LINUX Unplugged - 323: It's Pronounced 19.10

Episode Date: October 16, 2019

We risk it all and try ZFS on root with Ubuntu 19.10, and share our first impressions and what improvements we can't live without. Plus, exciting news for both Plasma and GNOME, coreboot laptops from System76, and too many picks. Special Guests: Brent Gervais, Drew DeVore, and Martin Wimpress.

This round of applause is dedicated to one and only Carl George right there. Mr. Carl. I have to thank you. I don't think I've eaten better this year. I ate so well while I was visiting Texas Cyber Summit. Right? Yeah. You were very welcome, sir.

Highlight of the trip. Yeah. Thank you very much, Carl. Also, thank you for driving us around. I appreciate that. You created a lasting good impression of San Antonio, I've got to say. I mean, you for driving us around. You created a lasting, good impression of San Antonio, I've got to say. I want to go back.

I agree. I like food a lot, and driving's just kind of a way of life in Texas. Everything's so spread out. We are so thankful, though, because we travel to these places that we have never been before. That was my first time in San Antonio. Same. I'm sure you've been in San Antonio plenty of times.

Yeah, as a kid, but not as recent. So you wouldn't necessarily know all the great spots. No. And you go there, you don't know where you're at, you have no way of getting around. Especially in a big place like Texas, right? And thankfully, we do these shows, and so we have listeners in those areas

and they can, they sort of are our tour guides in a way. It's so awesome. And the great thing about Carl is if he suggests we go to a place, we don't even debate. No, no question. Which in a group of people, Carl, you've seen this in a large group of people, right? You can spend like a half hour trying to figure out where to go eat. Routinely. And you end up with something not so great. Oh man, we ate so good. My main concern was I just didn't want you to come to town and then just go, you know, walk around the Riverwalk and then get back home and say, yeah, well, San Antonio was fine. I wanted you to have a better experience than that.

No, and you have that local experience. So, you know, like that that hole in the wall. Well, except for in San Antonio, it's more like that hole outside that has outside seating, but great food. Right, like the carnitas place that had one menu item. Yeah, when the guy asked if what else was on the menu and the lady just looked at him like, uh, there is no other item on the menu. Hello, friends, and welcome into Linux Unplugged, episode 323.

I'm Chris. I'm Wes. 323? Nicely done. Is that even a thing anymore? It is now. You've been here since episode 100, so nicely done to you, too. Well, Mr. Payne, we have a great show.

We're going to have our first look at Ubuntu 19.10, which is likely releasing just as a, well, maybe when you listen, it kind of depends on your schedule, but just about as you listen to this, Ubuntu 19.10 is releasing. We've got some big community news, including a new KDE Plasma and even more changes for Gnome Shell, which, oh boy, we just got a new Gnome Shell. Yeah, it's wild. Plus, not just myself, not just Wes, but Mr. Cheese and Mr. Drew are here to give you their takes on 1910. Hello, gentlemen. Hello. Hi. Nice to have you here.

We all ended up trying out 1910 for various reasons and all walked away with different notes. So I think this is going to be a really good one. And of course, we've got our virtual lug. Hello there, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello. Oh, hi. Oh, hi. Howdy.

Hey there. Look at that, a healthy showing. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Good to have you here. So let's start out with the community news this week because we're going to be talking a lot of Gnome Shell and Mate later today, so I thought we'd kick things off with some Plasma news. Version 5.17 is out today as we record. The big thing here for me is I'm all about, I like that color grading.

And Night Color is built in, it's a color grading system that helps your eyes relax as the sun sets, as they put it. And it is now in X11. It also recognizes when you're giving a presentation. I love that. And turns on D&D on that screen. That is straight up brilliant. That's next level D&D. I mean, if you're like me, you have friends who send you embarrassing messages right when

they know you're giving a presentation. That's actually a great prank. That is really great. But also, just sort of as a meta feature for 5.17, things are thriftier than ever with Plasma. Oh, yeah. It starts so fast. I'm actually running 5.17 right now. I updated it before doing the show.

