LINUX Unplugged - 298: Blame Joe

Episode Date: April 24, 2019

This week we discover the good word of Xfce and admit Joe was right all along. And share our tips for making Xfce more modern. Plus a new Debian leader, the end of Scientific Linux, and behind the scenes of Librem 5 apps. Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, and Ell Marquez.

Oh, bad news, Wes. I know you were really looking forward to this as a space enthusiast. I know you were really looking forward to this. But Pepsi is dropping its plans to use an orbital billboard powered by Linux. No more Pepsi in the sky? That was the plan. The publication Futurism reported on April 13th that PepsiCo's Russian subsidiary was working with a startup there called StarRocket to advertise an energy drink called Adrenaline Rush using satellites. The whole idea is it goes up and it makes like a billboard in the sky.

So you just look up and there's this annoying advert floating in the sky. Filled with cola ads. What could be better? A spokesperson, though, for PepsiCo Russia said that the company had agreed to partner with Star Rocket on the campaign. PepsiCo Russia said that the company had agreed to partner with StarRocket on the campaign. They said orbital billboards are the revolution on the market of communications, a revolution on the market. There is some confusion, though, because PepsiCo in the U.S., they did confirm that this happened, but they're basically saying this was a one-time exploratory event. We're not really doing it.

Actually, StarRocket was founded only a year ago and has not deployed any satellites as yet. So some industry experts are a little skeptical. Do they actually have the expertise and even the funding to do it? They're working to get $25 million in a funding round, but haven't got it yet. What do you think, Wes? Going to invest? No. Just a cold 25 mil.

So the other part that's important here is actually in the U.S., federal law prohibits what they call obtrusive space advertising. Right. Although it's just a technicality. Like they can't approve the launch in the U.S. at a federal level, but you could just launch it from, say, Russia and then park it over U.S. skies. Sure could. Yeah.

So the satellites involved in this tech we covered in SciByte years ago, and they do actually run Linux. I mean, why else would you want to run it in space? I do not like the direction of this. We've got to act fast. We've got to be one of the first, obviously. You know how big we are about advertising these days here on the podcast. Jupiter Broadcasting.

I mean, that fits in space way better than an energy drink. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 298 for April 23rd, 2019. Well, hello there and welcome into your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Mr. Payne. Good to see you. It is the calm before the storm right now.

Oh, man, I can't. I'm having a hard time even conceptualizing the next couple of days. I know. We got to do this show kind of quick today because if we're not careful, Alan Jude's going to show up in studio. He's going to crash our show. He's going to be flashing everything with FreeBSD. I know.

It's going to just ruin it. So we got to be flashing everything with FreeBSD. I know. It's going to just ruin it. So we got to hurry up because the crowd for LinuxFest Northwest is assembling right now. Alan Jude's one of the first in, but then many, many more. And it is the crazy LinuxFest Northwest just after this show. Pretty much. People start arriving like during the show. That's crazy. This is our last moment of peace, Wes.

Well, before we go any further, let's bring in that mumble room time. Appropriate greetings, virtual lug. Hello, guys. Pip, pip. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.

Hello, Brent. Hello, Code. Mr. Badger. Mini Mac. The Geek Tweets. This Geek Tweets. And Turth is in there. And of course, coming in on the studio line, we have Cheese and Elle.

Hello, you two. Hey, hey. Hey, hey. So glad to have everybody here today during our last moments of sanity. I thought let's ask about something I think many of you have forgotten about. I sure have. Did you? Oh, yeah. I mean, once I saw the story, I was like, oh, right, but it totally slipped my radar.

Okay, Cheese, I'm going to put you on the spot right now. Can you tell me what the Atari VCS is? Yes. It's a Linux-based console. Damn. I should have asked somebody else. With some classic games. And I think they also, don't they have a couple of the devs from some of the original Atari games working for them as well?

Yeah. Damn it. I was hoping to prove a point. I mean, I think a lot of people had kind of forgotten about this story. And of course, I'm a backer, not because I really think it's going to be great, but just because I kind of wanted to see if they'd get there. I wanted to have a stake in the game, to be honest with you. But it's not looking great. Like, we don't have a lot of results. A little bit of a reality check. There's no prototype. There's no Ubuntu-based operating system prototype.

And there's not even a convincing demo of any of the games which will run on it. Yeah, the thing that kind of made news this week, and Joey over at OMG Ubuntu caught it, the estimated shipping date on their Indiegogo campaign page has been revised from July of 2019, which is not too far away, to now December of 2019. A little bit further away. Just a bit. I mean, you want the extra polish so that you can make a prototype, right?

But that hardware is so pretty. I hope it ships just because then I can buy one second hand. Agreed. It would look nice on the shelf for sure. Yeah, it would. That's why it's like, if they get it right,

I'd really love to see Linux be used for something like that. So I had to throw in, but we'll see. Well, speaking of companies that have received their funding via crowdfunding and other mechanisms, Purism. Kind of been wondering what is the state of the Librem 5's application stack? Oh, yeah. And how are they getting a lot of those applications? We got a little peek behind the curtain this week

when Christopher Davis blogged about a new contract he's under to create a fractional scaling UI application for a Matrix chat client. Is that right? Yeah, it's his existing application that is pretty neat. And he writes, over the past year or so, I've been a regular contributor to Fractal, a Matrix chat client for GNOME.

My contributions have allowed me to take on a bigger role in the GNOME community, including maintainership of a few apps. I'm pleased to announce that over the next week, I'll be working to make Fractal's UI adaptive for the Librem 5's launch. There's a whole mix of terminology, which I'm kind of mushing up here. So Fractal is the application's name, which is a matrix chat client. And he is making it an adaptive UI, which is something that these GNOME apps are doing, where you can rescale them down from a desktop application to a phone-sized application,

much like the Convergence apps were on Unity. Don't call it Convergence. No, it's not. It's adaptive. And it's really kind of a neat trick. He has videos embedded in his blog where it really is coming down pretty nice, and it looks pretty sharp. Yeah, absolutely. He also writes, he's just really excited that Purism accepted this and he's going to get to work on it and someday, hopefully soon, actually run Fractal on his phone and we might get to too. So this is, I think, the real story. And I think this is actually one of the more positive things I've seen about the Librem 5's development is they are paying the existing maintainer of this application to make it compatible for their platform.

Yeah, really working with some of the existing community and people that they want to bring into the community. And something tells me this is probably not the only case. Now, if that's how they're going to get some of these apps onto the phone, I got nothing wrong. I see nothing wrong with it. I got no problem. That is, that's great. That's taking some of the crowdfunding money and some of the money that they've earned

from selling their laptops and redirecting that into the hands of current existing open source developers. Now this Christopher Davis character is going to be able to maintain the other applications too that aren't even related to this just because it's a viable thing for him now.

Yeah, this is interesting. It's early days of trying to build in this way. And in other communities, we probably wouldn't get to see any of this. Yeah, it's nice to see a little peek behind the curtain. And I haven't seen Purism make a big stink about it. They haven't been really clear that they're doing this. I think it's been implied, but I don't think they've been super clear. So it's neat to see this. Okay, so there's some interesting news. Now let's talk about something that's a little kind of sad.

These things happen. It could result in a black hole ripping through our universe simply because now the Large Hydron Collider is going to be running an unsupported version of Linux. I mean, there's a possible negative side to this, but scientific Linux is coming to an end. There'll be security maintenance, I mean, there's a possible negative side to this, but scientific Linux is coming to an end. There'll be security maintenance, I believe.

