LINUX Unplugged - 299: Shame as a Service

Episode Date: May 1, 2019

Fresh back from LinuxFest Northwest we share a few of our favorite stories and memories. Plus our concerns with Purism's new subscription services, Fedora 30 is released, and we spin up the Distro Hoppers. Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, and Ell Marquez.

I am legitimately. I didn't realize it, but I have some sort of weird Linux Fest sleep hangover. It happens every year, but I sat down and I actually forgot to even get in the mumble room. Have we ever even done this show without a mumble room? It doesn't make sense either. It's Linux Unplugged. You've got half the mumble rooms here. That is probably what it is.

Yeah. Both of you guys are here. And so that is a good portion at least. But it sounds like Wes has a pick-me-up before we get started. Oh, yes. Well, okay. We've both been watching the very same show, and you've reached something of an important juncture in that show.

Oh, really? So I just thought you're going to be done soon. It's always hard when you finish a show. You know, it's all over. You miss the characters. Here we go. I got you something to remember it by. Oh, okay.

All right. Here we go. Here we go, ladies and gentlemen. Oh, my God. No. No. It's all the songs. It's we go, ladies and gentlemen. Oh, my God. No. No. It's all the songs. It's a CD of Vic Fontaine from D-Space 9.

Absolutely. The single-handedly worst thing about D-Space 9, now on his own CD. Oh, the only thing that's going to make this better is you know I'm going to put this in the car and put this on when I'm in it with Hadiyah and see how long it takes her to notice. I was thinking maybe we could rip it and get some soundboard clips. I can't believe you found this. I can't believe it. Are any of the songs from the show on here?

Yeah, they're all songs from the show. Oh, yeah. Saturn, Doll, I'll Be Seeing You. Oh, wow, I'm getting angry just thinking about it. I'm getting there. There you go. I feel much better now. Thank you, Wes.

You're ready for the show. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 299 for April 30th, 2019. Well, hello there and welcome to your weekly Linux talk show that's just made it back from a huge Linux Fest Northwest. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Mr. Payne. How are you feeling? Oh, I'm alive, I think, but barely. Did you get some rest?

A little bit. I mean, I approached a full night's sleep, but it's about the only one in the past week. I'm sure you're even worse. Oh, yeah. Yeah, but we did walk away with some great stories. So we'll talk about those today. And we've got some great friends joining us in studio.

Some of them that have hung around from the fest, thankfully, actually, to make it on the show. So we'll get to all of that, you know, in this week's podcast, in this little here show. Coming right up. Lots to talk about. Two plus, towards the end of the show, a brand new segment. Something we're rolling out. Something that afflicts all of us. Premiered today.

First time. First time right here on the show. So we'll get to that in just a bit. But before we go any further, got to bring in that virtual lug. Time appropriate greetings. Mumble Room. Hello there. Hello.

Hello. Hello. Hello, Brandon, Bruce, Code Sections, Jeff, Mini Mech. Remember Sony? I can't see. Remembers only. Oh, remembers only. Right. of course.

TechMav and Turth are in there as well. But on the studio line, we have the one, the only Mr. Cheese Bacon. Hello, Cheese. Hey, what's up, guys? Hey, man. How you doing? Doing great. Good, good, good.

Well, nobody cares because we have something very important. I love you, too. I am very excited to welcome Brent back in studio. It's been a while, Brent. Hello. Hello. Almost exactly a year. Yeah. It's tradition now. It's been a while, Brent. Hello. Almost exactly a year. Yeah. It's tradition now.

It's tradition. Gotta keep it going. And joining us in the studio for the first time, Mr. Ironic Badger. It's Alex. Hello, Alex. Good day. Pip pip. Hello.

Hello. How are you doing? Very well, thank you. Good. Nice to have you for an extended time in the Pacific Northwest. It sounds like he's falling in love. It's beautiful. I know.

I think you should move up here, dude. Yeah, one day. Wow. Okay. Well, we have a lot to talk about today. Not just Linux Fest, but we have some really, really big news to start out with. Fedora 30 is out right now as we record. And we're taking a look at the Fedora 30 workstation, which ships with GNOME 3.32. Completely refreshed icon themes, new consistency across the desktop, way snappier performance, the new application panel that controls permissions for flat packs, and a lot more. Of course, there's also the Silver Blue release and the Cloud Edition release,

but I, regrettably, because of all the LinuxFest stuff, did not quite get this installed before the show. Wanted to take Elle out to lunch before she had to fly out. That's nice of you. I know. Did you get a chance to give it a look? You know, it took a while. I think their CDNs are pretty popular.

A lot of people downloading this release, which is a good sign. Yeah, I got it installed in a virtual machine and booted into the live CD. And it's, I mean, it's nice. Every time Fedora comes out, it's always a little hard because it's not a radical change, right? It's a small iterative improvement, but I've been looking forward to their release of GNOME 3.32 because I've been enjoying it so much in 1904.

And that flicker-free boot, ooh, it's shiny. Oh, man, we've been looking forward to that for a while. Okay. I mean, it's, honestly, I hardly ever reboot my computer except for like a kernel upgrade. So I don't see it a lot. It's not something I really care about. But as someone who grew up, some of the first hacking I did on a computer,

a wee little lad breaking my parents' Windows workstation was changing how the boot screen appeared. And finally, Linux users get first-class, decent-looking boot. Now you need flickerer free keg. Yeah, maybe, maybe someday. I tease. There's numerous improvements throughout Fedora and GNOME 3.3.2. It's pretty much worth it just for that update alone. But I'll give you more thoughts later on as I get a chance to kick the tires.

Congratulations to the team. And hopefully we'll get a chance to do a little comparison and performance. Did you have any early impressions between the Ubuntu 1904 implementation of Gnome Shell and the Fedora 31? I mean, there's always a little, you know, they don't have the Ubuntu style theme, but otherwise, performance wise, they both just felt really snappy. It's always nice to have a fresh Fedora installed with good classic Gnome. I didn't do any tweaking.

So it wasn't, I would say, it doesn't come out of the box quite as pretty as 1904, but, you know, you can style it to your taste. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And some people do prefer the more standard-looking GNOME. And it's perfectly usable, you know what I mean? Like, you may not like the default theme, but it works just fine. Sure, sure, sure.

Alex, I'm curious, did you hear any of the purism scuttlebutt while we were at LinuxFest Northwest? I had some things I'm not sure I'm allowed to repeat. Oh, I'm going to repeat them. I wasn't going to necessarily, but then we have a pretty big announcement today from Purism. And I don't know if you guys have seen this, but it is the era of services,

and they have launched the Librem 1, a, quote, growing bundle of ethical services. They have 530 out of 5,000 backers. Yes, this is another crowdfunder from Purism, this one now for services. And it includes a range of apps, Librem Chat, Librem Social, Libram Mail, and Libram Tunnel. Chat is an end-to-end encrypted VoIP chat using Matrix. Libram Mail is a rebadged mail client, I understand. Libram Tunnel is, I think, private internet access, white label.

And Libram Social, I think, is also a rebadge of Mastodon and things like that. But it's self-hosted private labeled privacy first focus as they say no ads no tracking and quote we respect you have you seen how many options there are on these packages it's quite a bit yeah there must be 15 20 different options here what do you think of the pricing so like the basic pricing yeah so you described it as a as like a crowdfunding thing but generally i think of a crowdfunding program as something you pay up front like you know you pay one cost here though they're all talking they say like the full monthly bundle 7.99 a month they also have a couple of weird ones like a 20 one time or five dollar monthly donation so there's like different options where you can just

and they the way they write it is kind of interesting. Purism is a social purpose company. If you'd like to donate to the cause of social good and technology and want to see more products and services from Purism, well, we welcome it. So just send us some money. But at this point, it's going to be cheaper in the long run to invest in your own self-hosted thing, is it not? And just as privacy focused. I do think it's an interesting space to explore because we're all all right. I mean, people that use Dropbox or other things,

there are many managed services that we like to use. We have complaints about the privacy of the implementation and what's going on behind the scenes. And I've kind of wondered, why don't we see more of this, you know, taking the open source software that we can run for ourselves and not really developing it anymore. Maybe they're adding back to it, but just running it for you. Compare a digital ocean droplet at $5 a month running next cloud with this service for $8 a month. You know, you look at the feature list here, you know, VPNs, documents, mail, all the rest of it. And there's pretty much nothing you can't self host yourself for $5 a month

that they're offering here for $8. But for $3 more. So I pay, I think, like $2 a month for someone to host my mail server. Not that I couldn't. I just don't want to. And I think mail's on the other end of that spectrum. I would agree because of the whole spam thing. But everything else, like NextCloud, is so good now.

