LINUX Unplugged - 317: Performance Picks for Kicks

Episode Date: September 4, 2019

We take a trip to visit Level1Tech's Wendell Wilson and come back with some of his performance tips for a smoother Linux desktop. Plus the story behind exFAT coming to Linux, and the big desktop performance improvements landing next week. Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, Cassidy James Blaede, Drew DeVore, and Ell Marquez.

So this is no joke, Wes. Did you see that the XKCD form got owned? A leak? Oh, watch out. Watch out, Wes. It's no good. I mean, XKCD, the site's okay. But the user form, which has a pretty sizable amount of accounts, like 562,000 accounts, was compromised.

Oh, boy. Yeah. Email, IP, and password hashes. This was pointed out by the one and only Troy Hunt. And I guess it actually occurred two months back. Yeah. You know, happens to all of us. Happens to the best of us.

They did, of course, have a little conflict to go with it. That's pretty great. There's a How Hacking Works by XKCD. Very relevant right now. Hello friends and welcome into Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show. This is episode 317. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello Wes. Good to be connected with you from afar. I'm on the road today.

It's impressive, but nevertheless we've got a huge show. We do. Actually, I think it's really kind of, it might be too much show for a remote episode. We'll find out if we pull it off. Well, stop messing around. Gosh. Well, you know, Wes, I decided to take a little trip, which I'll tell you all about here in a little bit. And it turned out to be very fruitful.

Not only did we get to go hang out with the one and only Wendell Wilson from Level One Tex, but I just got back from the Red Hat Tower, too. So we'll tell you about that and help us get through all of the community news and a bunch of big stuff that's launching next week. Of course, we've got our mumble room. Time-appropriate greetings,

Virtual Lug. Hello. Hi. Oh, hi. And also, we got Cheesy and Drew here helping us break it all down too. Hello, gentlemen. Hey, guys. Hey, nice to have you there. Boy, we got a packed mumble room today.

So that's pretty great. Alex, you're graciously hosting me today and you're in the mumble room. That's wonderful. Yeah. Howdy. Howdy over there. Alex has the ultimate podcast set up right now because I kicked him out of his office to host him and he's rocking it like a pro podcaster right now on the couch.

Supes comfortable. I see how it is. Now that we've launched self-hosted, you're like just gone all pro now. He's got a microphone stand that's designed just to be right next to him. He's got this comfortable spot with the dog. And he's been hosting me since Thursday. We came down, I came down from Seattle. He came and picked me up from the airport, and it's been quite the adventure. So we have a lot to talk about today.

But we should probably start with some community news, as we like to do, some big things going on in the community. Starting off with the news around ExFAT. So by now, you've likely heard that Microsoft has given their blessing for the exfat file system to not only land in a Linux kernel, but to also become part of that wider OIN Linux system definition. So it's big news. And the information has been pretty extensive. Like everybody's really covered this. We got the story down, but the short version is code's not out, but it's a policy change. And surprise, surprise, a driver has existed for quite a while, although it's proprietary. But it started popping up in 2013.

That code was never actually released under a free license because patent issues remained. So no real serious efforts to upstream it went into the mainline kernel. Just never really happened. But LWN, Jonathan Colbert, has a really good article that we'll link to that talks about part of the background here about this kernel driver that's kind of getting beaten into shape now. Yeah, that's right. Way back in July, a developer posted that he'd transformed the code

into something that maybe could be upstreamed, but didn't know what else needed to happen to make that possible. And the ensuing discussion made it clear that the patent issues were still a showstopper. And I mean, can you blame them with those things outstanding? I wouldn't want it in my kernel. Yeah, right. Although they may actually have something out of this, right?

Now that Microsoft's given their blessing, maybe those patent issues aren't such a big deal. Maybe we're going to get a driver sooner than later. Yeah, I mean, it seems like with Greg KH agreeing that it could, you know, be part of the staging tree, I think it's going to happen one way or another. Yeah, there has all things a bit of drama around this. Some people think it's too shoddy of work. Other people think that they should start over clean. But it looks like it's headed towards the staging tree where it will be tested and people will determine if it's usable or not. It's coming faster than I think we anticipated.

Thank goodness, too. I mean, I just remember a couple weeks ago you were finding out that this didn't work so well under Linux and maybe, you know, all the future Chris's out there, they can just forget about this little problem. Yeah, you're right. I popped in my SD card from my Canon camera

a couple of weeks ago, took some pictures from the old Sprintskis that we had and thought, oh, I'll just grab these really quick and share them with everybody and realize that out of the box, my Fedora desktop could not read an ex-fat formatted SD card. And of course, that's a very, very common format for external disks and for SD storage on cameras. Yeah. You know, Chris, Joe and I covered this a little bit on Linux Action News 121. That you did. And as always, thank you for filling in on that. You're always great, Wes, on Linux Action News. So check that out. The guys go into a bit of detail there. And incidentally, for those of you that don't remember, in 2014, it was reported that Microsoft

makes anywhere from $5 to $15 per Android device that's shipped with an ex-VAT driver. That's crazy. That's crazy. I know. It's so much money. And they say no more further patent litigation is in the works. They're done with that.

Done. Woo-hoo. The Wayland future is near, and there's some great news coming out of a Google Summer of Code project. Michael Erbel over on Phoronix has a write-up about WaylandPipe, which will provide network-transparent Wayland proxy for running native Wayland programs or games over a network similar to X11's X14 over SSH capabilities. How great is this? It all started when student developer

Manuel Stoeckel got paired up with Google Summer of Code and funded to work on this. And it's now successfully working for Wayland Games and applications. You can go give it a try right now if you like. It also supports some handy features like compression, multi-threaded optimizations, and hardware acceleration in some cases. I have one reaction to this, which is, finally. Yeah, you know, it's one of those things that's kind of outstanding. Everyone working on Wayland's like, yeah, yeah, we'll get to it, we'll solve it. So far, no one's complained about it too much. You know, in theory, we can do it, there's nothing stopping us, we just haven't. And I guess, I mean, now that's true. Yeah. Yeah,

while Google Summer of Code has ended, the project is going to go on, hopefully. Some further code cleanup, potentially some refactoring, some protocol extension. There's a really, really kind of comprehensive breakdown we have linked in the show notes. We'll give you a couple of highlights. Unlike the original X protocol, only part of the data is needed to display an application transferred over the network for the application because the connection is done at the compositor level. So large chunks of information can just be data that the compositor needs to draw the application and associated file descriptors. There is side channel information you could include in there that talks about the position and all of that kind of information that the display manager needs to display it on the other end. They just need a communications channel between them,

and in this case, they can use SSH. Yeah, Waypipe even includes some handy little wrappers too, right? So you can just sort of run Waypipe, point it at another server, it'll handle all the little SSH details, and you just get a remote Wayland connection. Yeah, that's really nice. And some of the small tweaking is done to just sort of make things a little more network transportable.