Pleased to say my Neon install is doing just great, honestly. They finally ditched Bash for some of the scripts that run as you're starting up Plasma, right? So you get past the login screen. You've entered your password. You have work to get done. Before, that was totally synchronous. It runs Bash, it waits for the script to complete, and then you get a desktop.

I mean, I love Bash, but it's not the fastest thing on the planet. So now they've rewritten it in C++, and it's totally asynchronous. So login can just start right once you're authenticated. Ooh, that's nice. That is very nice. As well as many, many, many, many other features that are in Plasma, including some system settings, improvements for Thunderbolt support.

In fact, overall, there's just been general improvements to system settings. Oh, yeah, tons of improvements to system settings, and there's more stuff for, like, KSysGuard, which can talk about C group limits, which you probably have

if you're running a whole bunch of containers or doing fancy system D stuff. Yeah. I also like that they put some stuff in there for visualization of the NVIDIA GPU stats. Sexy. That's really nice for Ubuntu users since the NVIDIA binary driver is now on the ISO. But one of the main new features of Plasma 5.17's display manager, KWIN, is fractional scaling on Wayland. That's a fancy term. What does it mean? Well, it means you can scale your desktop to suit your high DPI monitor perfectly, right? You might not need like a two-time scaling. That might be too much. You can dial it down now with fractional support. So you won't have tiny or gigantic fonts and icons on those 4K screens. I like it on a 4K screen because I can get a little more real

estate without having to be too tiny. And also, I mean, KWIN's Wayland support has come a long way, right? I mean, we've been covering it on this show for years. This was one feature that it's kind of been missing. It's been a standout missing feature. That's finally corrected. Yeah.

Also, something that's coming back, if you're an old desktop KDE user and you miss the ability to close windows with the middle click, it's back, baby. It's back. Is that just going to confuse some people? Here's why it's nice.

It's a great way when you've got a couple of windows up, you can close a window without changing focus. I will say, three mouse buttons, strictly better than two. Way better, right? Who doesn't want three mouse buttons? What am I, in the 80s? Also, here's a funny one. You can now, on X11, which wasn't really super easy before,

properly map the super key. You know, the little Windows key in here? Wow. Yeah. That must have taken some work in the back end. You know, deep engineering, I think, on that one. It did take some work in the back end, having done that in Marte over like 18 months. It's hard work, that.

What is it? What is it that's so dang hard? Because it has been a very top requested feature of Plasma Desktop. I mean, is it just that X is old and broken? No, it's the fact that anything could have a key bound to super. So when that gets picked up, you need to pass that event along all through the chain of windows so that any window that's got that in their key bindings can respond when they have focus. And it has to touch lots and lots of parts of the system. All right.

So I've waffled on this last item here, but let's talk about it. Discover. Plasma's software manager lets you install, remove, and update applications. It's been improved in this release. It includes better progress bars for the first time and different UI feedback indicators that tell you it's working. And they've added icons to properly demonstrate Snap applications

to help you get just some more information. And they've helped with better feedback on connection issues. However, maybe we'll get to this in a little bit, but having gone through a few different desktop environments in the last couple of days to try out 1910, boy, does Discover feel like the absolute... It's my least favorite product, honestly. It's the worst.

Yeah. And I hate to say that about free software that people are working really hard on. It's not that it's necessarily terrible. It is usable. I do use it from time to time. It's just that the competition has gotten a lot better, frankly. Yeah. I don't know what the solution here is because they have diligently worked

to make this better for a while. And it still seems like it's behind everything else. And I don't know what would be better. And I obviously couldn't write something better myself. But boy, does it feel like a weaker spot of the desktop right now. But it is nice to see some of these improvements, some of these informational feedback things

will go a long way in at least making it much, much, much more usable than it has in the past. So they do seem to be taking it in the right direction. Yeah, I mean, continued work is always appreciated. You do wonder, though, it's like, well, we need to just start over. Yeah, need to figure out quite what's wrong with the core there. Well, speaking of core,

Core Boot is coming to Comet Lake chips on System76 laptops, at least two of them. The new 14-inch Galgo Pro and the new 15.6-inch Starter Pro laptops will ship with Core Boot firmware rather than a proprietary BIOS. Now, as you probably know and has been pointed out by Mr. Michael Larable over at Pharonix, these laptops still have Intel proprietary blobs, because of course they do. So it's probably best to think of them as more open than most laptops, rather than being completely open.

