LINUX Unplugged - 302: Dark Style Rises

Episode Date: May 22, 2019

Can the Free Desktop avoid being left behind in the going dark revolution? Cassidy from elementary OS joins us to discuss their proposal. Plus we complete our Red Hat arc by giving Silverblue the full workstation shakedown, Drew shares his complete review, and we discuss the loss of Antergros. Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Cassidy James Blaede, and Drew DeVore.

This is going to be a fun episode because Brent's in studio. Hello, Brent. Oh, hello. Nice to see you here. Oh, so nice seeing you too. We're getting ready to go down to Portland for a Clear Linux event. We are. And enjoying ourselves pineapple cider.

I think we're just warming up at this point for the trip, you know? Yeah, that's right. We'll warm it up for the show, and then after the show, we'll be like ready to go to Portland. We're going to need somebody to drive us. Anybody? Anybody? I'm excited to have you here, Brent. Thank you.

It's great to be back in studio. Typically, the way it's worked previously is a year's gap between that. But now we're looking at this is, well, I haven't even been home since the last time I've been here. No. We were on the Friday stream and I was like, Brent, come back. Come back. It's funny because the whole story is really captured in that Friday stream. It really is.

And I hesitated, I have to say. You were here. You're here, though. You got to pull those things off when you get the chance. When you get an opportunity. Yeah, of course. I'm glad you did. We went out and bought brats.

Brats. They were at the front of the line. As they should be. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 302 for May 21st, 2019. Welcome into Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. And my name is Brent. Hey there, Brent.

Hello. Great to have you here. That's good, man. You already knew that, though. Aw, you know. Well, you picked a good episode because we have, I don't know, man, we have like staggering community news this week. You and I were out and about when this news came in. I was like, whoa, whoa, we're adding that to the show.

It's just breaking today as we're going on the air. But there's also just some really great like future stuff that we're going to talk about with Cassidy from Elementary OS. A couple of important things in housekeeping I want to talk to you guys about and get your feedback. And then, after all of that, we're going Team Silverblue. It's kind of like a Red Hat arc we've been having. You know, we started with Fedora's release,

then we went to Red Hat Summit and RHEL, and now we're ending it with a look at Silverblue. Because Drew's joining us, too. Hello, Drew. Hello, hello. Drew took the plunge. He's been rocking Silverblue for the past week and change because Drew's joining us too. Hello, Drew. Hello, hello. Drew took the plunge. He's been rocking silver blue for the past week and change and been taking copious notes.

So he'll be joining us later on in the show to chat about that. Of course, Mr. Bacon's here too. Hello, Cheesy. Hey, guys. How's it going? Oh, good, good. And hello, Alex. Good to see you here as well.

I'm excited to get into the news this week. Yes, there's a lot. So very quickly, I will say hello to the Mumble Room 2, our virtual lug time. Appropriate greetings to y'all. Hello. Hello. Hi there.

Hello, Bruce and Byte and Cassidy and Mini Mac and Nerd Burner and the others that will join us that never get called out as they filter in later in the show because they're running late. But a future hello to you. Now, let's start with, I think, what is probably the news that sort of shocked me the most this week, and that is the Anterogros project has announced it's coming to an end. Don't say it. It's true.

Come on. Yeah. This is really, really sad because I know a lot of folks in our audience run it. I ran it for a while. They say over their run since they've been tracking, which is about 2014, they had 931,439 unique downloads. Today, they are announcing the end of the project.

For existing Interagos users, there's no need to worry. They'll continue to receive updates directly from Arch, and soon Interagos will release an update that will remove some of their specific repos from your machine. You are a daily Anagross driver. You use it every single day. I really am, and part of that reason is from JB and all the recommendations that were coming in from that,

and I've loved it. I've really loved it, and what I appreciated about Anagross, or Antagross, as it was called, is that it made the whole process of going through Arch really simple. And so with seeing that go away, I know there's some alternatives, but with seeing that go away, it makes me wonder a lot of questions. I know. It's not that Manjaro isn't great. You do wonder if maybe the Manjaro competition here is a bit of this.

They say they ran out of time. Maybe there was too many options. The thing that I really liked about it over other options is it was essentially mainline Arch with a couple of small changes, like a couple of icon packages and whatnot from their own repository. But it was a great way to get a fairly base Arch desktop with GNOME or Plasma or any desktop you really wanted. They give you an option right there. And it was really, it was just, gosh, it's good. I mean, we're talking about like it's gone. I guess it'll still work for a little while.

Do we know a little bit more about what the main reason was for the Switch or the decision, I suppose? Only what they posted. Dustin, Alex, and Gatsu posted on a blog over here about it. And they talk about just if you've been paying attention to the project, and I kind of noticed this myself, like they really haven't been doing much recently. And it's because they've been running out of time. Right.

Yeah, well, time is a precious thing. And, you know, sometimes it's a good thing when you can decide that a project needs to switch and to do it gracefully instead of just kind of letting it die for a long time. So I hope that this is accepted by the community in a nice way and that the alternatives for current users, you know, if I'm going to stay on this system, which I love and I've had for a few years, I hope it doesn't just degrade. It does seem like a classy way to handle it, right, Cheese? Oh, yeah, definitely. And it seems like the way that they've kind of, they're shutting down the project and they're pulling these packages, but they're still leaving you a desktop to work from. I mean, they're gracefully bowing out, you know, and they state that it,

it really began as just a project, a summer project seven years ago and grew what it, you know, into what it is. Um, and as people grow older and their time is more valuable, you know, they move on to other things. So I am very thankful that they've bowed out the way that they have and they've allowed anyone to step up and take the plate and fork it and keep going with any of their hard work that they've provided us. Alex, does this mean we can't really trust these small time distributions? Like we have to stick with our Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora world, and there are open SUSEs out there, and things like Antigros or other small projects are just too risky.

They just seem to come and go every couple of years. They made it a few years. I mean, to give them some credit, they did make it a while, but at the end of the day, it's like another small distro that's distro fading. That's the nature of human effort, though, isn't it? Is that, like she said, as you grow older, your time becomes more valuable

and priorities change and everything changes in your life. However, if we look at Google, right, they like changing stuff, don't they? And they're not a small time thing. So I'm not necessarily certain that your assertion is uh accurate it might be fair in this case though um however you know another thing i'd like to say is that installing arch isn't that difficult so the value proposition of what and tergos brought to the table um was uh i mean i used it a lot so back back in 2013, 14 sort of time, I did a computer science master's.

And as part of that, I did a Linux desktop comparison as part of my dissertation. And I used the heck out of Antargos. And I'm reveling in that pronunciation. Might as well get it out while we can because it's going to be good. I used the heck out of it. It was one of the most vanilla Linux distro kind of presentations

of multiple different desktop environments that was out there at the time. It really fulfilled that niche for me at that point very, very well. And I'm sad to see it go. But at the same time, I recognize that nothing lasts forever. Well said. And I agree also to see it go, but at the same time, I recognize that nothing lasts forever. Well said. And I agree also with Brent's point about like, if they have to do it, doing it in a graceful manner is the best way to do it. Keep users' expectations. They could have stretched the thing out for, you know, a year. I mean, this could have taken them a year to come clean about it.

