LINUX Unplugged - 318: Manjaro Levels Up

Episode Date: September 11, 2019

It’s official, Manjaro is a legitimate business; so what happens next? We chat with Phil from the project about the huge news. Plus we share some big news of our own and the strange feels we get from Chrome OS. Special Guests: Brent Gervais, Ell Marquez, and Philip Muller.

Chris, have you heard the good news? KDE's working on modernizing Kate, their text editor. Oh yeah, I love Kate. It's great. So what does modernizing it mean, though? What does a text editor need? Okay, well, they say they want to make it more like Atom. Does that mean they're rewriting it in Electron?

Let's hope not. Hello, friends, and welcome in to Linux Unplugged 3.18. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Wes. Big show. Huge show. Too big, maybe. I know. It's an oversized show. We've got an oversized load.

We're one of those podcasts going down the road right now, and we have somebody ahead of us and behind of us saying, hey, this podcast is too big. Wildly swerving all around. That's how we do. Well, coming up, we'll have some really interesting community news, as well as Phil, one of the co-founders of Manjaro, will be joining us to talk about their big announcement. They're going and really taking Manjaro to what would probably be described as an entirely new era for the distribution. It's a big deal.

So he'll be on in just a little bit. We have a little bit of news we want to share ourselves this week. Sure do. And then something big is happening for Chromebooks that melts my brain a little bit. In the beta channel right now, on Chrome OS, you can choose between Debian, Ubuntu, or Fedora for your Linux user land.

And once you choose that, you get the full stack. You get the package manager. You can install applications, even graphical ones. They get added to the Chrome OS launcher. It's a full integration story, Wes. Can you say year of the Linux desktop, anyone? So we thought, let's go back in time to the origination, the launch of Chrome OS. How it all began.

We'll cover that a little bit and then talk about this huge change. But before we get any further, we got to say good morning to Cheesy. Hello, Cheese. Hello, Internet. How are you? Hello. Good, good. And time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug.

Hello, Mumble Room. Hello. Happy Linux Tuesday, everyone. Happy Linux Tuesday to you too, Jill. Hello to Brent and Bruce and Byte and Al and Jill and Lord Desk and Minimech and TechMav. Alt, so that he might have a goatee. And, of course, Turth is in there, too. And we start out with something pretty fun.

We got a package that arrived in the studio this week. And I'm looking at that box, Wes, and I'm thinking that's something from System 76. Sure looks like it. Do you want to do a live unboxing here on the show? I mean, I've been having to resist opening it up all day. All right, Wes Payne, let's do it. Come on now, get to that big box. Inside this, it looks like it's shaped.

I like how he's really going at it. You're really excited. There's no time to waste. He's been waiting for this. What are you seeing, Wes? Okay, well, they're characteristic. Lovely interior box art. That's no time to waste. He's been waiting for this. What are you seeing, Wes? Okay, well, their characteristic lovely interior box art, that's of course here. Oh, they've got good instructions, and I see a beefy rig. Yeah, that's right.

Ladies and gentlemen, in the box from System76 arriving in the studio is one of their Adder workstation laptops. It's well packaged in that there's a lot of plastic between me and it that I'm currently working on getting through. So what's neat about that is you can fold it such and that plastic gives and it makes it really easy to do recycling too. So you can pull that cardboard out, you let the bottoms out and it releases the plastic and the laptop slides right out. It's a really clever packaging system that they have. So the Adder workstation is a laptop that they say is really built for content creators, researchers, and gamers.

It's a 15-inch large screen. It's got an RTX 2070 in it, an 8-core Intel i9 CPU. So we'll see what we got here. Oh, yeah, there you go. He got it out. It's free. What's the first impression? It's thick, but it's not huge for something this massive.

It looks like some solid speakers right there underneath. That stands out. And, you know, not as many ports as I might have expected. Well, check the back. One of the things they do is they put a lot of the big ports in the back, which I think that's an old tradition that should have never gone away. Power cord, HDMI port, it's all in the back, so your big cables are not side to side, and I really like that.

Yeah, nice-looking keyboard, good depth of travel on the keys, at least it cables are not side to side, and I really like that. Yeah, nice looking keyboard, good depth of travel on the keys, at least it feels like so far. Yeah, and that screen is looking good. So we'll give this the full kick of the tires. If you have any suggestions or questions about a workstation laptop like this, let us know. Tweet me at chrisles or go to linuxunplugged.com contact and send your questions. And so we're sending that to the lab now to kick it off and see how it performs. What the hell is that? That's the sound from the lab.

Is that a truck? We'll let that go. We'll let that pass. Are we planning to benchmark this through the test suite or something like that to kind of see where we're at on it? Oh, yes. One of the things I've done, Cheesy, is I've benchmarked, you know, the machines that have been in here over the years, but also all of our studio machines.

So it's really cool. I can compare how systems that come in due to previous systems we reviewed, but also how they compare just to our existing boxes. So I can get an idea of like, if we were to say, replace a studio production machine with this piece of hardware, we could see this level of improvement. That's pretty fun because we've had some monster systems in here. So it's always interesting to see where they'll sort of rate on the leaderboard, if you will. Now, what do you say we get into a little community news here, Wes Payne?

It's about time. The one that I think a lot of people were surprised by in the community this week was Richard Stallman at the Microsoft Redmond campus giving a talk. Yes, Microsoft invited the free software legend, Richard Stallman, to speak at the Microsoft Research Headquarters this week. Microsoft Azure's Chief Technology Officer, Mark Rosinovich, tweeted earlier this week, September 5th, that Richard Stallman visited the campus and gave a talk at the Microsoft Research Lab.

Yeah, we've got a few inside details from someone at Microsoft. He basically said Stallman gave a standard talk, you know, covering the importance of free software, GPL version 3, GNU versus Linux. Although it sounds like he also had a list of what he called small requests. Make GitHub push users to use better software license hygiene, make hardware manufacturers publish their hardware specs, and last but not least, make it easier to work around Secure Boot.