Yeah, yeah, but still, System76 is just one of a handful of PC vendors shipping computers with Coreboot. Purism comes to mind as another, but frankly, System76 has more compelling and more options for laptops. Honestly, this is great to see. I mean, I've played with CoreBoot a little, and for me, the biggest blocker has been I just didn't have hardware that was

supported by it. I think it's a great option, and we need people in this space working on it, keeping it modern. I think it lost a lot of momentum after EFI support sort of went mainstream. If System76 can keep things working nicely on modern hardware, that should help everyone. I just thought of this now.

I should have thought of it before the show. If anyone at System76 wants to let me know, is this guaranteed to now be a thing for all future Galagos and Darters? Like, will all future Darters and Galagos just guaranteed have this? Or is this just this current line? What do you think of this, Wimpy? Well, I think it's a great step towards, you know, freeing firmware in computers from proprietary bits and pieces that we can't really

know what they're poking around at. And coincidentally, while was at um ubu con last week i was reacquainted with an organization that i've worked with in the past who are also doing some interesting things with um core boot that's a tease all right there's this outfit in portugal called libre trend um and uh wimpy you're such a tease sometimes i know um and we did some work with them uh having ubuntu mate pre-installed on one of their devices a few years ago which was a core boot device and um it was like um a knuck equivalent type device anyway they sort of went dark for a couple of years and they went away back to the drawing board and they've come back last year with a new desktop machine,

which kind of looks like a Mac mini. And that is a fully core boot enabled device. And they're very proud of that. But more importantly, they're doing work with the lvfs project to deliver core boot firmware updates via lvfs so that is coming soon and they also have two laptops the wildebeest and the wildebeest pro neither of which are core boot at the moment but what they're doing is they're gauging interest in those two devices to see which are the strongest sellers in order to determine which

device they invest the time and effort into getting core boot on and again this this lvfs work so they spent about two years doing the engineering up front for this LibreTrend, LibreBox they call it, which was fully engineered from the very beginning to be core boot. And it's also got TPM2 modules for full disk encryption and stuff like that, all in hardware. But for the laptops, they've decided they can't afford that kind of investment each time they do a device so they're testing the waters as to which is the more popular unit in order to determine where they put the engineering effort in. What do you suppose the long-term benefit for the user is? There's a growing trend isn't there to sort of you know create these devices that do have, you know, unencumbered firmware. And there's clearly a large enough

niche of users that desire that to support the, well, first of all, the R&D and the expense of working on this. But, you know, there's several companies around the world doing this now. So I think they're, you know, really looking out for that niche of user that really cares about their privacy. What a thing. We're becoming a market that actually needs to be addressed. What a hell of a thing. It's a nice feeling. It really is.

Gnome Shell's getting better, and we're going to talk a lot about Gnome Shell, or Gnome Shell, as I call it, in a little bit. But what you're about to get on your latest version of your favorite distro is already out of date. But don't worry, it's mostly fixes. Yeah, Gnome Shell 3.34.1 is heavy on those fixes. I mean, you've got stuff like allowing the editing of app folder names, making menu animations more consistent,

improving performance when enabling and disabling extensions, which, hey, I sometimes have to do that, fixing screen dimming on idle, crash fixes, and a variety of animation fixes, which all that doesn't sound like a lot, but I think it adds up to something noticeable. Yeah, plus there's also code for Wayland Fullscreen Compositing Bypass, which is a big deal for fullscreen video and games. But the other thing to watch with these future GNOME developments is what happens with Mutter.