That's true, especially with the Snap version that they have. It is easy to install. I just wonder, I mean, are there people who like the philosophy but don't have an admin experience or just don't have the time to want to bother with a digitalization droplet? Yeah, I think there is likely a customer base for this kind of stuff or else things like Slack wouldn't be as popular as they are. People want convenience of pushbutton and get a service.

The scuttlebutt that I heard and what is concerning because if you just look into it, if you know the people involved, it is apparently true. People received layoff notices from Purism Saturday evening over the weekend. Some of the people like in their sales department, Cherie from Nome and others were let go Saturday. They went home Friday thinking they had a job on Monday and Saturday evening they got an email saying you're let go. Jeez. And now we are pivoting to services, which seems to be the popular brace yourselves, kids, because we're going to get a lot more of this over 2019 and 2020. Hey, I need a reoccurring revenue stream Turns out selling and shipping to a free software market is hard to monetize

So let's go for reoccurring And let's figure out how we can rebadge some open source services And do this fundraiser style initiative Now my issue here is having been a previous backer of Purism's products is the previous products have not necessarily been 100% delivered on. The laptops didn't necessarily meet the original commitments. Now, they have iterated on that over time. The Librem 5 is currently the development edition is slightly delayed, unlikely to ship in July, as promised. That's also a crowd-raised product. and now we have services that are also crowdfunded while they're kind of quietly letting staff go on a Saturday night.

How many people are involved in this project behind the scenes, right? What's the company look like? Well, this is what I wanted to get to. So, Purism is an interesting beast because they're a social purposes company established here in Washington state. purposes company established here in Washington state. Now they're, they're a corporation in California. Like they're a business out of California, but their social purposes status is out of Washington state and God bless them.

I think this is an interesting idea, especially if let's just say things really line up. Well, the Libram five ships, the Libram 15 and those laptops do well. PureOS gets a large user adoption. And you start having devices that are phones, laptops, and tablets all running PureOS. You combine it with this Librem 1 service, and all of a sudden you're starting to see kind of an Apple iCloud model.

Very much so. You can see the logic in it. That does not make it a reality. And the thing that really bothers me as a former sysadmin is just like we've seen with these streaming services like CBS All Access, companies that don't have this as their core focus think it's easy to just stand up a service real quick. Oh, I'll just, you know what, we'll get into services. We'll build some servers. We'll rebadge some software. We'll invest in security. We'll get a couple of really smart people on our team and we'll really build out a really scalable, secure infrastructure and we'll start offering services. To answer Alex's question on their core team page, there's currently about 22 people listed. And that really bothers me because companies with 22,000 employees can barely provide

infrastructure-grade reliable services. Companies like YouTube and ESPN have invested decades in their streaming infrastructure and in their storage infrastructure. And so for a company that's making laptops and now attempting to make a phone and topple Android, also wanting to get into services while having a small employee base that's essentially the size of my team to make podcasts nearly is crazy.'s crazy does anybody remember mobile me yeah with apple that was a hot mess and if apple can't do it uh and you know canonical struggle with a been too touch um with a lot more people and a lot more money i think this guy's on cloud nine isn't he like well you know you got to have a you know you do need to have a visionary somebody who's

willing to be bold todd is a bold visionary, and that draws a lot of people in. It helps if the vision is realistic, though. Well, here's what the issue is. And this is, see, we are, I think, because I hear from the audience all the time about this, is we're the minority on this issue. What we're really facing here is, I think, the limitations of humanity. Seriously. facing here is, I think, the limitations of humanity. Seriously. The problem is, is that we are all tribal monkeys that want to be signaling constantly to each other. I agree with you. I belong in your tribe. I agree with what you believe. I want to be in your tribe. And so we do

that by promoting things that seem great ideas that reflect our ideals and our beliefs, like software freedom, like the ability to turn off your webcam, the ability to load your own operating system on your own phone. That kind of stuff is things that we believe in. And so we want to see that propagate. We want to see that continue. So we want to virtue signal that we think that's great. So we tend to just talk about this stuff and lacquer over all of the obvious issues, because deep down, we're all a bunch of optimists. And we want to see this stuff be successful. We want to believe there's a big enough market to buy free software phones. We want to believe a company like Purism can come around and change an entire entrenched

industry that nearly goes back now 100 years of legacy. We want to believe that's possible. And because we don't have the hands-on experience, we have no idea how complicated of a job it is. We frankly don't understand any of the dynamics involved in carrier agreements and getting something certified for a carrier network. We have no insights into any of that. We have no idea what it takes to manufacture a phone or to stamp out a motherboard or to write drivers for a modem. We have no concept of any of that. And so we sit back and go, that seems possible.

Yeah, it seems like that should be really easy. How hard could it be? Well, I sure hope they can get it. Well, let's give them another fundraiser. Let's raise more money because obviously it's going to go somewhere because I believe in this idea. And God forbid you don't believe in it, because if you don't believe in it, then you don't love free software. You don't respect privacy. Do you want the NSA listening to your phone calls, Wes? How could you not support the Librem 5? There's something wrong with you because you're skeptical. And that propagates shysters and crazy ideas because we love ourselves a great big moral idea. And if you've got a company here like Purism, who will tell you every three paragraphs that they're the moral authority in their blog,

seriously, they go here, they list out the business models of Purism, Facebook, Google. All of them are horribly evil companies that want to track you and control you, except for Purism, which, quote, benefits society. Then at the bottom of this post, there's a bunch of random quotes that don't really have anything to do with the product, like there's quotes in there from Stallman and other people. But the top quote, the top quote is from Todd Weaver. And the top quote says, society's technology genius is not lacking, but its moral genius is.

Because Todd's going to be our moral authority. And he's going to guide us with his social purposes company into free software and hardware. Now, if you don't like free software and if you don't like privacy and you don't respect users control over their computers, then why would you care something about Libra? Why would you back this? But if you do care, if you don't want them privacy, if you don't want them spying on you and invading your junk, well, then you should probably back this.

And because I'm saying that they're a tiny company who isn't built to do something like this and who should be focusing on what they can do, and I'm the lunatic. I'm the crazy person. I'm the bad person. We all know this to be true.

Gets me crazy. I think what you need to do is fund a much more grassroots level approach to solving this problem. So the talk that I gave at Linux Fest Northwest, for example, was about writing your own firmware for your own home home assistant related home

automation stuff if you if you um enable people smart people to write their own uh firmwares or or you know 56k modem firmwares we have no concept of how difficult they are to write. If we make all of the bits that go into a phone open, then we've seen over the years that open source will do amazing things with that technology. The baseband in the Purism phone, I have no idea how that works, but the baseband in my Android phone is a completely separate operating system that is a black box that the NSA probably have a backdoor right into. system that is a black box that the NSA probably have a backdoor right into. So my question really is how can we audit what Libra's purism are doing? How can I, as an open source advocate, how can I sit here and say, yes, what they're doing is actually legit?