Or let it rot, you know, and just disappear without having an official path. Your pride could get in the way of coming clean on that kind of stuff. What I appreciate about a small project like this is just taking some risks to try to get it going. And then, okay, if it's not going to work after a few years, that's okay. We can be all right with that. I think both you and Alex are convincing me that it's worth the attempt. Even if in the end you get four or six years in or three years in

and it distro fades, in the meantime, if they're doing something innovative, it's worth the attempt. And I think I completely agree with that. I'm glad they tried. Yeah. Did not all distributions start with two guys in a living room or a few people just trying to put some ideas together? Well, Apple started out of a garage, didn't it? You know, that's the famous one. I thought they all did. Yeah. I think that's the rumor. They all do. Hey, you know what? Technically, JB did. Right.

Don't we all need garages? Yeah, we do. All right, so that's probably the most upsetting news of the week. So let's talk about something that I'm excited about for the future. And I made this a prediction on this show, so I'm very thrilled that this is happening, obviously. That's my bias up front. But dark mode all the things.

Not by force, but give the user option. And I thought Cassidy nailed it in a post that they posted on their Medium blog about OS-wide dark styles. And this is actually a pretty complicated topic. I was reading through your post, Cassidy, and I was reading the part you touch on in here about research. And you say, in my time contributing to elementary and GNOME, I've become familiar with pleas from users to implement official support for arbitrary themes. While that itself is a large, controversial topic, I've been working over the past few years to better understand the why behind these requests. In addition to listening to folks across the elementary, Pop! OS, and GNOME issue trackers, as well as social media, in-person hack fests, meetups,

and conferences, I also decided to conduct a study to see if I could identify patterns in the data. Over 1,500 users of various OSs, environments like Android, GNOME, Ubuntu, macOS, and dozens more were participating in the survey, which gave me a decent look into this group of users. In summary, I found an overwhelming majority, 88% of respondents, said they sometimes or always use a dark style when given the choice, and 81% of that group are using dark modes to address factors outside their device, like getting headaches, combining that with eye strain, or just working in a dark office. This research you did here seems fairly extensive, Cassidy. Thanks. Yeah. Maybe a little obsessive about it, but it's really important to get it right, I think.

It's really easy to say, you know, of course you can use a dark theme today. You just switch out your GTK theme and, you know, if apps are broken, they're broken. Yeah, why doesn't a dark theme solve this? Because, you know what, Cassidy, I can install ArcDark and I can go take a box in Gnome Tweaks and I'm off to the races. Yeah, and especially on platforms like Elementary OS where we have developers doing much more interesting custom styles, that doesn't really work. First of all, those developers are targeting a specific style sheet, like the elementary style sheet, or in the case of nomaps, more commonly now, they're targeting Adwaita for their custom styling. And so when you basically you're ripping the style sheet out from under that app and replacing it with something that's inverted, unless they've tested against that specific style sheet, it's not going to go well. Yeah, the app doesn't know that you've just done that.

It's unaware that it's now on a dark canvas, right? Exactly. And there's, of course, there's APIs you can manually look at. Well, what is the background color? What is the foreground color? Does the theme end in dash dark? Which is all of those hacks exist in apps in GNOME today, but they're hacks. They're not really a, they don't really solve this issue in an elegant way. And they don't, they also don't solve it for other toolkits or, you know, big popular apps like Chrome and Firefox, which, you know, today don't support dark mode on Linux, but they do on Mac OS and on Windows now.

It seems like we also have a more comprehensive problem we're just on the verge of. Android Q, Android 10, big parts of their feature focus there is their new dark mode, which also, interestingly enough, if you turn on battery saver now in Android Q, it automatically turns on dark mode. So there does seem to be maybe some power saving benefits, especially if you have an OLED screen. But like I say, it's more comprehensive than that. So it's the applications, it's the system dialogues,

but in the future, it also could be the web browser and the web page. The website could be, I'm not sure what the right terminology to use here because this hasn't really happened yet, but the web browser and the website could communicate to know if they're both using a dark theme and display the dark theme by default if your desktop is in dark mode.

Like, it seems like it's a full stack issue from the OS dialogues all the way up to the applications to what the applications themselves are rendering. So it has to be a solution that is bigger than elementary OS, I think. Do you agree? Exactly. And that's why I published this post and did this study, not just from the elementary perspective, but from the GNOME perspective and the cross-desktop, the free desktop perspective. We had been working, I'd been working, I guess I said in the post, you know, kind of secretly

for months on this, on a prototype for supporting a dark mode in elementary OS. But what I kept running into is it really doesn't work unless it's a cross-desktop effort. You know, you can hack it on, you can bolt it's a cross desktop effort you know you can you can hack it on you can bolt it on on a gdk desktop like elementary os but as soon as you open firefox and your web pages are all white it really sucks yeah it's a blast of white in the face yeah and it's actually implemented today on mac os now in safari uh their dark mode actually propagates out to the to the websites and on chrome i believe Chrome Canary, maybe Chrome Daily on Android, on Android Q, you can enable it.

So you have, it follows your system-wide dark mode. Ah, so it's sooner than later then. Yeah. And as of Firefox 67, it's also supported on Mac OS and Windows. And there's a buried setting you can go change on Linux to force it as well. So it's happening across the entire industry. It's not even just Linux. It's the entire industry that's really shifting to say, you know what?

Dark style preference is really an accessibility feature. It's something that users expect, and it's something that they're catering to. Yeah, it just means I really nailed that prediction. It's so great. So moving from beyond that, it also seems like if it's a free desktop.org standard type thing, then there is still a room for a distribution like yourself that's building a whole platform to still provide a lot of value that's outside the standard potentially, like really good documentation for developers on how to use your whole toolkit

in dark mode. You know, those kinds of areas, integration with your own applications, with the App Center, there's areas that once there's a standard, you can kind of build on top of it. Exactly. So, you know, cross-platform and cross-toolkit, there's just the baseline of, hey, this app or this user has requested the app to use a dark style. And that's just, that's it. That's where that ends. But then, yeah, on the distribution side, there's things like making sure that all of the included apps support this dark style, that third-party developers are heavily encouraged to support it, that you give them hints on how color works differently in a dark style. Maybe they use slightly desaturated colors because it's less harsh against a darker background.