Oh, yeah. Okay, so they've got some fixes for Java applications, which I know, I know, but it's still nice to have. Plus, fixing the startup of X11 session services on Wayland, better screenshot and window animation support when scaled, optimizing the booting of untransformed off-screen stage views, various other scaling fixes, and fixing the numlock state for the native backend.

Plus a whole bunch of crash fixes, which, hey, as someone who's complained about that before, it's really nice to see. Yeah. It does feel like each release is a big deal. Yeah. And I think that's what matters here is

this is a point release with a lot of usability and just like day of you know everyday use improvements and you don't have to wait for

something like GNOME 3.36 coming in March. Yeah. Right. Or 4 or whatever. It really feels

like a remarkably different time than when Canonical announced that they were ditching Unity 7. Doesn't it Wimpy? Yeah, I suppose so.

I mean, it's sort of really growing with momentum now. I mean, it's got all of the mainstream distros shipping it as the default desktop experience now. Right, I mean, harken back to that era. I was one of the individuals that was pretty outspokenly concerned about performance and stability issues. I don't know if you noticed.

And we switched out our whole studio off of Gnome Shell because of it. I don't feel like that would be an issue today. Yeah, well, hopefully not. I mean, you know, there's a lot of people that have put a considerable amount of effort into improving that situation. And in fact, as we talk, there is a GNOME hackfest taking place in the Netherlands this week. And there are two members of the Ubuntu desktop team, Marco and Seb, who are both present there

working on, you know, crushing precisely these kinds of issues. I know that closing the gap between X11 and Wayland is one of the objectives of this week's Hackfest. Oh, that's great. It really seems like there's been enough back-end work done in the past few years that now some momentum can actually happen, right? And some of the user-facing features, things that we notice, well, those are improving. I think very much so.

We'll get to it here in the review in a moment. But I was really worried we weren't going to be able to even begin to solve the GNOME shell problems that we had. I mean, we had an episode here, right, where we debated, like, is this whole thing junk? Should we even continue to build in on it? Well, I had a real crisis of faith because here's all these top distributions shipping it as the default shell, and it just didn't meet my muster. Like, too slow, too many just didn't meet my muster.

Like too slow, too many different issues, crashes all the time. Takes down my whole environment. Right. And I was extremely worried that so many of the problems were fundamentally at the core of GNOME Shell, that they were not solvable. But really smart people have looked at this, and they've been solving a lot of problems and it really has become an example of how different companies with different goals and different priorities

can come together and improve a common piece of free software. It's a pretty good example. It's not perfect yet, it's not all solved yet but it has become... We have a fantastic desktop environment as a result, right? Much more better. Much more improved, much more usable, much faster. All of the bunches, you can really give it.

So, I think it's really kind of time we kind of get into some of that, because you can't really keep talking about some of these without getting into the review itself. Before we do that, we should probably do a little housekeeping. Because there's recently been a batch of brunches. Oh my. So many.

A batch of brunches, Wes. Batch. Maybe batches. I don't know. So for those of you that are not familiar with this phenomenon, Brent here, who joins us on the mumble. Hello, Brent. Oh, hey.

Hey there. Turns out, great interviewer. And he really gets down, you know, I think he does this thing called listening. It's new. You've never tried it. Wow. Wow. It cuts deep.

See, I listened to that. And Brent, he's a great conversationalist. And so we created this concept, Brunch with Brent with Brent, because he also, by the way, makes great brunch. He sits down with somebody and he has a conversation and it just is great podcasting. And so recently a batch of brunches has been released, including a chat with Angela Fisher and Alan Jude. Both, you got to go check out extras.show. You know, I guess one really neat thing to say about the chat with Alan is that you were able to, uh, visit him in person. Did you go to his house? Yeah, I happened to be about an hour away. Um, Alan lives in the same province as I do. Um, so he's near Toronto and I got to,

I basically said, Hey Alan, I'm, I'm near you. Is there any way I can come crash your place? And he said, yeah, yeah, come by. It happened to work out perfectly. It was his normal podcasting day, but they had recorded some in advance. So he had the whole day off. So he and I just kind of hung out for a long time and had a great conversation. And I think that just got released today. So it's a great chat. I listened back and it was a lot of fun listening back.