I like that one still on the list. Yeah, I think the rest of us forgot about it. Yeah, I did kind of move on. But RMS never forgets. He's like a dog with a bone on that kind of stuff. He really, like, he'll follow a cause to the end. Get it out of here. Also in Microsoft news,

the first Windows subsystem for Linux conference has been announced. That's how you know it's real. It's actually taking place right in our neck of the woods, Chris. It's going to be March 10th and 11th, 2020, at Building 20 on the Microsoft HQ in Redmond, Washington. Now, it's still coming together, but we already know it's going to have presentations

from Penguin, Whitewater's Linux for Windows, of course, Microsoft's Windows subsystem for Linux team, and some folks from Canonical. Hmm. I guess what, too. Rumor has it Wes Payne's going to be there as well. I think I just will. As well as myself, yeah.

I've already talked with Hayden Barnes, the founder of Whitewater Foundry, and he's one of the individuals working on this, and he would love to have you guys there. And previous guest on the show. And it's just a run down the old freeway for us, really. It'll be interesting to see this sort of newer community of users take shape, right? I mean, this is all kind of out in the open. It's happening. A lot of it's based on an open source, but it's a new generation. Yeah, it was pretty surprising when I emailed their PR and I got a response back from Hayden himself like, oh, well, okay, great. It's really cool to see this becoming super serious, too. I have a sense that it's no coincidence that

Canonical's name is on that list. I think they're taking it more seriously, too. So we'll see where that goes in the future. But this week, there's one story I think that really got people's attention. Pretty big deal for a little Linux distro that could. It started out as an alternative to Arch, and now it's really developed into some favorite desktop Linux. Well, this week, Manjaro announced that they're taking the next step. Phil joins us. He is one of the co-founders of Manjaro. He was there when it was a hobby project, and now he's here to join us to talk about this big announcement. Phil, welcome back to the show. Hello. Hello, sir, and congratulations on the big announcement. Yeah, it was pretty big, and a lot of effort went into that,

and a lot of man hours as well, and finally we're there. I imagine it takes many months of effort behind the scenes to get a company established, to make agreements with certain parties, and work out details. This must have been an area of some focus. Sure, we had a lot of airplane tickets, hotel stays, and work out details. This must have been an area of some focus. Sure. We had a lot of airplane tickets, hotel stays,

and business talks with several people over there, even with lawyers and accountants and whatever is needed to get a company started. So this has been in the works for a while. My first thoughts from the headlines of this is what we're getting out of this is some more full-time free software developers. How many people are getting employed as part of this? Well, at the start, it's two people. One is Bernard Landauer, who is from Austria.

And second is me. So we are becoming the heads of the company, both acting as CEOs. And from then, we will see who we employ. Now, a little tease. Right now in the books, we plan to have Bernard on next week to follow up on another topic.

But while we have you, Phil, I know Blue Systems is involved to some level. Can you share what their involvement is? Well, they're our advisor and helped us to create the company. And as you know, Blue Systems is in all areas of open source, and we are proud to have them on board. Yeah, they seem like they have taken on helping a lot of projects, and this is another great one on their list now.

Also, I believe some aspects of the Linux Foundation are involved, as far as donation transparencies and some of those tools, correct? Yes, it's thanks to Jonathan, who is one of our community leaders. He is gaining to secure all the donations we gain so far. So in the past, it's me who is taking the risk and the full responsibility for all the donations collected by the project.

And now it's the perfect time to give that over to non-profit organizations like Open Collective or the Linux Foundation, in this case, the Community Bridge. Okay, so there's been some confusion

in the early reporting around this. So I kind of want to make sure we get the details about this. So what is the story? Because there's, I think, confusion about where existing donations are going and these types of things. Well, in the past, it's on my personal bank account, so we couldn't give you tax deductions and such things. give you tax deductions and such things and the confusion might be because our company has a chipperish name like gmbh and coca-g which is an in uk terms lp if that is a thing which helps you out and people think it's non-profit as garden Gardner & Londuk says before on a YouTube channel. But we are a full-spectrum profit company now.

All right. And that's good to be clear about because, A, it's good to know what the donations go towards. But also, B, it means that in the future, it gives you avenues to explore. I mean, I'm just speculating, but other commercial ventures as well that are outside the core distribution itself, but perhaps hardware partnerships or other ventures, right? Right. So we are in talks with several other partnerships, also hardware vendors already, which will be exploring the ARM and the standard Intel AMD area as well. Oh, I'd love to know more about that when it gets closer. Okay, so what happens to existing donations, like say the Patreon right now?

Does that go away? Do they get directed towards the company? What happens in the future with that kind of stuff? Actually, I don't know of any Patreon. So if we have some Patreon, then some of the community has created that on their own, but it's not related to us. There is a page. Really? It's for the ARM community. There is a page. Really?

It's for the ARM community. There's a Manjaro ARM. They have it. They have it. It's a sister project. It's leaded by Dan, and Dan explored a lot of opportunities. And if Patreon is one of them,

sure, go for them. I think they have also an open collective one beside us. So let's say they explored a little bit earlier what they can do. But in the end, the main project will support ARM as well. So yeah, if we have a patron, then sure. That goes towards those efforts there individually. That makes sense. Right.

So I guess I just kind of wanted to shift gears to a personal side of this. So I guess I just kind of wanted to shift gears to a personal side of this. This must be a huge moment for you to take something that's been a passion project and convert it to A, a legitimate business with transparency towards funding, and B, a full-time job. And I just kind of wanted to get your state of mind on all of this right now well and in the past i was uh in sales so i know all about how to get a business started and such so i actually learned that uh past then i went to it i worked for big companies like bmw ardi and other automotive companies in the past for several years and the last was for public relations or the public industry where it's like more slow down to relax a little bit but my main project was always manchara on site and there was a point where i said okay is there a way to get it to main job or the main task as i do it anyway to have more free time for other things. And with Blue Systems, we got that chance and we took it. Congratulations. I remember that moment when I

was able to take my passion, the thing I really worked on and push it over into the full-time employment threshold. And it's a big moment. And you realize that once you get your feet underneath you, there's a lot of opportunity that opens up. It could mean fascinating things for the future of the project, and I wonder if you think it also isn't a bit of the statement of the popularity of both the distribution, but also desktop Linux itself. Yeah, we are community-centric, and that is always community first, and we want to keep that as that way.