For instance, they'll strip out certain kinds of advertising capability messages that will often be associated with graphics cards or whatnot that advertise what their capabilities are. Instead, that can be done once, and then it can be edited out from the transmission over the network. Yeah, the developer has a very impressive and detailed blog post-up that we'll have linked in the show notes.

Yeah, check it out. Linuxunplugged.com slash 317. I'm really, really hopeful about this. While it was a Google Summer of Code project, which, side note, some really good stuff coming out of Google Summer of Code this year. Anyways, Waypipe also supports a bunch of quality of life features,

including, like Wes said, that wrapper, hardware-accelerated video encoding, awesome, transfer compression, and a method to reconnect applications if your connection, like your SSH connection, drops. It'll support reconnecting and resuming the applications. Really excited about this. And of course, it can proxy programs that render images using OpenGL. So like we mentioned, there is a capability here that you could even stream something as complex as a game over the network with reasonable results if your bandwidth is sufficient.

That's crazy. Doesn't this really kind of solve like the number one concern people usually bring up about switching to Wayland is X 1140. Yeah, we're getting there. You know, more and more of these just keep getting knocked down sometimes surprisingly quickly, like in this case and before long,

well, the Wayland future will be here. The only one left now is Nvidia, right? Yeah. I mean, I know there's initial work on that. Yeah,

that stings. That does sting because I've been rocking Wayland still. I, since that weekend with Way that stings. That does sting. Because I've been rocking Wayland still. Since that weekend with Wayland, I haven't gone back on my ThinkPad. I'm still using it. I just, I'm hooked on the smooth. Once I see it, I can't go back.

We talked to Wendell about that too a little bit. We'll get to that. But let's talk about something huge happening next week. A major version of Gnome Shell. I'm sorry. Good Gnome Shell is coming out. Gnome Shell 3.34. And Joey over at OMG Ubuntu has a write-up of some of the top things that are in there.

But we'll just cover a couple of these. And then we're going to go deep on some performance work that really moves the needle. But from a general user improvement, there's a few things in here that are nice in GNOME 3.4, which is scheduled to land next Tuesday, should everything go as planned. Now, the new version makes it much easier to create app folders in that application overview, right there when you have all of the apps that come up,

you can now, from in there, kind of like on a mobile device, you can drag icons on top of each other. It creates a folder. It makes it nice to organize that. And then, like in the Ubuntu dock, I believe, haven't tested this yet, but I believe those folders will then also work in the dock,

which I think that's a really cool thing. Oh, that's very nice. It's also much easier to preview backgrounds. You don't actually have to set them, you know. You can also set an image as the desktop background, lock screen background, or both with the handy new popover menu. And you're no longer limited to picking a wallpaper from the top level JPEG folders in your pictures folder. Just click the add picture button and pick a file anywhere on your system. I mean, come on, about time. Hallelujah. It's truly 2019. I can now choose my own pictures folder,

which is nice because I like to organize my pictures folder. I don't like having everything just in the root of my freaking pictures folder. So I'm surprisingly stoked about this feature. Well, another thing you might like is an improved sysprof tool for profiling your system. It's got a redesigned UI, new data sources, and integration with core GNOME platform libraries, including GTK and Mutter. So maybe now you can measure just how smooth it is.

Joey's got a killer screenshot of this. Like, this looks like a real tool, doesn't it? Yeah, I mean, if I didn't already have NetData, I might really, really want this. Hmm. Hmm. Yeah. No, actually, the deep hooks right into GNOME, this seems like super handy. It wasn't as useful before.

But now I think I'll definitely be using it on systems that have GNOME. Yeah. I'm also delighted to see improvements coming to GNOME boxes. That's the virtual and remote machine manager.

Some nice changes in the 3.34 release. For instance, the new box assistant has an improved workflow to make it super quick to get machines up and running. And there's a new option. I don't know what this is, Alex, but it's called the 3D Acceleration.

Is it now optional setting? Do you think they're talking about pass-through? I don't know. Virtual Box has had a 3D Acceleration thing for a while. Maybe it's related to that, but we can hope. It could just be a different kind of driver. I think it's more likely related to VirtIO 3D acceleration, which is available for some Linux distributions.

Right, that would make sense. I feel like GNOME Boxes would be the perfect project to make a PCI pass-through, a couple of checkboxes, and a dropdown to choose the PCI device you want to pass through. It would unleash so much virtualization power. It's a whole new level, right? Like that would actually be very accessible to people in a way that it's just not right now. Yeah, yeah. Well, there is some good news. There is an open issue for that on the GNOME GitLab.

Yeah, maybe it'll turn, maybe it'll result in something. That would be wonderful. We've seen a lot of performance improvements landing in the most current releases of GNOME. Talk about a great meme, because the meme is now like, oh yeah, every release has performance improvements. This one, though, is so significant. We're seeing last-minute inclusion,

although it's been tested, but GNOME 3.4 is expected to release in just a few days as we record this. So squeezing this mutter fix in at the last moment is a big deal, and it has a big impact for those that are running GNOME on X11 with the NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver. Yeah, that's right. Canonical's been hard at work, in particular Daniel Von Woot over there. And you may know him from his many GNOME performance optimizations that we're very happy with. Well, over the past two years, he's Daniel Von Wut over there, and you know, you may know him from his many known performance optimizations that we're very happy with. Well, over the past two years, he's been toying with

a particular NVIDIA fix. It's basically the removal of GLX-threaded swap weight handling for the NVIDIA binary driver. It ended up stalling both the CPU and the GPU, and it's just not serving its intended performance use cases with the current state of Mutter's code. The issue it was originally designed to address around unthrottled rendering, well, that's just been addressed in a separate patch and done in a different way earlier this summer. So just in time for 3.34.

If you've been fighting with this, you've noticed it, you're an NVIDIA binary user, hey, it's a great time to be using GNOME. Yeah, and that's not the only performance fix that came from Canonical's Daniel Van Hoek. We got to get him on the show because he has done the people's work recently.

He's also landed another fix that will be performance improving for everyone that has a mouse cursor. So if you use Gnome Shell with a mouse, this performance improvement applies to you. That's me. That's me. It also has a fun name, geometric picking. And yeah, it's about cursor movement and avoiding OpenGL

or using the GPU for color picking operations. That logic is now being done on the CPU without OpenGL, but it turns out it's actually more efficient this way and is able to cause a measurable drop in CPU usage when moving the mouse. Yeah. And, you know, I don't want something that simple to be taxed on my system.

So by not using the GPU, they're saving CPU cycles. You know, I imagine they were shuffling data off over to the GPU in this case, and if it's faster to just do it with the CPU than bother to go out, get the data, send it to the GPU, and bring it back, well, that might be a win. I guess so. I guess so. They write on the bug tracker, this new approach also dramatically reduces the number of picking paint cycles required for cursor movements

since the pickability of an entire screen is calculated and cached. That's smart. Interesting. Stuff like this is so, so great. So these are like core infrastructure things that we need to see improved in GNOME. It's interesting too, right? This is kind of exactly the stuff we were hoping for when Canonical adopted GNOME as their default desktop. And it's, I mean, it's really been coming true.