I think this is the problem. Like I was saying earlier, we have no context. We have no concept of even how hard it is to get the corner plastic pieces of the phone molded. We don't even know. How long does it take to mold the corner pieces of the Librem 5? Does anybody know? Who have they contracted

to do that? We don't know any of this information. We're just told, don't worry. We'll take care of it. We have a vision. I just got my Pixel 3 in the mail today. So it's sitting at home waiting for me, which I'm excited about. But even then, right, Google just admitted they were having all the problems they've been having with that line. And they're

a huge business who already has some of these deals in place, and they still can't get a phone as cheap as they want it to be. Exactly. How are we supposed to? Now, I am curious. One option would be that we just shouldn't fund this sort of thing because it's not realistic. Well, and this is just going to be one of many. There's going to be other.

Are there ways that they could communicate more? So maybe, you know, maybe some of the issue I think we're having is the unrealistic expectations and that there are a lot of people who don't know that and are then funding it, right? Are there ways that a business like this or a project like this could be more upfront about that? Say like, listen, we want your money. Do we know what we're doing? Maybe kind of. We want to explore this. Buyer beware? You know what I think? I think no. Because I think what makes a company like Purism successful is by rolling hard into the freedoms aspect of it and the privacy aspect of it. And by positioning themselves as a moral authority because they, they respect and, and, and, um,

try to, um, enable user privacy, right? They're, they're, they're setting themselves as a moral authority leader. And, um, when you're coming, when you're, when that's your brand, there's really no higher ground. Right. There's you. There is no way to talk about this stuff in sort of a humble way. Right. Because you've already just crossed that out by the way that you're branding and marketing yourself.

Right. So I suspect there is no going back. And I also know from my own personality that I'm the type of person that when you get when you get high on the hyperbole scale, when you get – you know what I'm saying? What's a good way to put that? Like when you get really high on the like – PR. Yeah, yeah. It's just – I start – it starts to trigger me.

It just really does. And I – but I also appreciate that to really reach the market they're trying to reach, they have to hit those notes really hard. This is going to be a model in a sense. I think you're going to have distributions that try to do things like this to try to monetize the user base. You look at what Apple's doing with iOS. They've looked at this. OK, well, we're having a hard time selling more iPhones, but we got a billion active iOS devices. Let's start monetizing that user base with services. So they're launching TV streaming services. They're going to launch all this crap.

Everybody's going to do that. It's all going to be about the reoccurring eight bucks they can get out of you. And we're just, this is the beginning of many. What kind of bothers me about this one, and this is really petty because this is open source free software, but they've lifted two of the icons for their apps, the mail app and the chat app. And I know the mail

app, the mail app is the Geary icon. That's Geary mail. They just straight up lifted. And it's probably a free, it's probably a free icon but i don't know geez what like does that bother you like it bothers me i mean you know they have they could be working with the dev for all we know right maybe it is gary and they could leave her mail is gary no because these are all android apps i should point out these are all android and ios apps they're not linux apps right so um you know maybe they're working with the team or maybe they hopefully they asked the team. So it'd be really shitty thing to do, uh, to just lift an icon for

something else, which I mean, people do all the time. It's not like it doesn't happen all the time or not like Brent hasn't had a million of his photos taken and lifted and used on other stuff. Right. So, I mean, it it happens everywhere whether it's in you know the open source world or not you know the whole thing man i see it's it's interesting how they're they're trying to provide a services type plan um but you know didn't google one time say don't be evil yeah right like where do we where do we draw the line and how do we trust how do we trust purism to be that company? I think there are other companies out there that are doing similar things. The Pine guys and they're just here's a piece of hardware.

You know, this is for the community. This is for you guys. Use it. Try it out. Break it. You know, it's inexpensive. Yeah. And at this point, I feel like to some degree, it's a race to market between these two. And so while maybe this was something that Purism was going to do later, they decided to drop it earlier to create more buzz before. Because I really think these two companies in particular

are racing to get out to market with something, if anything, just for the Linux and the open source community. Where's that recurring revenue going to come from? So Apple, we just said, you know, struggling to sell devices. I mean, they're putting things on sale for the first time practically ever, all the time. If, you know, like the Pine guys, here's a piece of hardware, like you said,

where does that upgrade cycle, where does that revenue to sustain the company come from if they don't go into services? I think that's the real question. How do you sustain an income? Well, I think that's when they come up with another device. They keep iterating on that product, and if they can keep it in a price range that's reasonable...

You've got to finish the first one. Yeah, hardware 2 is a smaller scale too, right? Like, we might expect the big guys to be able to make a new phone every year, every two years, but that's going to be a challenge. And even those big guys, those annual phones are generally only fairly iterative. Yeah, right. Or Samsung who throws

out just all the crap that they possibly can and snaps checks. You know, there's entire YouTubers that make careers out of saying, is it worth upgrading? If you have to ask that question, no, it's not. Right, right. I think what I come back to is my core concern is I have a fundamental, and maybe it's outdated, but I have a fundamental belief that if you are going to offer data storage services like chat, like mail, and VPN tunneling where you are also either white labeling or standing up

VPN infrastructure. It is my outdated belief, I guess, that you need to be a specialist in services. You need to know how to run servers. It needs to be what you do. Now, that said, if I was going to pay a monthly money for something like this, I suppose I like the option of being able to use stuff that's all based on open source software. It's funny if this was the only thing that they were doing, I would believe that they could do this. If they started with this. Yes, absolutely.

Yeah, that's what's so weird is if they started with this, I would not be nearly as skeptical. But because it seems like, it kind of seems like flailing around a little bit. We're going to do a tablet. We're going to do laptops. We're going to do this. They can't even get the SSL set for their VPN domain right.

Oh, is it still screwed up as of now? Yeah, that's been since Saturday. Yeah, yeah, I know. I thought maybe by the time they announced it they'd have it fixed yeah i have not tried that i trust them now is it possible that they're just really good at selling ideas and not so good at carrying them through that's kind of what we've seen in the last few years is that their their ideas are are actually quite sound um however the the bringing to market is where things are falling apart a little bit.

Ideas are sexy and tempting and- Easy to write on a webpage. It's much easier to say, I'm going to do this than actually doing this. Right. And I think I'm a big believer that actually shipping is the difference between professionals and amateurs. Actually getting it shipped out there in something that you can feel good about is harder than coming up with the idea and the last 10 it's so cliche but the last 10 is the hardest part it's like a number of people that say i'm gonna do a podcast and then yeah yeah don't ship every week like you do yeah or all kinds of things right people get and that's fine

you know for some people it's just uh really it's that they are billed that we are billing them as this big name with a big project an idea that's really important that we should support. And there are aspects that, like you said, the philosophy that we agree with. But we just – we need to be realistic about the scale and expectations. And given enough time and given enough resources, they may be able to get there. But right now, I'm just – I'm not a big fan of the look of the constant fundraiser thing either. It's concerning to me that they're not at a sustainable point now. I know you could argue, well, they're a social purposes company and so blah, blah, blah.

They give money back, blah, blah. I don't buy it. Simply don't buy it. I think it introduces a large amount of uncertainty in their finances and that I'm sure makes it hard to plan for on their end, which only makes it even harder for us to have any idea what's actually going on. So what's the alternative then? Let's play devil's advocate for a second. If you were Todd and you wanted to build a sustainable company around this stuff, what other choice does he have? Well, going back to Wes's point, sorry to interrupt, but going back to Wes's point, I think they would have started with services.

I think part of it is I've never really believed the tablet and phone hype that they've had. And that has always – since they've gone down that route, they've really kind of dropped down in credibility in my book. Because not only is it an insurmountable problem, it is a problem that is solved. It is a problem that is solved. We should be figuring out the next major platform and getting open source and free software there first for once instead of spending five, six years, a decade after the fact, trying to catch up and even come barely close to feature parity. It just seems like a fool's errand because even if you get there the market isn't standing still and it eventually by the time you get a competent product the next wave be it wearables or vr headsets or implants or whatever it is will be here will be arrived like that it'll be the people that are working on that or will have started So we'll just be missing that boat now.

Correct me if I'm wrong. Isn't that why Ubuntu Touch ended up in the way it did? You know, the pace of the market is such that unless you are Apple or Google, it's almost impossible to keep up. Yeah. that were familiar with the matter that looking at the videos, like the videos that developers have released and that Purism has released, that they're where Canonical was about four years ago, which was about two years from getting deals with BQ and whatnot. So we'll see.