You know, all of those types of issues are things where we darker background. You know, it's all, all of those types of issues are things where we can walk, you know, step in as a distribution and, and really make the experience really great. Yeah, I could, I could totally see that. And I, I could see where you in, in elementary OS in particular would really exceed at that area. So it seems like I've seen the prototype screenshots, which we'll have linked in the show notes and they look, it looks, it looks really good. Now it's sort of like convince everybody else, right? It looks like you're planning to go to Guadec and try to get people talking about this. Yeah, so I have a session at Guadec, the free desktop dark style preference,

birds of a feather session, which is a mouthful. But we're hoping to get people both within GNOME proper and also just interested app developers and free desktop people together in a room to kind of hammer out the the actual technical side of it um i have a basically an example specification that could be adopted but it's it's not necessarily a cross desktop specification so um i've also been reaching out to people from kde and xfce and other desktops to to see hey if if uh you, if we were to do this cross-desktop, what would be a way that we're all comfortable with?

And also keeping in mind technologies like Flatpak, where the way an app interacts with their system is slightly different. You can't just read and write to system settings the same way you can with native non-containerized apps. So there's a whole lot of pieces that have to come together. But I'm really trying to show people, hey, this is a thing we need to do. It's an accessibility issue.

It's also something that users are going to expect more and more as other platforms are all adopting it. Absolutely. I'm really glad that you're reaching out, too, to the other projects because, you know, obviously you're very GTK-focused, but the project has done a really good job, in my opinion, of visiting the different camps and sort of staying friendly with the entire community and not really tribling down. recent decision with Flatpak, I know for a fact that people from elementary attended a lot of canonical events to get all the information to participate in both sides of the discussion fully. Like I witnessed that firsthand. And I think you guys did that really well. You have a great reputation for design. So it seems like too, you're a project that's already respected in this

design area. So you're positioned really well from a design standpoint to like people respect your opinions on this stuff. So I really think you got a shot here, Cassidy. Yeah, I hope I mean, we're always a fan of of cooperation, I guess is what we call it, where, you know, we think we have the best desktop, obviously, because we made it and we wouldn't we wouldn't be making it if it was the best, right. But we're going to work with everyone else to help them realize their visions too. And if there's shared effort, it's going to make everyone better. Well, Cassidy, keep us posted on how it goes. And if you want to check out the post, go do so.

And is there a way for elementary OS users right now to try out any of this? Not super easily slash officially. But if you do go to github.com slash elementary, there's a projects tab there. And one of those projects is called dark style preference. And you can kind of track the work there. There's a bunch of in progress branches that might support this feature. So if you get your hands dirty and start compiling stuff, you can kind of see what's going on. hands dirty and start compiling stuff, you can kind of see what's going on.

What do you think of this kind of thing, Cheese? Because I know as a professional design application user, your day-to-day applications, almost all of them for years now have been dark themed. Plus, you just have the overall design differences between designing for a web that's dark versus light applications. Curious to get your perspectives on this. Yeah, I mean, I think dark theming everything is definitely happening. It's going to happen a lot sooner rather than later. But I would say too, that there is something to be said about dark text on a white background too. I mean, there is a reason that books are printed the way they are, But I really like what Cassidy's done here,

the research that he's done, providing this back to the community. And I think it's something that is really something that needs to be focused on going forward in future distros. Is that UI and UX done top-notch. And that's, to me, is what elementary has seemed to have done over the years. And for them to iterate on that and put a dark theme, I mean, I think it's just, it's going to be great.

My body is ready. Yeah, I'm ready to have it. You know, Cassidy, I would say I've been waiting for this for years, doing all the photography stuff that I do. The worst thing I experience is doing a whole bunch of photography, getting in the zone, and then opening a web page or a spreadsheet and just bam. But what I realized is that it changes the ways my eyes adjust to colors and things on the monitor. And so it takes me a little while for that to come back.

And it's sort of frustrating. My mom says the same thing. My mom is a professional graphic artist. And one of the reasons she's very, very particular about having her background one solid color is because it does that same thing to her eyes. It messes with her perception of it. Yeah, absolutely. But when an application comes and hits you in the face, you don't really have a choice, do you? Hmm. Yeah. So hopefully we can so hopefully we can get applications on board and get desktop environments on board and fix that problem. I just want it because I'm sitting in dark rooms all the time. Well, I think you're going to see that 88% support

just be out there through everybody. Well, that's pretty neat. I'm looking forward to see where that goes. I love the idea as it's, you know, here's a working example, but also let's make this a free desktop standard. It's cross toolkit. I think it's brilliant. And link to information in the show notes.

I want to move forward now to WireGuard. Love it, love it, love it. It's really great. WireGuard is a beautiful novel VPN technology that we've been talking about in TechSnap for a little bit now. We've covered a little bit in this show, but it's great because it's a VPN as fast as it takes to bring up a network interface on your box. However, it does require you do some command line fiddling, and nothing too bad. You know, if your old humble podcaster here can do it, you can probably do it if you follow some directions.

But you won't need to very soon. Native WireGuard support is coming in Network Manager 1.16. It has landed and it is beautiful. So Network Manager just provides a de facto standard API for configuring networking on the host. The other thing that's really nice about this is you get a lot of other features besides just a basic WireGuard tunnel setup. You get some DNS configuration and FirewallD, which is set up in a consistent manner, so your traffic is getting routed properly, your name resolution is

getting routed properly, and it's all done from the nice, comfortable GUI of Network Manager. This, to me, feels like such a gift. I've been interested in WireGuard for a long time, which I think probably everybody should be. But I, unlike the Wess, I don't have the technical skills necessarily to

feel really cozy about it. I've read it over and over and over and I've wanted to implement this, but just haven't quite felt comfy about it. And I'm really hoping this makes the difference. I was hoping I could point you at the last episode of TechSnap because Jim and Wess did a fantastic job breaking down some of the stuff, some of the stigma around WireGuard. So maybe Brent, have a listen to that and maybe you'll feel like you don't need to be quite so much of a command line ninja to pull it off.

Yeah, I've been getting a lot of good feedback about that last episode of TechSnap. If you haven't checked out TechSnap recently that might be a good one to go catch because I've gotten several comments saying it was a pretty good one. Do you agree, Alex? Yep, I do. Jim, in particular, just has this great way of breaking down. He's like the new version of Alan. He breaks down a complex topic and distills it to the points you actually need to understand and then communicates it in a simple way.

Yeah, it was great meeting Jim at LinuxFest Northwest. Okay, so we've been talking a little bit about Project Stadia. And I think the big takeaway from all of the Linux media coverage was, well, it could be good for Linux. It could be good for Linux because it's going to be using Vulkan and the servers are going to be running Linux, right? That's been the coverage. And it was a gamble.

We weren't sure if that was the case. Well, this week, we've gotten some evidence that it is very much the case. Now, again, anecdotal, but this seems like strong evidence that Stadia, which is Google's game streaming platform that runs Linux, will benefit desktop Linux gaming. And here's perhaps why. At GDC 2019, in one of the developer sessions, up on stage was a developer from id Software who was responsible for porting Doom, because why not, you know, it's the acid test, right? Porting Doom over to Stadia. And he talks about the base setup they did to get ready to do the porting. And I think some of the setup might sound familiar. As I mentioned before, we had gotten Doom 2016 running on vanilla Ubuntu. We actually used this as a stepping stone to get

onto Stadia itself. It is an easy approach for you to take to start experimenting with the various technologies involved. We always recommend that you simply engage with Google directly but this is an easy way to evaluate technologies if that is preferred. What we did is we developed our own spec which we took for the software side of things, we took a vanilla Ubuntu 18.04 image with Clang 6 as We took a vanilla Ubuntu 18.04 image with Clang 6 as the compile toolchain. You'll want to develop against Vulkan, Pulse Audio. And then for the hardware, you can use...