A hundred percent. A hundred percent true. Good point. And kind of along these same lines, Guadec just wrapped up the GNOME conference. And Cassidy, who is, is it the chief experience officer, Cassidy? Is that what the X stands for? He's joining us today. Yeah.

Hello, Cassidy. Thank you for being here. You had a talk on the need for a free desktop dark style preference. Now you're not, you're not in this talk. You're not advocating dark style, dark theme, all the things, but what you are saying is, Hey, maybe dark theming is an accessibility thing. Yeah. Basically over the last like year, we've seen all these other platforms adopting dark styles, and they've done it in a really similar way. And so I've been kind of watching this happen,

and I've been listening to developers and users talk about the issues with dark styles. And so this proposal is basically a way that we could support this on free desktop OSes like GNOME-based OSes or KDE-based or elementary OS, but in a way that's easy for developers to implement and doesn't really break everything. Yeah, you had a great example of a link to your video in there you talk about. What if that one day you're in a dark conference room and you want to take notes and you want to flip your screen over to dark mode for that day? Or what if you're starting to have a headache come on and you've got to finish something up and you just want to flip your system to dark mode for a little bit?

And then there's also the overwhelming evidence that all of the other desktop and mobile vendors are implementing dark mode support and including web browsers. So it's here, really, and we don't want to be necessarily left out. But you're not saying everybody go off and do it your own way. You're saying we should come up with a free desktop.org standard. However, you are saying it in a time when there's a bit of pushback on theming in general. So I'm curious, how's it being received?

How did the bird of the feather session go afterwards? Like how's the overall reception to this idea that we should accommodate this? So the BOF, the birds of a feather session, actually went really well. It seems like about a year ago when I first started bringing this idea up, there was a lot of pushback because this idea of, you know,

ripping the style sheet out from under apps and putting a different theme on them, there was a lot of pushback from app developers. But when we talk about it from doing it at a specification level where it's expected, an expected feature of the platform, and when other platforms are doing it in a really similar way, it seems like the conversation has shifted and people are just kind of like, yeah, let's just do it. And what was cool is we actually combined the Birds of a Feather session with the GDK

one because there wasn't actually that much to discuss in our separate one for the Dark Style. And that meant we got the insight of very experienced GDK developers and we got a whole room of a few dozen people to kind of think about this and think about a way forward. So there's already work going into GTK4 to help support this, some new APIs. So it's exciting to see it already moving forward.

I also noted, and I'm not sure if this was a product of Guadec or if it just happened around the same time, but it seems like there's been some kind of agreement that vendor themes are going to stick around and now we need to figure out how to properly do them. Did you see this? there's been some kind of agreement that vendor themes are going to stick around, and now we need to figure out how to properly do them. Did you see this? Yeah, and I was actually involved quite a bit in this. It's actually all intertwined with the different style sheets that are user style sheets,

dark styles, and then vendors, like downstream vendors like Ubuntu or Pop!OS, or even elementary to a certain degree. We're going to exist forever. And there's different arguments from different camps of, you know, we really think that the system should have a certain style that matches our hardware and fits in with our brand. And I think a year ago, again, we had that whole theming discussion. And then this year, it's a little bit of a more mature discussion, I think, about it of, okay, we've kind of heard the extremes. Let's come to the middle and agree on something, on some way forward. And so basically the way we're moving forward, it seems like within GNOME, a more publicized and supported styling API, I guess,

with publicly exposed CSS variables in the GTK style sheet so that app developers can use semantic variables or variables that are guaranteed to be supported. And then themes like Pop! OS or Ubuntu, they can actually make sure they support those different variables as well. So it's kind of an in-between of, it's not ripping the entire style sheet out from under apps. It's more like, hey, it's compatible with these different variables.

And so I think we'll see some really interesting things in Yaru moving forward and in Pop! OS moving forward with this. It's essentially letting the applications know, hey, I'm set up to display this way. I look this way right now. And they can choose to implement that or not. And if they do, they can implement it in a way that they know is consistent with their UI design.

Yeah, and it's from multiple angles, too. So it's like applications can use those variables to create custom-styled widgets, but then the vendors themselves can use those variables to create custom styled widgets, but then the vendors themselves can use those variables to create their own style sheet that's compatible with Adwaita, so you get less breakage. Adwaita is how you're supposed to say it? Oh man, I've been way off. I have no idea if that's how you're supposed to say it, that's just how I say it. So no one knows, wow.

You've probably been around people pronouncing it, so you probably got it close. I say Adwadia, so you probably got it close. I say Edwardia, so what do I know? It might be like Advaita or something. I don't know. Could we just go with gnome theme?

The built-in, yeah, the shell thing. Of course, then we'll debate on how you say gnome or gnome. Exactly. And there's, yeah, varying ideas there, too.

There's no winning. Well, good talk. Everybody on the team watched it. We liked it. We have it linked in the show notes. I's no winning. Well, good talk. Everybody on the team watched it. We liked it. We have it linked in the show notes. I think it's a great approach to this. I'm obviously, I skew on the side of dark theming all of the things because I just find it a strain on my eyes after about five, six hours

of using the computer to have everything so bright. But I don't want to go overboard. And I really like the balance you're striking with it, Cassidy. I think you really have a great approach and I'm willing to bet that's going to translate into pretty good support in elementary OS. So some of these things you're talking about in your talk, are you moving ahead with them in elementary OS?

We're kind of waiting to see. So the way free desktop works is they really like to have two independent implementations before they call it a free desktop spec because otherwise it like to have like two independent implementations before they call it a free desktop spec. Cause otherwise it's just, you know, only one project is kind of pushing free desktop. Um, so I think we're going to wait to see how it's done in GTK specifically and engage the developers there. Um, and then we'll help expose it in elementary OS and I'll work with a gnome as well to help expose it.

So I think the elementary implementation and gnome counts as two separate implementations. And then we'll work on like standard officially standardizing the spec. Really curious to see where this goes. I like that. You know, it seems like it's like you said, it's been a year,

so it's not happening super fast, but at the same time, it feels like if it does happen, it'll be really set and it'll stick. It'll really, and that's a rarity. So that's really good to see. So keep up the good work, sir feels like if it does happen, it'll be really set and it'll stick. And that's a rarity. So that's really good to see. So keep up the good work, sir. Thank you.

Thank you. And thank you for stopping by. Mr. Payne, what do you say? Should we sashay into the housekeeping? Oh, yes, we must. All right. Well, let's kick off the housekeeping this week with announcements. September's free courses for the Linux Academy community members

is now available. A couple of things that Al has cranked the free handle on that caught my attention. The Microsoft SQL Server on Linux Quick Start Guide. Heck yeah. Oh, yeah, right. Maybe you're interested in self-hosting something like Bitwarden. That seems like a great guide.