And so what happens if you've contributed to this crowdfunding thing and it doesn't ship? Well, then you contributed to a good cause. Okay. I wonder if a different business model might be helpful. And I have an idea to grow on what you were just talking about. So I'm glad you interrupted me because it grew my idea a little bit. It gave me a little bit of time.

I wonder if they might be, you know, since their strength is ideas and vision, it seems, or at least some moral high ground that a lot of people appreciate. I wonder if it might be a good idea to, instead of concentrating on products, which is where their weak point seems to be on shipping products, I wonder if there might be almost like a Patreon style funding for their business. That's basically what they're doing, isn't it? Yeah, but they're tying it to a specific product. So what if you are instead funding them to grow ideas and be almost a think tank to try to get open source ahead of the curve for worse? Maybe just be more honest.

Like, because that's probably, I mean, probably these fundraisers do go to keep the company going. Of course. It's pretty obvious. Crowdsourced VC funding. That's what it is. Yeah. Almost.

Exactly. All right. Well, we spent way too much time. It'll be interesting to see where it goes. You know, that's what it is. Yeah. Almost. Exactly. All right. Well, we spent way too much time. It'll be interesting to see where it goes. You know, this is the ultimate. This is one of our more ponderous stories, the ultimate ponderous story for the last few years. Just last point.

Apparently, they've quietly dumped the tablet. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Chat room. Yeah. All right. Well, a few things to talk about. It looks like Elle joined us in the mumble room.

She's on her way down to DockerCon right now. So if you're going to be at DockerCon, say hi to Elle. Are you at the airport right now, Elle? I am, if you can hear with all the background noise. How is Painfield? It's tiny. It took five minutes to get through security. It was amazing. Perfect. I love it. I love it. I love it. We have Elle on the scene at Painfield right now. You guys know how... It's amazing. Perfect. I love it. I love it. I love it. We have a live. We have Al on the scene at Painfield right now. You guys know how. That's awesome.

I've been talking about Painfield the whole weekend. I'm just so jealous. All the locals are jealous of you, Al. So, yeah. Yeah, totally jealous. So, Al's got to what? A couple hour flight down to San Francisco and then it's DockerCon time. Yeah, DockerCon party.

People should join me there. Absolutely. Absolutely. How should they find you? Look for the hair? Follow you on Twitter? That's what I do. Yeah, just look for the hair or just ask somebody.

I hate to say it, but somebody will have seen my hair. They know who she is. Do you know the girl with the great hair and also knows all the things about containers? Cool. That'd be great. And there may be a couple of stickers. You never know. Depends.

Supplies while supplies last. Oh, my. Those stickers. These hot stuff. They're pretty good. They're pretty good. They're pretty good. I'm glad you're able to give us a on location pain field report, Elle.

Safe travels. Well, Wes has dared me to go and preach the gospel of LXD, so we shall see if it's safe travels or not. Wow. I believe in you. Into the wolf's den with that one. Did you put her up to that?

Oh, yeah. I mean, I saw her for all of, I don't know, 10 seconds while she was hopping out from the studio to go catch this flight. Yeah, of course. Yeah, good. Next week, Red Hat Summit. Wes, Cheese, and I will be at Red Hat Summit. Alex, are you going to Red Hat Summit? The Red Hatter is not going to Red Hat Summit.

That's ironic. Silly, isn't it? I've just not found anyone's budget to put the expenses again right yeah yeah you just start making the expenses and then they'll tell you where to put it that's how it works yeah my bank account probably yeah yeah very very fair i i totally understand no there's there's a there's a lot of competition internally for people to to go to red hat summit so i bet you have to submit a talk or you have to be actually associated with one of the products.

Does anything get done around Red Hat the weeks before the summit? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of people doing an awful lot of work. To crunch, to get ready? Yeah, I mean, there's an awful lot of OpenShift announcements coming up at the summit this year.

So there's a lot of work been happening for months, if not years, to prepare for this because it's a big release coming up. Oh. Yeah. Well, I'm glad we're going oh yeah

yeah one of the reasons i'm sad i'm not is because of open shifts the products i work most closely with um and it's going to be a big big announcement now one last little bit of housekeeping before we skadoots that's what we're about to do we'll find out what it means this is what happens when I haven't slept. I say things like skadoots. Have you ever heard me ever say skadoots? I just heard you about four times.

Skadoots. Maybe if it was the name of a project that you were trying to pronounce. Yeah, which would be a total mispronunciation. All right. So I just wanted to mention that Linux Academy was getting a bunch of great feedback on the promo of the $2.99 yearly promo. Normally the price is $4.49. It's $2.99 right now. They've extended it for just another five days.

That's a great deal. That's like a 33%. That's actually exactly a 33% discount. So LinuxAcademy.com, go take advantage of that because that's crazy. That's crazy. That's a mighty fine deal. It's a mighty fine deal, Wes. As someone who has paid the full price before being associated at all, that seems nice.

There you go. Right there, that was the keeping of the house. We're all done. Very nice. We got through that nice and quick. Got that through really good. Well, as I said, we're all back from LinuxFest Northwest, and Cheese just got in last night?

Yeah, yeah, last night. Around 10.30, 10.45. Oh, that's late. My dogs went crazy ballistic. Well, Cheese, what did you think as your first LinuxFest Northwest? Was it worth, or no, that's not the way I want to put it. Was it everything we've been talking about for years on the air absolutely yeah did not disappoint did not disappoint wow boy because we've been hyping it a lot yeah i mean it you know i was kind of going into it expecting you

know a conference a fest um you know just a kind of a small one. Um, but I did not realize how much it just, it actually felt more like a giant family reunion than, than anything else. Even with like that one crazy aunt, like it was still, this is giant family reunion. Yeah. Um, who's the crazy aunt? That's why I went there. Hmm. Hmm. Who was the crazy aunt? I don't know. Noah. I'll have to think. Actually I think it might've been Noah this year. He did get kind of crazy aunt, didn't he? Yeah. We'll get there. We'll get there. Don't know. Noah. I'll have to think. Actually, I think it might have been Noah this year. He did get kind of crazy.

He did. We'll get there. We'll get there. Don't worry. Oh, it's there. I got a story. I agree with you, Cheese, by the way. Family reunion.

And a lot of these people I'd never met Chris once before, but I never met Wes or half the crew I'd never met before. And yet, because their voices have been such a part of my life for so many years, it felt like a family reunion. Yeah. Really nice way to put it yeah this year more so i think than ever it really did i think it was really interesting too because you could tell especially at the studio when we had uh just a you know group i was hanging around just all of the voices it was it was super surreal because all the voices that you hear on the podcast everyone's in a conversation talking here there uh it was it was definitely interesting people with you know bodies and heads unfortunately when i met joe he uh he looked at me kind of strange when i said oh hey i'm brent nice to

meet you joe and he said oh you're not what i expected and i had to ask him well is that a good thing or a bad thing because you're not what i expected either And I had to ask him, well, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Because you're not what I expected either. I thought that about Joe. Joe looked nothing like I expected. Right. He looked nothing like his picture. Yeah, you have that moment.

And then it passes. And then it just kind of becomes normal because you fuse the voice with the person, which is good. Surprisingly quickly in almost all cases. And it is a little different. Some people look very different. But geez, we had also

not met, and I feel like meeting you, it was just great. I mean, I had seen your picture, but it really was just like old friends. Yeah, I felt like we were just like brothers or something. Like, hey, oh cool, yeah, you got some beers. Awesome. Yeah. And like, where else that happens with people, you know, maybe people you've known from podcasts, but even just

other people at LinuxFest, right? You just strike up conversations. You don't have to make awkward small talk. You have all the things to talk about. You have the same vocabulary. You know and like the same things. So it's not just us on air. It's like that for everybody.

