LINUX Unplugged - 320: RHELhide

Episode Date: September 25, 2019

CentOS goes rolling and announces version 8. Find out why we're excited to take a dip in this stream. Plus we review what might just be your next Linux laptop, and explain why systemd is coming for your /home. Special Guest: Neal Gompa.

Jeez, did you see Ubuntu Touch on the Pinebook? This came across my Twitter feed today. I did, in fact. It's on the OG Pinebook even. It's not the Pinebook Pro, but I'm sure they'll have it working for that as well. I mean, it's Touch on a laptop, so I don't know how I feel about that.

I kind of like it. I mean, you get one shot, so I can't make a big judgment out of this, but it feels kind of perfect because it always was meant to be convergent, to be usable on a desktop. And I don't know, I think it's sort of the perfect side project to try for something like this.

It's like why I love the Pinebook. It's why I love this so much. And I feel like the guy that put it together, that built that experimental release, is just like one of us. He's just, can we get it working? Can I get it on here? Can I make it functional?

And they have. They said it's a little sluggish, as you would expect. It's an experimental version, but you can actually go and pick it up out of their GitHub, I believe. If we ended up with a Pinebook and could have put Ubuntu Touch on there, Wes Payne, would you accept a challenge to use it for an entire workday? Oh, yeah, I would. Two workdays?

No, you're pushing it. Yeah? Two workdays? How about this? I'll use it while we do one of these shows live. All right. Hello, friends, and welcome in to your weekly Linux Unplugged program. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello Wes, how are you?

Hello, I'm doing great. We've got a lot of things to cover. It turns out it really is Linux Tuesday today. Yeah, it's a big laptop you've got there in front of you. Very big and with a beautiful screen. I'm really enjoying using it. We'll review the System76 at our workstation here in just a little bit. But before we get into all of that and the community news, so much big news, we got to say howdy over there to Mr. Bacon. Hey, Cheesy. Hello, everyone. How are you today? Quite well, quite well. Very, very excited about the

arrangement of topics we have. Like, there's a couple of news stories today that if it was the only news story, I would be absolutely elated. That would be great. Yeah. And, of course, we've got our virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hey, hey. Hello.

Hello there. Hello. Hello, Brandon and Neil. And who else do we got in there? We got Lord Deke in there, Mini-Mech, Tat2D, and The Drifter. Of course, The Drifter. The Silent Drifter. What, you wouldn't call him TattooD?

I think it's a good name. No, it's great. It's a great name. You're just cracking up over there silently, throwing me under the bus. That's all. All right. Yeah, okay. Well, we got some big news to get into today.

First of all, hot off the presses, CentOS version 8 has been released, build 1905. As I mentioned last week, I think, at least I mentioned it in Linux Action News, this is the release of CentOS, which is based on RHEL 8. Which came out back in May. Which is based on Fedora 28, essentially. So you get things like software modularity, a little bit easier and more modern approach to installing third-party drivers, a lot of things that are really nice in Fedora 28 that made its way into this version of CentOS. And that would be big news.

This is a release I've actually been personally looking forward to for a really long time. But Red Hat has gone and made even bigger news and announced CentOS Stream. CentOS Stream, Wes Payne. Yeah, that's right. What is CentOS Stream? Okay, well, the CentOS Stream project sits between the Fedora project and RHEL in the RHEL development process.

So it provides something like a rolling preview of future RHEL kernels and features. This enables developers to stay one or two steps ahead of what's coming in RHEL, which was not really previously possible with the traditional CentOS release style. You wouldn't use CentOS to figure out how to build. It doesn't make sense. No. You could maybe figure out if you target a certain version of Fedora, you're likely to

be building for a future version of RHEL, but it wasn't a clear-cut solution, whereas this really is now. And keep in mind, this is going to be in parallel with the existing CentOS release. So nothing changes for current users of CentOS, Linux, and services. They can just keep using it like they always have. This is an additional release stream now. That's pretty neat. That is neat. I actually kind of

think we're maybe really good candidates for this kind of thing here in the studio potentially, because one way you could consider this, though they won't call it this, but it's kind of like a Fedora LTS a little bit. So Fedora is the foundation for

future Rails, but CentOS Stream will be really an ecosystem for developers and folks like us that want to see not just a great, stable, enterprise-grade distro, but something that stays fairly modern and current, too. Right, and it's interesting, you know, now there's a way for people who want to contribute back up and are using CentOS, or at least using CentOS Streams,

to do so, right? They can have more input on what's going to end up in RHEL and therefore in CentOS. This is a pretty cool development. Didn't really see this coming. I was just expecting CentOS 8. Neil's here. I'm curious to know what your take is on this. Well, this is actually super exciting.

When I was at Red Hat Summit, there were hints about doing something like this, but I was kind of blown away this morning when I read the news about it. So from how I've digested it, it's basically we now have a neat little progression going from Fedora to internal RHEL development, now becoming CentOS Stream to RHEL to CentOS Stable. And I think this gives us something closer to how um you know people have talked about the fedora lts as you mentioned but also it gives people a way to develop for what people will be using in the future because everything that's in centos stream eventually

lands in centos stable when the next point release comes out. And the bigger point to this that I think a lot of people kind of missed is that this will also be an avenue in which the community can contribute directly to RHEL. Because what a lot of people don't understand, maybe because it's not immediately obvious because we don't talk about it that much, is that the relationship between Fedora and RHEL

is more or less a one-time thing, right? When a release is about to be cut and they branch from Fedora, that is a permanent branch for that whole, the lifecycle of that release. From that point, they're operating with their own lifecycle, their own components development, their own patches and things like that. So they create their own bugs. And so the idea behind this is that if the community discovers these things in the CentOS stream, they can send changes to be incorporated by the RHEL engineering team to integrate into RHEL and CentOS. It gives an avenue for that to be a proper community enterprise platform. Yeah. So a couple of notes I made here is I got a couple of questions. I'm wondering if you have some of the same questions or if you've heard any answers.

But one note, there are going to eventually be clear differences between CentOS 8 proper and CentOS 8 stream. And so on their wiki, I don't know if this link will last forever, but in our show notes, we have a link to the wiki spot where they're documenting the differences between the two. Right now, it's just like a kernel difference. Yeah, right.

They say the Linux kernel is the first part of CentOS Stream to move ahead of the upcoming Realm Point release. But here's what I'm wondering, Neil. Will this roll into eventually CentOS Stream 9, or will they cut major versions to match every major rel? So I think it'll actually be both. So currently right now, if you look at how it is synced out to the mirror network, it's called Stream 8.