Exactly. Network routing fundamentals. You want to get your wire guard on? You're going to need to know that one. And along those same lines, Linux networking and troubleshooting. And a Git, Quickstart, and Core OS essentials, plus a lot more,

all free now for Linux community members for the month of September. You just go create an account, get a community member account, and then you can go take that Mastering System D Class 2. That's a good one there, Elle. You got a good list this month. Thanks. I'm really hoping to help people kind of get their journey into Linux kickstarted. Now, speaking of journeys, let's talk about Texas Cyber Summit. We have

the Be New track, which sounds pretty killer. We've got a birthday party. So where do you want to start with the Texas Cyber Summit? You know, I think I'd like to kick off with the Be New track. And the concept is really what I've been, I'm going to say preaching because I think I get on my high horse every once in a while about tackling new things and not being afraid of it. The number one feedback that I get to people where they don't go to conferences is they say, well, I'm not ready yet. I'm not at that part of my career. And I can't stress enough that at the time that you are starting out, that you're looking to find something new or looking to get into the tech sector, that's the perfect time to start

going to conferences because you can learn more than just what you can see in a book or what you can see in a forum. You can see what people are actually doing with the tech. So we've built a whole track around, hey, you want to learn Docker? Cool. Let's do it with not just doing DevOps, but let's learn it with DevSecOps. Let's put security first and foremost in your learning process. You've heard about capturing the flag, but you don't feel you know enough to do it, then come to our capture the flag purvey.com has decided to sponsor that for us. And they will have mentors at the table, teaching you not just how to capture that flag, but what your thought process should be when you're actually approaching, you know, password cracking or whatever it is that

you have to do to get that to be able to capture that flag. So I'm really excited. Yeah, that seems like the most valuable part is you're learning how to think too. So then you can take that and you can apply that to future situations. And if you understand that kind of stuff, you're employable because technology is always changing. So there's always more to learn. It's about learning how to think about the problem. I think the major thing that people can walk away with is not just being able to say, hey, I went to this conference, but to say, hey, I went to this conference, I participated in the

event, and I hands-on was able to build X, or I was able to win this competition. That's something that you can put on a resume because it shows practical hands-on knowledge. Now, Texas Cyber Summit is coming up. It's just around the corner. So I want to get you the dates because the crew's going. A lot of us are going to be there, so we'd love to see you. So it's October 10th through the 12th at the Grand Hyatt in San Antonio, Texas. So if you can make it, we'd love to see you there because we're going to have a big presence, and we're also going to have an unofficial Hacker Family dinner and a birthday party too, Elle.

It's going to be my birthday, and I can't think of anybody who I'd like to share it more with in our community. So come by, have some Texas-style barbecue and some cake. It's going to be a great time

the day before the conference starts. That's amazing. We'll be at the Two Brothers Barbecue. I'll be there. The details, meetup.com slash jupiterb. I can't believe it's finally happening. Oh, it's like actually happening. Texas Cyber Summit. I feel like I've been preparing for months, so I hope that everyone loves the event. I'm pretty sure you and I've been talking about it since January at least. So it's been a long time and you've probably been thinking about it even

longer than that. So we'd love to see you there, and it's a great chance to get started and just see what the state of the cybersecurity industry as it is now, quite an industry, where it's at. So all those details, linuxunplugged.com slash 317. Well, that's the housekeeping. Now let's talk a little bit about some great tips that I got from Wendell. talk a little bit about some great tips that I got from Wendell. So for our self-hosted show, selfhosted.show, for episode two, we're going to have Wendell on. And the topic of the episode is why you should actually self-host in the first place and fairly enough, when you shouldn't self-host. And Wendell has a super cool approach to this. So we went down to his studio in Lexington, Kentucky, and I got to start the story at the very beginning. I have to give a shout out to this. So we went down to his studio in Lexington, Kentucky, and I got to start

the story at the very beginning. I have to give a shout out to Alex. He's taking care of all of the trip details, the room booking. He's letting me bum internet here at his house. He cooked a sandwich or his wife cooked a sandwich. It's been good. It's been really good. So thank you, Alex. It's been wonderful. And I flew in last week. Did I get in Thursday, I think? I don't know. You know, I think I got in Thursday. I think Thursday.

Yeah. You and the wife picked me up at the airport. And we got right to dinner, which was good. You know me, I like to eat. And then the next day, we took a drive from Raleigh, North Carolina, to Lexington, Kentucky, which was about 10 hours, 10 or so hours. But it's a drive through the mountains. We got to drive on what's called the Tale of the Dragon. We got to take Blue Ridge Parkway, which are – they look like they should be in an episode of Top Gear.

They look like they should be in car commercial roads. That's really something. I've never had road jelly before, but I am so envious of the roads around here. It was a lot of driving, though, and Alex did more than the majority of it, so I appreciate that. When we got in, we got in on Saturday, and Alex had to stay in a quality-in hotel, which I will say the first one was pretty good,

of decent quality. However, I did have this weird over-softened bed sheet situation where there was this weird residue on my bed sheets that felt almost a little moist. That was hard. This is a little Quint Simons. It was a little weird. It was a little hard. But I powered through like the pro traveler that I am. And we got down and we got to,

we met Wendell at his studio and spent the entire day with him. He was just really gracious. And you know, what's really nice is you get to meet people and they're legitimately what they are on camera. And that doesn't happen very often. But Wendell is a fountain of information. Alex, do you want to share the story? Of course, because we're sitting around the studio, there is all kinds of hardware. There's probably not a system in there with less than 16 cores. I mean, it's just, we're talking Tesla video cards.

We're talking just all kinds of great stuff. And so as one does, when you're in the presence of such hardware, we start benchmarking. I never really used the 4Renix benchmark suite before, and Wendell just busts it out and says, oh, look, this machine can compile a kernel in what, 20 seconds, 12 seconds. He showed us a system that it compiled so fast i believe the test suite had to do further tests because it figured it was an error that had compiled the kernel so fast wow yeah it was pretty great he had two two terabyte nvme boot drives in raid zero yeah and then of course he had a massive cpu in there i can't even remember how many cores it had it it was might have been 24 cores i don't know he just casually threw about oh this one has a thread

ripper but this one has a 3900x oh there's another thread ripper over there what uh what really impressed me is because of course as soon as we brought busted out the pharonix test suite i started geeking out because you guys know how much i love that freaking thing so we're talking about it and of course alex is discovering it and we're like well Alex, let's run it on your systems. So Alex remotes in and he's got a server here with a bunch of cores and a couple of Xeons in it. And he's got a desktop. And you go to town and Alex discovered the same Wendell rabbit hole, which I now find myself in, which is so funny. So tell them first what you discovered. And then I have something I have to admit. So I ran this benchmarking suite on a dual Xeon system, and I was able to compile a kernel, I think, in 64 seconds,

which was a good deal slower than his Ryzen system in front of me, but it seemed pretty good. So then I thought, okay, let's break out the i7-8700K. Let's see what this can do, expecting a really good result. 126. Horrible. So I was quite disappointed by that. What's great about Wendell too, just a side note, is you can rattle off the parts and before the benchmark finishes, he'll tell you what number you should expect. And then when you didn't get the number that you expected, he knew what the problem was from afar. He just said said to me what motherboard is it and i

said oh it's a z370 tai chi asrock motherboard and he goes ah you haven't enabled this setting in your bios i get home lo and behold i enable that setting and i knock 25 seconds off amazing he knew he knew exactly what setting it was where it was in the bios right off the top of his head with that particular hardware combination so i couldn't resist but start talking to him about the general performance and smoothness of the Linux desktop. He has a video that's coming out on his Level 1 Linux channel, probably by the time this episode is posted. And we chatted a little bit further about this with him in his video. And he has a pretty good idea of what it would take to get the Linux desktop a little more responsive.