Yeah, on 6 and 7, right. But as a distribution, they're wrapping up scientific Linux, which for those of you that don't know is it's essentially like a CentOS. It's a remix of upstream RHEL with the branding removed, focused for the scientific community. You know, I haven't, I don't use scientific Linux, really. But from my read on this, it seemed like it kind of arose from a darker time early on, maybe in the early 2000s, where before Red Hat had merged with CentOS and all of that stuff,

and where Linux wasn't quite as dominant, even in the sciences. And so it was hard to assemble a distribution, something that had all the right tools. And as anyone doing like machine learning type applications, some of those science frameworks are just ugly to compile and get going. So I think for a long time, scientific Linux could fit in that niche and just provide a standard baseline, especially if you're doing stuff like what Fermilab was doing, high energy physics. Possibly one nice way to view the story is just that, you know, software availability is better these days, so they can just run on the latest CentOS.

I think that's what it is, and that is what they're going to do, is they're just going to migrate to CentOS. And I think it is exactly that. The software availability is there now. They don't have to have a boutique specialized distro that requires maintenance. Flat pack install black hole. Beautiful. Is that a thing for real?

I don't know. No, I thought it was an app. That'd be good. That'd be really good. Like just the whole large Hydron Collider tool set, just one flat pack away. My point was that their tool sets and tool chains now are available in other ways.

Yep. So hopefully some of the effort they've been just, you know, it takes a lot to just maintain the distribution even when it's, you know, based on open source CentOS type Red Hat packages. Hopefully that can just go into improving

all the other applications people are using in science. I think so. You got to be easy on me, Alex. I'm, my mind is a blur from this whole Linux Fest stuff. I was telling Brent earlier today, he's like, Brent says,

how are you doing? And I said, well, I don't really know anymore because I've entered the blur phase. I know this happens every year. There's a blur phase where it becomes such a storm of things that are happening concurrently. You can't hold them all in your head.

They just sort of cascade in there. They're in there for a minute and then they run away and something else replaces it. And I actually kind of collapse a little bit and I become less competent. I become less capable. I can do less things. I can only do one or two things, and I really lose sense of how we're doing. But going into the blur zone before it really hit, I knew we were positioned pretty well. We've been planning for a while.

This is the most organized we've ever been. Yeah, right. So I feel like we were pretty good, but now I've lost all perspective. I think it's very true. By far the most organized we've ever been. But the flip side of that is we're also doing the most we've ever done. Yeah, like way more than the most we've ever done. We've got a booth.

We've got a dedicated room where people are giving talks both days. We've got tons of new swag. We've got the new logo rollouts. We've got the largest crew we've ever had there. We've got people, we've got multiple people flying in from out of country, which is coordinating several different flights and runs to the airport. It's a

hell of a thing. It's a hell of a thing. Cheese and Elle are going to be here pretty soon. Ooh, that's exciting. It is exciting. I'm looking forward to all that new swag that Cheese has been working on. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, the shirts just arrived. The shirts just arrived. Nice. So I just had to bring them all in. Did you see them stacked outside

the studio? Those are big boxes. Yeah, I'm glad they weren't dropped on us by a drone. Yeah, they were like 30 pounds each, I think. Yeah, they were. I was looking at the tracking. Elle, what day do you get in? I get in tomorrow. Oh, wow. Is it bad you didn't know?

No, I'm just losing track of everything. I just, everybody gets in a different day. So I just ask repeatedly. It's my approach. You need little name tags. Yeah. My name is Alan. I get in on Wednesday.

I wonder if Alan will be – so Alan is going to be in studio tomorrow recording BSD Now. So that should be interesting. Elle shows up and we're doing BSD Now. Well, let's update everybody on the Debian Project Leader election. Remember we first covered like nobody really stepped up. Well, that problem was solved. And now we have ourselves a new winner. And it looks like, well, it looks like if any kind of process like this is going to

be run by geeks, they have charts, they have flow diagrams. Like a directed graph of explaining how this all works, statistics and formulas everywhere. Yeah, yeah. It's pretty impressive. So our new Debian, is it DPL? The Debian project leader is hold on here. Hold on now. Come on now. We got to do this right. You ready, Wes?

Ladies and gentlemen, the new leader of the Debian project is Sam Hartman. Congratulations, Sam. It's kind of anticlimactic there, isn't it? There you go. There you go. Give him that and a little applause. Welcome, Sam. Sam's kind of anticlimactic there, isn't it? There you go. There you go.

Give him that and a little applause. Welcome, Sam. Sam joined Debian back in 2000 and has been around for a long time. He says, when I'm not working on Debian or my day job, I'm writing, reading, or learning to sail, or just trying to live life to its fullest. Over the past year, I've been learning how to DJ. That ended up starting with my writing of my own DJ software because what's out there is too visual for a blind DJ to use easily. Interesting. It's not packaged for Debian yet because I need to get one patch upstream and write enough documentation that

someone would have a chance to actually use it. I like that. You can tell he's intimately familiar with getting things going and packaged in Debian. He also writes that one of my key goals as a Debian project lead will be to make sure Debian is a community where we can be heard and where we have the opportunity to reach understanding regardless of whether our ideas are chosen. I will do this by personally participating in such mediation and recruiting others to these mediation efforts. and recruiting others to these mediation efforts. Eventually, I hope many of us will get better at seeking to understand and avoiding escalating discussions on our own. You know, on that same vein he's writing here, which I thought was interesting because,

well, there's been a bit of the hubbub about it, and we covered it. We've lost a number of developers because they were frustrated with our tools and processes. One of the common complaints I've heard is that the wide variety of Debian workflows just gets in the way when you want to contribute to a large number of packages. I know that for myself, and I find that our processes make it difficult enough for me to go fix an RC bug in a package that I don't maintain,

that I'm just less likely to do so. Yeah, I'm glad he's aware of the situation there. Yeah, I mean, it seems like he's aware of the situation there. Yeah. I mean, it seems like he's got a decent read here on what the Debian community has been talking about and that's a good thing

for a new lead. And part of his platform post here, he wraps it up with, I hope to find ways to reduce the stigma associated with bringing important issues to a wider audience.

I think it will always be the case that overriding a specific decision will come with a high price. However, often when we do face a controversial decision, we realize that there are broader policy questions that could be answered that would inform future decisions. Once we get some distance from the original decision, I think answering these policy questions can be valuable.

Sometimes it will be useful to answer policy questions in a form broader than a group making the original decision. Broadening the form like this should not be seen as a lack of trust in any of our teams or decision makers. Instead, it is working together in a broad community. I like those words. Yeah, I think this is a good reminder too, and perhaps why no one initially volunteered that first round. In some ways, this is something of a thankless position, right? I mean, it's a large, complicated open source project, a lot of people with opinions and here you are trying to herd them all together.

I think it's going to be a little different, though, than it has in the past because classically when you ask, well, what does the Debian project leader do? A lot of times, oh, he travels around, goes to conferences, represents the project, but he writes here in his platform, he's not going to do as much of that. He might try to outsource some of that to the community and he's going to be participating directly in that. He might try to outsource some of that to the community, and he's going to

be participating directly in conversations. I'm curious to see where Sam takes this, or Mr. Hartman takes this, the new Debian project leader. So welcome. And we have links in the show notes to more information about the vote. Anything in the data you thought was worth calling out? No, not really. I think it's all pretty

well presented and interesting, and I kind of want to spend more time digging into just how it all works. You know, I have thought about doing like a week on Debian. I'm wondering. I might keep an eye on things. I might consider that idea. Right now, I've got a new thing I'm into, which we'll talk about in a little bit. Oh, it's ridiculous. I can't help myself. I feel like I'm slipping into old habits with distro hopping again.