So the way I suspect it's going to work is that there will be a stream 9 after they branch based on how they're going to set up this structure and then people can switch to stream 9 and help with the development of what will eventually become the RHEL 9 tree and that is actually going to be super exciting because that would bring, because I've had the experience of this process with the way that SUSE Linux Enterprise has now developed. Since SLE 15, they've done it this way where OpenSUSE Leap and SUSE Linux Enterprise releases are actually developed in parallel and community contributions can go in and feed into SLE during development and vice versa.

So having this on the Red Hat family is going to be a big improvement, I think, across the board. And it's going to be very interesting to see how the community takes up with it, because historically speaking, CentOS is a very passive community. There isn't very much that they have been historically allowed to contribute to. And now I think this is going to give them the opportunity to step up and turn into what I feel is more of a proper diverse community of users and contributors, because there's now an avenue in which they can influence the RHEL branch to improve it for what they need. Yeah, I think it's a huge change for them. And it's going to mean that the project's going to have some growing and adjusting to do. But going back to one of the things that I'm wondering about technically here is how does this now work with software modularity, or I think CentOS 8 stream repository? So you could be on CentOS 8 proper

or RHEL 8, but using software modularity, take advantage of a CentOS 8 stream? In theory, yes. I think in practice, people won't necessarily do this without switching all of their content over to the 8 stream version. But of course, I think it's absolutely possible. That's going to be something. But because of the way that this stuff is being set up, I think that moving on to 8 stream proper is not going to be as dangerous or problematic for people. And I suspect a larger portion than what they would have normally expected will switch from 8 stable to 8 stream and start leveraging that content and become part of that process,

especially since there is now an avenue for them to help make that better. Because it means that if there is problems and things like that and they know how to fix it, there is a way to make sure it stays fixed rather than having to work around it locally like a lot of CentOS users do today. Yeah, this is really cool. And it's something we'll play around with here in the studio. I was about to say, something tells me we're going to be reinstalling. I think it could work pretty good on FakeNAS. Right now we have Fedora 30 on there and we were wondering if we were going to go to 31

or CentOS 8 and now I think we might were going to go to 31 or CentOS 8. And now I think we might consider CentOS 8 stream, although CentOS 8 could be fine. Like, there's a lot to consider now. Right, but, you know, if we just jump on for the ride, we'll find out how it goes. Woo! Yeah, get on board. One other thing that is something you might have to get on board with, at All Systems Go, a conference about some of the plumbing things in our beloved operating system, the one and the only Mr. Leonard Pottering

gave a presentation about reinventing home directories and introducing a new technology called SystemD HomeD. Yes, you heard me right. SystemD HomeD. Hi, I'm Leonardennart Pottering, and I'm going to take away your home directories now. So what's happening here is kind of a rethink on the concept of Unix home directories,

which really hasn't changed much in the last nearly 40 years. And Systemd, HomeD is a way to make the home directory fully portable and treat the user as a file on the operating system. Everything is a file. So yeah, self-contained home directories, right? The metadata about the user should not be distributed across the system with all its information about the user itself,

with all the resource management and stuff. It should be part of the home directory itself. This then means that the mere existence of the home directory's file where everything is stored should synthesize the user account in full. should synthesize the user account in full, right? It should make sure that if you call get PWNAM or something like this, like the classic Unix APIs to query user, the mere existence of the user file store

should synthesize everything else, right? In a way, you could say, I want that, yeah, you know, Unix, everything's a file. But yeah, users should be a file too, like where you just have one concept in the file system and that everything else comes from there during runtime and is not propagated persistently anywhere else. This is a radical new idea.

He's talking about divorcing user configuration from system configuration. Getting us closer to having a fully immutable system, getting us closer to having an Etsy directory that can be read only. Yeah, you have a machine that you've totally configured and then some user in your organization, whatever that may be, just walks up to it, maybe with a thumb drive with all their user info on it, and they can just pop up and use the system. The existence of the home directory creates the account.

So you're not modifying the system to create or change passwords. It's all stored in there. Really, the whole idea is to manage this stuff at scale and sort of solve problems that we've hacked together in the past. We always have this goal that if a system's configuration is not supposed to change, read-only should be immutable, ideally, even. And hence, the requirement that if a user is created

or removed or modified or whatever, you need a writable Etsy kind of sucks because a user's existence is not really configuration, at least in my view, right? So the concept that mixes state, I believe that the user record is state, it's not configuration, and the rest in Etsy is generally understood to be configuration.

So there's this semantical, this philosophical problem already that Etsy makes a state in configuration and then this propagates into the problem that Etsy needs to be writable. There's a couple of new ideas in here that make all of this really kind of possible, including Wes's favorite, there's some JSON magic. Oh yeah. There are two new concepts.

One of them is, I want to go for JSON user records. Everybody knows JSON. JSON is what the internet people all do. I think we should just start using that for our user records. Yeah. The reason why JSON is because

it's just the most basic thing. It's supposed to be machine readable. It's not supposed to be so much something you write. It's something the computers write thing. It's supposed to be machine readable. It's not supposed to be something you write. It's something the computers write for you and things like that. And it's also what probably most of the internet-facing user databases probably use anyway

when they exchange information about users across the network. So that's the first thing, JSON user records. And we keep saying the user is a file, the user directory is a file. What the hell kind of file are we talking about? We're talking about, in some cases, a Lux encrypted loopback file. So everything is encrypted to a Lux key.

Concept B is, I want that home directories are encrypted Lux loopback files in slash home. So that if I have a user called foobar in slash home, right? So that, you know, if I have a user called Fubar in slash home, traditionally there was slash home slash Fubar and was a plain directory. I want that there now is slash home slash Fubar dot home, and it's a file. And it's actually a Lux loopback image. And then when the user logs in, what do we do?

We set it up via Lux stuff as a loopback file, and then we finally mount it after validating that everything's okay. And by making it a file, you also make them portable. The goals that I want to be able to deliver with what I'm talking about here is, first of all, migratable home directories. Migratable home directories means that you can take a home directory as one unit from this

laptop to your new laptop or to your third laptop and it will always work and be self-consistent in itself and comprehensive and hence migratable. So this basically means that as little as necessary should leak into the system surrounding it. And particularly when it comes to configuration. Which is very different from what was there before. Before, home directories' user accounts were not migratable, because, as mentioned, we have all these sidecar databases, and there's no way you can sensibly migrate all that metadata that's distributed in all these configuration files in Etsy and all the weird sidecar databases

in VAR and whatnot from one system to another. We'll talk more about those sidecar databases there in a moment, but he's demonstrating a system where you can have everything. On that thumb drive, you plug it in. You're now a member of that system. You remove the thumb drive. You're no longer a member of that system. But he also wants to address some glaring security issues that we just don't talk about

in the current configuration. Number one, if you're on a laptop, you're likely at this point using Lux. I am. It works really well for me. One thing that sucks about it is it's a shared password by default because everyone has to use that one password to unlock it. This was an issue at my wife's clinic. They all have to know

the encryption password to get the system to boot. Then there's their user password and then usually passwords for services. Lenard's proposing you change that and link it to the user password. And he's proposing to solve the other problem, which we never talk about. And that is, when you suspend these systems, when you put them to sleep, the data remains unencrypted. The key remains in memory. And I don't know about you, but that's pretty much what I always do with my laptop. It's always in my bag of sleep. Yeah, of course. That's just the most convenient option.