It really is. And this year was our biggest LinuxFest in several ways. The one thing that we really did big time this year that was a massive success that we've never done before, and I think now we have to do it every single year, is there was a Jupyter track. A room that was just loaded full of Linux Academy and community members that had talks. And Wes had the privilege of giving the very first talk

very early in the Jupyter room. How's everyone doing today? Happy Linux Fest Northwest. I don't know about you guys, but 9.30 is just about the earliest possible time I think conference talks should be scheduled. Yes. You had a packed room. That was great. Everybody had a packed room.

It was very humbling, the number of people that came to our room. It was just incredible. I'm not joking. I had two different people tell me they were emotionally moved by Al's talk on the second day. I wanted to go see my co-host Jim. I wanted to go see his talk. I couldn't. It was full by the time I got there. You couldn't even go into Al's talk because they just closed

the room. They put a sign up that said no more people. It's crazy. Some of us just walked past the sign and sat down anyway. The live stream wasn't full so I got in there. That's always open. Yeah, we did try to get the audio on the live stream. We'll try to get the audio posted up on our site and the slides up on GitHub or something pretty soon

once everybody's done traveling. I know Elle was really nervous about her talk, and I thought she did a great job. I thought the feedback... Are you still there, Elle? What did you think? How did it go? Because I thought the feedback for your talk was particularly good out of all the talks.

Well, I always love doing the container talk because that one's always really fun. People get really excited and I love it when people actually turn in the homework I give them. But the mentoring talk was the hardest one this time because it is telling my story. And I was really happy to see how many people came to a community based talk at a technical conference. That was just really heartwarming to me. Yeah, it's something people are taking seriously. That is good to see. And I think LinuxFest Northwest in particular has a lot of that vibe.

I've noticed over the years a number of talks that will focus around that. You know, because it is a community-driven event, people are thinking about it already. I really liked your talk on Linux audio. You got into, like, even the science of how sound moves around a room and the different microphones work. Oh, you know me. I'm a nerd. Yeah, it was great. It was really nerdy. And Alex, your talk was packed on home automation. People were even sitting on the floor in front of the projectors and stuff.

It was a bit daunting, yeah. Somebody told me 83 people or 88 people or something. Wow. Yeah, we just got to get a bigger room. In a room for 30. Yeah, this is a normal classroom size. Yeah, I think it was 87 in Alex's talk. Yeah, 87 is what I counted. That's a lot of people.

Yeah. I like how toward the end, they just had to start putting on Alan's talk. No more. Full. Because we were cramming as many people as possible in there. And we also got rid of a ton of the vintage swag in there, too. Yeah, we were giving a lot of – people love that stuff. You know what I've been most amazed by since the talk is the interactions on Twitter.

People have been actively seeking me out and you know people i've never met or talked to are just like hey you know like your talk how do i find out more information so there is a blog post i wrote about it which uh i'll get when you throw in the show notes or something yeah for the home automation stuff which is so cool yeah the uh other talks were there were some other popular ones too um i think one that i'll have a link for in the show notes because it was a great one was Mad Dog's 50 years or something. It was unbelievable. It couldn't have been 50. But it was a long history of X.

You know, in fact, I have a clip right here of just the intro where I think he says it. Here, I'll play a little bit of it. Welcome. This talk is the 50 years of X, a computer odyssey. And it's not just a reminiscence of history about Unix and things like that, but I want to explain some things maybe to some of the younger people and maybe to some of the older ones who keep this information in the back of their head, and I'm going to bring it back out to the frontal lobes.

Yeah, I just didn't think 50 was possible, but it is. That whole talk's great. The entire talk is linked in the show notes. Also in the show notes, if you want, although I don't know why you would, our entire eight-hour stream from LinuxFest, which kicked off with a bang. We are here at LinuxFest. They just opened the doors about eight minutes ago. Of course, there was a lot of people waiting to get

their badges which this year are plantable did you guys try that did anybody try planting their badge well not yet no it's recycled paper with seeds in it i saw alan's there earlier i'm gonna take it home they these badges look like uh crumpled toilet paper yes they were the strangest badges i've ever seen well the first day. On the second day, they were looking extra crumpled. A lot fell apart. Did they start disintegrating?

Yeah. About a gradable in a day. Where the neck, like, what do you call that? The hole. The hole punch. Yeah. Yeah, the hole punch where you would clip it in

would just rip out. Yeah. I noticed on the second day they started taping that before they would give it to the person. Yeah. So they would tape over it to

reinforce it a bit. But then you've got to rip the tape off before you plant it. Nice bit of plastic on your biodegradable badge. So I sat down on the stream for a while with Angela and yourself, Chris, but then Dylan popped up for a while and that kid knows his Mario music. Yeah, he does. My goodness.

Yeah, that was fun. That's about halfway through the stream Chase starts quizzing dylan on different mario tunes to see if he can to nail him that is his specialist subject if ever he goes on a quiz it is that is he is all about that in minecraft um the most fun i mean i'm really trying to trying to to think of what it could be because there was great road adventures we went on. We went on a hike to a lake. There was sightseeing. There were so many good meals. But it would be sort of negligent on my part not to spend a little bit of time talking about our parking lot barbecue, right?

Like out of all the stories I could share, this is, I think, with our limited time, the one I have to share. Wow. Well, lesson learned. We're going to need more barbecues. We're going to need a lot more grills. Sounds like pretty soon you'll need a bigger parking lot, too. It was unbelievable. Cheese and the Bruce, a.k.a. Brandon, saved the day.

It was a massive scale operation, way beyond anything we planned. Over 300 people showed up to get fed. All of two grills? One like hibachi style? Yeah. Yeah, the little grill, I mean, that's just laughable. Yeah. You walk up from that lawn, yeah.

The Texans, Chris, were giving me lots of feedback on the size of your grill. Yeah. You need a trailer to fit a whole hog in next time. It hasn't been an issue in the years past, but this year it went big. And the beauty thing that happened is Cheese and Brandon fell into this system. The only way to do this when you're trying to feed 300 people is to have a system. I had no system. If I hadn't gotten injured during

the cooking process, I smacked myself in the nose with a spatula, then we would have been a wreck. Listen to their system here. Listen, this is great. Anybody waiting on sausage? Brats?

Brats? Come up here. Brats to the front of the line. Brats to the front of the line. That's cheese right there. As it should. One more time. Cause it's, it's,

I got to play that last part. Cause it's so great. Come up here. Oh yeah. Very nice. That was good times, man. And I,

you know, whenever it came down to it, uh, and I think Bruce, if, if he's in the mobile, you should jump in here too. But, uh, you know, I asked him, I was like, Hey, what do you want to do? Do you want, whenever it came down to it, and I think if he's in the mobile, he should jump in here, too. But, you know, I asked him, I was like, hey, what do you want to do?

Do you want to cook it or do you want, you know, you want me to prep it? And he's like, I'll cook. So, all right, man. I just started busting out of the hamburger patties. I was throwing them on the grill. He's flipping them. We're cooking as quick as we can. Yeah.

We ran out of charcoal. Twice. I think we had to keep going for charcoal runs. And then eventually we went for supplementary pizza runs to like to alleviate the lines um and then it was a good time though as the party sort of settled you know the people that have been drinking kind of held stayed back so they could sober up or kept drinking some of us retired into the rv and the RV and played ukulele a little bit. And others decided to cross-dress. Like Noah Chalaya.

And I happened to catch the moment when Noah decided to put on Emma's bathing suit from System 76. Here's what's happening right now. It's Noah's putting on Emma's bathing suit. I can hear the car gripping. Hold on. We've got a situation. Going to the front. I'm not sure. Hold front. He prefers the back door, Emma.

I guess. Alright, I got it. Okay. T-Mark! That's good. Okay, you're looking good. This is looking good. Okay, ladies. Now, there's no polite way to say this, but man, you look pregnant. I mean, I don't want a body shave. It got a little crazy. It just got a little, and then Noah was running around in a bathing suit for a little bit.