Sorry. For the hardware, you can build a box comprising an Intel processor with eight threads, an AMD Vega 10 GPU with eight gigs of VRAM, eight to 16 gigs of system memory, and an SSD-like storage device. Not too surprising because there's been a lot of speculation, but that detail there that the GPU they're targeting is the AMD Vega is also very exciting because it's just likely to just battle test the hell out of that software stack. And that has a lot of good ramifications for desktop Linux too. software stack, and that has a lot of good ramifications for desktop Linux, too. That seems like a good indication that at least for some folks, they're demoing or testing,

they're going to use Linux to try it out. And if that means they have to get their build on Linux, it's not going to be that big of a leap to go from that to fixing it up and shipping it. It is a leap. I grant that. They're not moving mountains to make that happen. Like, they've already ported it and got it working on Stadia, and they must have it at least somewhat reliable on Linux. So to just then go, well, now let's package it up and sell it on Steam,

that doesn't seem crazy. That seems reasonable. So I think this could actually, I think the Stadia crap, if it's successful, I'm sorry, I think the Stadia project, if it's successful, could be really good for desktop Linux. Not that that's all I care about. I don't know. Anybody want to push back and tell me I'm being crazy there?

But I think that's a good sign, right? We can't trust Google for this thing to stick around, though, can we? I know. I know. But even if it sticks around for three years, you're going to have, what, a dozen different game makers try to get their games to work on Linux? Well, that's true. And Vulkan, too. and the AMD Vega graphics stack.

And maybe that's what's needed to just break that barrier of entry or the thought that there's this uphill climb to take on. This seems really crazy. I'm just trying to picture explaining the story to a 10-year version of me, like 10 years ago, trying to explain the story, and his mind would just be like, what? No, this isn't possible. I thought you were going to say 10 years in the future when everything's running on linux oh yeah of course of course it's the year of the linux desktop brent oh i'm feeling it every year

every year oh the bell's getting some use today guys it's been a while i definitely think that there's an issue there's there's a deal there too with the reliability like alex said of of stadia being around in another seven years and then you've got gamers that have invested multiple hours into a game and google kills its service that's gonna upset a lot of people that's no different to a playstation game now though like i i have progress on gta5 on my playstation that i've literally had to bring across the ocean with me so i wouldn't lose it. You know, it's the same vendor lock-in. The thing that I think is really going to be good about it is it's going to get more people

using Vulkan. Even if Google goes away, once people start targeting Vulkan and say, well, you know, this isn't too much different from, say, DirectX and its cross-platform, and its cross-platform, maybe we'll see much more adoption of Vulkan, not just if this project leaves, but forevermore. Well, that's my point, Drew. If they get two, three years down the road with this thing, then dev shops will set up a tool chain and a software workflow based around this technology stack,

and they're going to be all in. If Stadia goes away, they're not going to, like, if Stadia goes away, they're not going to be like, well, throw away all these computers. Best case scenario is the next Xbox or PlayStation is based around Vulkan because of this. I wouldn't be too surprised if the next console uses streaming in a heavy way.

Maybe, like, all backwards compatibility is via streaming or something like that. I could definitely see that. You could see them just virtualizing those things. Yeah, you could. I feel like Sony has already talked about that with the PlayStation 5. I'm not 100% on that, but I do feel like I read that somewhere. Okay, that wouldn't surprise me.

All right, well, some important things in housekeeping this week. So we're rolling out a Joe Rez original for the background music. You like this? I'm grooving already. I'm dancing in this West chair here. Yeah, I know, right? You can tell it's kind of a Joe original, too. It's great.

I love it. So I have tried to put together, although I have failed miserably. I'll see if I can put one in the show notes. I've been doing PC part picker. You ever done this before? I don't know what this is. Really? Oh, it's really kind of cool.

You should check it out. So you go through here and people will like spec out different PC builds and they'll save them. And so I went in and I built like a Ryzen AMD build for my son, Dylan. I'm thinking after school, after school gets out in the summer, we do a little build project and do an AMD system top to bottom to replace his laptop. That's an amazing learning opportunity for him, I think. Yeah. Last week, I was asking about laptops, but then I thought about it more. It's like, a desktop is really what he needs. And so I was wondering if the audience had any suggestions, if they wanted to send me some PC part picker links at ChrisLAS or hit me up on Telegram at ChrisLAS. And there's the Jupiter Broadcasting Telegram link

at the top of the JB website. I got a couple different builds I've done. It's like around 800 bucks, so it's not like the cheapest machine. I'll try to get a link to it in the show notes so people can review it and tell me what I've done wrong. Because I think the one thing is I'm not sure about the storage or the RAM.

That's tricky. But it's all AMD top to bottom, and it looks like it'd be Linux compatible. And it's just going to be a gaming rig for him, right? Yeah, I mean, it's his desktop, so he'll do schoolwork too, but mostly it's for gaming. Right. So, and you've got the 2600X? Oh yeah, you can see it. Can you see it there in the link that I put in the show notes? I don't think that it's in the link, but there are some stats, some specs that you put in there. That's a pretty good setup.

I would bump the RAM to 16. I did. So actually, I bumped it to 32, and I put a Radeon RX 580 in there. And then I put a 930 gig Samsung, and then I put a one terabyte spinning rest for like long-term game storage and stuff. That much storage. Why wouldn't you just wait till it got cheaper in a year or two and then upgrade it? Maybe, yeah. You can get a one terabyte SSD

for about $90 to $100 now. And I know a spinning rust is half that price, but an SSD versus a spinning rust is a heck of a difference to usability, isn't it? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, I had an SSD in there for his OS drive. You're right, one drive.

Anyways, I'd like to get people's part lists, get their suggestions, and then I'll follow up on the show and I'll build it. It's going to be a lot of fun. It'll be Dylan's first home-built Linux rig. For what it's worth. He doesn't know yet. This is almost exactly my computer, except I've got 16 gigs, and I've got three SSDs in there instead of one big one. How's the GNU slash Linux compatibility?

Perfect. Perfect. Those are bold words, Drew. Perfect. Those are, because I'm looking for zero IT overhead here. I'm going to put elementary OS on it, and I'm just going to let them run it for years again. Well, so the thing about an AMD GPU these days is it's built into the kernel. So there's nothing proprietary to install.

So it just works. It's fabulous. That's what I was thinking. And it does. It just works. All right. Well, I'll follow up and I'll let you know

what the audience suggests too. I'd like a range. I'd say that the max is 1500. So, and that'd be really high end, but I'd like to see a range of devices people recommend. And Linux compatibility is top. And then gaming.