I don't know what happened to me. I thought I'd finally fix this issue, and yet here I am. We'll talk about that in a moment, but first, how about a little housekeeping? Oh, yeah, yeah. There's so many things to talk about, so we're going to go through them in a bit of a chronological order. chronological order. First off being this Friday, this Friday on the live stream, we'll have a very special Friday stream because we'll have a bunch of folks in studio that'll be in here fighting for mic time, hanging out with us and chatting on the live stream. It's something special we're doing for a little while. May or may not stick around after Linux Fest. So come join us Friday,

2 p.m. Pacific. You can get that converted at jupyterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. If you like this show, the people from this show and a bunch of the other crew get together

and just hang out and chat. But in a flavor all its own. I mean, it's Friday. May I ask where this will be? JBLive.tv, of course.

No, physically. I mean, I'm going to be in Seattle on Friday. Oh, it'll be at the studio. Yeah, come to the studio on Friday. Oh, sweet. Cool.

That'll be awesome. Yeah, slip in, get on the stream a little bit. It should be a hell of a stream. It'll be quite the mic rotation. Important question. Will there be any smoked meats? Smoking those meats? Well, we may have to.

We may have to. At this point, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Eating on mic makes you hungry. There's going to be a house full, man. It's going to be a house full of people. Yeah, it is. It is. Friday is going to be crazy. Because then after. It's going to be a house full of people. Yeah, it is. It is.

Friday is going to be crazy because then after that we head up to LinuxFest, which is part two of the housekeeping. So LinuxFest Northwest is finally here. It is this weekend. If you're coming to our barbecue, we have over 100 people now on the meetup. What? You might want to bring a chair if you're local. We're going to bring some chairs. I should remember to do that.

I'm local. Emma and Crewroom System 76 are bringing some too, and they're bringing a ton of meat. We're going to be feeding a lot of people, cooking outside the Lady Jupes. That'll be Saturday after LinuxFest Northwest. And if you are looking to carpool or whatnot up from SeaTac, jupiterbroadcasting.com slash LinuxFest is our Telegram group.

You can go there and coordinate with peeps, or if you just want to know what's going on, what's the fest has started, that's where we'll be chatting with people. So go check that out. Then, after that, it's Red Hat Summit. May 7th through the 9th in Boston. Cheese,

Wes, and myself are going to Red Hat Summit. So if you're in the Boston area and you're going to Red Hat Summit, let us know. Tweet us and come hang out. Oh yeah, it'll be fun. It should be really you're going to Red Hat Summit, let us know. Tweet us. Come hang out. Oh, yeah. That should be really good. We'll just be there for a few days.

In and out. Getting all the Red Hat we can handle. Yeah. We're going to get the low down, get the scoop, all that kind of stuff. So check out Red Hat Summit. If you're going,

we'd love to see you there. But if you're not going to Red Hat Summit, maybe, just maybe, you're going to DockerCon. Like Wes and Elle. Look at you. That's just Elle. I was like, Wes is coming? Oh, KubaCon's what Wes is going to DockerCon. Like Wes and Elle. Look at you. That's just Elle.

I was like, Wes is coming? Oh, KubaCon's what Wes is going to. That's right. Oh, okay. Oh, right, right. This one is in California, isn't it, Elle? San Francisco. There you go. So go say hi to Elle if you're going to DockerCon in San Francisco.

She might maybe have some swag. Ooh. It's en route. I'll make sure to steal some if I don't bring it down. Yeah, we'll send you with some swag either way. But we may have very special swag for DockerCon. Extra special. Yeah.

Hopefully. So go find out. Yeah, hopefully. We'll see. We'll see. It depends if the delivery gods, if they cooperate with us. And then, last but not least, huge deal going on right now for Linux Academy. Go to linuxacademy.com slash join to sign up for a

$2.99 yearly promo. That's 33% off. It's a great deal. You can see how learn by doing makes a huge difference at Linux Academy because it's more than just videos. It's more than just guides. There's hands-on labs. And for right now, that's a

fantastic deal. It's going just for five more days, seven hours. Check it out, linuxacademy.com slash join for the 33% off deal. That's a heck of a deal there, Wes. That's a heck of a deal. All right, that, I believe, that's all the housekeeping, yeah? That's it. Let's do it. All right.

By the way, that track there that we were laying down, Joe Rez original. No way, really? I was really enjoying it. If he doesn't want people to know that, he can cut that out. that we were laying down, Joe Rez original. No way, really? I was really enjoying it. If he doesn't want people to know that, he can cut that out. It's all on you, Joe. All right, so I got a confession to make. I've been a real jackass. This year has been a rough one for me.

I've had a lot of eat my hat moments on the show this year, and this is just another one of them. But I got to be honest. I got to come clean man i fucking love xfce i love it love it i am i i love it so much have you ever experienced something where you're so happy and excited about it like when you go to bed like your mind is just racing you're so excited like excited about it, like when you go to bed, like your mind is just racing, you're so excited, like you're just thinking about all the possibilities. That was me with XFCE. You've got like a hard high school crush

on XFCE right now. Straight up. With XFCE, are you kidding me? I'm not kidding. And I have been the biggest naysayer because I have this whole been there, done that mentality with XFCE and the whole like Windows 2000 kind of desktop

paradigm. And you moved on. You were in the new world of the Linux desktop. Yeah. And, you know, XFCE was for Luddites and guys like Joe. Joe is listening to this. You know that. Oh, he already knows. He already knows. You know, I really started, it really started when I went back to Gnome Shell on 1904, and the performance was a lot better. But I was still having issues with my two vertical ASUS 27-inch monitors and my built-in laptop screen. And I was trying to find a windowing environment,

a desktop environment that would work properly with my screens. And Plasma got pretty close, but it had issues sometimes. GNOME could get one screen but not both screens working and i came across xfce just in you know because joe kept you know just in the back of my mind you know kept telling me try it try it try it try it and i decided to give it a go it was like getting a brand new computer where it was like taking your machine that you've had for a long time, taking out a spinning rust drive and putting like an MVME in, or an SSD, and then doing a fresh install on that SSD and just getting incredible performance. Literally felt like that. And what I did is I've taken, I started with taking a couple of my 1804 installs that are running Kubuntu and Plasma Desktop. Right, and you just switched those over?

And just installed the Kubuntu Desktop metapackage. So it was the same install. And yet I noticed significant application load time differences. Windows would move around the screen faster. The whole using of Firefox and Chrome felt significantly faster. And I'm not alone. Jason Evangelo from Choose Linux, the writer over at Forbes, he just posted an article on the 17th. He and I, same trajectory recently, completely disconnected. There is a common factor, yeah. And Jason writes, I can't believe I'm writing this Linux article about loving the XFCE desktop environment.