And I'm like, oh, my data's protected. No. If they get it, not only will it still be unencrypted, but with USB-C, they can plug it into any old USB-C thing to keep it going. And they'll have physical access to my box. Yeah, and sitting in memory is your password right there.

Yeah, so he wants to solve that problem. Also one of my really important goals actually is to lock Lux on system suspend. Nowadays, I'm pretty sure that first of all, most of you probably use hard disk encryption on your laptop. And second of all, I think most of you probably don't even turn off the computers anymore at all.

Usually you just close the screen and that suspends the system. And then when you come back, you just authenticate again. But it systematically, I mean, it kind of defeats the decryption, like the encryption that you have there, because basically the way it's currently implemented, you use hard disk, like full disk encryption. So while the system is up, suspended or running,

we are up in that context, the decryption key is in memory, right? So if I go through customs to a country that I don't trust and I have the laptop with me and it's suspended and they pick up the laptop, in that memory, you'll find the decryption key from a hard disk. And that's something I think we should not do, right? We should, and this is something that people might not find important,

but I think it's actually one of the most important things in this entire approach at all, is, yeah, when you suspend the system, the decryption keys need to be removed from memory, right? So that I know for sure that if somebody steals my laptop in suspended state, because that is the most common state that they will probably steal my laptop in, they should not be capable of getting any access to my hard disks, right? Again, this is something you really, really should care about because it basically,

so far, defeated all kind of encryption that you had. Because yeah, as long as you did system suspend and everybody of you does that, if somebody steals your laptop, they can extract everything they want. Now they are proposing to make this system backwards compatible with the existing approach. Yeah, right, there'll just be shims in place,

so all the existing Unix tooling will talk to SystemD. And it's mostly a collection of existing utilities, like PAM, and other mechanisms. It's not like SystemD is re-implementing all of this stuff in some giant binary. Right, and it just uses Lux, right? It's not rolling its own encryption there either. And it could use other backends as well that are just file system stuff.

It can use SIFs or whatever. So there's all kinds of network possibilities. It does require some workarounds or development, though, because it kind of turns out all this stuff's a bit of a hot mess. I never really appreciated how patched together all of this is, and certain things just kind of bypass our basic authentication mechanisms as it is. Certain kind of important things that a lot of us rely on. There's some complications with all of this.

This is HLogins, right? that a lot of us rely on? There's some complications with all of this. SSH logins. I mentioned that I wanted that user authentication and decryption of the hard disk is the same thing. This is inherently incompatible with how SSH traditionally works. Because as mentioned, if you authenticate via SSH, it goes via the authorized keys file in the home directory. So if you want to authenticate something

that is inside of the home directory so that it can access the home directory, where does the decryption key come from to access the home directory? You follow what I mean? There's a chicken-neck problem. You're reading out the key that allows you access from the encrypted thing, which you only can

after you authenticate it, right? And there's a couple of ways to solve that problem, like maybe just unlocking it locally first or coming up with mechanisms to patch that process. Right, and a lot of this too is, you know, Leonard tries to be pretty clear that he's, some of this stuff is more general, right? Just like this extensible user record, however it's stored.

That's an interesting idea on its own. Some of this encryption stuff makes sense really only for client machines, right? Machines that will be offline or you may want to protect because you're moving them around. Not server machines that you have up and unencrypted anyway. Right, it's both trying to solve a problem of making querying users more rich in information you can store about them, maybe that are appropriate for your company. So that's all in that JSON file. It's also about supporting things like YubiKeys for authentication by default.

There's a lot of those kinds of making the UIDs on systems common and solving for conflicts. But it's also about kind of solving the whole hot mess of authentication. You heard Lennart earlier mention that there's all these sidecar databases, and when you think about it, it's a bit of a hot mess. I also see the problem, yeah,

Etsy, PassWD only knows Unix passwords, right? Like, passwords as you know them. It doesn't know anything else, right? Everything else how you might want to authenticate these days, YubiKeys, whatever else, cannot be in Etsy PassWD because it's not extensible, right? So anything more modern,

anything, if you even want to authenticate with a pattern, right, like which is what phones do and which you might want to do on your laptop too if you have a touchscreen, doesn't really fit into that model because, yeah, there's no way how that's available there. It's not extensible. This is actually a massive problem.

Like Etsy past WD, this database was designed in 1985 or something like this, has not been modified once since then. There has been this extension like the shadow database which added like five more fields or something like this, but everybody wants to add their own fields. And this is like fucking ugly, if you ask me, because they created these sidecar databases, right? These databases that extend the user record,

but they're not actually stored in Etsy, past WB and the user database itself, but at some other place. And that other place means something very different regarding where you're looking. All right, if you're looking. signing of these user records. That's another big part of this. There's a lot of implications for security and how you might manage this at scale, but you're going to have to go learn more yourself. It may never hit a desktop near you,

or it could end up all happening and be totally transparent, because that's the other thing to take away from this, is all said and done, you log in, your home directory would mount, and you wouldn't even know. If you've got these services going, you can just add this on and not have to change anything else.

And because it's backwards compatible with the previous system, it's not like something distributions are forced to adopt. But you could see where at-scale operations might want some of this management capability. I want to play with it already. It could be handy even for smaller stuff, too.

You could add me, and I have a little movable account. If I need to use a new studio machine, I just pop up right on it and use it. Yeah, absolutely. Or I use SyncThing to sync around my Lux home directory to all the systems and just sit down everywhere and I'm good to go. Maybe.

Could be the dream one day. We'll see. Hey, just a quick bit of good news for OBS, OBS, our streaming application of choice. Also, you know, people sometimes say, hey, what's a great quick screen cap application now? There's a bunch out there, but OBS is one of the best ones, too, just for that kind of stuff. It's such a cool project. It's like the number one streaming application that Twitch streamers use.

A lot of people don't use it. It's just taken for granted now. You remember the days before a project like this, and it was just only commercial applications that probably didn't run on Linux. It's so quickly

become just like the go-to that it's almost like an obvious, yeah. But, I mean, game changer. And so that's why it's so great to see Twitch becoming

the premier sponsor of the OBS project. It seems like a pretty good match. They write on the page that we're excited to announce that Twitch is now officially sponsoring my work on OBS. This sponsorship allows me to work full-time on the project without much worry,

and with it allows me to support other contributors to help maintain, manage the project, and work on important features. I expect more good things from the OBS project in the future. Yay! I am so happy for them because it's such a great tool. We run it dang near 24-7 here in the studio, either doing live stream reruns or doing something in-house. And it makes a lot of sense for Twitch to do this too, right?