And you know, Samsung, for their SSDs, they even have a utility to upgrade the firmware in Linux from the CLI. All right, so that's my personal thing in housekeeping. Moving on, we were just talking about free desktop standards. The guys are going to have a much deeper conversation in user error, error.show, even, you know what, just not even for the free desktop standard stuff. Just go there. It is such a good show. It is such a good show. It's hosted by Joe Resington, Alan Pope, and Daniel Foray. And I love it. It's my, like, soon as it's out, I listen to it immediately. Episode 66 comes out this Friday. Then the show that is one train wreck after another,

it's the Friday stream. This is a way for you to come say hi, hang out with us and meet us. We want to do more things with our community. We wanted an opportunity to stream and do live chats, have people join us. Brent, you've been joining every episode. Ever since the start, even from various pubs near you.

Yep. Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's right. That's when we got the, was that when we heard the squirrel story? That was Andrew's. No, squirrel was what? Was that last week? Okay.

Okay. If you listen to the Friday stream, you know why Brent's here right now already. That's what it is. It's like, there's a lot going on. We have a big crew and it's a chance to hear from people that are often in this show in a different context. If that interests you at all, come check out the Friday stream, fridaystream.com. What I love too is a giant mash of ideas that otherwise uncertain other shows don't have the space for, which is really great. Yeah, you know, you've

seen behind the curtain of some of the stuff we're playing with. We've got some ideas. Just around the corner, Texas Linux Fest, May 31st to June 1st. Cheesy Alex and I will be at Texas Linux Fest along with Elle. Come say hi to us. We have a meetup, too, down there, like a dinner. Yep. Come get some barbecue. Meetup.com slash Jupyter Broadcasting, as well as information about our next Kubernetes study group over there. And I'm going to just say this.

I don't know if – don't tell them I told you this, okay? If you become a community edition member over at Linux Academy, there may be an opportunity to upgrade that account at a really good deal. I'm going to put that out there. It's kind of a secret. I don't want to say anything. And they've recently added the Community Edition to the Linux Academy mobile app. So you can grab the mobile app and get access to the free community content. Now that's the content that Elle and I curate every single month. And there's a lot of really good stuff that she and I've been putting in there. She's got a good head for what should go in there, really. So it's more like I say, good idea, Elle. That's really my involvement.

But she's good at it. And that's available now for free. And the app's free. You can get into the community edition for free. And then if you decide to upgrade to all of the stuff, there might be a promo in there. I can't say. This is so great.

I would totally grab this, like, for example, when I took the train down here. Yes. Just having something mobile instead of having to take out something like the laptop. You can also cache the videos offline and stuff. Now you're talking. Yeah.

If you want. For us out-of-country travelers. It's nice, isn't it? It is. Go check it out. We'll have links in the show notes. And that, my friends, is the housekeeping. So Silverblue is an interesting beast. And it promises, I would say, what seemed like an impossible stable workstation, Drew.

And so that's why we've been talking about it behind the scenes. Seems like it could have, you know, long term great use in the studio. There could be all kinds of production purposes for an OS like Silverblue. Is there like a newbie way you could explain what the draw is to Silverblue above regular Fedora? Okay, so Silverblue is following on the heels of Project Atomic. And I love the idea of immutable file systems where basically your root is mounted read-only. So anytime that you go to do an upgrade, it builds a whole image and then you reboot into that image. That's kind of the high-level view of this is what Silverblue is doing and this is how it remains stable. And the advantage to that would be something goes haywire, you could boot back into the previous image and you're exactly right back where you left off. Correct. So if an upgrade goes horribly wrong, you just reboot and in your boot menu, just drop back to the last version, boot up, you're right where you were before you did that upgrade.

No need to go in and do an LVM snapshot rollback or anything like that. You're right there with minimal downtime trying to fix the issue. I have a layman's question about this. If you're updating just like, let's say, one piece of software, you get a new, I don't know, a new version of Audacity coming in and you update. Does that mean you have to do a reboot every time or how does that work out? Depends on how you installed it. So the whole thing is it's trying to push people into using flat packs more for their standard applications rather than installing directly into the OS. If you have Audacity installed as a flat pack, which yes, there is a flat pack for it, then no, it just upgrades automatically in the background. No need to

reboot or anything. However, if you're using RPM OS tree to slip that into the image, then yes, you would need to reboot for every application update. Is the idea a clear wall between your base operating system and your applications? In fact, so much so, I think by default, doesn't Silverblue even lack DNF? It does lack DNF, and you're not going to put it on the base image. Oh, really? No.

Really? Okay. If you want to use DNF to, say, search for a package, because rpm-ostree does not have a search feature that I found yet, what you do is you use this thing called Toolbox. M-O-S-Tree does not have a search feature that I found yet. What you do is you use this thing called Toolbox. And Toolbox is really, really cool. What you do is you use the Toolbox command to create an OCI container, which then has a full Fedora 30 base image. It's a minimal image, but it's a base image as an OCI container that you then enter into that toolbox. And you can do things like install DNF, install applications, including graphical

applications, and does have by default access to your home directory, which is great. So you can do something like install Audacity in a toolbox, launch it there, and then you can do your DNF upgrades in that OCI container and have your stable base stay the same. In theory, could you also install your own versions of, you can install FFmpeg and other things in that same toolbox and Audacity could see it? Like VST plugins, could you stash those in there? Yes. Now, that's kind of where it fell down for me, though, is I thought, okay, well, what if I make an audio container? It has all of my audio stuff.

It has my VSTs. Right, right, sure. It has LinVST to let me use my Windows-only VSTs. It's got Wine in there. It's ready to go. I got everything set up. I got Reaper installed. It launched. there it's ready to go i got everything set up i got reaper installed it launched uh i had the

graphical interface and no connection to the audio system uh you can't see any of the sound devices right sad trombone there so that didn't last long um i you know basically and this was after i put it on bare metal because I wanted to play with it. I wanted to see how well it worked on bare metal. And it works great except for those little fringe cases. Now, it's clearly meant for developers, right? For people who want to, say, launch this OCI container with Python version whatever and program against that because they know that that's what they have on their server and they want to do their testing in this particular container and then they want to see what happens when they upgrade it.

That's the sort of use case that they're really targeting. General workstation use cases, it can be done, but you've got to really be aware of what you're doing, the fact that you're adding complexity to your upgrade mechanisms because, you know, say you need to upgrade something in an OCI container. Well, you'll have to go into that container, do the DNF upgrade from the command line, all of that. So there's a lot more complexity that you're adding on top. Per toolbox. You have to do that per container slash toolbox. Okay, so that could get to be a little much after a while.

It can. But that's the tradeoff for having such a super stable base. Now, you can go the other direction and just do things in RPM-OS tree and add them to the base image. The problem you might face, which the developers are really upfront about this, is if you add too much on top in their hybrid application layer, you could end up with a system that does not properly upgrade when it comes time for Fedora 31. And you don't really know until you've crossed a threshold. Right. It's never going to tell you, oh, hey, by the way, your system is... Yeah. This particular library.