So I think everybody's going to enjoy it. What I've just learned is be careful letting Brent stay at your house. He will interview you. And as someone who has been interviewed, you end up telling Brent things you didn't expect. That's right. There's a brunch with Wes, a brunch with Cheese. I believe you're on the

docket sometime, huh? Perhaps in the future. I'm coming for you. Yeah, I wanted our brunch to be in person, though. You're just hungry. I felt like first of all, I did want to eat. And second of all, I felt like if I'm going to expose all, it needs to be in person. So extras.show is where you catch that. We also just released a reverse proxy basics and we have a container basics coming out.

Alex and I sit down with Wes on the reverse proxy basics, talk about NGINX, Trafic, or Trafic as they like to call it. And then in the next one, we get down into the dirties of containers. Oh, that's a lot of good detail there. And I talk a little bit more about my setup and my kind of realization that it's more than just hype. There's a practical, like even if you're an old school sysadmin, there's a real practical angle to using this technology. Oh, yeah. I mean, Alex is working with containers every day. So, some good advice.

There's other shows we haven't even talked about yet that are on extras.show, like Office Hours with Chris, Operation Safe Escape with Wes L and a guest, production meetings, chats with people from Linux Academy. And we're going to also do a summary of our visit to Texas Cyber Summit. Extras.show slash subscribe. Just grab that. Yeah, you know, it's a place where we can do a little experimentation. Yeah. If you like what we're doing, you want to see things we're trying, follow Extras.

A batch of brunches and more at extras.show. Also now up on the Linux Academy community section, that's a free section of the Linux Academy platform where you can sign up without subscribing. We've released a new batch of courses. Elle's in charge of this, and she has some great ones. Cloud Formation, Deep Dive, Database Administration, and SQL Language Basics.

Man, that's never getting old. I mean, if you're doing anything, you've got to learn SQL. Google Cloud Functions, Helm, Deep Dive, and the one that I'm going to be taking, the Ansible Playbook Deep Dive. Finally. Wow. That's a little aggressive, Wes. I'm right here.

Check those out. We'll have a link in the show notes. You can sign up without having to pay and get access to all that stuff. And Elle's always curating that, releasing new stuff over there. So check that out. And then extras.show. Wow. That's a lot of stuff. And Elle's always curating that, releasing new stuff over there. So check that out. And then extras.show. Wow. That's a lot of stuff.

Are we good? You good, Wes? You good with that? Oh, yeah. Can I move up? Please do. Okay. All right.

Wow. Again. Kind of aggressive. You know, I don't think we mentioned to the chat room that they should be banging suggesting as we go along. Yeah. Well, it sounds like J-Bob might be having some issues. Who knows?

Oh, really? Well, that's what chat room reports think. Thanks, little Dan. I don't know. I did some suggesting earlier. We got to move that JBot. So that JBot is down? Well, yeah, we're getting a bad gateway. We'll start up the WestBot. What do you think?

It ran out of memory? It does do that. I mean, how much memory is on that box? Like 8 gigs? So, you know, it's not enough RAM for that JBot. Ah, dang it. It happens. I think what we're going to do is we're going to, I mean, not to be that guy, but I think we're going to containerize it.

And then we're just going to put it on a supported system. Because that's on an Archbox from like 2013. So, it's insane. We really should probably move on. It's just that it kind of works sometimes. Yeah, I mean, you just got to go in there and then restart it and then get in the console

and then get the TCP IP stack back online and then get the thing all running again and then get its custom web server up and going. Once you've done all of that and you've forwarded the DNS, you're good to go. So, I don't know, you know, we're probably going to have to make some changes. I mean, it's only perfect that we talk about this, though,

because 1910 is, it's kind of like one of those releases that you're not going to want to install on a system like JBot, because you want that running for years. This is not the long-term support version of Ubuntu. Right, it's a place to try out new things and maybe preview some of the features you will enjoy in a long-term support in the future.

