LINUX Unplugged - 319: Positive in the Freedom Dimension

Episode Date: September 18, 2019

Richard Stallman has resigned as president and director of the Free Software Foundation, and that's just one of the major shifts this week. Also what makes Manjaro unique? We chat with one of the founders and find out why it's much more than a desktop environment. Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Bernhard Landauer, Brent Gervais, and Neal Gompa.

Wes, did you see that the Fedora 31 beta came out today? Oh, no. That's exciting. I'm already jonesing for it. But I was looking at it. Something in there has me a little nervous. They're switching from C Groups 1 to C Groups 2. Upgrade.

Don't really understand what that means. And one of the things they say in there is, if your tool expects C Groups 1, it may break. And I'm thinking like, well, what tool is that? Is that one of my tools? I don't know. You're going to have to read the docs, Chris. I'm already looking forward to it, though. I got the itch.

I got up this morning and my laptop was like, hey, can we upgrade? And I'm like, no, laptop, it's a beta. You know how it does that? Right. So then I'm moving along and it's like, hey, Chris. I'm like, what laptop? And it's like, I'd like to do an upgrade to Fedora 31. It's got that new GNOME shell.

And I'm like, no, the beta just came out today, laptop. Stop it. Calm down. And then I get to the studio today. It's like, hey, Chris. Hey, Chris, you got a fast internet here. You could do the update. It won't came out today, laptop. Stop it. Calm down. Then I get to the studio today. It's like, hey, Chris, you got fast internet here. You could do the update. It won't leave me alone, Wes. You know, I'm honestly very impressed you've made it this far.

I don't want to do the beta. I don't want to run a beta, but my laptop won't shut up about it. Is this when I'm going to find out you've installed the beta on one of our production machines already? On your machine. What? Hello there and welcome into Linux Unplugged episode 319. My name is Chris.

My name is Wes. Hello Wes. Hello. Big show today. Huge show. We have not one but two guests joining us today to explain various things that need explained. And of course we have some big community news to get into, as well as some new releases of one of our favorite tools.

Oh, boy. That's right. That's right. And some other community events to share with you, as well as some picks. We got, well, you could say like a whole rack of a show. It's not like a half rack of a show. Big rack, yeah. Yeah, it's a full rack. So to really help us dig into all of this, we really got to say hello over there to Mr. Cheese and Mr. Alex.

Hey, guys. Well, hello, guys. Buongiorno. Hey. Make yourself comfortable. Make sure you grab yourself a cup of water there. Wes brought in water for everybody. Of course.

And thanks for joining us. And sparkling, by the way. Sparkling. Oh, really? Nice, Wes. You know, everybody's going to have the burps now, though. Oh, whoops. And also, time-appropriate greetings to that mumble room.

Hello, Virtual Lug. Hello. Hello. I'm noticing we not only have a nice showing there in the main mumble room, but we got a good showing there in the quiet listening, the low-latency listening, as we call it, there in the mumble room. I think it's one of the best low-latency, low-bandwidth ways to listen to the show. It's like you're right here in studio with us, basically.

You do get a special studio mix. And we're glad to see you there. That's true. That's true. Well, let's start things off with some community news that I'm honestly a little shocked to start with. Today, as we record, it's been announced that Richard Stallman has resigned as president and director of the Free Software Foundation. And from the MIT CSAIL? Is that how we say it?

CSAIL. CSAIL department over his comments related to Jeffrey Epstein. Huge. First, in order of events, I saw the announcement about MIT, and then I saw the announcement directly from the Free Software Foundation. They write, on September 16th, 2019, Richard M. Stallman, the founder and president of the Free Software Foundation, resigned as president and from

its board of directors. The board will be conducting a search for the new president, beginning immediately. You can find more details on fsf.org when they know more. This is huge. And it's been also something of

a bit of a fascination of mine to watch the mainstream media begin to report this story. Right. It's connected to a huge scandal now. And they refer to him as computer scientist and open software advocate. Oh, boy. Wow. He has resigned. He has resigned.

The scandal tied to Jeffrey Epstein is related to $7.5 million in donations that he gave to the MIT Media Lab, which was far more than what was previously disclosed. Then the group inside MIT was discussing this issue when Richard Stallman made his views about some of the victims clear. Parts of that quote were then picked up by the media and after it was blogged about. And it's really kind of over the last few days since we recorded, it's turned into quite a firestorm. Absolutely. Kind of blew up, right? And we got insight into what seemed like indefensible remarks. And Stoneman has a long history, kind of brought that back to light too.

One of the things that I saw was it was a new group of individuals that were learning about his views on certain topics that didn't previously know about that. Some of us, you know, we've gone to his website over the last decade plus. We know what his views are on some of these things and have considered it to be a little gross for a while. know what his views are on some of these things and have considered it to be a little gross for a while. But a new round of individuals over this last weekend, really, you know, kind of starting middle of last week, discovered some of these things. But I think, you know, what I believe is important to take here from all of this is we shouldn't frame the conversation as a reaction to comments that Richard Stallman made about Jeffrey Epstein's victims. This is really the end result of a pattern of behavior over decades that has

eventually led to some kind of response. I think we all kind of knew this was likely coming for Richard Stallman. Those of us that have followed this for a while. Right. And I think you're right, at least in the wider community, he's mostly known for his fairly extreme philosophies and ideas about free software, at least viewed that way by many. But there is this undercurrent, and if you've been paying attention, this has always been there. Yeah, you followed this pretty closely for Linux headlines, and there was a moment where it seemed like

something was going to have to give pretty soon. Yeah, absolutely. Well, over the weekend, both the Software Freedom Conservancy made a statement saying that basically Richard Stallman shouldn't have this position anymore. And then the executive director of the GNOME Foundation said that in his view, the foundations could no longer have a formal relationship if Richard Stallman was still there. Wow. Yeah. They write, we admire the work that the Free Software Foundation staffers and volunteers have done, but we have reached a point concluding that the greatest service to the mission of free software

is for Richard to step down from the SFF. And if this doesn't happen, then they'll look at, as they write, severing the historical ties between GNOME, GNU, and the Free Software Foundation. And that would be the only path forward. Wow. Like that was, I mean, something had to break here. Yeah, absolutely.