I mean, so many of their users are using it. No kidding. They need it to stick around and stay healthy, don't they? They sure do. That's a really good point. All right. How about a little housekeeping? So if you are not signed up as a Linux Academy community member,

it's free. So it's free. Go check that out because every month Elle is dropping new batches of content and October is just around the corner, my friends. So you can still get a little bit of September in there and then go check out the October stuff. Plus, there's evergreen stuff that stays free all the time. Elle curates that. I really recommend it. So we'll have a link in the show notes for the September courses. But if you just Google, like, Linux Academy community account or go to linuxacademy.com, go get that because that's a great deal.

Absolutely free. Texas Cyber Summit, also I want to let you know about, is coming up very soon. The crew is getting ready to go a party at Texas Cyber Summit. There's going to be a hacker birthday meetup. Uh-huh. Pre-funk the summit. For Elle and Allie, it's their birthdays, and we're going to do a meetup. We're going to just combine the whole thing and make it great.

It's October 10th and the 12th for Texas Cyber Summit, texascybersummit.org. Are you going, Wes? Yeah. Yeah, I am. Of course. Was I going to miss this? No way, man. You'd hike there if you had to.

That's right. I think we just did a ticket giveaway too, didn't we? Yeah. Oh, yeah. I think Rob was our winner from the ticket giveaway. If you would like a chance to win a ticket, you too can enter to win. And to do that, all you have to do is go to

you too can enter to win. And to do that, all you have to do is go to tcs2019.ellopunk.com It's tcs2019.ellopunk.com You'll be dropped into the Telegram chat and Elle has a randomizer, name randomizer that she's using to pull those. And Rob was our first winner.

So if you want to go and maybe you don't have the money to drop to go jump in there. See if you can't win yourself a ticket or two. And if you're in the area you could always join us at Two Brothers Barbecue for the birthday party. Details at meetup.com slash Jupes Broadcasting. That's Jupiter. Yeah if you want to

hear more too there's an extra over at Jupiter Extras. That's what I was trying to remember. Right. Al and I sat down with the blind hacker, and he tells us a little bit about the great ABCs of CTF's talk he's giving, which might just help us, Chris, if we're going to impress Al. There's been some really good stuff popping to the Extras feed. We haven't been plugging it very hard, but if you're looking for just a little bit extra Jupyter Broadcasting content, extras.show. Some good stuff in there.

Usually something coming out every single week. And, of course, it's an easy RSS subscribe to go get that, extras.show slash subscribe. But that, my friends, is everything in the housekeeping. All right, let's talk about your next Linux laptop. I'm curious to know what your requirements are and if they shift like mine do. So you've been sitting there using the System76 Adder workstation. Yes, I have. And you traditionally spend your days on your ThinkPad T480.

That's right. And if you were to go in the market today and buy one for yourself personally, I'm curious to know what your requirements for your next Linux laptop would be. And I'd like to know the audience's too. Let me know at ChrisLAS, because I'm kind of wondering if your shift like mine do, mine kind of swing between ultra-portable long battery life and

oh my god, I want all of the power. Yeah, I mean, workloads vary, right? And I absolutely do love something that's ultra-portable. A lot of work that I am doing is just reading the news or working in a terminal, and that's perfect for that, especially when you might be flying to a conference or something. Yeah, that's where portable and low power,

there's nothing better. Yeah, but also, I mean, we're doing work with audio, we're rendering things out, maybe doing some video work from time to time. Plus, I just can't stand when the machine is slow. Once you start noticing those little stutters or delays, it doesn't feel right. Yeah, this machine did break me in a couple of ways, which I'll talk about here in a second. But first, let me tell you what we have here in the studio.

So the System76 adder workstation that we have is configured with a Core i7-9750 at 4.5 gigahertz, six physical cores, 12 threads. It is ridiculous having 12 threads on a laptop. It feels like it's like, I feel like I'm getting a deep fake CPU over there. It's incredible. This has two eight gig modules in there, a DDR4. So it's a pretty smoking fast RAM. It's got a Samsung 970 Evo, 250 gig. And get ready for this, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 with 8 gigabytes of RAM. That's insane. Yeah. And it's running Pop!OS based on Ubuntu 19.04 with Gnome Shell 3.2.2, X Server 1.20, NVIDIA graphics driver 435.21, and a screen resolution nominally running at 3840x2160,

although I did mess around with that a bit. So by my calculation, my price before tax and shipping, I suppose, is a grand total of $2,314. Okay, so not on the cheap end, but... It is a workstation laptop. Yeah, this is spec'd out. It's got a 15.6 inch 4K OLED display. Ooh, and boy is that putting my ThinkPad display to shame

today. Oh my god, lapping the ThinkPad display doesn't appropriately describe how much of it is just crushing the ThinkPad display. But, in fairness, this legitimately might be one of the best displays I've ever looked at because the blacks on this OLED are so incredible that basic logos when video games load look incredible. That's it. Everything that we've been doing, even just basic stuff.

I'm looking at like a night mode notes program right now, and it's beautiful. Like the fonts pop off the screen. And then it is running in high DPI mode, so of course it looks gorgeous. It has two M.2 slots in there, so you can pop in two MV&E drives or something, so you get up to 8 terabytes of MV&E

storage if you like. It's also got gigabit Ethernet, of course it's got Intel AC. Yep, oh yeah. It's got one USB 3.1 Type-C with DisplayPort on there. It's also got another USB 3.1 Gen 2 with Thunderbolt Type-C connector. So it's got a Thunderbolt port, Type-C connector, and then three USB 3.0 ports. With the blue coloring, which is always a nice touch.

Plus SD card reader. It's got a big power adapter, not like as big as I've seen in the past, but it's big compared to what you would normally get on some systems. But that's because this thing's got all of this machinery in there. 230 watt power adapter. So it does not charge over USB-C, but that's because you just can't, you can't deliver that much power over USB-C. Right. What I would love to see, and this is Cheese's idea, is in the future, I would love to be able to charge the battery over USB-C when the system is off. Because this is something I do with the old ThinkPad ski is I have a dash charger in my RV that is USB-C.

So I just plug it in and, you know, it takes all night to charge, but I don't care. Right, if you're just leaving it there and you're not using it. In fact, it may be better for the health of the battery to charge slower with less heat. Who knows? So that'd be fun to see down the road. But in the meantime, I kind of, it makes up for it by the fact that a lot of the bulky ports like your HDMI and the power adapter, which is a bit of an L plug, are on the back. So your big IO plugs are all on the back, coming out the back of the laptop,

which means they're not along the side, so it's not blocking your hands from mousing. I love that. I mean, I frequently sort of add my ThinkPad to a desk and take it away, and that's not the best on the ThinkPad. Honestly, this would do better. Yeah, it's so nice having those big ports on the back. I love that.