And I agree with him completely. And he gave me a couple of tips that I've heard over the years, but when you combine them all together, really do make a pretty sizable performance difference. So I wanted to share them with you guys. So that way you could go down the same rabbit hole because I did these things and realized there was a lot more area for optimization and improvement. And now I've been spending my free

time in the evenings locked up, locked away in my room, tweaking my laptop. And so I want you all to experience this too. First of all, take a little time. Don't run it forever. But if you're on GNOME, sorry, GNOME install the cpu freck extension just for a little bit it's a little slow it's a little clunky it's got a pop-up banner thingy not a pop-up that's a it's got like a splash thingy while it loads but it gives you such a good wealth of information including a simple way to turn on Turbo Boost, which on some machines is off by default. So that's A with right there, A number one. You can increase performance by turning on Turbo Boost.

CPU Freq will also tell you what things you need in order to control your governor. Most Linux boxes are not in a performance mode, so you'll get some throttling. And in this, you can also do things like turn off some of the cores. So this morning I was in a long meeting, didn't have my power plug, so I just turned off four of my CPU cores. Additionally, it'll tell you if there's a couple of low-hanging fruit performance items on your Linux box that you need to resolve. For myself, this is interesting because Wendell

brought this up, IRQ Balance, which is a service that it looks like it's designed for performance. In fact, if you read most things online, most people say install IRQ Balance for performance because it's a little piece of software outside the kernel that looks at your load and your tasks and will do some workload splitting up amongst your CPU cores. I mean, that sounds like a good thing, right? Turns out, not so much. It's kind of conservative in how it actually manages things, and the logic and sorting all of that out puts overhead in there,

and it actually can be one of the things that can make your machine a little more leggy. So this is something that this application will flag, the CPU FREQ, C-P-U-F-R-E-Q, like frequency. It also puts a little item up in your Gnome Shell toolbar that tells you what frequency your processors are running at, which is something that you can use to see if you're getting the full peak performance that your CPU is capable of.

Before I made some of these changes, I wasn't. By stock, Wes, you probably aren't either, because some of these settings will be the same for you. So you install that. It'll tell you if you have IRQ balance messing up your performance. It'll tell you if your CPU is being throttled. You can do things like turn off your cores and turn on turbo boost. If it's a one catch all application, it's like the first thing Wendell was installing

on his machine because he set up a Fedora box while we were there for some testing. And like the first thing he installed was CPU frequency. Do you remember the drill that he installed the cpu cooler with and then he didn't so and so he you know he wanted to he wanted to get as close as he could to replicating alex's home setup and he basically has every machine iteration so he just he grabs an mvne drive and a cpu and walks up to a machine and just takes a screwdriver and screws the cpu cooler in, pops the MVNE in, this gets to work. It was great. Because you're having a conversation

with Wendell and it goes like this, I wonder how that would work. And then he says, well, let's go test it. So that's what we did on several things. Every time. Yeah. That was pretty fun. So I have links to that in the show notes. If you're on a T480, there's an additional step you need to take.

Or if you're on, actually, it's not just a T480. There's several ThinkPad laptops, including a lot of the X series, like the X280, the XC16. The T580 is also the ThinkPad Anniversary Edition, even a couple of E series. even a couple of E-series. The Dell XPS 9365 and 9370 series and the Microsoft service books are all suffering from aggressive, naughty CPU throttling, where they're actually even cranking down

the wattage of the CPU. Initially, it's 44 watts when you're plugged in, and then when you're on battery, it hard limits it to 29 watts, And you can't ever go above that, even for like turbo boosting. And it actually resets to that every five seconds. Yeah, it's every 30 seconds when you're on battery. And it's a it's a value from the driver and the embedded controller that are getting passed back and forth. And it represents itself in essentially limiting your overall CPU burstiness. Your machine might run slightly cooler, your battery life might be slightly better, but if you're plugged in or

you have great battery life already, this isn't really a concern for you. So there's a fix you can run. I'll have that link to the show notes, and it sets up a system to service that essentially turns this off. It's still safe, but you can use it at your own risk. But it was fun talking to him about this stuff because he talks about it in kind of a holistic way. He talks about how it's all these different components that kind of need somebody to come in like an orchestrator and fix it all up. like an orchestrator and fix it all up. You need somebody who's working at the compositor level, at the graphic stack level, at the kernel level,

and at the audio stack level, and at the scheduling level. All of these things need to be kind of working together to really get the kind of performance that we want on Linux. But you do have the means to make some of these tweaks yourself, since it's Linux after all, and get the performance closer there than you do by stock. And I don't know, you look at this kind of, you look at some of these settings, and you think to yourself,

why are we doing this out of the box on desktop distributions? Things like IRQ balance. Maybe there's reasons, but I don't know what they are. Yeah, and I'm sure much of it is legacy changes in architecture that just haven't bubbled up all the way through the different layers, right?

And Linux is deployed on so many different types of systems, especially maybe older or low-end systems, that I imagine it's a hard thing to get just right. But if more of us start experimenting with it, maybe we can change that. Yeah. I love the idea, though, of maybe one day some Skunk Works project turns into like this big project where people put money into funding development on all of these little rough edges to make Linux audio just a little bit smoother, to make performance mode a little bit easier to achieve.

There is a project out there. I think, oh, I always forget this, but there's a project out there that's made by a group that changes some of this for you. They're a gaming company. I don't know if you guys know who I'm talking about. They have a game mode for Linux. You guys familiar with this?

I actually have it installed on my system. All right, maybe you can make me look it up. Game mode for Linux. And it is a project that's attempted, yeah, by Feral Interactive. That's who.

You guys are probably familiar with Feral Interactive. They have a project right now called Game Mode for Linux which optimizes Linux's performance

for on-demand gaming. And it essentially changes a lot of these things I'm talking about. Your CPU governor, your IO priority. It even goes a little

bit further in some cases. It'll put your GPU if it's an AMD or NVIDIA in performance mode. It'll inhibit your IO priority. It even goes a little bit further in some cases. It'll put your GPU if it's an AMD or NVIDIA in performance mode. It'll inhibit your screensaver. It can change the kernel scheduler. So it can go even further. Yeah. This looks great. No, I totally missed this one. Yeah, this is something that's been around.