And when I saw this happen, because this was before Richard Stallman's announcements, I thought to myself, the FSF is going to go down with Stallman. The two are inseparable. They are linked. You can't have one without the other. That certainly has seemed that way for years.

I was really shocked when I saw this. But, you know, I think it's not super surprising. Richard Stallman probably wants to take whatever actions he thinks are best for the longevity of the foundation. And it's probably better for the community as a whole if we don't have someone with this history representing us. So I think Richard Stallman probably knew that this was the best move he had to make. There's a famous quote of Richard Stallman's

that I shared with the team when the news was announced. And I kind of feel like it's appropriate to read it here on the show because it's like one of those prescient quotes from the man himself where, you know, there's that meme that Richard Stallman was right. Well, he even has a quote that sort of summarizes this. Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics. You can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone. He's right. Absolutely.

And that's exactly what happened here. I'm definitely along the same lines as you as far as it's been a discovery, a week of discovery for a lot of people where we knew after reading his blog, you know, there are questionable things in his blog. I always had kind of a weird feeling about the guy myself, but what he's done for the Free Software Foundation and that movement has gotten it to where it is today. I'm glad that he is willing to just step down and let the Free Software Foundation continue with, you know, quite frankly, better leadership. All right. Well, moving on then, let's talk about something that's pretty exciting for owners of the Raspberry Pi.

There is a first fully functional 64-bit OS for the Raspberry Pi 4, because right now it's 32-bit only, even though it's a 64-bit device. But who it's from is a bit of a surprise, Wes. Yeah, it's our friends over at Bellina. Yeah, Etcher, right? Yeah, the Etcher people. But it turns out they do a lot more than that, too. Yes, that's very true.

Okay, so if you don't remember, Bellina OS is an open-source, minimal, Yocto Linux-based host operating system that's designed for containers. It enables a fast and modern workflow for many different embedded device types, and now includes the Raspberry Pi 4. Basically, they've got a system in place to take modern workflows that you might be used to on the server, you know, building a new container image, pushing that up to test, and then eventually into production, and make that work on embedded and IoT applications.

and make that work on embedded and IoT applications. So now you can get the 64-bit goodness and run side-by-side 32-bit and 64-bit Docker containers on your Pi. I kind of like this because I'm using the Pi exclusively right now to run Docker containers. And I did kind of pine about not having a, pine about having a 64-bit OS when I was loading it up to do server stuff. And one of the things I didn't fully appreciate when I bought the Raspberry Pi

4 is I was buying a machine to run Raspbian. And pretty much only Raspbian. When you look at some of the things that they had to overcome to even make this thing possible, it's clear that it's going to take a long time before most distros are supporting the Raspberry Pi 4.

Right, yeah. I mean, like, basically, there's been a lot of hardware changes, and you're trying to move over to 64-bit. So they had to improve stuff in Yocto for the board support package changes, which is all that stuff for the Funarm platform, and work with their bootloader.

Yeah, the bootloader, the way you initialize the graphics, the way you initialize the PCI bus, all weird and different. It's all different on the Pi 4. Just how it works, right? So I'll be running

Raspbian for a while, I think. However, you and I very momentarily did get CentOS running on the Raspberry Pi 4. Yes, we did.

That was fun. That was fun. We had to get it working on a Raspberry Pi 3 first, right? Isn't that what we did? And then we patched the kernel on the SD card and then booted it on a Raspberry Pi 3 first, right? Isn't that what we did? And then we patched the kernel on the SD card

and then booted it on the Raspberry Pi 4. Thankfully, some kind of community member out there had built an updated version, but that was what you had to do before. That's what they did. Right, right, yeah. It was kind of awesome, though, to have CentOS on a Pi 4, but it was 32-bit as well.

So, Bellino OS. You know, it is neat to just see because they're leveraging, you know, open source distributions and a bunch of the, like, open source Mobi-based tooling for Docker to build their customized platform. Yeah. Let's talk about NextCloud. NextCloud 17 is out, and there's some pretty nice features in here. The one that really jumps out to me is remote wipe. All right. So if you permit

downloading of documents by a third party, you can now wipe the documents from the devices after you're done collaborating. So maybe you have a few sensitive things. You want someone to, you know, assess a pre-release of something and they don't need access afterwards. Nextcloud can make it happen. It is a little creepy though, right? I mean, once I download something, I kind of want to keep it. Yeah, I don't see how it could work without either a NextCloud client installed or you go back to the website and next time you revisit, somehow it could remove those files.

But I think it's got to be tied into the client, right? So it's only of certain probably usefulness. However, definitely had a scenario one time where a client had Dropbox where it was one of those random implementations where the staff just started using it to share files around. And then they worked with a contractor who took off and took off with the folder

on their hard drive. Yeah, I mean, really, like, that's the story here. This is an enterprise-friendly feature and might make it easier for some people to adopt it. Yeah, they've also been trying to make a bit of a showcase out of some of their larger government installations and better support for two-factor authentication. Now, during the initial sign-up and login process, a user can set up two-factor authentication and more services than ever are

supported these days. There's gateways that use SMS. Of course, you have your standard one-time password services for like Google Authenticator or similar apps. So they're really all in on the two-factor authentication now with this release. That's good to see. It does look nice because we're using Nextcloud. Right. I guess that means it's time to update, Wes. I think it is.