And he writes in here, every time I looked at screenshots of the XFCE, even from the official website, it reminded me of something from the days of Windows 2000. Gray and blue, uninteresting. Which I agree, the project does not put their best foot forward. No, if you just install the stock stuff,

it's pretty, it feels dated. It does, it does. He says when he uses XFCE and drags Windows across the screen, it feels like you're using a monitor with AMD FreeSync. It feels like you're using a 120 hertz monitor. I have grabbed a tab off of Chrome and gone to take it to my third monitor, and the tab has ripped off and moved across the screen so fast that I thought I must have mis-grabbed

and just grabbed the title bar of the entire browser and moved it. It is voraciously fast. It is addictingly fast. It is a different computer now. And so I thought, okay, well, if this is what it feels like when I load sort of a good implementation, but not what a lot of the YouTubers consider peak XFCE. If you look around on YouTube, everybody says it's Manjaro.

You got to use Manjaro XFCE edition. If you look at Linus Link Tech Tips, in their recent video, they're using Manjaro for their virtualized Mac machine. When you look at the latest video from Wendell, he's talking about Linux gaming, Manjaro. Everybody, it's Manjaro and Pop! OS right now is what everybody loves in the gaming

space. And I thought, okay, well let's give since I'm not interested in Gnome Shell, Pop! OS is fine, but I'm not interested in Gnome Shell, let's give Manjaro a go. So I downloaded Manjaro XFCE Edition. And it was exactly what I expected. In that the

installer was a bit of a hot mess, crashed on me once. Oh, really? See, I was going to say, I was really impressed with the installer and had a great time. Not bad. It couldn't partition my disk, so I had to...

See, I love the partitioner, and I loved, because I was installing it in a weird West way, that it let me just easily skip installing a bootloader at all. I thought it was a dream, one of the best Linux installation experiences I've had in a while. So I didn't mind the look of the installer or the functionality of the installer, but I had two issues.

Number one is, I think this is, and maybe number one, cause number two, when I was doing the disk partitioning, I decided, you know what, I want to hibernate. I'm going to go ahead and have a swap file. When I chose swap file, the installer crashed, just completely dumped out on me. And then after that, it couldn't partition the disk. And I think because maybe the partition table was thus in use by the kernel at that point, and so I had to use the command line installer to go wipe out the partitions, reboot, and then I could use the installer.

And after that point, it was fine. But you're right, it is otherwise a good set of features. And once it loads up, the XFCE desktop is nice. It's got a bar at the bottom, really good set of themes, nice launcher. Everything's really clean. Yeah, I don't think it would be the style I would settle on or keep for my own personal aesthetic choice. But it felt very consistent, even just from the start. They say it's a lightweight desktop.

And it is. It is remarkably lightweight. And here lightweight desktop. And it is. It is remarkably lightweight. And here's what I realized it is. And I ended up enjoying my stay with Manjaro, but I just went back to my 1804 installs with the Ubuntu desktop because XFCE is XFCE. And it's, in a way,

because it's not like Gnome Shell where Fedora has a slightly different implementation than Ubuntu does, and they have slightly different patch sets. Right, all these vendor patch sets. But it's very current, right? And it's like, you've got to get the latest version of Fedora. You have to listen to Linux Podcast to find out that there's these new changes you might be missing. Right.

But if you get 18.04 or 19.04 or you get Manjaro or you use straight Arch or whatever, you're kind of just getting the same XFCE that's available for all of them. And what I think makes XFCE a better desktop environment for me, possibly than Plasma, although Plasma still has been great. I'm curious about this because, I mean... We're running it here. It's been fun. And it's powerful. Yeah.

What I think I prefer about XFCE is they're trying to solve a smaller problem domain. What I think I prefer about XFCE is they're trying to solve a smaller problem domain. They're not trying to make this entire comprehensive platform. They are making a desktop environment that is a minimal implementation. And the end result is less things break, things are faster, cleaner, simpler, and more straightforward for the user. And I can conceptualize how the XFCE desktop is put together. I can't really fully wrap my head around. I'm sure if I spend more time, but I don't really fully understand all of the components, the way the KIO slaves were, whatever, if they're even there anymore. I don't know how any of that works really in Plasma.

But with XFCE, I can clearly conceptualize how this works. And I still get to ride the wave of modern GTK apps that are sort of the peak, I think, of UI design and features that are shipping for GNOME Shell. And they still look great at home on my XFCE desktop. Have you not found any compromises? Because knowing you, I mean, you also spend some time on other platforms, let's say, that are known to look nice and be visually polished. And I think you're hitting on something

with Plasma and GNOME. They're like our, they're our flagships, right? There are philosophies that we're projecting about how Linux can do desktops. I mean, there are many of them, but they are the prominent ones. And because of that, you know, they've tried to make themselves look nice. Do you, yes, I like, I get that you want things to be snappy. But how many times are you really opening an app? You know, like I start my computer, I launch Chrome and a few Electron apps. And then I don't think about it. So the Electron apps I noticed the least difference.

But I feel consistently like all of the native applications like Chrome and Firefox and the Terminal and the File Manager. Holy crap, the File, are consistently faster. Like somehow the menus open faster. The webpages render faster. The applications launch faster. They show up on screen faster. I don't know why. Maybe because they're not going through some sort of 3D rendering pipeline.

I don't know what it is. Less in the way. But so the end result is the consistent use of the desktop, even once things are loaded, still feels faster. And more memory is left over for my other things that I want to do. So there's those things. But I have had to make modifications to make the sucker work for me. Number one thing I had to do is I went and got ULauncher,

which I think is a very good launcher. If you guys are looking for a nice desktop launcher, check out ULauncher, which I think is a very good launcher. If you guys are looking for a nice desktop launcher, check out ULauncher. By default, control space just brings up a little prompt and you can type in terminal commands, directories, or just the name of applications, hit enter and they launch immediately. It's got some nice autofill.

Reminds me a lot of Spotlight. Yes. Or Alfred. Yeah, Alfred or GnomeDew. It's a more modern version of GnomeDew, those things. Quicksilver is another one. I was a little disappointed just running it on Plasma, and I kind of still like the built-in Plasma launcher more.

It did a better job of finding the right things that I wanted. KRunner is better on Plasma. But Ulauncher's nice. Yeah, Ulauncher's great on XFCE, super quick, and really easy to get installed. So once I got a launcher, I liked the whisker menu, but I needed a quicker launcher that just was a keystroke away. I had to make that fix.

Another way to make XFCE a little more pleasing to me visually was I installed the Arc theme, and I used the Arc theme. Classic. It just looks great. I should have brought it down here for you. It looks just, I think it looks just as good as the Dome Shell. Wow. I mean, and I've got a nice transparent panel launcher that I think looks really good.

I've got all the applets that I want right there in the thing. It's just like. I do really like some of the XFCE suite of applications. Do you like, you mentioned like Thunder? Great. Great. XFCE Terminal?, like you mentioned, like Thunder? Great, great. XFCE Terminal? Mousepad's good, yeah.

So I installed the ArcDark theme, and then I installed the System76 pop icons. So I'm using pop icons, which give it a modern, trendy look. Would you say they make it pop? They make it pop. So, and there's, you know, System76 makes the pop theme available for free

up on their GitHub, so you can just go grab it. So I got that. Then it was sort of like the edge case stuff. And I think maybe this is because I didn't install like Zubuntu from the ISO. I just did the Zubuntu meta package. So it's still technically a Kubuntu install too. So I got

Plasma on there still. So I could always bail, but what I'm wondering is maybe I didn't get like my notification stuff set up right for the XFCE desktop. I started having this issue where Slack would lock up and then I just essentially would get bored and kill the process and relaunch Slack and respond to the message. And then a few minutes later it would lock up again. And I'm like looking around trying to figure out what's going on. I did have my machine rendering on a massive project, which I'll talk about here in a minute. But I thought maybe that was the cause of it. And maybe I was just running out of resources.