Sure, we have to make our decisions in the commercial part of the entity, but for the community itself, Manchow will always be free. We'll always gain the updates, as you know, and now we'll get more supportive. And if a company is interested in some business support, we are now able to do that. So it's more a win-win situation for that. What a moment. What a great moment. And like I said

earlier, it means more people working on free software. So that's great. It really solidifies the distribution, right? Yeah. Montreal is here to stay. Yeah, really. It's a big moment. It's reaching another threshold of legitimacy in the distribution world. And I'm just really thrilled for you guys. And I think what we're going to do after this call is we're going to, for a week,

try to get all of our work done on Manjaro. You ready? Oh, yeah, let's do it. There's a USB right here. We'll just get it burned today. Alright, so we'll report back in the next episode and see how it goes. You've inspired us with all of this, Phil. Yeah, it's always like we started an operating system what was useful for us.

More people come to the group and started to develop some tools like PAMAC or the Manjaro hardware tools and other tools which make the life of everyone using Linux in general easier. And our tools were always UI driven, so easy to use. And we see a lot of Windows users enjoying Linux and some of them coming to Manjaro. So it's a plus. And we all see that also in the forum. So when we announced we are a company, we actually crashed it. So we are now currently working on getting a better server, more horsepower to compensate everybody's going to the beloved forum and gain their knowledge out of it.

That must be a big part of the mission ahead, right, is factoring in some infrastructure improvements over time. I think I saw you mentioned some of that in the announcement. Sure. One of the things we plan is more continuous integration. So all our ISOs we produce should be automatically tested, which gain also more quality itself. That's great. And we can produce them faster in a more related way. That is really great.

I think this also reflects a great kind of common thing that happens in open source and a great kind of like, will it make it or will it not kind of make it story. A project starts out and you'll hear common myths come up about a project. Oh, it's just it's delayed arch. And it's like this really kind of sum the whole thing down to one variable and dismiss it kind of argument. And people will just stick to that for a long time.

But you guys stuck to it. You clearly had a vision. And you followed it. You made choices. You clearly had a vision and you followed it. You made choices like we recently had that conversation around free office that pushed the distribution forward in certain areas and you make compromises when you feel like the community made a good point. And so by sticking to that vision, by making something that truly solved problems for people and by working with the community when they made a fair point and compromising, I think you've kind of come on something special and unique, and it's I think it's reflected in this as well.

Well, Phil, again, congratulations, and look forward to seeing where the project goes next. This is the beginning of a whole new era. Sure. And I hope we'll talk to you soon. Now that we've chatted with Phil, I think next week we'll get a chance to chat with Bernard. Oh, looking forward to it. And we'll talk to you soon. Now that we've chatted with Phil, I think next week we'll get a chance to chat with Bernard. Oh, looking forward to it.

And we'll have Ran Mangero. I'm going to try out some of the Community Edition stuff. I think it's going to be... We sure do love making promises for ourselves. I know. We like throwing work at it, but at least it's fun stuff. And it's been a while since. I mean, I'm looking forward to it.

Yeah, same. I'm really excited for them. You know, more people working on free software is always good. Absolutely. And, you know, in the past we've kind of talked about how do you make, you know, these distros that we worry about. Do we have too many distributions? Are they just sort of small independent people working on an operation? This is a big step solidifying them, showing that Mandreau is serious about being around for a long time.

Yeah, they'll be here for a while, which I think is probably the biggest takeaway from that story. All right, well, let's make a little news ourselves. We like to do that every now and then. I am pretty excited to say time goes by really fast when you're having fun. This Thursday will be our one-year anniversary with Linux Academy. Happy birthday! Isn't that something? Does it feel like it's been that long?

No, not really. I mean, it's a weird mix of it just happened and it's been this way forever. And I have no idea how long it's been. Right. Which means it's been just over a bit of a year for Elle at Linux Academy. So happy birthday, belated birthday to you too, Elle.

Thank you very much. So we are celebrating with the launch of Self Hosted. It's sort of a reverse birthday thing. We give you presents. That's how it works in the internet, man. That's definitely how it works. Self Hosted launches episode one on Thursday the 12th. Now Selfhosted has probably some of the most experience we've ever, like as a team, we all, we went through a sprint. We've really thought a lot about this and it's been a really, really rewarding process. And a huge shift for me because before this merger, a lot of times, all of the creative decisions were unilaterally just made by me.

Right. I mean, you're the guy running the whole thing. Like, the idea of Tech Talk today, from concept to launch, happened in two hours on a Monday. Wow. I, like, on the drive to work, I got there and was like, hey, Rekhi, do you think we could do this? And he's like, what if we did this? I'm like, what if we did this? And then it was just like, then, like, the next thing was like, hey, Rikai, do you think we could do this? And he's like, what if we did this? I'm like, what if we did this? And then it was just like, then like the next thing was like, hey, Ange, can you have somebody go get us some art?

And like the whole thing just kind of just snowballs, right? But now we're much more deliberate because we want to measure twice and cut once. We know we're going to put a lot of effort into whatever we decide to make, right? So we got to get it right. It's a real commitment, right? So really self-hosted is our show where you can discover software and hardware to get the most out of the devices on your network. Like control your smart devices, build things offline,

take things that are available in the cloud and build them for yourself using open source software. But use the cloud, leverage it where it's appropriate, where it makes sense. Be able to integrate, use the abilities that are there, but make sure that you stay in control. Exactly. That's really the key of it. So I'm very excited about self-hosted. Episode one is this Thursday. It's Alex and myself. And then episode two, it's a twice a month podcast because we know there's a lot of shows out there. So we're trying to make really good shows and not

overwhelm you. And, you know, there's always room for things to increase, but we wanted to make sure that we really got this right, gave ourselves time to work on it. So then episode two with Wendell from Level 1 Techs comes out on Thursday the 24th, if I'm doing my date math right. I think you are. So it's every other Thursday. Selfhosted.show slash subscribe. If you want to get it, it'll be out this Thursday. Oh, man.