It's time to update. Well, let's take a moment and talk about something a little different. So in our community is an individual who's an advocate for PowerShell. is an individual who's an advocate for PowerShell. DM is active in several communities, and he's also the individual behind the PowerShell on Linux website and Twitter account. And I love his story, and I wanted to share it with you, and why he thinks PowerShell,

which is a topic that's just like, what? PowerShell? Linux? I mean, we've talked about it. Bash is perfectly fine. We talked about it when it came to Linux for the first time. We knew it was out there, but I don't use it. Even today, though, I was in a Telegram group where he mentioned using PowerShell,

and somebody was like, blasphemy! But like so many tools, out of necessity, you discover something's quite useful. In DM's case, he's a very clever individual, and he manages a lot of boxes. I manage over 20,000 VMs. Yeah, that's a lot of VMs. And so saving time is extremely important.

And there's an element to this that I can really fundamentally appreciate. But I think maybe we start with PowerShell itself. PowerShell is a bit of a different beast, isn't it? It's not like Bash. No, I mean, it comes from a different heritage, right? It's not really a Unix tool. It comes from the Windows world. And you get to leverage a lot of the.NET platform.

So instead of throwing text around, you've got objects. Yeah. For me, I like Bash, and don't get me wrong. But because it's very text-based, it's the good thing about it, and it's also the worst thing about it for me. Because if you have to work with text, and you need to figure out all these special commands, and because PowerShell is just like Python, it's object-oriented, you can do amazing simple things so easily in like one command.

That seems to be the core difference, object-oriented versus text. That seems pretty key to using PowerShell. Well, yeah, right? I mean, so imagine you have, you've got a date and you want to go grab like just the month part of that. Well, you could probably whip up something to split by whatever separator you're using and then grab the middle field or something.

But if you've got objects, well, there's probably just a method that you call to get the month out of it, right? So it's more structured than text. Now, there's an aspect to it that I can completely appreciate as well. As somebody who was a desktop Linux user managing Windows systems and having to deal with user account changes

and other things that just desperately, desperately need to be automated and trying to come up with a solution and even some means to automate them across platforms. Creating an active directory user used to take 30 to 45 minutes because of all this special stuff, like this all special configuration. And using PowerShell, I kept saying like we would hire 30 people and then they wouldn't pass their, you know, insurance selling exam. And then we would fire half of them.

And then I would just spend hours creating these accounts and then deleting them, which was crazy. So then that's pretty much how I started with PowerShell. I was like, I'm not going to spend hours. It's funny. There has to be a better way. That is how it always'm not going to spend hours... It's funny. There has to be a better way. That is how it always goes, isn't it? It's a necessity. Yeah, absolutely. And it's not all just for managing Microsoft systems. It's not all just about making sure you can

create Active Directory users. There's a big community out there. The other day, I found out there's a FreeNAS module for PowerShell. Wow, really? So now all of a sudden, you know, oh, I have this FreeNAS box that I use for, you know, like my home lab and whatnot. So all of a sudden I'm like, oh, I want to create a new volume. Then I import this, I download this module, I import it.

And then I have like connect FreeNAS server or something. I give it the name of the server, the credentials, and poof, I'm connected. And then I have other simple commands like, I don't know, new volume or whatever, new Freenas volume. I don't remember the exact command. Right, but then you can start scripting your own little environments and handy helpers. Yeah, exactly. So then, you know, so you start at home and then all of a sudden you take it. And because the API is very similar between FreeNAS and TrueNAS, you can use the same, I think the same library supports TrueNAS.

And then you take it to work. And then at my job, I have to administer a bunch of different storage systems so we have because the application we build integrates with different SAN providers and stuff like that so I have to administer NetApps and Isilon and all kinds of weird like Freenas

is not weird but other weird storage vendors so if they have PowerShell support, then all of a sudden, from my Linux box, it's really easy for me to automate the deployment of all this stuff

because I have one kind of like this one interface, which is PowerShell, and I have all these different modules. One of the things that seems like it's a key differentiator is that PowerShell has these modules. Yeah, right? I mean, it's sort of built right in. In Bash, you might automate things by installing additional programs,

and then sort of tying those together. But PowerShell's more like a programming language in the sense that you've got these community modules you can go find and use. So whether it's FreeNAS, or I know DM was talking about Selenium driver, so if you want to go do a bunch of automating websites that don't have APIs, well, you can do that with PowerShell too. Yeah. Not everything

is golden, though. Not everything is golden. For example, a lot of the Active Directory modules don't work on Linux yet. I took it upon myself, I keep talking to different people from Microsoft,

from all kinds of places, like, oh, I have this module. Can you test it on Linux? So I downloaded it in my box. And then I think one of the Azure SQL team members at Microsoft, they have an official SQL server module. So he said, hey, it works on core, it should work on Linux.

I already know that it's not true because sometimes there's all kinds of little things that make it break. So I downloaded the module, I tried to import it, it doesn't work. It doesn't work because there's, you know, Linux file system is case sensitive and Windows is not. So then all of a sudden, this file has a lowercase letter in it. Boom, it doesn't break.

So then I created a PR, not a PR, an issue in their system, and I'm trying to fix it. DM makes the case that the more users on Linux, the more priority it becomes for Microsoft. And what's also great about this, and this is something I really connected with him on, is it means, fundamentally,

more people can run Linux on the desktop. I'm trying to make the PowerShell experience on Linux much better so then more people won't have to go to Windows to do their day job. And I think that's probably... If Microsoft was trying to extinguish Linux, there's no way they would have open sourced this. Because it's pretty much the tool that allows you to manage

all these Microsoft things without Windows. It is really kind of, I was thinking like, and we have an extended conversation with DM that'll be out on Jupyter Extras, but I was thinking when I was talking to him, like, I would have killed for this. Yes, right? I mean, you can actually go interact with,

leverage a bunch of Windows environments in a way that's native to them. I think we're also made a little uncomfortable because it has this different heritage, right? Like, it comes from Microsoft, it's using Windows tools, but it's an open source shell on top of an open source kernel, right? Like, what's not to like? And that cat is out of the bag. It's MIT licensed.