It's good times. I just feel bad for Emma. I mean, is she going to, I assume she'll just throw that one away and get something. Yeah, that suit would never be the same again, will it? Well, if you listen to the very first of that clip in the background, you can hear Noah say, oh, I think I just ripped the leg hole. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, that happened. Oh, we had Jeff up from California,

the guy that helped do the wiring for your RV, and he was flying some drones around. That was fun. One of the best moments of the barbecue, actually, because, Jess, what are those drones called that Jeff had? FPV drones. Very fast. Yeah. And he had the goggles so you could put on like VR goggles. Plus he had an auxiliary display screen so other people could watch. And we were playing around for quite a while and Levi starts to get hip to the fact that there's a thing flying around that's like an insect and maybe that should get out of

my backyard. He starts to think to himself. so he spends a couple of hours chasing the drone until one beautiful moment when levi manages to catch the drone in his little dog mouth and he catches it such that the camera faces outwards so you then get a point of view from levi as he does a celebratory run around the parking lot just totally pleased with himself for finally capturing this drone. As he should be. First-person dog view. It was great. And then you look over at the people with the VR headsets on just laughing

because they're seeing the world from Levi's point of view. And boy, does that dog move. He just booked around. It's a big party. He's a cutie. He loves that. He loves that barbecue. He loves it because he gets all kinds of scratches and scraps.

It's perfect for him. It was a lot of fun and thank you to everybody who made it out. It was great to see you. Didn't get a chance to chat a lot with everybody, but tried to shake as many hands as possible. Yeah, I mean, it was an amazing diversity of people. I think we got lots of regulars and lots of people who might just be now learning about the network, Linux

Academy, and everyone involved. Yeah. I just saw a great amount of mixing. You know, like you would have groups that would form, but then new people would come in, others would leave. It was amazing. Yeah, there was a lot of that. Yeah, and people weren't too creepy about Lady Joops this year. That was nice.

It was good. Yeah, the awkward part is you do have your home parked here right next door. Good toilet etiquette. It did work out. It worked out. Other than the fact that the toilet got overflowed. But that's another story. And I just have to drive people's poops down the highway.

Yeah, yeah. And I am still carrying their poops around in Lady Jupes. That is also true. But I think... Big thank you to System 76, too. Yeah, oh, jeez. They really pulled it off. Amazing.

Wow. So awesome. The barbecue, just straight up up would not have been possible without them. And man, when Emma saw the crowds that we were getting, they went out and did another meat run. And she also set aside a couple of sirloins for those of us in the crew

that were hanging out late. So after things kind of died down a little bit, when the coals were still going, just a little quick salt and pepper on the old sirloins, threw them on the grill, and we had ourselves a little more meat. I ate a bit of cheese's meat and it was delicious yeah yeah he's got some good meat he really does was there some bacon on there no no it was just sticking that steak that steak sans bacon was good enough yeah yeah yeah they did they also grabbed a bunch of chairs and just a ton of stuff. So system 76 was just above and beyond, went above and beyond

with the barbecue. And, uh, Emma just left the studio a couple hours ago. She went out to breakfast there with Brent and, uh, they went out and tried to try the restaurant that I used to go to as a child. The Bluebird cafe, Bluebird cafe. Emma, um, impressed me because she ordered two very large blueberry pancakes and then proceeded to order a cup of ice cream and ate all of the pancakes with the ice cream. I had never seen that before. She earned it.

She had a hell of a day. I think Popey and Wimpy would have really enjoyed that experience. It was so good seeing them. So good. So good seeing them. We have so many stories

I want to share on the Friday stream. I think some of the non-Linux related stories we'll put there. But I'll wrap up this LinuxFest review by saying hell of a year. Great, great talks, great crowd, great exhibit hall. People were into the raffle this year, and we just blew the doors off the barbecue. And the Jupyter track was so much more successful than I would have thought. I thought we'd have attendance.

I just didn't think we would have that much attendance. It was especially because, I mean, there were a lot of other really interesting talks at the conference. Like it's not like we had the, all the good stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

Although we had some pretty great stuff. We had some great stuff. Oh, absolutely. The one, the only, I will, I will try to work with as many people as possible to get,

um, to get those up online. We'll have a link to Alex's talk. We'll try to get some of the audio posted. I recorded nearly all of them in audio. We weren't doing video, but I think we might try to get video of the slides next year. But we will at least have the source slides up on GitHub eventually

in a week or so. It was really lovely, actually. So my mom and dad were listening in England to the audio stream, and they texted me both afterwards saying that was, that was fun. So thank you for making that. That's great. Yeah. Also, we heard from people that had to leave the fest early, but got to keep streaming

as they're on their way to the airport. That's also really cool. Definitely. I had to chase for making that just make that, making that. Oh yeah. That was awesome. Yeah. Great, great point.

Yeah. Geekgamer.tv to check out what he's doing. And you walked away with a bit of a plasma success story too. That's, I mean, if that That was awesome. Yeah, great, great point. Yeah, geekgamer.tv to check out what he's doing. And you walked away with a bit of a plasma success story, too. That's, I mean, if that's not something, I mean, trip worth it, right? Worth flying so many people out here. Oh, for that. Yeah, I was attending a really interesting talk about, it was like a live coding demo, and someone was, you know my little hobby language of Clojure.

There's a JavaScript version. They were making a Minesweeper game just like live right there in the browser. Didn't need any supplies. Their laptop wasn't working so well. So some of the other staff and volunteers had been trying to get things set up on another laptop. I guess that room had been having projector problems. And we should say like there's a lot of rooms.

It is a complicated setup, especially with the live streaming and the mixing and the recording. So there was another distro out there with a green logo I won't mention by name and it just couldn't cut it on the projector. Really? Like it wasn't detecting it?

What was the desktop environment? It was Linux Mint. That's what it was. Actually, I thought it was SUSE. Did you think SUSE when he said green? There aren't many with a green logo. Absolutely. I thought Sousa. I thought Susie.

I had mint. Did you? Okay. Nothing against it. It's fine distribution. Yeah, so it's Cinnamon then. It was like it wasn't finding it, and then eventually it did. But have you ever seen where it's just shifted, so you have multiple desktops,

but you can see where the desktops end and begin? Wasn't going to cut it for the presentation. But I had just given a presentation that morning. It's going to work, right? I got a laptop. I don't need it. I was here for the talk anyway. So I just go and volunteer,

stick my laptop up there, plug it in, Windows key P, choose, you know, mirror the things. No problem. Worked perfectly. And no credit to me. I was just really glad that Plasma is so dependable. It works so well in that sort of setting. It does so good with projectors. It really perfectly. And no credit to me. I was just really glad that Plasma is so dependable.

It works so well in that sort of setting. It does so good with projectors. It really does. And that meant I actually got to enjoy the talk. Oh, that's great. That is a nice win. I also will say, I mean, so there's a Plasma success story. I have a bit of an XFCE success story.

And it's out, Joe. I know, right? Yeah. Don't let anybody else hear this. I didn't bring my power cord because I'm lazy. I mean, I had it because it's out, Joe. I know, right? Yeah. Don't let anybody else hear this. I didn't bring my power cord because I'm lazy. I mean, I had it because it's USB-C. You are so lazy about power cords. I know.

I hate power cords. Ran my laptop, my T480, both days recording all of the talks, except for like the last couple of talks of Sunday, all from battery the entire time. Wow. I just left it in the room overnight, sleeping, came in the next day, fired it back. I mean, just all from X the entire time wow i just left it in the room overnight sleeping came in the next day fired it back i mean just all from xfce sips my my experience of xfce is limited still but um when plasma's on i've got a t480s think pad and you know you can feel that thing when it's running plasma you can feel it under your fingers it's a few degrees warmer than your

hands are yes uh but xfce is actually cooler and the fan turns off completely yeah yeah it's running plasma you can feel it under your fingers it's a few degrees warmer than your hands are yes uh but xfce is actually cooler and the fan turns off completely yeah yeah it's for it's a big difference yeah not pushing the gpu as much as i imagine all right well so i think we have enough time i think we're going to try to slip in we have a brand new segment for the show i'm very very excited about this ladies and gentlemen jason evangelo and el marquez both have commitment issues when it comes to picking a distribution. So instead of suffering, they have decided to make a new segment called The Distro Hoppers. And they kick it off with a new random distribution they've picked. And that, am I building the tension yet?