Launching a new show. There's really nothing like it. Good job, everybody. Now, what if we wanted to ask questions? Say we had our own self-hosted questions and we wanted to direct them to you guys to possibly address on the show. How would we do that? Why cheesy? That's such a great question.

You could tweet them at us with a hashtag Ask SSH or a telegram and put that in there in the telegram message. And we'll get in a future show. Awesome. So, yeah, that's something we're something we'll be doing thank you for bringing that up plus there's also the contact page self-hosted.show contact but what if what if we wanted to launch two shows this week no that's crazy yeah it's crazy now we're gonna do it actually we've decided we're launching two shows there's another show we're launching that we haven't told you about it's actually already launched two episodes are out already as we record this. Look at this. Isn't this fun?

Linuxheadlines.show. Linuxheadlines.show. Linux and open source headlines every weekday in under three minutes. How about that? That's it. That's the show. Ladies and gentlemen, very excited about the new project. I think I got to do an extras

episode that tells the history of this, but this is something we have been trying to crack this formula since before the merger. Oh yeah, a long time. It's something that Joe and I kicked around for a very, very long time. We've done internal pilots that we've canceled, but now we've decided to really go into this and really commit. So we're launching two new shows this week. Check out linuxheadlines.show. Every weekday, the headlines you care about in three minutes or less. It really is a testament to how much has changed

and the great support from Linux Academy that we actually have the ability to do this and feel like we can get it right and launch two shows in a single week. Yeah, we have a whole team behind us. It really makes a difference. It really does. And the idea here is you can get just the headlines.

You pop it on before you listen to a longer show. We're going to target it for an afternoon drive release. So we closely monitor the news, and then we have a process we go through to select which goes into the headlines, and we'll try to get it out for your afternoon drive on the East Coast. How great.

Are you excited? Yeah, right. You're busy at work all day. You just check in. You go subscribe. Yeah. And we'll publish to the smart tubes as well, so you'll get it as part of your flash briefing if you like. That's all in the process right now.

It works great in that capacity. And, of course, we're putting everything we know to try to make it sound good so it's a good sounding, clean, crisp, tight show with links for more information if you want to read it, like we always do. Of course. You guys know we got a minimum standard we're going to meet, and it's going to be great. So we are now in a position where we've got Linux Unplugged that covers the community stories, the ones we can really get something going about, something we can chew on. A nice conversation.

Then you got Linux Action News, which covers the stories in Linux and open source every week that really need analysis, that need further discussion. And that's, you know, five or six headlines that we've got further expansion and a lot of research. We generally have contacted people involved with the stories. Good analysis, keeping you

up with, you know, threads that happen over time. And then headlines keeps you current on the daily updates in the Linux and open source world, right there. And I just, I feel like we've really come up with something great. It's, we've boiled it down to the essential thing you need just to get in and get out.

We're not wasting your time. Yeah, not a bunch of fluff or anything. And we try to make sure, you know, we're human, so we're still learning, but we try to make sure we have something really good out of the gate. We've been practicing for a little bit, and I think we got it. I think we do. Linuxheadlines.show slash subscribe to get that RSS feed.

I am so thrilled. We've been trying to crack the daily show format for a long time. You know, there's a lot of different ways you can go. You can overdo it with campy music and trying to, like, emulate radio. And you can under-deliver by being too dry and too boring, and you want to have some insights into what the audience is interested in. It's a big problem domain to solve, and do it right. LinuxHeadlines.show.

Go check it out. Very proud. And SelfHosted.show, first episode comes out on Thursday. Linux Headlines are already publishing. We started publishing on Monday. So if you've got six minutes, you can get all caught up. It's easy. It's really great. And that's the great

thing, too. It's like it's not impossible just to get it on the ground floor on both these shows. Self-hosted is coming out twice a month, so that's not going to overwhelm you. And Linux Headlines is three minutes. So it's I appreciate that there's a lot to listen to these days. Right.

We do. We very much do. But we responded accordingly and we're trying to make something that's still consumable and worth your time. And of course, we'll have links

in the show notes too at linuxunplugged.com slash 318. Big pat on the back for everybody. Everybody on the team. We've been really, we've been whittling away

at this problem. And sometimes, you know, like we had a few ideas that we really loved. We were like ready to publish. Really close. Really close. And we had to say, no, it's not good enough. Just got to get it right. Pretty excited.

So go check those out. Linuxheadlines.show and selfhosted.show. Now, before we get into our Chrome OS discussion, and we haven't even mentioned the machine that we put this Frankenstein Chrome OS install on. Yeah, you're right. There's a certain irony to it. We'll have to get to that. But let's do a little housekeeping. There's some good things to cover here.

First of all, new audio stream. We had some troubles with our JBLive.fm. So if you want to tune into this here show live or any of our live shows, JBLive.stream now. They'll take you right to the M3U file. Yeah, high quality, low latency, just right in your ears. I like it. Wes, you should do like a slogan that we play on the live stream.

Oh, yeah, right, each time it starts up. You're listening to JBLive.stream. High quality, low latency, right in your ears. Oh. Coming up. I kind of like that, dude. I think maybe you should do it there, Chris. Anyway, so we're trying to get the FM URL working because it's hard-coded into some apps and stuff.