I've been watching for a little bit. They have different installation methods for different distributions. You can play around with it. They got stuff for Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, Gentoo. You could build it yourself. I've been running it for a little bit on my laptop. You activate it, and you go play some No Man's Sky. It works great. I'm sitting here gaming on Wayland, playing No Man's Sky under Proton with an eGPU all day long. It's wonderful. It's made a big difference. It's a noticeable game of difference, and I, on my setup, haven't noticed any stability impacts.

One of the other amazing tools that Wendell threw into my toolkit this weekend is i7z. This allowed me to look at the CPU frequencies and the different C states of my processors as well whilst I was running benchmarks. And I find this is going to be an excellent new tool in my toolkit alongside something like S2E, which is another tool that lets you do a similar thing. Yeah, we've covered S2E on a previous Linux Unplugged pick, I believe. It's pretty great.

So we'll have a link to CPU Freq. We'll have a link to i7z and also ThrottleD if you're on one of those laptops that's impacted by that built-in throttling, which is really kind of a bug that's really a shame that Lenovo hasn't fixed a firmware update. So it's kind of on them. You know, I saw a little update in a Lenovo forum recently. It sounds like they're working on it, but nothing concrete yet. All right.

One thing I'd like to mention about Thr throttle D before we move on is the under vaulting section can be pretty important when you're trying to really get those thermal levels down. I went through and did that today and noticed some real improvements, but you do kind of have to know what you're doing and test conservatively as you start activating that feature. What are you using to monitor your thermals? Throttle D actually has a built-in utility that you can launch on the command line with the dash dash monitor flag, and it will show you exactly what's causing any limits.

No way, really? I got to try that. That is so great. Thanks, Drew. That's a really handy way to kind of see some... I've been using CPU freck, and that's a lot. It's verbose, it's gooey, and I don't plan to keep the extension around forever.

So that's awesome. Yeah, I find between tuned and throttle D, once throttle D is configured properly, I'm getting some good performance with better thermals. Hmm, that's a win-win. So check out the links in the show notes if this has got your interest piqued, and be sure to keep an eye on selfhosted.show.

Episode 1 comes out on September 12th. And then episode 2 comes out with Wendell on why to self-host. And then we kick off a whole series of episodes. We had a good chat with Wendell. We talked a little bit about his home setup, his Linux background, his server setup that he has there in the studio, what he chooses to cloud host versus what he doesn't trust in the cloud. Really good conversation coming up in self-hosted episode number two, and that's at selfhosted.show.

They all start shipping on September 12th, and it follows fortnightly after that, selfhosted.show slash subscribe for the RSS feed. Really was a great trip. Alex, thank you so much for theshow slash subscribe for the RSS feed. Really was a great trip. Alex, thank you so much for the fun drives, for the trip, for scheduling all the details so I could just show up and get the work done and not have to worry about all the individual itty-bitties. Thank you very much, sir.

It was a pleasure having you. I mean, the farts aside. Now, also, Cheesy's been doing some work. He set up a new gallery that has all of the photos from a lot of these events we've been talking about over the last few weeks including red hat summit linux fest northwest our sprint for self-hosted um the trip that alex and i just took uh to go see wendell all of that at a new site jupiter..gallery. What's some of the magic here, Cheesy? What's on the back end to make all this happen? Well, I mean, obviously it's self-hosted with a little assistance from my buddy Wes over there. But yeah, it's Lichi,

I believe is how you guys pronounced it. Essentially, all I've done is set it up through Docker. I got it set up on a Linode and just kind of messing around with it this weekend. I looked at various other options, other choices out there, other pieces of software and self-hosted routes. But this was really the most attractive to me. So that's why I ended up choosing Lychee. And it seems to be doing pretty well so far. We'll see. Right now, obviously, everything's been posted in September of 2019. But as we progress through, those dates will be fixed and everything will be in order from here on out. So looking forward to it. It's a great way for us to catalog our photos. And I encourage any of the listeners out there, if you have photos from any

of these events that you see there, please get them over to me, cheese at Jupiter Broadcasting. I'll get them posted into these galleries. Because really, you know, the whole part of this is showing our community and I want our community to you know share their photos with us so we can enjoy them as well i'm sure there are some great shots of uh myself or chris or some other great candids out there that we just haven't seen yet that uh i don't know maybe maybe we can get one of those noah photos in there of him in his uh bathing suit oh my gosh oh my gosh those might be too hot for the internet. I got a couple of those. So there you go.

It's nice looking back at the Linux Fest Northwest pictures, just remembering how long that line was that you had to go to the front for, for your brands. Oh yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Good times, good times. And that's, and that's really what the gallery is about is to capture those moments.

And so I encourage any of the community members out there that have photos to share, please get them to me and I'll make sure to get them uploaded into the gallery. And yeah, looking forward to seeing it grow. Jupiter.gallery for that. And the software, the open source software that's the gallery management software is L-Y-C-H-E-E, if you want to check that out. And yeah, I really, it's fun having all the pictures in one spot. So go see that. It's pretty great.

It is. Now we had some emails come into the show. I thought this was a really good one. So I wanted to read it on the show. And then lucky us, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Drew DeVore, still in the house, hasn't evacuated yet, and he's here to answer your technical audio questions.

He's just perfect for this one. I know, he really is. So JT wrote in, he says, I've read on a few different blogs and message boards that the audio systems in Linux are not up to professional standards. I know we don't have any DAWs, that's digital audio workstations,

as fully baked as, say, Pro Tools, but is that the result of an inferior audio system or just the typical Linux problems we always face when it comes to proprietary applications? Is there something lacking in ALSA, Jack, or Pulse Audio's stack that I'm not aware of? Or is there something that we obviously can do in pro audio production, given that we have Ardour and Reaper and Audacity, that people just are missing? Thank you very much, JT. Well, Drew, I thought this would be a great question for you

to answer since your day job is audio engineering on Linux. That's right. So, you know, audio production in Linux definitely is not fault free. There are plenty of issues with it. You know, probably the most visible one being that the ALSA, JACK, and PULSE stacks. When you put them all together, it's really complex and it hopefully will get streamlined down with Pipewire in the future, but for the moment, it's still pretty hairy to try to work with it on a daily basis. Once you understand it, you can work around a lot of those issues, but it does take some deep diving. Now, as far as software, you know, with things like Bitwig and Reaper and VST producers starting to target Linux, I think the tide is starting to

shift. And hopefully we'll see more pro-level software coming our way. But honestly, for now, I can do 90% of what I need to do all in Linux. There are still a couple of things that I run in Wine, but even that works just fine so long as the application is compatible with Wine, and even some Wine VSTs that I can run directly through a compatibility layer. Right, and those Wine VSTs and things that you're running through an app compatibility layer are actually, it's possible to like bring them up in Reaper. So it's like in the Linux editing application you're using, you can summon these Wine plugins. Right, they just masquerade as a Linux VST, and they're just kind of piped through wine to get them into the application. So, you know, will we ever see things like Audition or Pro Tools or the other big boys coming to Linux? I don't know. I kind of doubt it. But Reaper is really, really good. I consider it professional quality.

really good. I consider it professional quality. So realistically, I don't know if we need everything to come to Linux, so long as we have enough things of high enough quality that we can get the work done. And I'd say we're most of the way there. Yeah. And Wes, you've done some deep diving into Jack. And once you learn the system, there are a lot of powerful things you can do from not just audio processing and routing, but real-time monitoring and all kinds of stuff that are really useful in a professional audio workstation. Oh, yeah. I mean, you definitely have to invest. And really, I think a lot of areas were lacking. I mean, you've been using Reaper a bit more. You've also introduced me and shown me some stuff over on like the Mac side that can do some similar audio routing capabilities.