It's out of the bag. Also of note today, Microsoft open sourced their C++ standard library. open source their C++ standard library. Actually, it was technically yesterday. They announced at a community conference that they were releasing their C++ standard library code as open source. The STL code is now up on GitHub and provided under the Apache 2 license.

Oh, yeah. Look at them go. More and more open source. More and more all the time. They say they hope this move will help developers continue to keep the library compliant in the fast-moving world of C++ standards. And they hope it's a measure of payback to the developer community.

Isn't that an interesting statement? The first part's being like, we're not doing a great job keeping up with the standards. Will you guys help us keep this going? It's kind of an admission of that, isn't it? Right. And then the other half is like, but also, like, here, you know, we can all make this better. You get to have all the code for the other stuff, too. I don't mind that.

No, honestly, it kind of makes sense, right? That's part of the open source community and the interaction is we're all going to use the tooling and if it is open, we can all make it better. Yeah. We have a few items in housekeeping for the episode. Got messy in here. Yeah, you know, I've been traveling. Was in Washington over the weekend.

Just didn't have time, brought in a whole bunch of dirt. I'm sorry about that. So here's a few things we've got to take care of. First and foremost, just a reminder, Texas Cyber Summit coming up real soon now. Texas Cyber Summit, October 10th through the 12th, 2019 at the Grand Hyatt. San Antonio. San Antones. Wes and I will be there.

What? Think cheesy? Are you going too cheesy? Oh, yeah, I'll be there What? Think cheesy? Are you going too cheesy? Oh yeah I'll be there Honestly cheesy being there That's a reason to go If you weren't already Thinking about it

Yeah that's That's definitely enough Nice If you are going to be In the area And you don't have a ticket But you would like to go Join our telegram group

It's t.me Forward slash TCS 2019 And You might be able To score a ticket. What is that again? T.me slash what?

T.me dot T.me slash TCS 2019. TCS. Alright, very good. Texas Cyber Summit. There's a B-New track too, which if you're thinking about getting in the cyber industry, that'd be a good one for you. Don't forget we also have the

Hacker Birthday Dinner meetup. Meetup.com slash Uber Broadcasting. It's all there. Don't forget, we also have the Hacker Birthday Dinner meetup. Meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting. It's all there. So, also, can we just take a moment, ladies and gentlemen, a round of applause again.

Two new shows launched on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network. Very, very, very excited to say we are now into week two of Linux Headlines,

linuxheadlines.show. Great show. Oh, man. Wes, you're doing a bang-up job. No, you're doing, linuxheadlines.show. Great show. Oh, man. Wes, you're doing a bang-up job. No, you're doing a bang-up job. No, you are. You're right, though. Drew killed it on Friday.

Fridays with Drew are my favorite. He's so damn good. How can he be so new and still that good? I don't know. We'll learn from him, though. I know. So linuxheadlines.show, go check that out. The things you need to know that's going on in Linux and open source in three minutes or less every weekday. Yeah, I said every weekday. I said that. I said that. It's crazy.

Linuxheadlines.show. Also, it's finally here. Self-hosted episode one. The first one is out. Self-hosted.show slash one. Alex and I just get things kicked off in this episode. And then coming up very soon, selfhosted.show, our episode with Wendell. Oh, boy. Great chat with Wendell. It's all ready to go. We'll be launching it soon. Every fortnight over at selfhosted.show. So go get episode one now and stick around for episode two with Wendell.

We had a great chat. Toured his studio, his servers, his workstations. Chat all about it. It's pretty great. So go check that out. Selfhosted.show and Linuxheadlines.show. Man, so much going on. Crazy.

And before you know it, it's Texas Cyber Summit. Before you even know it, Wes. All right. That's the housekeeping. That's the housekeeping. Nicely done. No, you did great. I don't know.

I think we've just come up with a thing. So you and I had a chance last week to talk to Phil, one of the co-founders of Manjaro, after they announced the new formation of their company. Yeah, which was great. Really exciting for them. And we then thought, well, let's have kind of like a Manjaro celebration. Let's double down. thought, well, let's have kind of like a Mangero celebration. Let's double down. And let's talk with

Bernard, one of the other co-founders, this week, because you and I checked out the community editions, which is one of the many things that Bernard's involved in, as well as a few other things. And just to really kind of recognize the moment for Mangero. They've moved into a new echelon of distributions. There's a

legal entity behind them. They have a community. They've formed partnerships with commercial organizations. They're getting recognition on large YouTube platforms. It's a big moment. And so we really wanted to take the time to both talk to Phil and Bernard. Hello. Thanks for having me. Hello, sir. So why don't we start off with a little bit of news? There's a brand new, fresh release of Manjaro that's out just as we record. What's your favorite thing about the new release? Oh, it was quite busy for all of us because we had to get a lot of different editions going.

Of course, the official ones, KDE Plasma, XFCE, and GNOME. And I'm also in charge of some of the community editions so I was doing i3 and Cinnamon and they're all rolling now so yes we have the 18.1.0 release of course it's

just a snapshot not a real I mean it's not a real thing with a rolling release but of course we polish everything with the install media and so that the installer works and stuff. With some new additions, of course, with the new Flatpak and Snaps support with Bau, our new tool. And also Calamaris had a recent update and and we also offered a new Office Suite chooser. So I want to talk about the Community Edition stuff here in a moment, but we got to do the human stuff up front. So you got a new job.