That sounds pretty risky to me. Right. So daily driver, not for me yet. But I think, you know, if they keep working on it and toolbox gains more functionality to be able to tie into maybe GNOME software or something along those lines where it can be more useful to supplant the hybrid application layer, I think it has a real shot at being an excellent workstation for regular users and not just devs. Interesting. Now, putting on your IT hat, you must see some use cases, too, as like enterprise-grade workstations. I wonder, is it usable now for enterprise, or would it require changes on the Silverblue team's part to make it usable? So here's the nice thing. You can point the RPM-OS tree upgrade path wherever you want.

So say you're in an enterprise and you've deployed a bunch of these workstations, even in VDI or something like that, and you publish a new image with some upgrades or some new applications for your employees to take and use. What you can do is you can point all of those at your image locally on your servers and have them pull it. And once they reboot, they're in that new image and they're working and it's on a new image that you've already tested and put it through its paces and said, yes, this is ready for my employees to use, which limits downtime for individual people and issues that they might have. That's really a huge benefit to something like this, where you've got the stable base that is bit for bit the same across deployments.

And it's also the same reason why Debian and Nixos and other distributions are targeting build reproducibility is for this exact kind of thing. Now, I think that it could be made better. They could build some tooling around it to tie into, say, LDAP, where you can automatically spin up an instance in a VDI cluster that people could log into. Right. Maybe some central storage, like maybe make some provisions for quickly mounting some NFS storage. Exactly. I think if they can really get that going, then that would be a game changer for enterprise. Yeah, you could really see the beauty in like a VDI or even just standard workstation setup

where you combine it with LDAP for the authentication. So that way you're not having to keep updating password files and things like that. And it's all centralized. Oh, man, God, that would be a dream. Well, I used to use a Citrix desktop, which was a Windows-based system VDI thing. And the applications on there were delivered via a container. So a lot of this stuff is already done in the Windows space, bizarrely. Yeah, any other thoughts on it, Drew? I mean, this seems like it was a worthwhile experiment,

but ultimately you're not sticking with it. Right, I'm not going to stick with it just because my particular workflow working with media is not a use case that really is part of their spec, and I don't expect it to be. But right now it does not work for for me for what I need to do. If I were wearing a sysadmin hat, things would be different. I would love this. Yeah, that's what I was just thinking. For what I'm doing, it doesn't quite fit the bill. Now, you know, speaking of the sysadmins again, though, just to bring it back a little bit, if they could put some tooling in that really ties this together,

you could start supplanting things like Chef and Puppet for broad system control, where that can be baked into the image, and you don't need to run as many scripts across multiple machines. I could see that's where they're going. You know, it could still be really early days. I mean, it's only been called Silverblue for a few months. That's very true.

Yeah. I think Atomic might have been a better name, but hey, you know what? We'll move on. We'll move on from that. Well, Drew, thank you for the roundup. I've been very, very curious about it. I'm glad you had a chance to do a deep dive on that.

That was fascinating. And I think we'll keep watching it and seeing if there isn't a time, maybe an opportunity down the road to use it in something. I could also really see it as just being a great host for containers and VMs on the server. That's another area beyond the workstation where it just seems like it could be a killer system. We've got CoreOS for that one, don't forget. That's true. That's true. CoreOS is really sort of the story there now. And that sort of when things changed and we went to silver blue really was after the after core os came along alex i want to give you all of the credit for one of the picks this week i had did not even have it in my list i'd never even seen it until you suggested it to me full disclosure audience

prepare yourselves get ready i have to tell something to Brent in private. So just give me a moment. I'm sorry, you won't be able to hear this. The cone of silence. Hey, Brent. Yeah, Chris. They can't hear us, so don't worry about it. I am.

So I got a really good app pick this week. Really? Where'd you find it? Alex told me about it. The issue is, though, it's an Electron app. It's a what? It's an Electron app. You think I should tell them about it. The issue is, though, it's an Electron app. It's a what? It's an Electron app. You think I should tell them about it?

You know, that's a little risky, I think. All right, you got my back on this? I'm with you. All right. The cone of science. All right, well, sorry, we're back now. The app pick this week is called MindTime. It's a calendar for the 21st century

and it's i think the best calendar application i've ever used alex how the hell did you find this and why didn't you tell me about this sooner i hate you i had to try and find a way to get um calendars for work and uh at home in sync um because android or android's just rolled out a new feature or has just been presented to me a new feature that you can have different profiles on your device for work and home so it installs gmail and the calendar app on your android device into a container the the downside of that is it means that i can no longer see my home calendar and my work calendar in the same place right so i was looking for a way to try and synchronize things with NextCloud, with CalDAV, to try and get it all in one place again. And I just searched for Linux CalDAV calendar and this

MindTime thing came up. And I've been searching for the longest time for an iCal replacement. I think the Apple Calendar application is possibly my favorite uh way of just viewing events the ui is clean adding new events is simple and it's it's just really customizable i can tell it that i want you know 15 hours viewable in a day for example and um it's it's it just basically looks like a polished version in Electron of Apple's iCal. It also is a fairly stampy Electron application. I wasn't 100% sure it was even Electron. It wasn't smelling real bad or anything like that.

It didn't have a code stink. It launched pretty good, doesn't use a ton of memory. And sure enough, if it doesn't work great with the different hosted calendars I have, and I've really been recently struggling with this because Linux Academy uses Google Apps. I have my own personal stuff and I have the JB stuff. And it's been a real struggle for me because I don't really like Lightning. I don't like the way Evolution does it. I haven't really taken to any particular calendaring application. And so what I've been doing, like a monster, is I've been just natifying the Google Calendar for different calendars

and just having like three different natifier applications running on my desktop like a caveman, right? I mean, this is horrible. Think about this. So I could have all this different calendar stuff. And then Alex comes around with this MindTime.ai application, and Bob's your uncle. I've got it all in one application.

But here's another thing it does, which you did not even tell me about, but is quite impressive, is it gives you a fascinating analysis of how you spend your time and who you spend your meetings with, who initiates the meetings. That might be dangerous.

Oh, yeah. Boys, it's sometimes fuel for a righteous fire that I can have, let me tell you. But it's so great because now I have visuals of how much of my time per week is spent in meetings. And it's, let's just say vindicating. Let's just put it that way. And it tells you who the worst offenders are

for scheduling meetings. So my boss is right at the top of the list. Yeah, Yeah. MindTime also has, like they, it's, they call an assistant, but a lot of other really nice calendar applications have this where it just understands natural language. So you just say, go to Portland with Brent on Wednesday. And it, it processes, it processes all of that. It says, well, he must mean the next one day, Wednesday, and he must mean Brent from his contacts. And it processes all of that. It says, well, he must be in the next Wednesday, and he must mean Brent from his contacts. And so it just figures all of that out and then puts it on your calendar right at the right time. And you can just do a brain dump right into a text field. You mean in English?