It does have a removable 6-cell lithium battery at 62 watt-hours, so you're getting, with my rather aggressive usage, you're getting an hour and 45 to two hours of pushing it. If you're sitting there doing a little light work and you're using Firefox as opposed to Chrome, you can push that a little bit further. But it's definitely like enough power that we could use it during the show on battery and do some work.

And as long as we eventually get back to the plug, we're okay. If you're just going to go to a coffee shop for an hour or two, great. If you're going to be there all day, then pack the plug. And it is a 5.51 pound stock. Depending on your config, it'll change. 5.5 pound laptop. It's kind of right on the boundary. It's honestly not that heavy.

I'm sitting here with all my knees as we're doing the show, and I think I could reasonably carry it around in a backpack, but it's not exactly comfortable. And it would be a little bit much on a plane, I think, too. I took this on a trip down to the river. I took my RV down to a river, had very little connectivity, and really kind of spent as much time offline as possible playing No Man's Sky when I was online or, you know, just sort of enjoying having a little bit

of peace and quiet. And so I ended up lugging it around in a backpack that you and I got as a company event. So it's a Linux Academy swag backpack. Standard issue. And yeah, standard swag issue. And, you know, I thought i'd be griping about oh it was so heavy to carry around in the backpack but my thinkpad with its extended battery on there kind of i mean it's it's a little bit heavier but right not a lot heavier it's like it's like

4.8 pounds versus 5.5 pounds it feels like what you think it would feel like it's not like it it seems heavier than it should be or anything. That's great. Jesus. That's great. So there's some things I don't like, and there's some things I really like. I'll start with a couple of things that I really like. Number one, this isn't unusual, but System76 does a great job of putting together what

they kind of coin a quick start guide. But it's more than that. It completely illustrates everything from what each key and port does to how to pull out the cooling on the CPU in case you want to repaste it and everything in between. See, that's so nice. With color-coded motherboard diagrams of this is your storage, this is your Wi-Fi, like totally. You don't get that from other vendors. No, and in that same kind of vein, like replacing the keyboard is simple, just requires a crosshead

screwdriver and you could pop that keyboard off if you damage it and replace it. So there's aspects about this that I find when you're investing in a workstation where it really kind of matches that workstation name. Replaceable keyboard, replaceable battery, the storage, the memory, technically even the CPU cooling if you really want to go crazy, they're all user serviceable. That is really pretty great. And when you consider like if you're going to spend, you know, $2,200, $2,300 on a machine like this, you kind of want to be able to do that. It's a big investment, yeah. Right. So I think that kind of stuff actually does matter and it's something you don't see very much. Also, without making a

big fuss about it, there's some keyboard combos that I really like. One keyboard combo kills the webcam. I like that a lot. Another keyboard combo can turn on and off airplane modes. You can just kill all the radios. It doesn't have to be some tacky switch on the side of the case. It's just a keyboard combo.

And something else I like, because every now and then I know I'm going to just push this machine to the limit, you can toggle on and off the fans to absolute maximum. I discovered this once on accident, but now that I know it's like function F1 or function one, something like that, now that I know it's that, and it's in their quick start guide, I love it. Right. Maybe it's a hot summer day here in the Pacific Northwest, but you just need to get some work done. It's a hot summer day in the Pacific Northwest, and Chris Fisher and Wes Payne are turning their laptop fans up to max.

I don't know what just happened there. I don't know what happened there. But speaking of laptop fans, I did want to kind of talk about fan noise a little bit. So I'm no Wendell Wilson, but it seems to me that they have a somewhat kind of aggressive cooling curve on there where I'll hear the fan kick in, and then it kind of holds sort of low, and then it really kicks in. And I'll give you an example. This is near the side of the laptop during some benchmarking that I conducted, just to give you kind of idea what the laptop noise is like. It's not horrible,

but it's noticeable. And you'll hear it kind of an idea what the laptop noise is like. It's not horrible, but it's noticeable. And you'll hear it kind of ramps up now. It moves quite a bit of air. Yeah, it does. There's two fans in this thing, so you can actually hear it's a little bit of fan noise hitting, and it's just on the table, right? And it's not horrible.

And we were playing some games, and you could hear it over the speakers, which were turned up all the way. You could still hear the fans, but it wasn't that bad for what you're getting. Right. You're getting incredible graphics. So it's sort of like, what do you expect? I suppose I would love to see something a little more graceful in the ramp-up, but at the same time, I'm a stick-it-in-high-performance kind of guy and just let it go. Right, and you've got some control, just not maybe all the control that you'd like.

So this laptop was an opportunity for me to really experience something with some profoundly better graphics than what I'm used to. I've spent the last year and change on Intel graphics. So when I was digging around in Pop! OS and seeing different options for switching graphics and performance governor options that were in the GNOME menu, I want to know if this is something they invented or if this is just something that people that have these fancy graphics cards experience. That is not specific to System76 products. It's any time you have a battery show up on the system. It assumes the system is a laptop and the System76 power daemon,

which is a component of Pop! OS, creates that extension. So it allows you to set the CPU into a lower power mode. I'm sure you've seen that there's the performance mode, there's the balanced mode, and then there's the battery saver mode. And what those do is change the turbo settings of the CPU. And also there should be a graphics switch that shows up in that same area if you have NVIDIA Optimus. And this is on any system, not just our systems, although many of our systems have NVIDIA and have Optimus. It's super cool having a machine with these advanced graphics because it's like a whole new world of things I get to play with.

And one of the other things that I don't often get to mess around with is really brilliant high DPI screens. My last experience was on a really kind of small high DPI. This is a very large screen for a laptop. And I noticed when I went into GNOME Shell display area, there's some customization in there to enable that. Can you talk about that a little bit? That's right.

So on the Adder, we have an OLED high DPI screen. It's our flagship in terms of displays. I'm typically on a Galago with a 13-inch high DPI screen, and it is a world of difference when you move to OLED. It's so bright. The colors are crisp. The contrast is incredible, but software support is not that great right now in upstream GNOME. So what we had to do was develop a number of items to perform brightness control for OLED screens. Brightness control is done in software on OLED screens. Since there is no backlight,

the brightness of each individual pixel has to be edited by the graphics card, essentially, using a transform. So we do that with X11 gamma settings. And this works in X11 in any display environment, in any desktop environment. So whether you're in GNOME or KDE, we have a daemon called System76-OLED that controls the X11 gamma settings. In addition, GNOME with Wayland, we have integrated into GNOME Settings daemon the ability to control gamma settings in Wayland as well. So

there is Wayland support, but since there isn't a common way of setting gamma, it's only available in the GNOME Wayland setting, not in other Wayland sessions. Okay, that makes sense. And how portable is some of those System76 daemons? Say, maybe I'm an Arch guy or an OpenSUSE guy or gal. Am I going to have a shot of running those? Yes, they're highly portable. What you have to do is just go to the GitHub page for Pop!OS and search for System76-OLED. That project, you can compile. It's standalone.