Yeah, I do. I mean, it's basically the job I've been doing for five years already, but now it's a job. It just used to be kind of an oversized hobby for me. I was doing other stuff. I was in the music business as a singer, but my hobby was taking a lot of time. And so this is finally what I can now concentrate on. Congratulations. You mentioned it as an aside there, but you're a bit of a known musician. We did a little Googling, Bernard. You have a bit of an online presence when it comes to music. Show research, you know.

Oh, yeah, that's true. Yes, I've been quite active. How did you end up being also pretty prominent here in the open source community? Oh, well, I was just, I always liked tweaking and analyzing stuff and breaking stuff and putting it again together. I actually started out with Atari when it was still a thing. And so I found myself quite at home with Linux. In between, I was, of course, using Windows for everything I needed and then

my main stoppers to switch over to Linux were especially the music software like music editing I mean printed music editing and this kind of stuff and but during the recent years, we now have really software for everything I need. So that was finally my opportunity to switch over to Linux. So you come from a creative angle on all of this. Yeah, you could say that. It seems that that has also manifested in your,

you're one of the, probably, I guess, you're probably one of the prominent supporters of the different community editions. I had an opportunity to chat with you off-air about the i3 and Cinnamon editions, which I think you're the direct maintainer of. So let's talk a little bit about that. Is that a creative expression for you as well? Yeah, it is. I mean, I've styled the desktops. I mean, i3 is a good example because the way it comes from just the packages, it's just totally naked and ugly and difficult to use. And so it took quite a lot of creativity also and tweaking and also about the optics and theming is also a topic in all of our editions, of course.

And so I took over Cinnamon and i3 was kind of abandoned a few years ago. And so that was really a good opportunity for me to also express my taste. express my my my kind of my taste and i like things to look nice and to be also accessible and and also pretty on the surface can you um maybe go into a little more about what's different about community editions i mean you know you're involved and you're part of the core project so how is that different from one of your major releases? Basically, traditionally in the Manjaro community, it used to be open box originally, where the core team was maintaining a main edition. And then we had XFC and KDE came after after that and then gnome is more a recent edition

and the community editions were mostly just done by one person so if you found a desktop environment that you would like and then you would like offer it on the forum. And if you were the first one who presented a desktop edition, then it was just your edition. And yeah, it has also grown, I would say. And nowadays, it's like also the community editions are maintained by members of the core team. Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah.

I look at the Cinnamon edition and the i3 edition specifically, and I think they seem like passion projects to me. But I do kind of want to, I want to kind of examine that question that Wes had there just a little bit further. So I kind of, when I picture the Manjaro project, I picture a default xfce desktop but we were just chatting recently and it seems depending on the time of month or day there's other editions like the plasma edition that may actually be more popular manjaro isn't necessarily defined by a single desktop so i guess you know bernard in in your opinion what definesjaro, especially for people that are listening that maybe don't use it, what defines it apart from Arch?

One important point is the usability. I mean, i3 is a good example because, as I already said, it's very hard to use as it comes originally. very hard to use as it comes originally and so i've really tried to make it more accessible to to make it look pretty and run right out of the box with everything available all the shortcuts organized and with a little introduction and i mean manjaro is is mostly about the core system and uh as you can see it's it's a huge variety of just different desktops on top so the the team everybody together makes sure that the the core system runs well and that the system is is reliable and then it's just a question of putting any desktop on top basically and over the years we have like also developed our our typical style it was also we decided that it would be good that when you open up a desktop on the first site you would be able to see oh yes this is a manjaro edition

so it's like the colors it's uh the the fonts so there is some branding element yeah you could say that it's not actually the same themes yeah because they they don't necessarily work on every desktop but then we we try to find kind of matching colors and common wallpapers and that kind of stuff. So do you feel like it would be a fair assessment to say the difference from Arch is the brand, the community, and the intention that you put into the desktop? And you can apply that to i3, Cinnamon, XFCE, or Plasma, because what defines Manjaro isn't a desktop environment. The mentality of presenting a desktop ready to go, I would say.

I mean, Arch people are really keen on building everything and styling everything the way everybody likes it personally. And we offer like one version that you could just start using on an everyday basis and if you can live with how it looks like then you can just you would never have to change anything and also we we put together a combination of packages like you have an image viewer you have a music player you have an office suite you have a music player, you have an office suite, you have a mail program, a browser, so that you have everything that you would normally need. So my question is, now that things are changing a little bit, you know, it's becoming a real

business. It's a full-time gig for you. Will there be some shifts in your priorities? You've got a lot on your plate right now, especially with the community edition stuff. Do you see a future where you kind of narrow the list a little bit of what you're involved with? I don't know. I mean, at the moment, we are just starting out and looking around a little bit where our direction is really going.

We are collecting ideas. And I have the feeling that the team is extremely motivated by our steps. And we have a lot of discussions between not just the two of us, of course, between the whole team, which is about something around 12 people or so. And at the moment, it's also about finding out who likes to specialize in what and where the strengths of everybody lie. And I don't really think that we need to narrow down our offer at the moment. It's not really what it's about. I mean, the basic idea is to keep what we have running and then to add what comes up.

It sort of strikes me that Manjaro is sort of the first to make it this far with something that's based on Arch. You could look at Arch much like Ubuntu looks at Debian as a great base to build a product on top of. And you're sort of first to this real estate. You're the first to this new land. What happens next? I mean, Arch has this reputation of being hard to build, hard to use, and hard to maintain. And so that's somehow where we have grown into, right?

We have built our way of balancing the bleeding edge idea with usability and continuity. Of course, it's still a bit of a balancing act, but I think we have found our ground here very well now. So that's probably why we are now in a position where we can really say, probably why we are now in a position where we can really say okay this is quite reliable and we can look back on several years now where this has been running smoothly and well one of one idea of the of the incorporate of incorporating was also that as you can see with other projects, at a certain point it really gets very hard to do this beside everything else you do. As a hobby, you really need to invest a lot of time, a lot of energy, and to keep it with a certain amount of quality. That's basically our motivation to find a way to really be able to focus on this. I'm pretty excited about it

because I think at some point I had just accepted the idea that all of the next big distros that were ever going to happen had happened. And now it was just a matter of, well, let's settle in and figure out how to make this work. And then Manjaro comes along and proved me wrong.