All right. So how do you say the name, the code name? Eon? I don't know. Eon? Yeah, let's go with that. How are we doing, Wimpy? Is it Eon?

You pronounce it 1910. Yes, you do. Yes, you do, actually. Yes. Confirmed. We did try to look it up, right? I mean, you went and tried to define what it is. Well, yeah, I thought maybe we should have some definitions. I'd like to know, confirmed. We did try to look it up, right? I mean, you went and tried to define what it is. Well, yeah, I thought maybe we should have some definitions.

I'd like to know, yeah. Yeah, I know I've been really appreciating, it's a silly thing, but Popey's been doing these live streams. Oh, they're great. And so I learned a little insights recently. You see, they, canonical, refer to it as the code name during the development cycle, Wes. But as it nears release, one of the final changes is switching over to 19.10. That sounds small, but it's probably a big deal. And then once it's released, it's referred to as 19.10.

So get it right. Well, it's not out yet. No. Although, if you think by the time people listen to this, it probably is. So don't screw them up. Right. But we, I mean, this is kind of our first look, right? Because it hasn't been officially released.

We've been playing with it, though. And really, the whole crew has. I think our intention is to continue to run it for the rest of this week and then give you a report on some extended experience with some specific things next week. But we did want to give it a first look this week because we have

been running it. Even on our trip to Texas Cyber Summit, Wes got Ubuntu Mate installed on his ThinkPad T480. I'm running that right now. And I have been running the main line Ubuntu with GNOME Shell on my system. Mr. Bacon, what have you been running? I was running the beta for a couple of days and then switched over to the latest daily of Malte. Ah, okay. And then, Mr. Drew, are you on Gnome Shell or are you on what? What desktop?

I started on the official Ubuntu desktop, which is, you know, their rebranded Gnome Shell. But then I switched over to the more bland Gnome Session just because, you know, more comfortable there. You're a Fedora guy, I know. Okay. But all right, so mainline. All right, very good. So these are a collection of experiences. I'm going to try to sneak in some other flavors over the next week and give you a more comprehensive review in the following episode,

as well as some performance testing and other things with the whole ZFS stack. well as some performance testing and other things with the whole ZFS stack. But as far as our first looks go, I thought, let's talk about some of the headline features. So we'll get to Gnome Shell here in a moment, because it really, really shines in this release. But I think the one that's going to get a lot of news attention is the ZFS support. In this version of Ubuntu 19.10, ZFS version 0.8.1 is shipping with features like native encryption, trimming support, checkpoints, raw encrypted ZFS transmissions,

project accounting and quota, and some backports from 8.2 that did rocks, and I assume others, determined were appropriate. So we have a pretty solid ZFS implementation. But on top of that, there's a lot of work that went into making the rest of the stack ZFS ready. What I'm thinking of, Wes, is things like Grub.

Oh, yeah, right. So there's this project called ZSYS. Grub. Oh, yeah, right. So there's this project called ZSys. And the goal really is to make a lot of the ZFS advanced in basic concepts easily accessible and transparent to anyone. Because maybe you're a sysadmin and you're familiar with ZFS. You're like, oh, yeah, I mean, it makes sense for my big pool of information. But you have the time and need to go study up, review, understand how the system works.

ZFS still has a number of great features if the software between the user and the system can help the user take advantage of those, right? Stuff like automated snapshots, rollbacks, offline instant updates, easy backup support with ZFS replication, right? I mean, come on, those are all amazing features. Unfortunately, desktop Linux hasn't really integrated those yet. I mean, because ZFS is in an awkward spot.