But I got a ton of RAM. I got a ton of disk. That's not it. Now my desktop doesn't use any memory. So it wasn't that. And it just kept happening for a day. And so this morning, I'm looking around. I'm looking around.

I'm like, you know what it is? It's every time I get a message and a notification would come up, my application freezes. What I discovered is there wasn't a notification daemon running in the background of my XFCE desktop that was taking these notifications from applications. And for whatever reason, Electron apps just respond by locking up because, you know,

garbage. So I installed Dunst, D-U-N-S-T. It's a lightweight notification daemon which works with most desktop environments. It's very customizable. It's not dependent on any particular toolkit. It takes very little memory, and it just now receives,

I think it's just a D-Bus client or something, it receives those messages and displays them, and now my Slack client doesn't lock up. So I solved that problem. And it makes me think you're already learning about some of the pieces of the modern desktop, which is good, but I'm curious, too. I think we experienced this yesterday, troubleshooting a totally different Linux-related

thing. The flip side of that is it kind of just didn't work, right? Like you had to dive in, and Plasma probably wouldn't have been a problem. Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't. I've never had that issue. And I'm, you know, I'd be surprised if I run into more things like that. It's possible, I suppose. Yeah, I guess that is, that's the point, right, is how many? One or two for an experienced Linux user who wants a optimized desktop? Not a big deal. I'm also, I'm unfortunately not getting a perfect hit rate on my monitors still. So all the monitors light up, which is great.

But sometimes it, like, reverses the primary and, like, it makes, because I have two verticals, and now what it makes, because I have two verticals. And now what I've done is I have two vertical 27s, the Asus 27 monitors, which are 2K monitors. They're just, I think, one of the best desktop monitors for Linux because it's that sweet spot of a nice, wide, high-resolution screen, but it's not high DPI. Okay, right, yep. And then I, so then I bought a third one and I put that right smack dab in the middle. So now I've got three 27-inch Asus monitors, two of which are vertical. It's great.

It's really great. But sometimes it moves my desktop around to like the vertical screen, and so everything's sideways. And so I don't know if it's the order in which I have them plugged into the video card to the display ports or what. So anybody in the audience has had that issue

where you wake your XFCE desktop up from sleep and all of the monitors have re-jumbled themselves. Like back in the day, I would just go like write a custom XOR config and I think that would solve it, but now I don't even have

an XOR file, so. I had that, I had some daisy chain displays for all, I also had three screens. Mine was the reverse where I had two regular and then one rotated.

And I was always using AR and R. Okay. Yeah. AR and R, yeah. And that'll just generate you some XRender sort of commands that you can run. You can save it in a little script. You can make it launch

at start. So sometimes it would be annoying. So just have that as I log in. It just sets it. That's a great idea. Great tip, Wes. A decent workaround, at least. Okay. You throw a link to that in the show notes for me? You know it. You're also a Manjaro user. You run an XFCE, right? Yep. And throw a link to that in the show notes for me? You know it. Now, cheese, you're also a Manjaro user,

and you run an XFCE, right? Yep. And on a lot of other distros, actually, I've had to use the XR&R for, it's a Dell and Spirion, I think. It's like a 3000 series, little 11.6-inch two-in-one. But yeah, because the screen would be rotated,

because it's a touchscreen as well, so the screen would be rotated because it's a touch screen as well so the screen would be rotated on a lot of distros out of the box um so but no i mean manjaro dude out of the box x xfce has worked no problems um you know if i flip if i flip it into tablet mode keyboard you know is disconnected uh everything works fine there. So I haven't had any problems with it. Obviously not the best touch interface, but you could get some work done with it for sure. What do you think about those tools that Manjaro makes available? Like the tool to install different drivers, like it's easy to switch between Intel drivers, NVIDIA drivers, or Bumblebee. Like have you played around some of that stuff?

Yeah, a little bit. I've also played with just messing around with Steam because it comes pre-installed out of the box. And so if you're doing that and you're, you know, working with a little machine like this with integrated graphics, I mean, it works flawlessly, man. I was able to jump on and pull down

I think it was faster than light and play a little bit of that. No problems. I was impressed with how different, it had been ages since I'd used Monjaro, because mostly I just, you know, regular Arch got. And how different it feels from regular Arch. It feels almost like a real stable distro. And the weird part of us just having 1904 out, that was a newer kernel than what I got when I installed Monjaro.

So it was just like a, what's happening here? But it is impressive how different it feels. The ISO has all the stuff. It just dumps it right on the disk. And it's still doing those sort of gray zone thing. You can just choose the non-free driver right there at boot and just start right out of the box with the non-free stuff. No problem. Have at it, Haas.

They're clearly thinking about it. It's a cohesive experience. And it's the distro of choice in all of these new Linux gaming videos from Linus Tech Tips and what's the other one? Wendell. Yeah, them and PopOS. It's like these

two distros are standing out in the gaming community. Solus almost had that for a hot minute. Maybe he kind of proved it out and then, you know, these other ones came along and executed it.

Yeah. Well, and I'll agree with Wes in that it definitely feels, it feels more stable of an Arch-based distribution. I don't know. I mean, I've had no problems with any updates breaking anything,

having to go back and tinker with anything just out of the box. Everything's worked. And, you know, I get the latest and greatest for the most part, you know, which isn't really a big deal as far as graphics drivers go for this machine with integrated graphics. But for those desktop rigs out there running it, I think they'd find benefit at just the pace at which it's updated. I will say it was really nice to be in Arch again for a bit. It's still on the ThinkPad. I left it on.

I think I'm going to run it on the ThinkPad for a while. Just having Pac-Man right at your fingertips. It's so fast. It's so good. It's so good. It's so good. All my other rigs, I'm going to keep on Ubuntu 18.04 and just put Xubuntu desktop packages on them. Because it's, they're all working fine. Like, 18.04 is proving

out to me to be a really good solid desktop. Super solid LTS, yeah. Like, getting that machine up there reset up on Xubuntu and going to get some of these things, you know, the software is, everybody makes a package for it. There's a package always available. And especially when you're

on the 18.04 LTS. Yeah, it's a PPA or even just in GitHub, right? Like the build deps, well, they're the Debian packages. That 18.04 build is really quite appealing. I've just switched my main server from Debian over to Ubuntu 18.04 simply because it has ZFS

compiled in. It's better than that DKMS stuff. And having the GNOME UI that I can just remote in and use is actually kind of nice sometimes. Yeah, server guys aren't ever supposed to admit that, though. We're never supposed to admit that. That's why I said it quietly. Yeah, don't worry.

Nobody will hear you. You know, so now that Joe has gotten me, and now that Joe has gotten Jason, the next target on his list is going to be Elle. Oh, you know it. Yeah. Elle, what's your current Linux desktop setup? I was sitting here thinking that exact same thing. I'm like, I'm going to blame Joe for this.

But I'm running Pop!OS right now, and I don't want to leave. Oh, that's right. In fact, you had the successful upgrade to 1904 last week. Yeah, everything went so smooth. I haven't had an issue with anything, including all of the tools that we use. Yeah, everything went so smooth. I haven't had an issue with anything, including all of the tools that we use. Like, everything has just worked. Mm, that is a hard...