But JBLive.stream, pop that in your browser or VLC, and it'll play the audio stream for you. It's going 24-7, but we do this show live on Tuesdays at 2 p.m. Pacific. So if you want to join us, jblive.stream, and it's jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar to get that converted in your time zone. Quick reminder, new courses in the month of September and details about those courses will have linked in the show notes. And another thing to keep on your radar, Texas Cyber Summit is coming up. It's coming up. And there's the Be New track. What should we plug about Texas Cyber Summit this week, Elle? We're going to be there. That's worth

mentioning. There is so much going on that it's hard to just kind of focus on one thing. But the one thing that I really want to announce is the fact that we're going to be doing some ticket giveaways for people to kind of stay tuned and, you know, come and join us and have a great time at the conference and the birthday party. Absolutely. The birthday party, too. Details about that, meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting. Texas Cyber Summit, October 10th through the 12th

at the Grand Hyatt. Should be a great time. Should be. It's been a little while since we've been to Texas. I know. We're missing it. You know, we're going to be going just as it starts getting real crappy here. So that's good timing.

Yeah, that will be. Then we come back and it's like, evil crap, that's true. There's also a Texas Cyber Summit Telegram group if you want to get on that business. We have that linked in the show notes as well. So get all of that, linuxunplugged.com slash 318. That's everything for the housekeeping.

Boy, Chrome OS really does seem like it's becoming the de facto desktop Linux. Because if you go by definitions of years past, to be desktop Linux, quote unquote, we threw out a lot of definitions. And there's a couple that really stuck. One, you should be able to go to, like, your big box consumer store and buy a laptop with it running on there. Absolutely Chrome OS meets that criteria, no doubt about it. But one that Wimpy threw out a while back in the past, episode 296 of this here show, at 37 minutes into the show, Wimpy mentions that to be truly a desktop

Linux operating system, you need to have the ability to download the source code of the kernel and compile it and install it and reboot and load it yourself. That we weren't so sure if Chrome OS was going to meet that particular criteria, but that may be up for some debate now. So before we go too far into this, I want to go back in time, if you will allow us, go way back in time to the Linux Action Show in 2011. Brian and I were covering a Google I.O. keynote, one of their early ones. And Chrome OS had been announced. And we were trying to figure out what to make of this all right so here's the one that i think we'll touch on first is now chrome os because that's that's linux that's a

linux machine and so chrome os i got a i got a bit of a bit of a fanfare at google io and uh one of the things that i thought was interesting is uh was it sergey right from the one of the uh sergey brin the head dude now over there at google came out and said that uh one of the reasons they're launching chrome os is because standard desktop operating systems, Windows implied, standard desktop OSs are torturing users. Torturing users, Wes. That's what past Chris said. Outstanding. That's a strong sell.

And now, and keep in mind, when Chrome OS launched, it was a totally different thing. Now, it's capable of running desktop applications from Linux. Chrome itself can do much more. The web is much more capable. Connectivity is more common. In 2011, Wi-Fi was just simply not as prevalent as it is today in the States. Just about every kind of medium-sized town will have some coffee shop with Wi-Fi. I mean, the limitations have become less, and Chrome OS has grown a lot of new abilities.

Exactly. And Google has grown in influence. So it's been something to watch Chrome OS over the years go from toy that we kind of mocked a little bit. When you watch that full episode, we're pretty harsh on it. that we kind of mocked a little bit. When you watch that full episode, we're pretty harsh on it. We mock the 100 megabytes of data bandwidth allocation.

We mock the lack of storage. We mock the idea that you'd ever use something in the web when you're offline. Like we really kind of have a go at it. And while I actually feel like the criticisms that are brought up in that 2011 episode

are still valid today, it's clear it hasn't been a huge barrier for the market. Right. More of them keep getting made, getting sold, and people are using them. And something that I don't think we fully appreciated in 2011 that we now in 2019 just have a foregone conclusion, education. Education changed all of this. I had a conversation with my son, because I knew we were going to be talking about this.

He's been issued a Chromebook since the second grade. He had them in kindergarten, but they were just shared in the classroom. They would put them back in a storage unit. But since second grade, he's in fifth grade now, since second grade, he's had his own assigned Chromebook. He is signed in with the same Google account. He has opted to change his password a couple of times, but I'm not even sure if that's been

necessary. Talking to him really, it made me realize that where you have institutions where they have scale and they have enterprise grade connectivity, at least close to it, those concerns about the cloud basically almost completely go away. Well, I mean, I can tell you personally that my wife uses Chromebooks in her classroom, and they have what they call a Chromebook cart. So all the Chromebooks go back into the cart where they're charged up at the end of the day, the cart gets, you know, pushed against the wall or whatever, or can be moved to different rooms. She so far loves Google's educational suite. Is it maybe kind of sort of possibly indoctrinating kids to use Chrome OS in the future? Maybe.

Is that maybe a gateway for them to learn a little bit more about Linux? Possibly. So, I mean, I think that there's, you know, it's interesting how they've kind of beat some of the other players in that educational market. And they're really, they just seem to be going crazy right now in that arena. My instinct on that about the indoctrination is it's a little bit of yes and no. I don't know about you guys, but when I was going to school, Apple was really pushing in education. Apple IIs were really common in my school. And then later they were replaced by the Macintoshes, the sort of like the post-Steve Job Macintosh monster machines. Our schools were filled with those.

Did you guys have that? Yeah, I had Macs. But then those were supplanted when Microsoft got into the same game of pushing Windows PCs into schools. So I kind of switched halfway through. Yes. Yeah, I witnessed a little. I witnessed that's a story for an extras one day. I witnessed quite a thing.

But same sort of thing. It was a battle. And even later when I was still in school but became part of the district IT department, as I did back then, there was a split internally in the IT department between Mac and Windows. There were the Mac technicians, and they were a little arrogant. And then there was the Windows technician, and they had contempt for the Mac guys. Well, of course. And it was really something because I was just sort of a universalist. I didn't really care, just liked technology.

And that was what I was into. So I was like, you want me to fix a Mac? That's fine. You hadn't joined a gang yet. Really? You don't mind? No. But you fixed like, you want me to fix a Mac? That's fine. You hadn't joined a gang yet. Like, really? You don't mind? No. But you fixed the Windows computer. I'm like, yeah, that's fine. Of course, I eventually burned out on fixing the Windows computers. And now I've burned out on fixing Macs, so I just stick to Linux. It is interesting though, right? I mean, in some ways, education makes a lot of sense because you

have fewer power users that have special applications that they need to run or support, and you have less sort of embedded other legacy applications existing. So at least for the students, you can have this sort of fresh idea and actually take hold. Well, and from the school district standpoint, you're not dealing with passing around files in a way that is likely to expose the school to malware. Yeah, it's a lot safer by default. Right? Students could take something home.