And I think it's just so fantastic. I think we have absolutely room for more. And you guys are really committed to the project. And it's getting recognized for what it's contributing and those paper cuts that it's solving for end users. And it's just such a great thing to see this next step being taken. And Bernard, I love the community additions.

I had a chance to play with cinnamon and I three over the weekend. We'll have links in the show notes for those. And I, I just, I love that that's even a thing and that we can have a company where this kind of thing can go on and it can be a creative expression for you and all of that. So thanks for coming on and just answering some of these questions.

It's just something I've been considering and I don't know, man, I'm just super happy for you guys. Thanks a lot. Cheesy, you've been running a Manjaro for a little while, haven't you? Yeah. So I've got this Dell Inspiron. It's 3000 series two in one. It was my wife's old computer. And, you know, so just got hand down to me. The first thing I was going to do is load Linux on it. Whenever I tried to load any distro on it, I would have a problem because it's a two-in-one. It has an accelerometer and a gyroscope in it. So by default, and this was elementary, pop, fedora, I mean, any distribution that I tried, those kernel modules would be enabled by default.

So my login screen would be flipped 180 degrees and then inverted as if it was in tablet mode and you would be entering information in tablet mode, which, you know, it was nothing that you can't with gnome. You can lock screen rotation now and you can do other things that make it a little bit easier.

You can X, R and R, you know, set it back to normal. You can go back in and blacklist those kernel modules, but the one distro that has worked every single time out of the box, doesn't matter which DEF tried, has been Manjaro. I've never had those kernel modules loaded by default. And for me, I mean, that's a pretty significant thing. You know, that takes three

steps out of just getting the machine working properly. And, you know, so I've been using Manjaro off and on on that machine. Just I use it to test other distros, knowing that I'm going to have to rotate the screen. I'm going to have to do a few tweaks, but then inevitably always go back to XFCE, the XFCE variant of Manjaro on it. And man, I really like it. It's been solid. Like Bernard said, I love the fact that I still get that rolling release, but I don't have to spend the time to set up Arch. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I mean, I've been down that road. I've done that as well, right? But to have a distro out of the box, bleeding edge, boom, here you go.

Yeah, it helps that they make such nice choices. The defaults are good, so you don't have to change that much. Yeah, it's tastefully done, absolutely. And the fact that they've gone through and they've tried to mimic those themes across all of the DEs and everything, I think they've really done a great job. I haven't tried all of the community editions. I will now, though, knowing that I didn't realize that Bernard was putting

those together as well so um i guess they're official community additions ish yeah i really love manjaro too uh i'm a diehard arch linux user on the desktop but my laptop is running manjaro and the implementation of xfce that they have is the one that made me realize that XFCE is pretty great. You know, I'm getting 10 to 12 hours worth of battery life on a T480. The laptop's cool to the touch, you know, it just works like she said. And it's more than Arch for people that can't be bothered to install Arch, I think, which is what it was always sold as. I look at it a lot, although I try, I'm going to try not to make this comparison, but I look at it in some ways similar to Ubuntu to Debian. Like I could get a decent Debian desktop

going if I wanted to spend some time changing all of the defaults and optimizing things a bit. I could, you know, it's not much more work really than setting up Arch. I mean, it is probably a little less, but it's kind of equivalent. Or you could install Ubuntu and you have a pretty ready-to-go machine. Like, that's very much how Ubuntu started.

It was a refined selection of good desktop packages with some sane defaults synced to the GNOME release schedule. And so it was a great way to get easy-to-use Debian. That's what made it so successful initially. And that fundamental recipe is kind of what they're applying here to Arch. Well, one thing that I really like, too, is as an official version, they have the architect edition. So if you want to do the same thing you would do with Arch,

you can still do that with a Manjaro ISO, which I think is cool that they offer that as an official version as well. Well, congrats to them. Very happy to see them turn this into something they can do sustainably. What am I trying to say? Sustainably, yeah, right. I mean, it's a big deal. Bernard had a successful singing career,

and now he's focusing on this Linux distribution full-time, and it's cool that that actually exists. So, we have an app pick we want to get to, and we have a headline that we pulled out of Linux Headlines to discuss a little bit more here in the show. So, let's do that one first. Just one last thing here from the community news is, we've got new

kernels, Wes. We've got one that's out now, kernel 5.3 came out this weekend, and then I also kind of want to talk a little bit that's out now. Kernel 5.3 came out this weekend. And that's always fun. I also kind of want to talk a little bit about 5.4. But in 5.3, they added the ACRN hypervisor, which I was hoping was pronounced acorn. Acorn. But I don't think it is.

Why would you not pronounce it acorn? Why do we need another hypervisor? What's so unique here? Well, okay, so this is actually guest support for Linux. So acorn is a hypervisor that's targeted at embedded and IoT applications, but things like real-time and safety. So if you've got things in your car or maybe in factory-managed equipment that people's lives are at stake.

Where it could be an embedded device and it uses virtualization to run different OSs on it. Yes, workload consolidation, right? You can move lots of things. Existing hypervisors, things that you might use in a data center, not really set up or designed with those goals.

So this is supposed to be an open source implementation of a reference stack, basically, all managed by the Linux Foundation, of course.