Well, then I'd say stick with it. I'd say stick with it. If I was going to... I think right now, I would like to try out a Gnome Shell. If I was going to try out a Gnome Shell implementation, I think it would probably be Popnow. That would be my next hop.

I'd recommend it. I give you three months, though, before Joe wins you over. He got to me eventually. You'll get bored of stability, too. Who wants that? Who wants that? I hate to say it, but I think he's right. The way you talk about XFCE, it sounds almost like a window manager without a desktop environment. That could be the next logical step. It really does get out of the way. So once it's up and going, what's great about it is, like Thunar, for example, is it's everything I love about Nautilus, but faster. And for me, in my personal experience, it's network browsing works better.

So I was like, just randomly decided, you know, I need to grab a file off of a computer down in the studio, go to the network section, boom. All listed right there. Would you want a SFTP in? Do you want a Samba in? What do you want?

Have at it. It also doesn't change its UI much. Not SCP though. No. No, definitely not. Don't get me going on that. Don't get me going. If people miss the reference,

go listen to Linux Action News. Episode 102. I think I was judging a book by its cover for a really long time. Now, keep in mind, I had been an XFCE user for many years back in the past because it was great for Linux terminals of a project. But I kind of looked at it from that same vantage point from many years ago. I think the math in my head was the project moves slow, the screenshots look like ass.

Ergo, I know I've been there, done that. I don't need to revisit, you know, but I was wrong. I just think it's a matter of time, Chris, before you're back on Arch with name. Do you ever try out some of the i3s and the Sways and the window managers that don't have a full desktop environment? That might be where I go next, I suppose, because I've been doing kind of the same thing with that for a long time. The only reason why I really haven't made a jump to a week in i3 is I have been using a window desktop environment since the 80s. I've used different graphical desktop environments that had multiple

windows. And so I grew up like I instinctively when I sit down at a computer, I arrange my windows in a stack. I enjoy it and I mentally lay them out very visually the way I'm working. And so for me, being able to do that is an efficiency booster. And I feel like I would lose that if I went to something that arranged my windows for me. But I'd be willing to give it a go for a little while. I tried out i3 for about two weeks, six months ago, and it required quite an investment of having a cheat sheet open next to me the whole time. It's an investment to learn all those commands and stuff, but it's fast. If you like XFC's fastness,

i3 is probably up there with it. And you might find that once you've adopted the paradigm, and depending, it might not be i3, it might be a different tiling window manager, that it gives you that control more so than other desktops because they acknowledge that people are picky about where their windows go. It's for people who like to mess with computers. Very nice, sir. And there are also static window managers that give you even more control.

Okay. All right. All right. I mean, you guys got to let me hang out for a little bit. You're going to give me whiplash. I'm moving around so much. for a little bit. You're going to give me whiplash. I'm moving around so much. I think something about it is touching a,

like a, what I felt like I unlocked was this sense of relief that I'm going to be able to just use my computer to work now. And that was so exciting to me. Like this,

I'm not going to have to screw with this now. I'm just going to have to screw with this now. I'm just going to use my computer to work. And the fact that XFCE moves so slow to me is kind of a nice thing because now I've got kind of a moving fluid base with frequently updated apps and then a desktop environment that takes quite a few years to really progress in any way that's going to alter the way I work. So devil's advocate moment.

I've heard you make this pitch numerous times over the years. What happened to the iPad Pro or is this just augmenting it? I feel like the iPad Pro's role is more like communications. I really am not crazy satisfied with mail applications on Linux because we at Linux Academy use the Google Mail Suite, the Google App Suite. And I'm not a big fan of using Thunderbird or KMail or MailSpring for any of that kind of stuff.

I've tried them all. And so what I'm doing right now is I pretty much do the majority of like the Zoom calls and Slack meetings and emails on the iPad. And the reason why is because I batch those things at certain times of the day when I'm not on air anyways. And then I use the desktop for like real work that is like my more productive work. I do have some of those applications. Like I have Zoom installed on the desktop and I have Slack installed on the desktop, but that's like supplemental. So that way, if I need to open up a link or something on the desktop and I have Slack installed on the desktop, but that's like supplemental. So that way, if I need to open up a link or something on the desktop, I've got it. And the mail is really the

weakest spot in my opinion, because when you have the Google app integration, you really want something that works tightly with calendar invites and can look people up in the directory. And it works well with doc links and stuff like that. And that's where a lot of the desktop Linux applications fall down. And so I've either used Wavebox, which is an application that lets you have a bunch of different cloud accounts in one app. Wimpy's talked about that before. Or I will use Natifier,

and I'll just natify Google Calendar and Google Mail for Linux Academy, and then I just have those as essentially desktop applications. And it works, you know, and the nice thing is both those apps work really well in a vertical layout, so I can put them on my vertical monitor and then pretty easily see all the information I need. When you're talking about XFC, I would also say that one of the good things about it is that, like you said earlier, it gets out of your way. So whenever you do want to add these

other bits and pieces from the Linux ecosystem, like a new launcher, a new doc, all of it seems to play nice together. Like you never really have an issue where just the theming is extremely broken on this one thing or, um, that something won't play nice with XFCE. And that's, I'd say that's one of the best advantages of using XFCE. Yeah. And to that point, I was able to load up Guake and I'm able to use the tilde key,

which is my preferred key to, to summon the Guake terminal. Um, because nothing else is using that on XFCE and control space is available for you launcher because nothing else is using that on XFCE. And control space is available for uLauncher because nothing else is using that on XFCE. Because there's, again, I think this is what's key about it, is they're trying to solve a more limited set of problems.

It's a smaller problem domain that XFCE is trying to solve. And therefore, what they've limited themselves to, they can do really well. It's just simple and consistent. Yeah. It's nice, and it's exactly what I want, and I think I'm going to hang out here for a while and watch where GNOME goes

because the development rate on GNOME is just, it's incredibly impressive, and see where Plasma Shell goes because I think it's got some of the best technology out there on a desktop. Honestly, you do seem a little refreshed, though, because we have to talk about those things. It's part of what we do here on the show and the network, right?

But you're off the hype train. You get to, like, just take a little break. You're not on the roller coaster. You're watching it. I'm an observer of the two desktop environments now. I remove myself, like, if they don't do something right. You know, we had this problem the other day here in the studio. It's not a big deal, but we had this problem the other day where, for whatever reason,

Plasma Shell was using like 700 megs of RAM. When you combine all the different components, it was nearly a gig of RAM. And we've got a rig here that's got 64 gigs of RAM in it. 64 gigs of RAM. And we had to reboot our OBS machine before Coder Radio because 100% of the RAM

had been used up, with the machine just sitting here. Yeah, that was less than ideal. 64 gigs. 100% used up. So we had sitting here. Yeah, that was less than ideal. 64 gigs, 100% used up. So we had to reboot. And we can see, like, actually we're starting to have an issue too. We've already had 59x runs. I bet you if I were to look at the memory usage, it's starting to creep up right now.