They could get a USB drive infected, especially when everybody's on Windows. Everybody's heard this story. Bring it back to the school. School gets the virus. Now you got crypto encrypted files everywhere. Then additionally, the school district doesn't have to worry about centralized disk storage for all of the docs and the spreadsheets and the presentations because that's all online in Google Drive. And so that reduces their

investment in server hardware and administration and overhead. So it's a great ongoing cost. Yeah, it's a great cost. It's a big cost for them. Sure, it's an ongoing cost, but it's great. It's fantastic because we don't have to do all these things. And at the end of the day, if a Chromebook breaks, it's on warranty. It's on a service contract and we do all these things. And at the end of the day, if a Chromebook breaks, it's on warranty. It's on a service contract, and we just get it replaced. And we love it when these machines just get swapped out because they'll often just put the newer version in. It's great. It's a pretty good –

and when you're dealing with students who are hard on computers – Right. You don't need a big, expensive machine. You want something light and flexible. Well, I mean, I'm curious as to, you know, because it's obvious that the Chromebook's cheaper than Apple's offering with the iPad. And if you're buying these in bulk for an entire district, you've got to be getting a great deal. And like you said, tag on the extra services. It's really kind of a no-brainer, it seems like, for education these days to gravitate that way. I also think, back to the indoctrination point, there is some benefit in just learning the general concepts of like copy and paste and how spreadsheets work and how docs work and the concept of saving your files.

Those are universal concepts that would apply just as equally to LibreOffice and Office 365. So teaching the students those high-level concepts that they can then apply to other UIs is useful. And I have to make this argument because I was the guy advocating to switch the school district to LibreOffice, and the parents would come to me and they would say, you can't do that.

Our kids are going to go use Office in the real world, and so they have to use Office in the schools. And my counterargument was, that's not true. By using LibreOffice, they will learn these fundamentals that they can apply to any software suite. Well, flip it around. Now something else has come in. Those things are still true.

And they're going to be interacting with other cloud services. They're certainly going to go to Google to actually search the web. So it's sort of inevitable. It does. One thing I've noticed with my two older kids is it indoctrinates a web-first mentality. So Dylan had a little video project that he wanted to edit and a photo.

I think you were here when he wanted to do the Pokemon photo thing. And he was really struggling using a desktop application. And then I realized you know what I could do is I could open up Photopea in a web browser for him. He'll get this. And he just, it was like he was back at home. And I'm sitting there one time trying

to show him Katie in live and he laughs at me. Oh dad, what are you doing? Just open up Chrome. What are you doing? And then of course because this web one has, like, all of these, like, stock search stuff it can do, so, like, it can go get the green screen background for him and all of these things that are so much better

when you have, like, infinite search and all this kind of stuff. And I felt like that was probably the biggest side effect of him spending so much time on Chrome OS is even now when he's on his elementary OS laptop, which is a Dell XPS, he's doing everything in Chrome. But isn't that true of adults too now? People who aren't into

tinkering and playing with computers? Most people open Facebook or play maybe some games on the web, check the news, send email. So if this is the common consumer use of Linux, when you look at all the school uses, when you look at average people that buy them, the fact that you can get them from a store, it's kind of Linux for the masses, much like Android was. And now it's even easier because

you loaded a project on a very ironic piece of hardware. So tell people about what this is and what machine we put it on. Yeah, okay. So this is CloudReady, which is a distribution basically of Chrome OS or maybe Chromium. You know, they use the upstream sources for Chromium OS and then build and ship their own. Now we're using the free edition,

but they also provide commercial editions that gets you their support and also integration with all of Google's enterprise e-management sort of features. Take that in for a second. So they are reselling a version of Chromium OS with their commercial support. And the appeal is you can essentially install it on any x86 machine. Yeah. I mean, it kind of worked just like any other Linux distribution. Downloaded the file. I used Etcher to write it to a flash drive, got here, booted it up on the Librem 15.

The what? You know, the Librem 15. Turns out it makes a great Chromebook. Yeah, it does. The Librem 15 really made it great. Took a little bit to get installed, but now it's up and running, and we even got the Linux application beta mode enabled. Yeah.

Now, that is, oh, wow. So this is something I'd really been wanting to try for a really long time. Two ways to get to it. If you just launch the search, like, launcher, and type in terminal and hit enter, it just brings up the screen that says, hey, do you want to set up a Linux environment? That's so handy. Or you're just in the settings. You can go to Linux in beta, it has in parentheses, and start, and it loads a Debian 9 environment.

With the full app repository, you quickly install Darktable. Yeah, we got up. We could just edit photos like any Linux desktop. Chrome OS picks up the.desktop file, creates a launcher entry for it. Yeah, it shows up in the launcher at the system level. The appropriate Darktable icon is right there in the Chrome launcher. And you're running it. No weird borders around the window.

It didn't seem super slow or anything. It was normal. Yeah. And now the thing they're taking to the next level is they're letting you choose what distro you want in that environment. Or perhaps, potentially, even possibly, all of them at once. Isn't that crazy? all of them at once. Isn't that crazy?

I mean, like, am I supposed to be attracted to this? I don't know. Is this supposed to be something I'm attracted to? I can't tell anymore. Well, it is. You know, it's kind of on the borderlines now because before it was almost like an appliance, right? Mostly a black box. You weren't going to tweak it too much.

You used it transactionally. You weren't invested. That was the entire point of the Chromebook. The entire point. And now that's a little less true, but only as much as you want it, right? Because you can blow this environment away. All your stuff is still going to be saved to the cloud, right? You have to share folders into this Linux environment. You don't have to go down these rabbit holes. Right. So maybe, you know, I think we've both gone through phases where your workstation can be both a workstation and sort of a toy, a hobby machine.