And it doesn't expose to you the same level of detail, but it also has a much simpler default and, you know, easy to use sort of settings. And Drew, you were helping us out learning Reaper better. And there's like, there's a lot of stuff you got to go tweak and configure to make it look competitive, to make it sort of like as nice of an editor. You can get there. You just have to be willing to invest the time. Yes, that's right. And I would say that I like Jack better than anything on Windows or Mac that I've played with. But yeah, it's you got to learn a lot more to really expose those features and take use of them. And once you do, you have a whole new tool set to work with. And that's the part I'm struggling with is I'm in that point right now where specifically

with Reaper, like Jack is clicking with me more and I get it. But Reaper is a big shift from what I'm used to in proprietary world editors. But I can already tell that once I have it set up and working, it's just as powerful, if not more powerful than what I've used in the past on the proprietary side. This isn't totally fair, but I've jokingly said to the guys behind the scenes that Reaper has a $60 UI and a $5,000 functionality. And the UI, thankfully, is themable. So you can get far if you just know a couple of websites to go to to set things up properly.

Drew, what's the number one one you always tell me to go to for my Reaper stuff? Stash.reaper.fm. And it's also worth noting that not only can you theme it, you can configure just about everything in the workstation as well. So you can put things in different places. You can add different things to your toolbars. The whole thing is just fully extensible, which I know I sound like an ad for Reaper right now, but it's the one thing that lets me do my job on Linux all day, every day.

Now, when you make a really good product and you make it available for Linux as a native binary, and you update it frequently, and you've been doing it for years on Linux, and you only charge $60 for personal use, that you buy loyalty that $60 could never afford you. We're just such huge fans of it. The thing is, and I think, JT, this is what you're noticing, because I suffered from this as well, is there's a lot of hard lessons you've got to learn

when you're doing production on Linux. Like, Pulse Audio is going to fail you a few times. Jack's going to be complicated. You've got to learn a really weird UI in Reaper. And these paper cuts add up to a really frustrating experience, especially when you're used to being really proficient at a particular job. And then you move to do that same job on another platform and you are no longer proficient. You actively seek out all of the things that are not your fault as to why it's bad because, you know, you're frustrated, you're suffering.

And so a lot of times what you see is people go to their blog, their Twitter account, their podcast, and they'll do a kind of a rant and rave. When they're in the midst of that, then you fast forward like a year later. Like we're nearly two years into this transition now, and it's so smoothed out that it's just table stakes now. Like everything, this show is being streamed live on Linux. All of our hosts are connecting in over Linux remotely. I mean I'm in Raleigh, North Carolina, and I'm using all Linux to do this right now. It's being recorded on Linux.

It gets edited on Linux. It's the whole thing from top to bottom of what I feel like are some of the best podcasts on Linux in the world is all produced and done every single day on Linux. It's totally capable. It's just once you get it all figured out and it's no longer a frustrating topic, you just don't talk about it as much because, you know, it's old news. Yeah, and that's why it's doubly hard, right? I mean, if you're trying to learn

how to do a bunch of audio production work on Linux, you have to learn two things at the same time. And all the tools and examples are targeting those other platforms. And experts are already used to assembling their own tools in this domain, right? So they just go tune their preferences and get to work and the rest of us are left wondering how they make it all happen. Yeah. And the other thing that can be,

there's a creative element to this too. And if what you're doing is like you want to make music and you just want to have a creative expression and you're mashing your face against your tools, it's really kind of an impedance mismatch. You want to creatively express. You don't want to go do a deep dive and learn. So what I have found is for me to really learn a new tool, it has to be a project that I'm starting fresh with. Fresh project, maybe it's not under a massive deadline, so I can learn the tool as I learn the project. And that's the best way to make a transition. And that's the best way to make a transition. And I am applying that very logic to Reaper.

There's a new project we're working on, and I'm going to use Reaper for it. I'm going to make myself use Reaper, and I'll learn it that way. Oh, that makes me happy. I know, it's great, isn't it? It's fun because we get to geek out. We're all geeking out on different Linux audio tricks now. So it's just something to consider. And if you get frustrated, I have something to help you Zen out. It's called ZFrag. We got two app picks this week, and this first

one's silly, but it's so awesome. If you've switched to Linux from Windows and you've missed defragging your hard drive, well, friends, I've got a fake application for you. It's a fake DOS display of defragging your hard drive. There's an interactive version and an automated version where it just sits there and does a fake DOS style defrag for all day, every day. That's all it does. Oh man, there's an automated, I missed that. I'm just sitting here in the studio. I've been doing it while you've been blabbing on about Reaper this whole time. It's very relaxing. I love too that if you're doing it, it measures you too. So it shows you how far you've

completed and then the elapsed time. Maybe you make it a race if you're feeling a little too relaxed. Our Windows and Mac using friends aren't left out too. There's a download for them as well. You just kind of find the auto defrag mode and then just sit back and enjoy the show. It's a little bit of nostalgia.

You just need then like a little hard drive seeking sound effect. You know, as it's moving all the stuff around. That's sort of perfect. So check out ZFrag. The URL is not friendly for air, so you're just going to have to get it from the show notes. And then Cheesy coming in with old Meshroom, which looks like

some high-end stuff. This is really cool. And it's open source. Yeah. So Meshroom, and I just started getting into photogrammetry, which is basically where you use photos to help you determine distances and depths, and you can use it for mapping and those sorts of things. But you could also say, use it if you wanted to take a bunch of photos of your boss and create a bobblehead of his head. Sorry, what? Yeah, exactly. Oh, we do want to do that.

So I was just looking at some different photogrammetry tools to do this with, and I came across this one, Meshroom. It's produced by Alice Vision. They also have another application and it looks like they support Windows and Linux. I'm so sorry, Mac folks, but you should take a look at it if you're into photogrammetry. If you're not into it, maybe you have a 3D printer and you want to do something different and you could, you know, go to some statue in your town and take a ton of photos of it and use this mesh room to put it all together and 3D print an object for yourself. Oh, man. Now I'm never going to hear the end of it from Alex. This whole week he's been trying to get me to get a 3D printer.