This patch set allows Linux to be booted on top of Acorn. So, hey, that's great. That means more places

that Linux will run. I mean, if you're going to run an OS on your IoT device, I'd rather it be Linux. Yeah, right. And I'd rather it be updatable and supported. And if it's baked into the kernel, that's great. That means more places that Linux will run. I mean, if you're going to run an OS on your IoT device, I'd rather it be Linux. Yeah, right. And I'd rather it be updatable and supported. And if it's baked into the kernel,

that means it actually might be possible. Now, this is only bare-bones support, so we'll see what happens. There's another patch in 5.3 that I thought didn't get enough attention. You know, I don't know about you, Chris, but sometimes you have a high DPI screen, and then you go and you boot Linux,

and you can't read it. You can't read anything, especially what happens if it doesn't boot up all the way. There's a fix for that now. Prefer a bigger font for high resolution screens. That's the name of the commit. I mean, why would you not want that? Everything you need to know is in the name of the commit. So it will prefer a console font that is larger on high DPI displays so you can actually read it.

Yeah. Now for like 1920 by 1080 and below, nothing changes, no effect. But if you're above that, there's a different font that's used. So that seems like this should have happened ages ago, but as a terminal user, I'm glad. I actually didn't super mind it. Sometimes we get a little janky on how it would update on the screen, but I kind of like fitting more stuff on the screen, you know? I want more screens, and I want

to fit more on them. Yeah, but I don't always have my microscope right next to my display. That's true. Yeah, on the XPS 13, it was kind of ridiculous. It was getting pretty bad, actually. Well, so it's not out yet, but I kind of wanted to talk about something that I thought was interesting about the 5.4 impending release. So this next one has a bunch of neat stuff. But what I think we're now seeing is, do you recall just a few weeks ago when the news came out that Microsoft was changing their positioning on ex-fat licensing

and said, all right, have at it. You can whip up some ex-fat code. You can submit to the kernel. We will not pursue any patent infringement litigation. Great. Hoorah. And then there was this sort of side story about, oh, turns out somebody created some XFAC code.

It's not of great quality, but it'll probably make it in the kernel pretty soon. Who could that be? Well, now we got a name on a commit and that name ties back to Samsung. Samsung. Samsung. So Samsung whipped this up for their Android devices, likely. Of course.

Of substandard quality, which... You know, you just hack it together. It's fine. They're just putting it on a cell phone that's going to millions of pockets. It only costs $800. Who cares, right? And so that should be landing in its early quality status in the 5.4 kernel, exFAT like that. I'd love to see that land in Fedora 31. Now, has there been time for quality improvements?

Or is this still... No, no, no. I mean, maybe. You know, maybe. I mean, honestly, if I were them, I would, as soon as Microsoft made that announcement, I would have been like, all right, get that guy back over here.

Get him working on it. That's what I would have done. I don't know. But you're right. I mean, it's nice to see, and now we can all use it. Finally, it's out there That's what I would have done. I don't know. But you're right. I mean, it's nice to see and now we can all use it. Finally, it's out there. Not that I needed a ton. I just had that experience during the...

So what happened was, is during our team sprint in the summer, we had a bunch of great pictures and I'm like, well, let me pop in the old SD card here that's built into my ThinkPad. Right, it's great. Take advantage of that. Because hashtag port options and I pop it in there and I look like a fool because my operating system, which was Fedora 30,

could do nothing with it. And I had the realization that oh yeah, I gotta go install Fuse and I got this whole song and dance. It sounds silly, but it's almost like being pulled back to old Linux. You know, like these days things just mostly just work. And this is suddenly like, oh right,

Linux is like this sometimes. Yeah, and so it would be kind of a remarkable thing if in the next release, if in 31, it just worked. Even if it wasn't like, even if it was just read-only, I'd be fine with that. I don't, don't get me right. Just let me import my damn pictures, please. I want to stash them in my file system like a squirrel.

It is cool. I mean, like, right? Open source. And now you know that if improvements are needed, we've got the kernel infrastructure and development staff in place. Well, I think this only helps the creatives that use Linux from day to day, like Brent, you know,

constantly pulling images from large SD cards or creating video content, drone video. I mean, anything like that. I think this is a win for us for sure. So tell us about ClipGrab. Jeezy brings us an app pick this week that could be useful for those of you that like offline media like I do. So, yeah, I was digging around actually in the Manjaro repos last night and I came across

ClipGrab, which is essentially a GUI version, not necessarily a version of YouTube DL. It's its own thing, but it's super nice. I use it to pull down tutorial videos for different Adobe products and stuff like that so that I can offline those and watch them separately on another device while I'm actually going through them.

I love it, man. It's a clip grab. Check it out. It's worth the download and it's super easy to use, dead simple to use. You can pull down MP4, MP3, AUG, all different

various formats. Oh, this is just an app image. Hey, Andy. Yeah, it's an app image and you can just download and run it and yeah it can convert videos

to mp3s if you want to like pop it on a podcast while you're driving and you don't need the visuals that's pretty great thanks Cheesy

there's so many options out there now for that kind of stuff I don't know how YouTube feels about it but it seems clear that there's a need and a demand

for that kind of thing absolutely you can find a link to that kind of thing. Absolutely. You can find a link to that, as well as everything else we've talked about, and the news stories and all of that, over at linuxunplugged.com slash 319. And Wes, did you know we do this here show live? Oh, yeah, every Tuesday. It's probably a good thing you knew that, because if you didn't, we'd need to have a separate conversation. Yeah, that's true.

It'd be really awkward. It'd be weird. How have my timing been so good all this time? It's just lucky, I guess. Go get more Wes over at techsnap.systems. Him and Jim Salter doing their thing over at the TechSnap program. Loving that every single week. And do join us live

if you want to know when. JupiterBroadcasting.com slash calendar. You can also just follow us on the Twitters. Oh, yeah. We tweet about it. Yeah. That's for sure. I'm at Chris Elias.