It's not too bad. It's not too bad. Let's see. Yeah, okay. We're using 4 gigs right now. That's not too bad. It's a little much, but it's not bad. And I guess I'm discovering as we've learned really, really

how to work with the Linux audio stack, as we've really learned, like, there's a couple of things that are a little odd about it that we have to compensate for. Some applications still use ALSA, and then the ALSA software will talk to the sound card, and the stuff that's using pulse audio will be completely unaware of the changes

the sound card has made. Say you go from 48 hertz to 44 hertz or from 44 to 48. If you don't tell the pulse applications that you've made that change, they sound like Barry White or like a chipmunk, depending on which direction it's gone. And then we do too.

And we have no way of knowing because we haven't changed anything. It's just there's two different audio stacks and one of them has talked to the card and hasn't told the other stack because they're completely unaware of each other. And they're just interpreting the same data stream differently. And that just happens.

And it happens to us frequently. It was happening to us very often. It was a ritual we'd go through on the live stream. And there's other strange things, like when the system boots up, it enumerates the sound cards, and it assigns them sort of at the order that they were enumerated to the operating system by the motherboard, not by like a physical ID of the card. So for some strange reason,

the motherboard, which can happen, were to enumerate the sound card devices in a different order, maybe their USB devices that boot up in a different order for some reason one day or whatever, even if they're PCI devices, they will get different IDs in the ALSA level and the pulse audio level because it inherits what ALSA said. And so you can actually have sound cards

that are your in and out sound cards on a machine change day to day when you reboot the system because they will get different IDs in the system because they assign ID at the time the motherboard enumerates them instead of like reading a device ID and saying, okay, this is sound card one, this is sound card two, and it always shall be. It doesn't do that. It just takes whatever the motherboard gives it. Okay, it's assigned now. Let's go. Good to go. And these are crazy weird things that when you add an additional complicated desktop environment on top of it, like Plasma, that also has its own audio stack, Phonon, which is then sitting on top of Pulse, which is then sitting on top of ALSA, which is then sitting on top of the driver stack, which is then sitting on top of the hardware.

And so with something like XFCE, you essentially remove one of those layers. You just have a simpler setup. And, I mean, I think it's kind of just turning the question on its head, right? Some people, you might need a fuller, richer desktop. I think some of this exploration is just deciding, like, do I need those features, and are they worth the cost?

Because eventually, if they aren't working, you're going to have to debug them. There you go. So I only have one last issue that I haven't solved yet that I would love to get the audience's help with. It's a real humdinger, speaking of audio. Everything plays audio just fine except for Firefox.

I've got no audio in Firefox. Don't know what it is. It's the strangest thing. VLC, Chrome, MPV, audio is just fine. Is this just in your Zubuntu install? Yeah. Firefox.

Otherwise working great, but no audio. Interesting. Which in some respects is actually nice. Yeah, that's your silent browser. Yeah, it is. It's like I never have to worry about it. It's private, it's silent, it's perfect. But other times, like I click a link and I'm like, oh yeah, right, now I gotta copy the link, go open up Chrome

and listen to it. I don't know what the hell that's about, speaking of audio issues, but I'm sure I'll solve it eventually. And if anybody knows, let me know, at Chris LAS. All right, so before we go, man, that's a lot I just dropped on you guys. I'd really like to know what you think.

I know I feel like I'm hopping again. I feel like I'm distro hopping again. But this one I'm pretty excited about. I'm really still happy. These machines here in the studio, I don't really see us going off of Plasma anytime soon. It works fine.

I think we would switch out to XFCE if we had a reason to touch these machines and do a bunch of other stuff too. So maybe next LTS we'll reconsider. Maybe. Or if we decide we're going to, I don't know, spend some time re-standardizing. If we were making some other large change,

I might consider because it's such an easy transition to go to XFCE. But otherwise, all the systems here in the studio, which is a good number of systems right now, are all still running Plasma Shell. And it's great. So they're all getting pretty good. You know, Elle's happy with Pop!OS and Gnome Shell. Plasma Shell works great here. There's tons of great.

It's just XFCE is better than I was giving it credit. And I feel like if you have been in my camp at all, it's worth giving it a go. If you want to see a pretty solid implementation, Manjaro does have it. I don't know if you need to run Manjaro, though, to run XFCE, but it's not a bad place to visit. Might give you a template, something to base your own. Yeah, and show you a more modern interpretation of a classic desktop paradigm. And yeah, i'm just really happy with it so far i'm gonna stick with it for a bit all right pick times wes pick times i have um

a disclaimer to make with this pick and i hate to even i hate to even have to have a pick where i feel like i need to make a disclaimer but you could use this i suppose um for for nefarious purposes. So don't. Well, I am a long time, like since forever, Audible subscriber. I really enjoy listening to audiobooks, especially when I'm driving. You know, I do a lot of road trips, and so audiobooks are great. Hadiyah, my wife and I, we share audiobooks. We just love it. It's just my preferred way to consume lots of information when I'm traveling. And it's a preferred way to consume lots of information when traveling. And it's a nice way to supplement since I don't get to read as much as I'd like. And I tend to find certain stories even work better in audio.

But the biggest problem with Audible books is they are in a proprietary DRM that is not playable on Linux or other free software devices. That's where OpenAudible comes in. OpenAudible.org. Now, I am a longtime subscriber. I own all these books, and I will continue to be a subscriber. I'm just going to back up my collection with this legitimately. I know people say that as a euphemism for stealing, but I am honestly using this as a backup.

I'm backing them up to my server, and then I will have an offline copy. Something offline media. So what OpenAudible does, and it is a clunky Java application, I will warn you, but God bless it if it isn't performing the Lord's work here, it will download, view, and convert to MP3s. It will manage all of your Audible.com content with their desktop front-end application. It's kind of weird the way it works, because you launch the application,

assuming you've got JVM running, they're set up, and you then go to the menu to browse Audible. You log into Audible through their, like, Java browser implementation thing, and then you sit there and tab through your Audible library pages, which I have, like, 17 of. Jeez. And if you try to, like, set the sorting to 50 at a time, it'll lock the application up

eventually on about page eight, and then you got to start all over again. So you got to keep it at the 20, and then you go through it page by page. And as you go through it, the application is basically ingesting the HTML. I ran it from the terminal so I could actually watch what it was doing. It's just taking in the HTML, stripping out the links, and it is building your library locally in the application. Once you've done this, you can export the list so you don't ever have to do that again.

And as long as you properly exit the application, it will save the list. If the application crashes, it'll lose everything it's added, so avoid crashing. As you can tell, I had to crash a few times. And by default, when you click a title in there, and you can also just by default tell it to download everything, it will download and then convert the entire audiobook to a high-quality MP3. See, that seems nice, right? Then you have that file, you can take it with you wherever you are,

plays on all your normal devices. Yeah, and that's it. That's pretty much it in a nutshell. There's other various things you can do with it, but for me, it was just a way to get all of my Audible books that I've never been able to access on my Linux desktop. And I have many occasions where I've been listening to an audio book on the road and I get back to my desk and I just want to finish it up and I can't play it on my nice desktop speakers. So hopefully this will solve it. Yeah, this is interesting. I've kind of stayed away from Audible just out of some of those very same concerns. So hopefully this will solve that. Yeah, this is interesting. I've kind of stayed away from Audible just out of some of those very same concerns. So I might have to reconsider now.

Things have come and gone in the past. So grab it while you can. And again, please don't use this to like throw it up on a torrent site or something like that. I debated not even including this in the show, but I decided since I know as a longtime desktop Linux user,

this is something I've struggled with for years. And it was only made better because they have a decent mobile app, and that's where I do the majority of my listening. But in the back of my mind, I've always wanted my own copies somewhere on a file system. And so I wanted to play them on my own desktop. And I actually, when I first started Audible, I got my Audible subscription, and then I canceled it. And in there, I told them it's because they don't support Linux.