When you're not looking to do that, right, this might be perfect. You know it's not going to break. You're not going to be able to do an apt-get right before the show and have it not loading to show you the show notes, right? That's my favorite thing to do. But if you want to go install or try to play with some random Linux app, well, you probably could. Or, you know, you want to go install or try to play with some random Linux app, well, you probably could.

Or, you know, you want to get this particular app from Debian, and you want to get that particular app from Fedora, and you can just pick and choose. I mean, it's also embracing a bunch of neat kernel features, right, with containers and such to make all this possible. So that's neat. Both of us were like, yeah, performance seems just fine. Even with something like Darktable, it just seems fine. we're like, yeah, performance seems just fine. Even with something like Darktable, it just seems fine. It does feel like looking out Chrome OS,

it's been probably since 2014, the last time I gave it a serious go. I think it was 2014 when we first got Word of Crouton. I was like, all right, I'll give it a try. Like every time something significant with Linux happens on the Chromebook, I'm like, all right, okay, I'll give it a try. So this time I was like, all right, I'll give it a try. And I go in there and I check it out. And I'm like, it's way more complicated than it used to be. Like, it's got a full desktop now with like a whole different launcher set up.

Like, they have complicated it up a little bit. Right. I mean, it's even got some decent window management. We were splitting windows and dragging them and resizing. Yeah. And it was doing the thing where it'll pair the two windows and then you can just drag that one middle bar and it resizes both of them at the same time. I love that. Slick. I just think that's the best. I kind of liked it.

Yeah. It wasn't bad. I was thinking back when I was in college or similar times where I didn't have a lot of time to mess around, but I was using Linux at the time. This would be fine. I was doing stuff on other servers anyway. If I wanted a little terminal to play with something, it's there.

That's why I like this project you found, because it's a great way to, like, Chrome OS-ify a laptop that you might just, like, keep at the couch or something. For a little while, it was too nice of a machine to leave it like this, but for a little while we had the XPS 13, and we just took it and wedged it between a cushion in the couch. Oh, nice. It sounds really low-tech, but it was perfect because you'd sit there,

and you're like, I just want to look something up real quick. And you'd take out this tiny wedge of a computer, open it up, and do a quick search. And I used it all the time. And I kind of miss having that, but I just couldn't commit to putting something really nice. That just seems like such a waste. Right.

But maybe a Chromebook. Or an old laptop with Cloud Ready on it. Yeah. I mean, I'll give this CloudReady a go. The free version seems perfectly fine. And there's also other projects who I've linked in the show notes that may take those types of installs

and perhaps Chrome OS-ify them as the project space. Yeah, there's various little attempts at making this work to be a little more Linux-y. You know, I was a little off-put at first when you have to install it, and of course you're prompted to log in with your Google account. But that's what happens on other operating systems.

And the nice part is you set it up, we set it up under your account, and I wanted to go play with it, and you were off working somewhere else. I just log in with my Google account, and then suddenly it's my Chromebook too, right? Like, it has all my links, it's signed in, it's ready to go. And, more importantly, we both had our own unique linux

environments so i whatever i'd done in my linux environment whatever i'd set up was not applicable to your account right so you could go in there and set up your own environment and you didn't mess with mine and i that is super nice because you can't even do that on a on a linux box right not by default no no so there is some potential there. It leaves me with this weird feeling because it feels much like the Android situation where it's Linux. It's Linux, but it's... It's reimagined with some of the same base parts, but it's not what we would have felt. In 2011 when it came out, my vision for Linux desktop for the masses involved some version of a desktop with Gnome Shell or Plasma on it. That was my, like, that's my ideal desktop Linux is a mainstream free software desktop is what everybody's using.

But the reality is, is Linux is a fundamental enabling technology that massive corporations that have the means are going to use to publish their own product. Right, but they've got their own agendas, their own designs on it, and they can use those technologies because of those licenses and shape it to be whatever they want.

And it means that they don't have to invent how to do TCP IP and can instead focus on things like services and a decent desktop feature set and things like power management, power washing for restoring, multi-user stuff, Linux environment containers.

I mean, there's a clear advantage for them. And I guess I give Chrome OS more respect now after this than I did as a development workstation. I kind of thought that was sort of cute that they were trying to compete with WSL or, you know, like Docker, you know, all the different things that we just recently talked about, the code-ready containers from Red Hat.

That's another attempt at this. All these different attempts to make development on the desktop match production. That's one of Ubuntu's strengths, is you can deploy Ubuntu LTS on your laptop, and you can develop on the same environment that you run in production. Google's trying to give you all the options. Hey, you got a that you run in production. Google's trying to give you all the options. Hey, you got a Debian server in production?

You got an Ubuntu server in production? Just great. Just get Chrome OS. We'll play with that. And you're already using Chrome anyway. Yeah, you got a Gmail. You're using Docs and Drive. Listen. We're going to have to install Firefox on there after the show, you realize, right?

Just to be fun. We totally should. We should do that. We should totally do that. Also, I just realized it'd be interesting to see what the battery life is like on that. Well, you know, we might just leave it around for a while and start using it a bit. It would almost, almost, if it didn't require installing Pure OS, it would almost be worth putting PureOS on there

and seeing what the battery life is and then putting Chrome OS back on there and seeing what the battery life is. You know, just for science. Yeah, just for science. All right. Well, these scientists are getting back to the lab, so I encourage you to join us next week

in that there chat room or mumble room. Go to jblive.tv for that live extravaganza or jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar for the time and links to everything, including the new shows and all of that at linuxunplugged.com slash 318. Go get more Wes Payne over at the Tech Snaps. Yeah. And now Linux Headlines.

Wes, myself, and Drew bringing it to you every weekday. Linux Headlines. And check out Self Hosted with Alex and myself. Episode 1 launches this week and then Episode 2 with Wendell coming up very soon. We'll see you back here next Tuesday. There you have it. I was wondering if CloudReady was legit or not, but it seems like it is. Yeah, actually working pretty good.