Yeah. Isn't that nice? Strange. Yeah, the computer has to adapt to you. And then it also provides some smart scheduling, which is really, really nice. It'll try to analyze your schedule, and it'll look at other people's schedules, and it'll make group scheduling simple and easier and recommend the times that have worked best for you in the past.

It's nice. It's an Electron application, like I said, but that means it is also cross-platform, and it's probably one of the better Electron applications that I've seen. Could I highlight their data policy? Yes, please. As a research project, MindTime is financed by ETH Zurich, a Swiss innovation agency.

We take data protection seriously. We will never sell your data. These technologies are developed and released for free and can be used by everybody for non-commercial purposes. I think that's pretty clear, don't you? Thank you, Alex. Yeah, I think that's a good thing to point out. So Alex, I was literally, last evening,

I was literally looking for something like this because I'm sharing a few calendars with some people who only do the Googles and stuff like that. And it's almost like you were listening into my mind and you've solved my problem for me in about 15 hours. So kudos to you. I was looking recently and this did not come up. Well, you're not looking in the right places.

I just need to ask Alex. It's fairly new, right? So I don't know when it exactly was released, but it's a new entrance into the 21st century calendar landscape. Well, check it out. MindTime. We will have a link in the show notes, as always, at linuxunplugged.com slash 302 or in your podcast player. Now, since we did an Electron application, I want to clear the decks with a good old classic desktop Linux application. The good stuff just keeps on getting better. Now, if you've been rocking a rolling release Linux distro, you may

already be enjoying this goodness. But if you are on Ubuntu 18.04 or 19.04, it turns out you may be running a slightly older version of Quake that is the world's best drop-down terminal.

Have you had the pleasure of a drop-down terminal? Oh, I have. So I am an old Quake game user. Yes, yes. And so I was first familiar with the drop-down terminals and its origin. That's where it's from. And it was great.

That's why I keep it to the tilde key, too. That's why I still use the tilde key. Classic. One tilde key away from a terminal. Man, it's so brilliant. Well, Guake has, and something I have not been able to really enjoy until I just went ahead and slapped a PPA on my system, Guake has added a bunch of great features,

and one of them that I just want to take a moment and highlight recently, if you're using an older version, first of all, you need to upgrade. Second of all, split terminal functionality. Now, let me take a moment here and tell you about how this will change your life. So you got a tilde key, your one tilde key away, boom, your terminal drops down, right? So now you can split this sucker horizontally, vertically, however you want it. Let me tell you how I do it. So I've got one large terminal on the left-hand side. That's my free terminal, always available. As soon as I need to do something, I got a terminal. And then on the right side, the right half of the drop-down terminal,

I've got three different terminal areas. They're all like all vertical breaks on this horizontal panel. And in there are like all of those weird esoteric command line applications that I need to run that I go start on the command line for some reason that I don't really need them until the time comes. So I just go run them manually. And then I like to watch their output on the command line because that's how I get feedback of what they're doing. I stash those in the different panes and they're just, well, I always have the left hand side always available.

So I'm always a tilde key away from getting immediate feedback on what like my Usenet application is doing or what that command line torrent application is doing or you know any of that kind of stuff and I I find that to be so useful just to have that and then one tilde key and it's all gone and I'm right back to what I'm doing I just think it's great so Guake if you're on GNOME and Uwake if you're on Plasma and they both are just fantastic and is this propagating to Uwake I think Uwake if you're on Plasma. And they both are just fantastic. And is this propagating to Uwake? I think Uwake already has it, although I don't remember for sure.

Because that's what I use daily. And if not, if someone in the community and IRC would just kind of put a feature request there. You ought to open that thing up, and then in the post show you should tell us. Well, maybe I will. Because Uwake's great too. But now that I'm an XFCE user, I've been using Guake again.

You like that? It's part of what makes the perfect XFCE desktop is Ulauncher and Guake. You add those two applications, and you're 90% of the way there. Then you add the Arc theme to XFCE, and then you're good. You just sit back and wait for Cassidy and team to make elementary OS and dark theme a thing. They're going to do it. Come on. We're working on it.

I had a real XFCE problem today, Chris. I'm so used to 10, 12 hours of battery life that I just stopped packing my charger and I turned up at the office and nobody had a USB-C charger. First world problem, eh? And the value of this is negative. You know what?

I really, really appreciate the battery life. In fact, so Brent is sitting here in the living room at the studio, and I'm like, Brent, watch this. Watch this, Brent. And I open up the laptop, and boom. You see how fast, and did it wake up fast or what? I was impressed. It almost like it knew you were going to open the lid and it woke itself up.

And that was after it had been there for like a day and a half. Just pow. It's instant. XFC to the rescue. It's impressive. It took you, you asked me, you said,

so how's it going and what don't you like about using XFCE right now? And it took me, like I sat there and I thought about it for like a minute and I realized

what I'm not in love with right now is the window management. I did figure out how to stop applications that like bring a browser tab up from moving the browser from say the first virtual to the fourth virtual desktop. I figured out how to fix that. like bring a browser tab up from moving the browser from say the first virtual to the fourth virtual desktop.

I figured out how to fix that. But if anybody in the audience has tips on scripts I can run that would restore my applications to their positions and also restore my window screen layouts, I'm still having the issue from time to time. When I wake up from sleep, my windows are completely jumbled. Even though I've done like, I've put everything in the right display ports,

I've made sure like the primary displays and the right display port, all of that, I still get things that move around because I've got one regular monitor, one 16 by 9 regular monitor, and then two vertical monitors. And XFCE just has a hell of a time with that sometimes.

It sounds like you want to try out i3 next, Chris. That is something I'm actually considering doing. A lot of people have been recommending that to me. It's definitely something I'm starting to consider much more seriously right now. I'm just still in the XFCE zone. But I've got to be honest, because I was so judgmental about XFCE

and discounted it for a long time, I've now decided that, well, all right, I need to also give i3 a shot because I've been sort of behaving the same way with i3. So I'm getting there. But in the meantime, if people have scripts or hacks they have to restore window layouts and screen layouts for XFCE, let me know. Because one of the things I'm really enjoying is I can go find a stack exchange post or

whatever from two years ago, and it's still applicable. It's still applicable. It's the best thing ever. It's so nice. It just makes so much more of the documentation online actually applicable because XFCE for the last four years has basically not changed much. So if I find something from

the last four years, I'm pretty much good. It's like persistent documentation. It's like what Windows users get. It's true. But in Windows, it's just because nothing changes. Yeah, well, yeah, because it's super boring and nothing changes. Yeah, nobody upgrades. But it's still the same thing.