It requires the Rust compiler. And there's already, I believe, an Arch package for it on the AUR, which of course there is, right? Of course, yes. In addition, we hope to upstream the GNOME support for this. So we're not sure exactly what the transition will look like for non-gnome environments, but I do predict upstreaming the gnome support for OLED. It will require specific DMI information for each model. When we were doing this, we did some research and development.

We tried to figure out what other vendors were doing. It turned out none of them were enabling backlight support or brightness support on OLED. So there's a Lenovo laptop that has OLED. There's a Dell laptop that has OLED. The Dell one actually comes with Linux out of the box from Dell. And they simply don't enable brightness control. And that really struck me as odd. But it also made us think, how would this have to be?

If we're the first laptop company to upstream something like this, how would it have to merge into the X11 stack, into GNOME, into different desktop environments to be as open as possible and work across different laptop vendors. So hopefully what we've done is generic enough that other laptops from other vendors can use it if they have an OLED display. Something else that came up on your call was some additional work for high DPI users. There's an additional component. So in addition to OLED support, we have a high DPI daemon. And what that does is if you plug in displays that have different DPIs, it will attempt to match them using a combination of X11 scaling and changing the DPI settings.

And with GNOME Shell, this works really well. So you could plug into your adder a low DPI display or a standard DPI display, I guess is the way you should call it. And it will ask if you want to render the standard DPI display in X11 at two times its native resolution. And that way you get really crisp graphics on both displays without compromising software compatibility or having to move to Wayland. I want to thank Jeremy again for taking a few minutes there to take my call. And, you know, it's just so nice to be able to pick up the phone and just say, I got a couple of questions for you. System 76 is great.

Right. Easy, straightforward. You don't have to go through layers of bureaucracy. And you get to find out all of the cool details there. So I played around with what he was talking about there. And this is how I eventually ended up setting the panel to 120 hertz. So when I set it down to 1080 to match

a 1080 screen that I was plugging in, I noticed I had the option to set the refresh rate to 120 hertz. So when I set it down to 1080 to match a 1080 screen that I was plugging in, I noticed I had the option to set the refresh rate to 120 hertz. And when I ran X-Rander, it looked like I might be able to get other fun combinations if I wanted to push it, but I didn't want to push it. I just wanted to see what that was like. To my eye, and I'm curious to see what you think, but to my eye, it seems, did you just change it? You're changing it right now? To my eye, it feels like a whole nother dimension. When you and I were playing No Man's Sky, when that thing was set to 120 hertz.

Now, granted, you take your 4K screen down to 1080p to do this. No Man's Sky, it looked like we were looking through a window, not like we were looking at a screen. Like, you described it as it's broken that screen game barrier. Yeah, I mean, it really, you were just immersed in it. It broke me.

We were both just sitting there kind of gawking at it, playing with it, just moving, you know, just looking around the world. I will never be able to unsee that on all of the systems I game on now. It will never be as satisfying as gaming on this system. Because of that graphics card in there with that screen, which means the blacks just are truly black.

And then at 120 hertz and you're getting like, oh, I don't know, 70, 80 frames per second. When you're playing this thing at 1080p, that the frame rate is just, it's ridiculous. I mean, it's like, even at 4K in some of the games, I was getting 70 frames a second on some of my games. So even at 4K, like I was getting great frame rates. But so when you're in 1080p at 120 hertz, I can't even describe it. It broke my brain and I will never be able to go back. Like, now I know, like, my next system I build, I will have to have these components in the chain. There's, that's just how it's going to be. And like, again, 12 cores on that system means anything you do. Like, I built our app pick that we're about to talk about today on there, and it's just

nuts, because then I built it on my six- six core Intel desktop and that thing, that thing really did trounce it. So that's what I want to talk about now is I want to talk about the actual performance because that's what you're buying this thing for. And I guess it depends. If you're buying the Adder workstation to take on, say, like a Thalia workstation or a similar system that you could build, that you would build with modern parts, that desktop is going to beat this laptop when you go toe-to-toe. That is just how it is because it's a laptop. However, if you are looking for something

that is beating all of the other laptops on the market, that's where this thing really shines. This is like, in my estimation, as good as it kind of gets right now in supported Linux laptops for ultimate performance. Right, like a mobile workstation that does all the things you might want or need to do on a desktop, but you can move it around. It's not as fast as a desktop of today, like a really great desktop of today. Right. But it is as fast as a really great laptop of today

that has full Linux support. And I want to make a couple amendments to that. First of all, this laptop has a pretty good set of compromises. Most laptops

are a series of compromises. Of course. This one has weighed in a couple of ways that I, in my current phase, of future laptops, appreciate.

I could see myself with something like this because of this. It compromises portability and battery life and USB-C charging for a really just unbelievable screen, a extremely fast processor, and extremely competent graphics and a lot of storage. You can put a lot of storage into this thing. You can also put standard SATA SSDs in this thing. I mean, I have an Evo in this thing right now,

but it also has, like I said, two slots, two M.2 slots. Ready to go. So you can put a lot of storage. You get a lot of CPU power. you get a lot of CPU power, you get a lot of GPU power. Right, it's leaning to that power side, not as much the portability side.

If you're doing encoding, you're doing TensorFlow, you're doing these kinds, CUDA work, these kinds of tasks, this is so far and above and beyond buying something else that you would slam Linux onto.

But if the one thing you need, and above anything else, is just raw horsepower, a desktop's still going to beat this thing. Of course. That's just the reality of it. So it really does depend on what you need. So here's what I did. Last night and this morning, I uploaded a few benchmarks to openbenchmark.org.

Memory speed benchmarks, where this thing really crushes it, by the way. File system speed benchmarks, where this thing really crushes it, by the way. File system stressing benchmarks and graphics magic computation benchmarks. So you can do a one-to-one comparison with this laptop to your laptop. There's a command line when you go to the web page, if you have the Pharonix benchmark installed, there's a command line that you can copy that will compare your system to this system using all of the data I have uploaded open benchmark. And you can use that to put real numbers to compare what kind of difference you would see in your workloads and maybe quantify the value. So if you're on the fence and you can't really decide, use that tool because it's a fantastic resource. But I'll note, as you've sat here now,

because we kind of mentioned the fan noise, as you sat here just using it running, I presume, Chrome or Firefox maybe? Yeah, I got Chrome going here. Nice. Because I didn't put Chrome on there. No, I installed Chrome. It hasn't made a peep.