It did. It did work pretty good. I think I might give it a go myself. Yeah, if you haven't. If you've got a machine laying around. I don't know if it's possible to compartmentalize it or install it. Virtual machine would be your best bet, because by default it just wanted to wipe the whole thing. Initially we were thinking just do a VM, but then when we had the Librem 15 and the deliciousness

of that irony, we couldn't resist. I stumbled on CloudReady 2 just recently because my Chromebook was end of life. I was just surprised to see that Google has some lifecycle for its Chrome devices. I mean, what can't be so hard to give updates for a single program? Yeah, right. I cannot understand that, because even Windows XP or Windows 7 have a 10-year lifespan. How long have you had that Chromebook?

Well, that's an Asus 720. It came out in 2030. There was first a feature freeze, so installing Linux applications was not possible. I can somehow understand it, because the hardware given to ROM was not the best one.

But, I mean, leaving the people out there now without security updates is something I cannot understand. I really cannot understand, because hardware is known. You have your BILD config file for that hardware, you just push a button to release it out. You know the kernel's going to be supported.

I can't argue with that. You would think out of all of the OSs, this would be the one that could support the longest. But who knows? I'm sure there's partner dynamics involved, as they would say. The thing is, as you told at the beginning, these are computers that are used in schools, that are used for people that are not that gifted when it comes to computer knowledge.

So all they want is they see an icon and they say, I have to update. So they push a button, the system is rebooting, and everything is done. years you stop with that and now you leave all the people with security issues with a program that has i think the worst attacking surface you can have on the internet like internet browser that is for me not understandable at all really not so i stumbled about cloud ready and i probably will have to install that on my chromebook now i'd be curious to know if it works because that's a great point you're making. And I think, obviously, the other elephant in the room on this conversation that we've just, we've talked about so many times that I didn't go there, but the whole privacy aspect of it.

It's just there's a clear privacy concern with Chromebooks that simply do not exist with desktop Linux. Not at all, not in the same way at all. But that is an entire conversation in itself, so I didn't bring it up in this episode. And it's hard to tease that apart from the Chrome environment in general and using Google products. And Chromium.

So we just felt that we'd focus on the tech side of it. We don't need a two-hour unblogged. Oh my gosh. Thinking about all that stuff, it's really something. I want to do a quick follow-up to a pick we did last week. So last week, I think it was, we talked about USB Top,

but unfortunately it is not available in Fedora and it never will be, right, Carl? Never. Yeah, it's already there. It is there! What? It is there, yeah, that's right. After the show, Carl contacted me and said, hey, what do you think about me giving that a crack? Carl, you're the best.

That's awesome. He knew. He knew we needed it. Yeah, it wasn't too bad. It me giving that a crack? Carl, you're the best. That's awesome. He knew. He knew we needed it. Yeah, it wasn't too bad. It wasn't? No, it was a pretty straightforward spec file. I love it. That's awesome.

Best audience ever. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, another round of applause is due in this episode. We're very happy to say another episode of Brunch with Brent will be coming out tomorrow on the Extras feed. Hey-o. Brent, we should tease this one a little bit. What can we expect from this week's episode of Brunch with Brent will be coming out tomorrow on the Extras feed. Hey-o! Brent, we should tease this one a little bit. What can we expect from this week's episode of Brunch with Brent? Well, last week we had Drew on. I don't know if everyone caught that. And this

week, Wes, you make it on with me. And we have a great, great conversation. We go into a whole bunch of stuff that is completely different than all of the previous Brunch with Brent, which is the case. Every new guest brings a new flavor. And so whole bunch of stuff that is completely different than all of the previous brunch with friends which is the case every new guest brings a new flavor uh and so this week i don't know we we chatted about some a whole bunch of adventures and learning and problem solving because west and i are all

about that um we talked about the art of being introverted and agreeable which that's me that doesn't sound like us at all. No, not at all. And Wes really talked about the value of hammock time. And so you can learn more about that. Extras.show. Yeah. Hmm.

That's hammock time. I want a hammock. Can we get one of those in the studio? I think we need one. I think that would be really good. Whew. I'm, you know, I can't believe we. I think that would be really good. Whew. I'm, you know,

I can't believe we've launched a daily show a little bit. Because so many times in the past we were like, nope, not good enough,

damn it, and we killed it. And so this time, I don't know, I think part of me thought we were never going to actually launch.

It didn't feel like it, right? We were going to keep contemplating it, keep shooting it down for one reason or another. Yeah. But the thing

where we had our breakthrough, I have to say, is I think by, A, killing it and then giving space to reconsider it, like, with no pressure. Right. And then, B, the test pilots we did where we started. So we're kind of splitting up the work a little bit. So it'll be myself, Wes, and Drew. we're kind of splitting up the work a little bit. So it'll be myself, Wes, and Drew. And that was kind of one of the breakthroughs we had as we realized it's probably going to be a lot more sustainable if we don't make it all just Chris or just Joe. Not one of us goes crazy. Yeah. And so then we just kind of had to figure out like the math on that, how to set up like a

backup system. And we have a check-in system that we have because it's got to happen every single day. Right. I mean, we both had to learn how to and got to take advantage of the team system we have now. Yeah, yeah. And we had to increase staffing a little bit because news research is a big part of what we do. And there's a pipeline now that brings in all of this news, and it just required a little bit of staffing. Yeah, you don't have to, you know, draw the depths of all those barbaric Linux news sites out there. Just come to us. What's going to be a challenge for me, and it may even happen as soon as next week, possibly, is at some point I'm going to be on the road again. Yeah.

And I'll have to do the show from the road somehow. But I got a decent mobile recording setup. That's true. We've been working on that. Yeah. We're really going to have to figure it out now. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Plus, we got a good backup system, so I could always pull the backup lever. Of course. And just be like, bail me out. So I could always do that, too. Yeah, so look for, you know, varied JB

voices from time to time. Yeah, but I'll generally be there on Mondays for now. At least I would kick things off, and then Wes and I throughout

the week, and then Drew on Fridays. Fridays with Drew. That's right.