All right, well, if anybody has, this has been the Help Chris episode really. If anybody, don't you think, like help me build a PC for my son and help me fix XFCE. It's not that I3 wouldn't work for me either, I think. So it may happen. You know, some of these picks are helping me with problems

I didn't even realize I had. Oh, yeah? Are you trying to wake out already? Yeah, I have to say I haven't figured it out yet. What if you right-click in the middle of the terminal? Oh, hey, no. That seems too obvious. So go over there and drop that terminal down.

So I'm a control tilde, just saying. Oh, yeah, well, because got nothing on the right click. Plasma already assigned something to the tilde by default. Really? Nothing? No, not even like adjust your profiling? Oh. Split left, right.

Split top, bottom. You just got to know where to right click. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. I figured. That's how all Plasma software is. It already does it. You just got to find it.

Well, it's all a learning journey, right? Especially with Plasma. Yeah. All right, Brent. Well, it's all a learning journey, right? Especially with plasma. Yeah. All right, Brent. Well, thanks for filling in on Mr. Paint Seat. Thanks for being here. This is a great seat, and we have missed Mr. West. Yeah, we have.

Hey, Wes, how are you doing out there in Barcelona? Bubble worries. What was that? Bubble worries. Oh, bubble worries. Okay. Yeah, he's out in Barcelona right now at Cubicon with Elle. So I'm sure they're doing okay.

I think it's like 3 a.m. there right now. I would imagine they're partying at this point. I hope they're sleeping, to be honest with you. Because they've got to get back here and they've got to get back on mic. Anyways, this show will be live next Tuesday. I think Mr. Payne will be back, assuming he's not too jet-lagged. You can get it converted to your local time at jupiterbroadcasting.com. LinuxUnplugged.com for our website!

See you next Tuesday. ...... holy smokes look at this wes pain on the remote line wes i can't believe you're here hey buddy so how how are you feeling? Give me just like the quick elevator review of how KubaCon's gone so far. It's like the most boring rave I've ever been to. Really? Wow.

Well, can I ask you something? Do you think, do you feel like it's something that regular people would want to go to? Could anybody do it, Wes? Could anybody be like you and go to KubaCon? It turns out if you try hard enough, you can. Well, there you go. Wes, thank you so much for being here.

See you later, buddy. But we'll raise it. Yeah, see you later. So nice to hear from him. Yeah, really was. Good guy. What a chump showing up at 3 a.m., huh? I know. He's so dedicated. Alright, let's go pick our title, jbtitles.com. So, Bruce, are you still over there?

Are you still 3D printing? I sure am. The lizards are still squealing. They really are. Screaming salamanders. That is funny. So if you hear something in the background when Bruce talks, it sounds like a thousand salamanders being strangled.

He's 3D printing what right now, Bruce? So I've got this show thing coming up, so I'm printing things that I hope will be interesting to people. So right now I'm doing what's called a self-watering flower pot. Oh, that is right. That is so cool. How is a self-watering flower pot? This one's pretty basic. It's just, it's got a, um, uh, an inner, uh, cone basically with a perforated cone inside that you plant the plant in that goes inside a bigger reservoir thing that you can water from the side that, you know, you can fill it with water without having to pour it right

in the dirt and it's supposed to just draw water up as it needs it and bruce can we get a clean salamander uh screaming sound here just an open mic yeah it truly sounds like a torture chamber there for a second. Did you hear that? Well, it's the sound of the stepper motor singing. Sure. Actually, some people use the, they use, like, you know how you had the people who did the floppy drives doing songs and stuff like that? Mm-hmm. So they could do the same thing with 3D printers. They can program the three motors on them to do harmonies and stuff like that.

So if I was ever, like, torturing lizards in the background while doing a show, I could just say I was 3D printing and people wouldn't know any better. What kind of 3D printer is it? It's actually interesting. I've been looking for, I've had a little one for a while and 3D printers are typically, you know, fairly expensive, usually over four figures to get one. And I walked into a computer store and found this guy, which is a pretty standard size for 3D printers, which is a 20 by 20 centimeter bed. And it was only 300 and some odd dollars. And then do you load everything onto an SD card or a USB thumb and pop that sucker in there? Or is it actually hooked up to a machine? This particular one can do both.

How are you doing it though? I'm doing it from the computer. And that's because I want to be able to click on the screen and move the head around for things like if I want to move the head out of the way for taking things off the bed or stuff like that. I've never installed GNU slash Linux. Is that working on GNU slash Linux? Absolutely. I wouldn't do it if it didn't. I love that answer. Hey, Bruce, I have a quick question for you.

Have you discovered OctoPrint yet? I know about it. I haven't gone to that level yet, but it a quick question for you. Have you discovered OctoPrint yet? I know about it. I haven't gone to that level yet, but it's probably in my future. I have a couple of other, I have a RepRap 3D printer, which is, it just needs a new part that belongs to the makerspace that I'm part of.

And another little guy that's only 100 by 100 millimeter that I think I probably will end up putting OctoPy on when we get our physical makerspace set up. And Bruce, I have a question as well. How many salamanders do you have to feed it per hour to get the output that you're looking for? It's measured by millimeters of PLA. So, you know, depends where you're printing.

Of course, right, obviously. Well, it's really exciting to hear that you're setting up a makerspace. How far along is that? Well, a lot of the preparation is done. It's just a matter of we've got a local space that's probably about 15,000 square feet that we're dealing with the current owner that is probably going to give us a sweet deal on it because it's community-based and that sort of thing. So we're probably within a week or two of getting a signature and then moving in. It's going to be fantastic. Congratulations. Will you please keep us updated?

That's really awesome. I love to follow that kind of stuff. Can I ask where you are? Barrie, Ontario, which is an hour north of Toronto and three hours southeast of Brent. Yeah. Oh, that's a nice reference. So I have given some talks at a makerspace in Sudbury,

and I would, and actually when I was in Cranbrook recently, at the co-working space, I was doing the podcasting out of, they were saying, hey, we're just putting up a makerspace. So this is an area that I'm pretty interested in. And so with my having travels through Barry often, I would love to come see this space once you get it up and running. I've been thinking for a while, and I've kind of put it out there a couple of times, like in the chat room and stuff is that, uh, I think JB would, would do well with having some

sort of a maker kind of podcast, but of course, another thing on your plate is not, I mean, I would love to be part of it, but you know, time and stuff like that. I'm the kind of guy who can talk, but you know, I've got four kids in a maker space to do, but, uh, I would like to be part of it. It might be something we can put together. Well, we'll talk more. Let's keep talking, and yeah, maybe we'll get Brent out there sometime. He can be our on-the-scene reporter, and maybe we'll get going. Maybe something will get wrong because I do want to do a Makerspodcast in the future.

Well, good luck, Bruce, and make sure those salamanders meet their doom. I'm keeping this puppy running as often as I can. Bruce, I would say, hit me up in like Telegram or something, but I'd love to come down and take a few photos for you. If you need that kind of thing, I'll get you, I don't know, some extra assets. Yeah. Media and promotion and all that kind of stuff. Stuff is definitely valuable. Yeah. No kidding. It's a great idea, Brent.