And then when they released the mobile app, even like the very early betas for Android, I signed back up, and I've been a user ever since. So this is really nice to find. My library is like 70 gigs of MP3s. Wow. It's a lot of books. It's a lot of books.

So I'll be tossing those on the old free NAS. And then Wes found what looks like a really nice web UI for setting up WireGuard VPNs. A WireGuard VPN GUI, eh, Wes? Yes, indeed. I like the name, too. Yeah, over from the people at Portal Cloud, looks like they run their own sort of VPS hosting company. And if you just want to, you know, you're confused about WireGuard, or you just want to give it a shot, the configs on the command line are admirably simple and easy to understand, as you've seen, Chris. But, you

know, that's not always enough, especially as you're scaling. You know, maybe you're supporting a small company, you've got 30 different people that you're all, you know, trying to manage their stuff. Now, I haven't used Subspace yet, although I do have it running. I just haven't integrated it into my system, so bear that in mind. Subspace. It's nice to see this stuff taking off, though,

because these are exactly the kind of supporting applications we need if we really want to see WireGuard be as successful as I think we all hope it will be. Yeah, and this gives you a simple web UI that almost reminds me of the early UI of BitTorrent Sync where you go in, you add a device, right? It does. And you see all the different devices there. You can delete and revoke their keys or you can create another one.

And like this would be perfect for the WireGuard machine that we have here in the studio just to add a few of the staff's machines on there. And the way it works is it's a Docker image that assumes you have WireGuard set up and running locally. They also walk you through if you want to toss this on a VPS, like a DigitalOcean droplet to get your own custom WireGuard. The nice thing is it should be really easy to test out. Yeah, that's true. Or you can just throw it,

if you have WireGuard set up on your own local machine, then you can deploy the Docker image, and you're off to the races. It's pretty nice looking. I really think we'll probably get this set up here pretty soon. Subspace, which is also just a great name for something like this. And more power to WireGuard. Yeah, you know what else was neat about it?

Hey, it has integration with using Let's Encrypt right out of the box, because of course it does. So Portal.Cloud is the company, huh? Is this like another commercial WireGuard hosted solution? No, I think they do next-generation open-source hosting. Yeah, look at that. Hmm. Add great open-source cloud applications to your account in seconds.

I see. Yeah, they've got a couple other available open source apps, like they've got a simple blogging platform, web analytics server, stuff like that. So I haven't tried any of these before,

but an interesting development. I got to say, they look, you know what, guys, if you listen, get in touch. They are, they're really stressing data portability. They, free software is like bullet point number two

on their site here. That's not bad. That is not bad. I'd love to see that kind of stuff. Anyways, but that's neither here nor there. If you want to check out Subspace, we'll have a link in the show notes, and you can go deploy your own WireGuard GUI and get people added to your WireGuard instance nice and easy-sneezy.

Get to it. All right, there you have it. Now, oh, man. Oh, Al and Jude's going to be here any minute now. Oh, my goodness. We better prepare ourselves. Oh, jeez. All right, we better get to be here any minute now. Oh, my goodness. We better prepare ourselves. Oh, jeez. All right, we better get out of here.

Linux Fest is nigh. If you're going to be there, come say hi. Meetup.com slash Jupyter Broadcasting for that event and future events. Love to see you there. Join us live next Tuesday for this show, and join us live this Friday if you're listening the week this came out for a hell of a live stream. Love to see you there.

Anything else we need to plug? Um, you know, if you're going to go over to our Jupyter Broadcasting meetup, meetup.com slash Jupyter Broadcasting, you should also stay tuned. Oh, yeah. I know Elle has been so hard at work

with all kinds of exciting study groups. Yeah, command line threat hunting very soon. Definitely do that. All right. See you back here next Tuesday! I'm out. Yeah, our next study group, command line threat hunting. How to figure out if your box has been owned on the command line. How great is Tony, right? Oh, he's amazing.

We've had a little sneak peek at the material, I should say, and we know it's going to be really good. I'm excited to get to watch the whole finished thing. Yeah, we got a little interview for Tony to run on the show here in a little bit, too. So, yeah, it's going to be good. Alright, so, guess what?

We have a couple of bits of housekeeping to get out of here in the post-show, too. Alright, number one, we got to get the title, so jbt in the post show, too. Ooh. All right? Okay. Number one, we got to get the title. So, jbtitles.com. Everybody go vote. And then number two, something major happened this weekend. This is a historic event.

Probably up there with Skynet. As of this weekend, April 2019, the cheese cloud has gone online. Mmm. It has. online. Mmm. It has. Yes, yes. So Mr. Bacon has set himself up a next cloud instance. Come here, over here. The cone of silence. We don't want to share any details that might get your box bones.

So just between you and me, what'd you do? Did you do this on a droplet? Did you do this on a physical server? Yeah, I need IP address, root, password, please. Mmm. It was a snap. Setting it up. Oh, okay, but come on.

You see what I did there? I do, but I want to know about what's the box. Is it a droplet? Is it a physical machine? Is it a Raspberry Pi? What are we working with here? It is a droplet. I just went that route for years.

Geez, man. I want to know everything. NYC? Okay. All right. So it's an East Coaster. I catch it. Yeah.

Well, I've got a couple of droplets, you know, because they're just so ridiculously simple to spin up. 1804 Fedora? 1804 base. 1804 base. Basically just installed it with a snap. Setup was ridiculously simple um went through set up with uh what is it next next cloud dot https oh yeah so you got a cert on there yes or something like that so you know just pull down your automate your uh let's encrypt cert and everything so it works flawlessly out of the box. I've got one of the lower end droplets.

So I'm running like one CPU, two gigs of RAM, and just like 60 gigs of storage. One of the things I haven't quite figured out yet, well, I just haven't really dove into it, but is relocating some of that into block storage, which one of the things that I've learned about specifically DigitalOcean, I'm sure a lot of the others are the same, that you can only move that block storage within that center. So basically, since I do have a server that's in LA and I do have one that's in NYC, then I could not move that block storage between those two.

This Geek Tweets has been using, you're still on 16.04. Did I know that? Yeah, I've been running the Next Cloud Snap on 16.04 for a year now. And it's, you know, it's been absolutely rock stable. It's on a VM at home back in the UK and used it all over the place. I've got two or three Android phones backing up photos to it in real time. And it's been absolutely flawless. do you handle your your storage is it hosted on the same local machine or do you yeah it's just one big virtual disk i probably should sort that out gotcha brent's got a pretty

clever title x-ray foxtrot charlie echo for the spelling out of xfce-C-E. That's pretty deep, Brent. I'm impressed. I had to look it up. Board of Stability, Dammit Joe, Blame Joe. Those are good, too. Blame Joe is pretty good. So I think it's between Brent and Blame Joe right now, which is Wes's suggestion. JBtitles.com.

Not a lot of boats today. Not a lot of boats. Come on, guys. Go boat. Go boat. Blame Joe is pretty good. But would people get it? of boats today. Not a lot of boats. Come on, guys. Go boat. Go boat. I blame Joe. It was pretty good. But would people get it?

No, I mean, it wouldn't tell you what at all the episode was about, but it would be a slight callback to a tiny bit in the episode. It is so his fault.