There's been zero fan noise. Totally fine. I got NetData going on here too, and you can tell. It's just, you know. You put NetData on there? here, too, and you can tell. It's just, you know. You put net data on there? Well, yeah, and it looks beautiful. So if you're not pushing it, the noise profile is surprisingly low. In fact, I think it's probably one of the quietest large System76 laptops I've ever used.

And when you push it, it doesn't seem unreasonable because it's got to have cooling in there because you got a big old GPU and you got a big old CPU. Like you got to cool that. And that's the compromise you make on this kind of thing. And it's not like a really harsh noise. It's kind of a white noise fan noise. No, it wasn't offensive at all. I'm overall, I'm really impressed with this.

The keyboard is pretty good. It's not my favorite keyboard. It's not a ThinkPad keyboard, but it's better than a MacBook. Oh, but by far and away, yes. Trackpad is bigger than they typically have been. It's not a ThinkPad keyboard, but it's better than a MacBook. Oh, by far and away, yes. Trackpad is bigger than they typically have been. It's smooth. It's not my favorite trackpad. It's not better than a MacBook, but it's better than historically we've gotten on laptops. It's not bad. I mean, I jumped on it today and it hasn't been a big issue.

I actually, I really kind of got my, with the exception of when I'm gaming, I've been using the trackpad for the entire review, which at times was hard, but I'm just not a big trackpad guy to begin with. The IO is fantastic on this thing, and when you match it with the performance, it's pretty killer. And throughout, I was like, can I do this on a different distribution? I actually thought, just as a side tangent, I actually thought I'd blow Pop! OS away and put Fedora on there or Manjaro. Sure. Never bothered. I was so impressed with the entire process from first-time setup where it reinstalls and encrypts the drive to the Pop! shop, the extensions that they've chosen to install

the theme all of it was so damn nice and then you combine a really fast gnome shell at 120Hz where the animations are butter even at 4K when the thing's at 60Hz I was never compelled to remove pop partly because for a large portion of my usage, I was mostly offline. So I really couldn't, like, download a distro, and so I kind of had to stick with it.

But once I got rolling, I was like, this is pretty great. Right. I mean, just having Linux already on it, right? Then you can just sit down and get to work. And I also can now better appreciate Pop!OS' role in System76's mission, using it on their hardware, where they've got just some rough edges smooth, like moving between GPUs and hooking up the external display and these little things that you could get to on any distro, probably,

but they've already done it for you. And now I get it. Oh, they're really actually doing quite a bit of customizations. They've done their own installer. They have their own shop. They are making these extensions pre-installed by default that they think make their experience better. And I agree. I, in fact, there was not a single one I went in there and pulled out and I'll be the first to be like, nope, nope. And that out of there did not do any of that with these, the entire through and through process felt like it was very cohesive.

And I want to remind everybody that I've bought a lot of System76 hardware over the years. I was one of their very first customers. So I've experienced different levels of integration with the operating system. And in, I don't know, what is this, 12 years that I've tried out System76 hardware? I don't know what, it might be more than that.

This is clearly the most integrated experience I've ever seen. And my instincts are, I don't know, but my instincts on it is they're still just getting really started. There are only a couple of releases into this. And that's why through the entire review I was fishing to see, is it dependent on Pop! OS? Because I think that's a deal breaker for some of our audience.

Sure, right. And each time the answer was no. Sometimes, well, you might have to build it. Right, you might have to do a little customization yourself that we've done for you. But it's all out there in the open, right? And that's one thing we love about System76. It's pretty nice.

Pretty good rig. You just got to make the decision for yourself. So that's why I encourage you to try out the Pharonix test suite. It's absolutely free. And that's the tool that Michael Larable uses for the Pharonix website. And compare it to the ones I did. I uploaded the ones that I thought were more relevant. I tried a few.

Some of them didn't execute properly. It was a bit of a mixed bag, but one of the fun things is that comparison because it'll generate all the charts for you. I love that. It's so geeky. And we'll have more information in the show notes if you would like it.

Mr. Westpain, I've got a very fun app pick for you this week. I know you need another terminal, right? Like you need another shell, I guess. But Starship is a minimal and fast shell prompt that is, get ready for it, written in Rust. Yep. Yeah, and because of that, I saw you sneak this into the show notes,

and I've got it installed right here. Yeah, isn't it cool? It is. So did you use Cargo on that system? No, they've also got some release binaries that you can go download and just stick it on your path somewhere. Yeah. Then you've got to just add a little thing that starts it up in your Bash RC.

They've got instructions, or maybe you're doing CSH or Phish or whatever, and it's much like, you know, it's a Powerline-style prompt that you might be familiar with from other things, but it's just fast. It's fast and has a nice, what looks like a nice little TOML configuration file if you want to customize it a little more. Yes, you will have to install the Powerline font first,

which is how to do that is linked in the guide that we have in the show notes. It is just fun and cool. I just thought it'd be. You know, there's nice little things like indications of return code status or how long the last command took and how long it executed. Right there for you,

out of the box. I do like that. I'm a numbers guy with that kind of stuff. Yeah, there's lots of little configuration options, which are really cool too, like ways to display the current prompt order and configuration on how your path should look. You know, all those little things that you can really tweak to make the shell feel like it's perfect.

It's nice that it's fast, too, because some of those prompts, like once you've got a lot of options, they can get kind of sluggish. And it's always annoying when you open up a terminal and it takes any time at all to be ready for you. I'll tell you my motivation. I wonder what you think of this. Oh, that's cheese, too.

I have been thinking about becoming one of those guys that's like, rah, rah, use the terminal. Noobs should use the terminal. Yeah, come join me, man. Because it's like the universal interface to all Linux distributions. You can message people commands that they can run, but also it's like the common denominator.

Your system can be really, really hosed, and if you're somewhat comfortable on the command line, you have a chance of getting it going again. Geez, you think I'm crazy? You think I'm going to scare off all the noobs if I tell them to use the command line? No, I mean, I feel that, yeah, it can be intimidating to jump in the command line initially and try and figure it out yourself. I know it was

for me whenever I first started experimenting with Linux back in the 90s. But it's really one of those things now where it's, you can jump right in, you shouldn't be scared to get in there on the terminal and do a little bit of work. And like you said, it could really save you a lot of grief if you know enough to get in and start looking at what's going on in the bootloader. It can instantly lead you down a path to troubleshoot for yourself. Here's the other reason. Inevitably, it always happens. You're browsing the web for a guide. You eventually come across something that says, copy this command and paste it in your terminal. Now, if you have no idea

what any of these commands do, you've got no idea if that's a good idea or a bad idea. You can't evaluate it. How are you supposed to be a responsible command line user if you don't use it from time to time? And you eventually will come across an opportunity where somebody says, pop open the old terminal and sudo w get this bash script. That's, I mean, we've all seen that.