Now it's my excuse. There's life before 3D printing and life after. Well, you just have to find space in the rig for it, I guess. I think I could fit it, because I'm sitting next to Alex's right now in his studio here, and now I understand why when he's on the Lepo show, you can hear his printer, because it's within arm's reach of

the microphone. It's pretty cool. I think that would totally fit in the RV, too. There's really no excuse. I could put that in a storage bay. I'd like to have a 3D printer in a storage bay. Like a replicator bay. You could 3D print some storage for your 3D printer totally that would be nice

you know yeah some meta boxes that's what I'll call them alright well before we get out of here just a couple of bits of business

everything's over at linuxunplugged.com of course check out the self-hosted show couple other things to check out go listen to our friends over at Ubuntu Podcast.

They're not here this week, but they're still great, so we'll give them a plug. Of course, TechSnap with Mr. Wes Payne and Jim Salter from Ars Technica. Check out TechSnap. Better than ever, you guys are killing TechSnap. So if you haven't listened to TechSnap for a while, go grab that. And of course, go listen to Choose Linux with both Drew and L on it and Joe. He's on there. Great show.

Always some fun distributions you guys are trying out. Do you want to give any teasing for the one that's coming up this week since you guys are likely in the know? Sure. So we're going to be talking about Slackle. That's a distribution based on Slackle. It's based on Slackware and Salix. Sorry, yeah, Drew, it sounds like you're saying Slackle. That doesn't make any sense.

I'm sorry, Drew. That's what you get when Drew drinks. That's the name of the distro. Oh, okay. So it's based on Slackware, huh? Yeah. Cool. I'll definitely check that out. I always do. So there's that. And also, I'm going to give one more plug because I'm feeling generous Yeah. Cool. I'll definitely check that out. I always do. So there's that.

And also, I'm going to give one more plug because I'm feeling generous today. You've got to go check out User Air. And then tweet myself and at Joe Resington, top or bottom bunk, after you listen to User Air. I've got to know. All right. That's all the plugging I have. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm at Chris LAS.

He's at Wes Payne. The network is at Jupiter Signal. Be sure to check out selfhosted.show next week, and we will see you next Tuesday. So Cassidy, so welcome. You just got back a little bit ago from Quaddick. Thanks for making it on the show, man. Quaddick was incredible. It was my second year this year, and we were in Greece on the beach. Oh, it's hard to beat that.

Yeah, it was so good. So, Quaddick, is it just for g uh, gnomies? Like, uh, is it worth like somebody like myself going? I think it's worth anybody who uses gnome or uses stuff that's based on gnome. I mean, elementary is trying to go there every year now and we're not, you know, strictly gnome based, but we work with gnome on stuff. So it's just a lot of really cool people building a lot of really cool stuff and, and sharing what they're working on. How big of a presence is Endless there? They're always there. I don't know. I think there's like a handful of people there always. Man, I wish they'd have it somewhere where it'd be a little bit easier for me to get to,

and I'd totally go. I think that does sound like it'd be nice. So next year, the two intense... So they bid for the location every year. One of the bids is for Mexico. I forget what city, but it's somewhere in Mexico, which is a little closer for me to get to. Yeah, I could probably make the one in Mexico. That sounds really fun. Yeah, that sounds great. You know, I mean, if it has to be in a nice location with great weather, I mean, that's, yeah, I mean, that's okay, I guess. Will rough it?

No, we have to. Well, I'm really glad you've enjoyed it. And it does seem like it does seem like it's pretty important for elementary to be there because like you said,

you don't use Gnome Shell. I'm trying to say Gnome this episode. But you do use a lot of the stack, like a lot of the stack, don't you? Yeah, we use like

basically all the underlying stuff, just a different UI. So it's really important that things like GTK and GLib are being developed, not just with GNOME in mind, but with these other downstreams like XFCE and elementary. I got a funny, just anecdotal story for you. Not that it really matters, but I just thought it was interesting. I decided to reinstall my wife's XPS 13 from Kubuntu, which had been great, but just some things

had collected over time. And I thought, let's do a fresh install. And I put her on the latest elementary with it. It's even got the new login, which looks really slick. And she felt like I upgraded her whole computer. She felt like it was a more professional, elegant experience. She really took to it a lot more than I thought she would. So it's two of my family now on elementary OS.

You're next. You know what? I could see it. I could definitely see it. Yeah, well, and I run it myself, and I'm also a supporter. So I think JB is definitely covering the elementary aspect with private machines. That's for sure. There you go.

Yeah, we do. We love it. Well, I'm glad you made it. Thanks for coming today. Yeah, absolutely. I also just got back from somewhere kind of neat. Just a little bit before the show, Alex arranged a tour of Red Hat Tour. He works at Red Hat on OpenShift as part of his day job over there.

And so he called him up and said, hey, I'd like to give this podcaster guy a tour of Red Hat Tower in downtown Raleigh. I'd like to give this podcaster guy a tour of Red Hat Tower in downtown Raleigh. And after some back and forth, as happens with PR departments and whatnot, they arranged it for us. I got to go there. And let me tell you, this office is decked out with glass gates and they have a badge culture. I mean the security around this place is top notch. There is a real culture around everybody badges in. Even if somebody holds the door open for you, you still badge in. Well, you don't want stragglers.

Come on. You get your picture printed on your guest badge. But a beautiful office. Like, not only just like high quality interior stuff, but beautiful displays, glass artwork, huge open windows, interesting different kind of workspaces, and of course, cafeterias and snacks. Lots of snacks. Lots of snacks. But there was one thing that Alex had his eyes on 10 minutes after we got there. And this was part of that sandwich that they made for me earlier.

What is it, Alex? What is this? He goes and he buys a sauce from the cafeteria. It's so funny because if you get the sauce anywhere else, you've got to pay an arm and a leg. I've got to deal with the cafeteria guy. He sells me a big pot of Chipotle gourmets for $10. They get the hookup here.

So they got the food system, which is all sort of a discount or subsidized, however you want to put it. But, Wes, get ready for this perk. Are you ready for this? Ooh, tell me, tell me. They've got a post office. No, just like right there? In the building. You go up to it, you give them something you need to ship, they'll weigh it,

they'll box it, they'll ship it, and then the cost of the postage is subsidized. No! How does that make sense? That's incredible. I tell you what, that's a serious perk. It's almost making me want to send mail. I know. You know how I hate sending mail, but I mean, come on, right? That seems pretty serious. That seems legitimate. So I was pleasantly surprised with my tour. It's a corporate office space, but it's one with a lot of

accoutrements, a lot of nice accoutrements. I was really impressed. Like, it's a pretty nice place to work, it seems. And you have one of the best views of downtown Raleigh from this Red Hat Tower. It even has a red hat. And happy to report, they are so on point with the branding. You know the new Red Hat logo? They've even updated the signs in the parking garage.