Just get on with it, man. they've picked. And that, am I building the tension yet? Just get on with it, man. And that distribution is Linux Lite. You know, I was actually really afraid. I was afraid that we were going to end up with something really weird, like, you know, a NAS-specific Linux distribution.

So when I clicked the button and Linux Lite OS popped up, it was actually kind of relieving because I was like, okay, I can do this. I can look at this OS and actually give honest feedback to what it would be to somebody who's new to Linux. I want to start with the minimum recommended specs for this distro because it's billed as really lightweight.

And all you need for it is a one gigahertz processor and 768 megabytes of RAM. And I think even the recommended requirements are something like a 1.5 gigahertz processor and two gigs of RAM. That's recommended. So that's like when it will really scream. Linux Academy recently sent me some USBs to give away and these things are like two gigs in size. They're tiny. There's nothing you can actually do with them. So I have a bunch of them sitting around and I put Linux Lite on it and I put it into the computer and I could actually run off of it. Like you could have a functional OS on a two gig USB that you can now use. That was amazing to me because I can't even burn most ISOs on something under eight gigs at this point. Did it run well with the live USB? Honestly, yeah, it did. My daughter has

this little bitty laptop that we bought on sale on Back Friday that I just regret because that thing runs like mud with real specs to it. It's Lenovo something pad, like the oldest version possible. Linux Lite was running off of this USB faster and more user friendly than that laptop has ever run. So did you get around to doing an actual native install onto the hard drive? Okay, so this one, I kind of started getting out of my comfort zone because on that laptop, I was running Fedora. And because I give it to my kids, I like having it as secure as possible. So I ended up leaving EUFI actually enabled on it and no problem with Fedora. But I couldn't even get it to read the USB or boot up to Linux Lite OS without going back to legacy boot. So I don't know if that is a concern for some people.

It really goes back to how much work are you doing that requires security. But I ended up going ahead and going to the legacy, going through the boot process. You had told me that this was very similar to the Ubuntu boot process. I haven't gone through that, so I can't speak to that. But it was really native. It was very simple. The English in which it asked how I'd like my install to happen was very user friendly, like somebody off the street who generally doesn't even really mess with installs or even computers could understand what it was asking. Are you sure that you actually want to erase everything on this drive?

And then you click yes. And it says specifically, these are the areas that are going to be deleted if you accept this. Yes. And it's like, what keyboard would you like? And it gives you a little bar at the bottom so you can test to make sure that your keyboard is functioning with the option that's chosen. So you don't go through the entire process and then find out later that you made a mistake. The fact that it prompts you to ask you about third party drivers and Wi-Fi before you even get into the mix, I think eliminates a lot

of the issues that people who are brand new run into when they kick an OS. Yeah. So it uses the Ubiquiti installer, which is the same installer that Ubuntu uses. And it's just as simple. It may have some slight language tweaks like you pointed out. But yeah, it's basically click next, click next, click next. Let's talk about the first boot. Let's talk about your first experience.

Did you spend any time in the Linux Lite OS welcome screen? I did. And that's because this is kind of interesting. So when I was going through the boot process, there was a little option that said, you know, do you want to go ahead and install updates? So I said, yes, I do. You know, why not do it all at one point? Then it goes in and the little welcome screen shows up and it's

like, first thing it says is to install updates. And I'm thinking, well, I already did that, but let's, you know, Hey, I'm test driving this. And I clicked the button and I was really surprised that there were packages there that needed to be updated. So I'm not sure what the disconnect is there. Did you happen to see that? I didn't actually notice that because I did the same exact thing, but I skipped down cause there's like four steps. And I basically ignored that because I had updated already and I went through the remaining steps. But then so I was going through the welcome screen and just kind of looking at all the different options. And I do like how you're picking as you're picking them. It actually has information to what it is that you're doing.

It doesn't just assume that if you're running updates or that if you're choosing another one of the options that you are already going to know what that's going to do. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. It's very, I found the language on this OS to be very explicit. It's very clear and it assumes that you are new to Linux. And I really love that. And this welcome screen, probably my favorite welcome screen since Ubuntu Budgie's welcome app, because what this does is it just guides you through every step. It's install updates, install drivers, set a restore point. That's another cool thing is that it actually suggests to you, hey, set a restore point so that you can have a backup down the road. It's like it knows you're going to screw it up at some point. And then there's links to all their support pages and forums and social media.

And they even have this hardware compatibility database that's just for Linux Lite OS. There's thousands and thousands of reports on there from people who have volunteered their hardware information, kind of similar to what you get with the Steam hardware survey. So in your case, like if you were, you know, booting up that live USB, you could click that hardware compatibility database and see if your components or your system is perfectly supported by Linux Lite. I don't know if you had a chance to open up the terminal when you did this, but I find it interesting that as soon as you open up the terminal,

there's actually a link to that same support guide right there. And I saw that throughout, like you down the menu and they give you the support docs. So they're making the option of support like first and foremost through your entire experience in the OS. Well, if my support docs were this good, I would want to link them everywhere too. The documentation for Linux Lite is so good. It's all super detailed and it's really easy to follow. There are visuals, actual screenshots of everything you could possibly imagine. You know, one of my qualms with so many Linux distros is that there's this lack of education about all these different drivers that are out there for AMD and NVIDIA.

And this breaks it down in really simple language. And it even has this section where it's like, okay, if you want to, if you don't know what graphics card you have, do you have AMD? Do you have NVIDIA? Open up a terminal and type this. And then there's tutorials on customizing it, how to use a VM, how to use time shift to create and restore backups. There's tutorials on customizing it, how to use a VM, how to use TimeShift to create and restore backups. There's troubleshooting tips. And it's so well done. And I flipped over to Zubuntu in a VM because I wanted to see, okay, what's kind of the big XFCE-based distro that would compete with this. So I fired up Zubuntu and I went into their documentation and it's just, it's laid out very cleanly, but it's all text. I don't think we can make light or even just kind of glaze over the fact that

how documented their screenshots are. I would argue that you could actually take the text out of most of those support guides and still be able to know exactly what you're supposed to be doing by going through those screenshots. Okay, did you did you happen to dig into the menus and notice something called light tweaks? I did. And that's because so I actually went looking for it simply because whenever I opened up settings and configuration files, I don't know if you noticed, but there's no minimize bar. So I just assumed that I had to go in and install it the way that I had with elementary OS. So I was looking for that setting and then suddenly realized that my computer and other options do have the minimize bar. It's kind of hit and miss on which ones do, but that's how I ended up finding

that option. So I really like this. It's not the most attractive app, but it's super useful. It's got, I don't know, 12, 15 different tweaks that you can run. You can fix your boot process. You can locate large files. You can clean the Firefox cache. It'll show you how much space you'll clean out if you you know execute this tweak or this tweak what's really neat about it is it shows you before you execute the tweak would you like to clean out 63 megabytes of firefox cache would you like to clear seven recent entries from your favorites menu and so it's updating that in real time and I think that's really cool because when you're on Windows, you have to, you know, go into the, you know, right click the disk and hit properties and then hit some other thing and then run it and analyze

it until finally it tells you this is how much space you'll clear. The light tweaks menu is the first time that I saw something on this OS that I'm going, okay, this is targeted to more than just new people. Because I don't know if you noticed, it actually has some higher level kind of Linux user experience, like installing new kernels, removing new kernels, things that I would say that I would always do on the command line, because I can't imagine a GUI running for me. And then it grades like, how severe is this action? Is it something safe, and I really can't hurt my system or, you know, proceed with caution? It's possible you're going to break everything because I can imagine somebody coming in here just be like, oh, what's a kernel? I don't need it. And removing their

kernel. Yeah. So, I mean, you get the sense that they really thought about both beginners, but also power users. I think this would be the first time that I've really thought that of a Linux distribution, that they're just like, you know, we're going to include things that will be easy and make life easier for all of our users, not just a specific category. Yeah, it's really, it's a little confusing because when I see the words Linux Lite, When I see the words Linux Lite, the image that forms in my head is this lightweight, stripped down distro, not a lot of apps installed, just, you know, bare minimums, right? Linux Lite, bare minimums.