I like your idea here, though, because I don't think it needs to replace it. We should still try to get great graphical user interfaces out there, right? But for some people, that can be better for some interfaces, for some commands, for some tasks on the system. And we happen to have a great terminal environment on these Linux operating systems, we should take advantage of it. That's just it. There's some really good tools in there that aren't, they're not hard to use, they're just different to use. One example too, and I mentioned this last week, with the two-in-one laptop that I was messing with, it has an accelerometer and a gyroscope in it. And so whenever the machine boots up,

the login screen would be rotated and upside down. I would still be able to log in. And as soon as I launched the terminal, I could run X-Render, TACO, normal, and boom. Everything's right at itself. I'm good. I can go back and blacklist kernel modules, whatever I need to do from there.

And then I'm done, right? Yeah. And yeah, I mean, it took a couple of commands on the command line to do from there. And then, and then I'm done. Right. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, it took, you know, a couple of commands on the command line to do that. Because even the gnome rotation lock wouldn't work in that instance. So, you know, you can get yourself out of some really tricky situations by just knowing a few commands and not being intimidated by the terminal for sure. Back in my day, you had to write your own X config. That's what I say.

Get out of here, old man. XF-86 config, baby. All right, listen, there's a few bits of housekeeping that we should probably wrap on, too. We should include these in the actual housekeeping. Too late. You can get every single episode at linuxunplugged.com slash subscribe. Show notes for everything we talked about, linuxunplugged.com slash 320. We're on Twitter at Linux Unplugged.com slash subscribe. Show notes for everything we talked about. LinuxUnplugged.com slash 320. We're on Twitter at Linux Unplugged.

We do this show live on Tuesdays. Every week. Every Tuesday. Over at JBLive.tv. Converted over at JupiterBroadcasting.com slash calendar. I'm at Chris LAS. He's at Wes Payne. Go check out TechSnap.Systems.

And we'll see you next Tuesday! sent us stream centos stream centos. Which one do you like better? I kind of like CentOS. CentOS. Yeah, I think I find myself using multiple ones. I mean, mostly CentOS and CentOS, but it's hard to keep that straight. I fluctuate on pronunciations. Thankfully, everyone knows what you're talking about either way. I personally use CentOS,

but a lot of people around me have been using the word CentOS and it's bled into the way I refer to it. I'm having that happen with Gnome Shell. The reverse of it. Yes. Like at some point I was like, I'm going to be stubborn. I'm just going to call it Gnome.

But then now everybody around me has been calling it Gnome and now I'm Gnoming it up over here. Tell you what, on the Gnome desktop and the Gnome Shell. One of the things about the adder that I think is really interesting too is that there is the full gigabit ethernet there so you have all this power and you actually have the bandwidth to push you

know these i don't know heavy graphics projects through video rendering whatever you might be doing also you got you got display port hdmi and you can do video over one of the usbc ports so there's like all of the ways to get screens on this thing. Right. If you ever show up to a conference and they're like, you're going to need a display port. You're like, I got it. I got it. Yeah.

I was like, I wish I had enough screens to try to use up all the ports on this thing just to go at it for a little bit. But they do not grow on trees around here, unfortunately. But I love that those ports are on the back. Love that. You got a USB on the back, you got your Ethernet, you got your display adapters, and your power all on the back behind the screen, so you never have

to see the cables, they're never on the side, and if you're Bluetooth mousing it, you're basically good to go. It's pretty nice. Yeah, that's great. But I don't know, I am very giddy about CentOS 8 and CentOS Stream because starting about Fedora 28,

I started really enjoying Fedora. Yeah. And so it's essentially, it's like time-capsuled what has been one of my favorite releases of Fedora. And I've got all these projects right now. I've got these Raspberry Pi. So I'm going to set up another Raspberry Pi in a few weeks, and I'm thinking well, do I maybe try out

CentOS now instead? I think you do, bud. But do I do CentOS 8? Do I do CentOS Stream? Definitely Stream. You think so? You start with 8, and then you can go to Stream whenever the hell you want. Okay, I just got to process that for a second. That's really cool.

It does make sense too, right? With the Relay transition and focus on containers, which I mean, you're also running a whole bunch of containers, so it's ready for you. It's important to realize that the CentOS stream is not fundamentally different

than CentOS 8 right now. It is just essentially at this point going to eventually become CentOS 8.1 or CentOS 8.2. So it's just a little bit of the future with maybe some new stuff that Red Hat has been cooking on backporting from Fedora into the RHEL 3. That seems like the right gearing for a home server.

It does sound nice, right? Because you don't need like crazy stability, but you also don't need a whole bunch of crazy new changes. Yeah. Oh boy. One really cool thing that I noticed today while researching all this and looking at it, the HStream has a newer kernel than what's in the RHEL 8.1 beta right now.

Right. It's awesome. Yeah, because right now, CentOS stream is actually based on 8.2. Ah, of course. Right. That's how it's going to be. Well, just the kernel right now. The rest of the stuff matches 8.0. Yeah, they say they'll document

it on the wiki. We shall see. I'm going to be watching this pretty closely. I honestly didn't think RHEL would get first to streaming. I mean, I appreciate it's not RHEL, but I didn't think, or to rolling. I thought, honestly, we'd see like an Ubuntu rolling first. It doesn't make sense for an Ubuntu

rolling to really exist because what an Ubuntu rolling first. It doesn't make sense for an Ubuntu rolling to really exist because what is Ubuntu rolling but just a rebuild of Debian most of the time. The way that the Ubuntu development process starts from is they are mass importing Debian packages and just rebuilding it with the Ubuntu branding. They don't make changes until they freeze the tree and stop importing. I feel like I'm much more comfortable running an Ubuntu LTS on a server than a current release of Debian. And I know that sounds crazy to some people. And I am running Debian on a server. I acknowledge that.

But to me, Ubuntu LTS feels more like – like Debian feels more like a Fedora and Ubuntu feels more like a RHEL and LTS. Like Debian feels more like a Fedora and Ubuntu feels more like a RHEL and LTS. And I think they don't necessarily need a rolling because they've kind of nailed the update methodology where they backport like the driver enablement stack to the LTS release. This just sort of keeps that LTS relevant and ticking. Debian default doesn't have that live patch ability either that, you know, you do get withuntu, because I'm the same way. I have a Debian, Armbian-based server running on a single-board computer, but I also have stuff in the cloud running LTS. Also, another thing that I don't know if anybody picked up on in the last couple of months or so, but now Red Hat is slowly working through

including kernel live patching in the basic subscriptions for RHEL. It's no longer a separate component. I don't think we will see that trickle down into CentOS yet because the amount of effort it actually takes to make live patches that work is kind of ridiculous. Hey, Neil, I think you mean CentOS. Oh, I mean CentOS.