Right. Unless you're running the latest Ubuntu. They're all there, but nothing's really fully incorporating them. Yeah, so that's why Canonical has been developing a new user space daemon called ZSYS. And it's going to cooperate with things like Grub, and it's got some patches and better support for Grub, and it's also going to interact with the standard ZFS tooling to sort of smooth all the little gaps and make sure all those advanced features can actually be enabled. And it's not necessarily Grub dependent. However, this does mean that they're shipping now a patched version of Grub that lets you boot right on ZFS on root, as well as support other functions. Yeah, I mean, well, as long as the installer gets the system

ready. You've been playing with it, Chris. Yeah, so this obviously was the thing we wanted to really try because this is a bigger commitment than just including ZFS in the main installation. There is software

that's being patched. There's this ZSYS layer here. And there is a lot of thought being put into pre-configured data sets, if you understand what ZFS is a bit. So I thought, well, let's give it a go. Because you've got two things here. You've got the core ZFS support of Ubuntu 19.10.

And then you've got the installer support. These are two separate things. And what's really brand new in 19.10 is the installer support in Ubiquiti. And that's what I really wanted to give that a go. And there's a couple of limitations you need to be aware about right here, right now. Number one, it's automatic mode only. Number two, it's going to take over the entire disk. So everything on that disk is going to be rewritten. Yeah, you can't install with CFS on an existing installer next to existing installs. And if you need to make customizations,

well, you're going to have to do that after the install is finished. The custom partitioner does not support CFS. So that is an after install thing. So be aware of that. Number three, and it's not a big deal, but the installer is going to make it look like it's doing Extended 4. So you just need to be aware of that too. And that's actually because under the hood, it is using Extended 4. So you just need to be aware of that too. And that's actually because

under the hood, it is using Extended 4 for some stuff and then moving it over to ZFS later. And so it just requires a lot of patchwork ubiquity to display it. And it just didn't make it in time for 1910. So these are the caveats you need to be aware about if you want to use it. I was comfortable with all of these things. My workstation here at the studio, we talked about this recently, it's a pretty old install. It started life as Neon 1604, ran really great, which was then upgraded to Neon 1804, which is kind of around the point I decided to try out XFCE, and then I converted it to a Ubuntu 18.04 install that also had Gnome Shell installed so I could check things out on Wayland

a little bit here and there. This is gross. It kind of began to fall apart, but it was a solid install from like 2016. So I wrote it as long as I could, and I thought, it's at a point now where I need to reinstall. I don't have to, but I need to, and 19.10 is here.

Let's do this shit. So I wipe out the whole system after backing everything up ZFS on route using the big, bold, all caps, experimental option in the ubiquity installer, hit that next button, rock that install option. And I get everything installed and my goodness, it is glorious. My goodness, it is glorious. I mean, it's fast. It's beautiful. It is the fastest my computer has ever felt. And the software center is packed full of snaps and other apps ready to go. Slack, Telegram, Chrome, slam it on my system. And I've got an AMD GPU, so not a single proprietary driver is loaded. I am rocking this thing. Three screens, two of them vertical. It's good to go. I love this. Oh, what's this, Geary? Oh, this has really gotten pretty great. Look at this. It picked up my GNOME online account stuff automatically. Wow, this is such an amazing experience. Well, time to go home. Shut the computer down, go home, spend the night with

the wife and kids, come back to work in the morning, hit the power button, system fails to boot. Dead. This is when I realized I was in a bit of a situation. So if I go into Grub and I reload the previous kernel, the one that came on the daily ISO, I could boot pretty good. Couldn't get a home directory, couldn't get a VAR, but I could get the system up. If I boot on the new kernel, I could get to a busy buck shell, and that was it. And that's when I realized that I had hit a bit of a situation.

You really didn't take the experimental thing seriously, did you? I mean, I was on fire, Wes. I was on fire. And this was a hard, hard right turn, and I was not expecting it. And I sat with it. I thought about, you know, troubleshooting here and there. But what I realized is I'm going to take advantage of the super solid ZFS support that is in 1910, and I'm going to go ahead and bypass the installer support.

