, of course, going to be different for everybody, but if you have a little bit of trouble reading or you're learning how to type, this keyboard could be really nice because it's very approachable, and the lettering is very very big it feels very solid it's got a little bulge

on the back of it where the electronics are but then it thins out towards the space bar on the back of it it's very much like a laptop keyboard like the way the arrow keys

are there how do you feel about that? oh yeah you're right doesn't that kind of feel like a magic keyboard a little bit but a plastic version of it? a plastic version yeah

yeah lighter a little bit lighter yeah quite plastic version of it. A plastic version, yeah. Yeah, lighter. A little bit lighter, yeah. Yeah, quite a bit lighter. Well, lighter, yeah. Yeah, that's actually not bad. I think for the price it's actually worth it. I think that's actually,

I think I'm pretty happy with that purchase. It works. It's working on your machine now? Yeah, plugged it right in. There you go. I actually, I'm going to say

it's a recommend. Have you seen where someone's already put a Raspberry Pi Zero in it? No. Yeah, they already tossed like a Pi Zero in it and set it all up. So basically, you just plug it.

I love the internet. I love the internet. Plug HTML into the side of it and go, man. That's a great way to play around with Linux. Jupyter Chainsaw Massacre. Even BSD looks good. Now, we can't give away one of the punchlines in the title, guys. I mean, I do like that.

That's a good one, social happiness. That's a good one. But I don't want to give away the title. I don't want to give of the punchlines in the title, guys. I mean, I do like that. That's a good one, social happiness. That's a good one. But I don't want to give away the title. I don't want to give away a punchline in the title. Brent, how the hell are you? Good, man. How is everybody? Good.

Good. I saw you sneak in there. I didn't get a chance to give you a call out, but I did see you sneak in there just under the ground. You know, sometimes you're late. Sometimes you're early. It's just how it goes. How are the Linux Fest Northwest plans shaping up?

Oh, you know, I think I may have secured some cat care. That's number one on the list. And then flights are coming in. There's a sale going on. So, you know, all these things are starting to line up. There's a lot of moving parts because I got that gig at the same time, as some of you know. So lots and lots of moving parts, trying to store uh basically a car full of photography gear in a city that i don't exist in oh yeah so i gotta find someone in toronto to

fleet my gear with wow the dynamics of the type of thing of of brand i don't know if it is a lifestyle is that the right way to put it you know because it makes it sound like it's something weird but you know just like though you're the i i totally know where you're at and i i completely understand like there's just weird problems that like you don't solve a hundred times in a row. So it's not like you just have a process. Like, you have to figure it out from scratch to solve that problem. Yeah. And the other thing is when you approach people with, like, potential solutions that you've dreamt up for, you know, a week, they always look at you a little funny. Like, no one's ever asked me to store, you know, a van full of stuff before. That is a little odd. That's an odd request.

Yeah. Speaking of flying, I am so damn jealous of Elle. I just about, I just about can't even right now. Elle, you want to tell people, you want to tell people what you did today, what you told me today. You want to share with the class? That I booked a flight out of, what, PAE? Is that the acronym for it now?

Yeah, Payne Field. Yep, to San Francisco for DockerCon. Nice. Oh, yeah, it's great. It's great. Good job. I don't know where she gets off. Because I'm telling you, I've lived here my whole life,

and finally they open up a new airport where I don't have to go all the way down to SeaTac. An hour drive through the worst part of traffic. It finally opens up. After all this flying I've been doing, all of this driving back and forth to SeaTac. An hour drive through the worst part of traffic. It finally opens up. After all this flying I've been doing, all of this driving back and forth to SeaTac, you know. Oh, yeah. You know. Oh, man. You've suffered.

And Elle. She beats you to it. She just always does that kind of stuff. She's like always leveling. She's like leveling up. She's like, yeah, I'm going to give three talks. Like, what? Oh, I'm giving one talk, you know. I'm going to fly out of Payne Field. What? That's awesome.

Yeah, it's great. I mean, y'all could come with me. I might actually. Maybe I'll be your ride. Maybe I'll give you a ride to the airport, and then I can check out the airport. Would they let me? I can just get and walk around. Like, I don't have to go through security.

I just want to see it. Yeah. Like, I want to scope out the parking situation so I know next time I travel what it is. It's a whole other workflow. And I want to know like how long is it from

I-5 to the actual airport. Yeah I have no idea. Yeah. There's a lot to it. I can use my

new official Raspberry Pi keyboard to help me find out. Look at you go. Woohoo!