That's what I get in my head. But there's a lot of software, even, you know, all the stuff that you mentioned. Plus, there's a lot of software that's pre-installed. There's GIMP and VLC and LibreOffice and a bunch of other utilities and accessories that, as you mentioned, power users could really take advantage of. I was told you earlier that I was running Pop! OS and as much as I've loved it, one of the things that I had to do when I went in was go in and configure Firefox so that I could actually watch certain videos on sites that I go to for training. then in this one, that was one of the first things I did. I'm like, okay, how much configuration do I have to have on this to make it work out of the box? And I clicked Firefox, I went to the site,

and the video is just loaded. Everything was already installed, which is just confusing to me on something that says it's a light install. Yeah, it really makes me wonder, you know, I don't know anything about Linux Lite's popularity or usage numbers or anything like that, but it may have it may actually suffer the same problem that I think XFCE suffers is it it doesn't have that first impression that it needs. You know, with XFCE, you get these gray screenshots and it looks like it's from like the early 2000s. And then you have a, you know, Linux Lite based on Ubuntu 1804. And so immediately you think, well, is it

just a stripped down Ubuntu? Why would I want to use this? I was imagining something like PuppyOS. That's really what I was imagining when we first decided that we're going to do this challenge. And I'm like, okay, Linux, yeah, all right, I'm going to have a hard time being able to really get this up and running so that I can work off of it. So that's kind of why I went so many different ways trying to figure out how to install it and how to really provide feedback on it. And I was blown out of the water. I was really wrong with my first impressions on it. And I have to point out something here regarding the appearance. When you go into the customization options, there are like 30 different desktop styles to choose from built in. I was having fun with that, just going down and be like,

you know, there's XFCE Winter and XFCE Purple. And I'm like, all right, let's just try all of these. Yeah, that was a lot of fun. And I love that. I love that they include that many options without having to, you know, get on the Internet and download themes and make those tweaks on your own. Well, I think we better get out of here. But we have one more thing to do. What is next? All right. Let me get the screen up. I'm going to cross my fingers. The winner is... Oh, you have to stay tuned to find out what distro they're going to pick next. So the whole idea is they run a rando spinner,

it picks a distro, and then they give it a go. Oh. So probably trying some things I would not have tried. Yeah, things you and I were never going to try on the show. Now we get a chance to give them a go. Now I really hope they get Gen 2. Good luck. Right out of the gate. Is it actually called the Rando spinner?

Because if not, it should be. Well, we should. Yeah, I don't know. I actually don't know if I've gotten the name of it from them, but I like the idea. So I think we'll be hearing from them in the future. And if you have any suggestions or feedback, go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact and let us know in there. Let us know what you think. I enjoyed it.

I think I was right. I was right along with Elle. I thought it would totally be like a puppy small, like damn small Linux style. That's what I was expecting. That's what I was expecting. Anyways, we have reached the end of our program. And before we get out of here, I wanted to point you to an article that Mr. Bacon has worked on over on the Linux Unplugged website. We'll have a link for this in the show notes as well. But you can also just go to linuxunplugged.com slash articles.

And it is some behind the scenes photos of our Linux Fest events, including the Friday stream in the studio, which we had a great crowd in the studio. You can see some pictures of Mr. Chase, who's just looking incredible these days. He's lost 140 pounds. I literally did not recognize the man until he opened his mouth. Yeah. And I heard the voice and was like, that's Chase.

Are you kidding me? Amazing. Look at that group. There's some pictures of Alex in there, Chase working the booth, and of course some of the rooms, Al at her talk, Alex at his talk,

and some behind-the-scenes photos from the barbecue as well, all up on the website, linuxunplugged.com slash articles, or there'll be a link in the notes wherever you consume those show notes. We usually say the website URL, but then I realized most people listening, they're checking on their phone app.

That's really where they're looking at the notes is in the phone app because now we have it in the feed because that's how we do now. That's right. Well, gentlemen, thank you very much for making it into studio. It was great to have you. So good to be here. Mumble Room, thank you guys for making it. And Mr. Bacon, is there any

parting words we need to give people before we get out of here? Maybe a plug for the Friday stream or something? Yeah, Friday! Friday stream. Friday's coming up. It's coming up. We're going to be doing that. We're going to be going through some of our travel ventures back home. Yes.

I encourage anyone that was there to show up and maybe share some of your adventures there or around. I'm reasonably excited for the Friday stream. Yeah, people can jump and mumble, share their stories. They'll be good. They'll be great. They'll be great. Yeah, the Friday stream's a great chance to meet the crew, cover a few stories, wrap up a few things here and there.

Guess what? We do it on Fridays. jblive.tv, jubilabroadcasting.com slash calendar for that and this show when they're live. And LinuxUnplugged.com for links, subscriptions, all of that. And I hope to see you right back here next Tuesday! Get it out of here. It's for people who like to mess with computers. I do like to mess with computers. Thank you.

Episode 300 next. Oh, boy. That adds a thing to the mix I hadn't expected there. I remember 300 of Lass, and that was a big deal. Yeah. Stop it, you. It's like, you know, it's not the first time he's got to 300, so he's just like, It's getting less of a big deal.

It's like the third or fourth time i've gotten to 300 at least you blink and just sort of burp out 300 podcast like come at me when i get to a thousand you know burping out podcast there's another one so next year we're gonna have to uh race uh our little tiny hawks right oh yes oh yeah oh definitely jeff jeff yes is that what race our little tiny hawks, right? Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. Oh, definitely. Jeff, Jeff, yes. Is that what they're called? Tiny hawks? Yeah, the model is.

That specific model is, yeah. I'm going to have to buy some. I mean, these just seem aggressive. I know. So I warn you now, a drug habit will be cheaper than FPV. Yeah. So the drones themselves are $150 or so. Okay. Then you need the batteries, which can be 10 to 20 bucks a pop.

And they have a flight time of two to three minutes. So you need five or 10 of them. Jeez. To have any kind of, you know, Jeff had three, for example, and he had lots of downtime in between, which can be annoying. And then you need the radio, which is $200. And then you need the goggles, which can be two to $500. So, you know.

It's a proper hobby then. You need to set aside at least a1,000 to get into it. And then you're going to want another quad for when the first one breaks. Sure, of course. Or some dog gets it. Well, the E-Max Tiny Hawk has a little bundle. It's right around $200. It comes with everything.

But it's not a hobby-grade radio, not hobby-grade goggles. But it'll get you started. Okay. I think I probably, I won't say. I spent more money than I told my wife. I spent. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Every, every time. But, uh, yeah. So there's the little tiny ones like Jeff had, but then there's also the five inch racing drones,

which you can build yourself, um, out of components from China. And, and that's for me, I learned a lot of my electronic skills through doing that um when you plug a 12 volt thing into a 5 volt thing and it goes bang and it lets out the magic smoke it stops working yeah good that is a good that is a good way to

learn if maybe just a little bit expensive but a point which you made very well in your talk was that's why in your travels you have found components that you can assemble that you are willing to have blow up on you so that way instead of losing a sixty dollar part you're losing a six dollar part correct yes so the most expensive component on an fpv drone is probably at most thirty dollars each you know each motor is about 20 the flight control is probably the most expensive bit around 30 or30 or $40 at most. So if any single component goes bang, then it's not that annoying. If you fly your drone off into a lake, then you've lost $300, $400, and that is annoying.

It's like what Alex always says. I mean, he's famous for saying this. If you can think it, you can do it. You just have to know how.