I'm at Wes Payne. The network is at Jupiter Signal. So go check that out. Also, go check out our buddy's Ubuntu podcast. Go check them out. Oh, yeah. Why not? Always cutting out a good episode of those guys every single week.

So go check them out and join us next time. LinuxUnplugged.com slash 319. Thanks so much for joining us and we'll see you right back here next Tuesday! Thank you. It's an episode of transitions. Think about this. No kidding. So we talk about Richard Stallman resigning. We talk about PowerShell on Linux.

What? And Manjaro becoming a legitimate business and like the top tier Linux distributions shifting. Like this episode really reflects a really kind of massive amount of change going on. And it's like part exciting and part somber because it's, you know, the somber side, it's, you know, seeing somebody like Richard Stallman

who is so well-known in our community and the technical contributions he's made have been so important to computers. I mean, a passionate free software advocate and it's shaped their discourse for a long time. Yeah, and then also yet undeniably a troublesome personality for a long time that there was going to be some kind of reckoning. radically shifting with Microsoft and just the massive, massive deployment of cloud infrastructure and all of the people

that are writing software for that. And also at the same time, Manjaro becoming a company, to me, seems to be a clear indicator that there is still a market for desktop Linux. Like I thought we were done with this. I thought we were all done with this. We'd had it, you know, everybody gave their shot.

The people that could make it work had usually other commercial backings to them, like obvious reasons why they were in the market. And then Nigeria came along. It's like an unexpected little bright star in the Linux constellation. And it seems to validate the market a little bit. It's not necessarily like a foregone conclusion.

It's not, but it's a data point. It's a signal. Yeah. It's exciting to watch, too. Yeah, I mean, it's not all like a foregone conclusion. It's not, but it's a data point. It's a signal. Yeah. It's exciting to watch too. I mean, it's not all that surprising, Chris. If you think about projects with their own self-commercial backing, like elementary OS being a thing, and there's a number of other ones like,

I mean, Endless is one of those that are closer to the failed state than a lot of other ones, but almost every single desktop Linux distribution project that has existed has either pivoted some other way or refocused or even pivoted back or something like that. The fact that desktop Linux still exists today after almost, what, 20 years of ragging and attempts and stuff like that, I think kind of proves that there is some degree

of staying power, but we probably just don't quite understand where the pieces fit just yet into making it like broadly successful. I think that's fair. Yeah. Yeah. We'll keep trying. I mean, everyone from Red Hat to Endless to, you know, Manjaro and all the rest of them. We'll all keep working at it and we'll see what happens. I think, Manjaro, too, the other thing that's fascinating about it is it's not sold as super approachable for new Linux users. Out of the box, you know, get mom and dad started using a computer. It's a little bit more of a more sophisticated user's desktop.

Right, yeah, you're a Linux user, you want a good, solid desktop machine that you can use without a bunch of limitations. Even the concept of how it does its updates is more of an advanced user's concept than what people are used to when it comes to commercial operating systems. I have a bit of a theory here,

and this is the rise of DevOps, this is the rise of people using Linux at work and then thinking, hmm, this is quite good on the server. Why don't I give it

a try on the desktop? What's the worst that could happen? Right. And there is some nice advantages to the desktop being rolling

because if you want fresh user land applications. I do, I do. And you want fresh whatever, like for me, it would be Gnome Shell if I was a Gnome Shell user. Such a sucker for that.

Gotta get the latest XSE every four years. You know, there's some advantages. Really what it is is about getting fresh Chrome and fresh Firefox and new Thunderbird and getting all of these applications that are just in a repository automatically updated. That's all, when you come from Windows or macOS, that's all luxury.

It's a yearly thing where you've got to upgrade your operating system on macOS. They do that every year. Oh, you mean it works just like the Play Store? Yeah, right? So the advantages of rolling for somebody who's just using it as a workstation, as long as

it doesn't break anything, you're pretty appealing. They're hand-holding in the right places. Aren't you Mr. Fedora that wants to upgrade every nine months? I think Fedora is a better cadence because you still get fresh applications, but it's not rolling constantly. So that to me is just a little bit slower

and that's just the preference I like, but I can totally appreciate the peel for the desktop still. I kind of miss it sometimes. So the other thing on the flip side of this with the pure rolling environment, then the major difficulty that you'll start having is, how do you make sure everything stays working more or less forever? One of the reasons why most distributions have a cadence

is so that they can have a choke point or a break point in which they can make changes. Like my experience with working in OpenSUSE, a tumbleweed and other rolling distributions is that it gets extremely hard to make major changes without breaking people unless you have those kinds of release points. And so one of the challenges I'm watching out for to see how Manjaro handles it is that how are they going to handle when they need to make a major change? And then they have to make sure that that works and it upgrades and it handles cleanly. And as they grow as a business, because that's what they're going to do, there's going to be people filing bug reports, expecting some kind of assistance or help or fixes or things like that. You get into an interesting mess that you don't typically have as a community project

that doesn't have a commercial sponsor. I don't know how they're going to handle this, and I'm kind of playing the wait and see to see how this will shake out. So one of the reasons we don't really see rolling do this is because this is really, really hard to do right in that commercial-ish context. Even for home users, especially for home users who don't necessarily have that same level of patience that maybe enterprise users can be pushed back into. Right. I also feel that when people pay money, they feel like entitled.

And then if a rolling release breaks after they paid for it in some way, shape, or form, then the backlash is going to be much bigger. Well, maybe that's a market opportunity to sell us a service support contract. I mean, maybe. It kind of depends on how they set the expectation. I think it's fascinating because it's not your typical distro to go for this kind of thing. Clearly, there's a community behind it.

And also of note, we're talking a lot about workstation, but a big part of the community there is clearly gaming too. That's what's got so much attention on YouTube. Right. It's something to watch. Like I say, it's a, the end of summer is always interesting

in open source land.