Root on ZFS, for me, has a lot of potential in a little while, but not a lot of potential today. Do you know what I mean? Like, you could kind of visualize how that would be handy. Right. I mean, we've seen other systems, things like FreeBSD, other systems with longer ZFS support, or maybe things like OpenSUSE, right, with ButterFS. Like, you can get a lot of benefits with ZFS on Root,

with snapshots, rollback, integration perhaps with the package manager to make sure the system stays in a consistent state. Right, because you see like a grub entry last snapshot. So when my system fails, I just load that and boom, I'm right back to where I was right before I did that update. Right, but you don't really get that right now. Not yet, yeah.

And you're risking a little bit of complexity. Right, so the ZFS support in Ubuntu 19.10 is top-notch. The Ubiquiti installer is limited today. So what I did on my next reload, after I gave it a thought, is I went, get ready for this, extended 4 for my root, XFS for my home, and ZFS for all my data partitions, which I just set up later after the install was done with gparted

and just tossed them in an FS tab. And a big deal. ZFS for all my data partitions, which I just set up later after the install was done with gparted and, you know, just tossed them in an FS tab. And a big deal. So basically you've decided that on 1910 at least, maybe just skip that setup unless you specifically want to play with it and enjoy the consistent ZFS support we've enjoyed for a while on Ubuntu.

I'm going to give the ZFS on root a go again. But I really do heed Didrock's warning where you know, where he says, this is legitimately an experimental thing we're doing in so much that the format of the way we lay out the disks may change and it may not be compatible with what we decide to go with in the end. This is what I loved back in the day about these interim releases of Ubuntu. They were really the try something out, try something new,

deploy the new desktop environment, deploy the new compositing backend, deploy the new frickin' file system. That's the only way to get some of this stuff ironed out. You can test it all you want behind closed doors, you can play with it on the limited number of systems you have available,

but until the people who are actually going to use it use it, you can't fix all those bugs. You've got to put it in production. And that's what these interim releases have been about in the past, but it really feels like the good old days. If you love living on the edge a little, 1910 really makes you feel right at home in that regard. So that's where I stand with the ZFS support. For my production systems, for systems that I'm going to depend on from a day-to-day basis,

I will not use the ZFS en route experimental installer feature, but I am going to use the hell out of the ZFS support that is there. I'm just going to use it in a more traditional manner. Yeah, I mean, that's still fantastic. And I expect by 2020, it'll probably be a different story.

Yeah. Wimpy, sounds like you perhaps had some feedback here. Yeah, the way that the ZFS on route is implemented changed quite a bit, literally in the last few days. And it sounds like some of you early adopters there with the daily images got bitten. I suspected as much. As of yesterday, it's all fine again. It's still carrying an experimental flag

for the reasons that you highlight, Chris, which is the implementation may change slightly between 1910 and 2004 based on feedback and such and how people get on with things. But when the final release is out, if you want to test ZFS, you shouldn't run into the issues that you've just described. Yeah, I would expect so.

I still think maybe for my day-to-day production systems, I would avoid it on root. But unlike my computers that are not like the end of the world, if I do an update and there's an issue, I think I'm going to give it a go again. And I obviously am using it on the data partitions. It's just making me excited. I'm looking forward to when this improves.

Yeah, I mean, this is how you get there, right? So let's talk about desktop environments for a moment. So you spent most of your time with Mate. I spent most of my time in Gnome Shell. From the Gnome Shell side, I would say it feels like a supercar now.

Oh, man. I am so hooked on the Gnome Shell setup. I mean, I've been riding pretty happily with Fedora recently, but whoa. I mean, I got to see what Fedora's setup is. But, I mean, everything is so smooth. It's so fast. But more than that, and this is something that Ubuntu has always done really well with, but good God, the fonts look great. I've been working with XFCE for quite a while. And to sit down on this computer, this computer, I get a sense of peace when I look at

the fonts on my screen. I know that sounds so stupid, but there's something about when they nail it, and my mind isn't distracted by what's wrong with it. It's just perfect. That's how looking at the screen feels with Ubuntu 19.10. I can't go back. And I don't know what I'm going to do now about my laptop. I don't know what I'm going to do because I actually hate being in this position because I don't want to base all my setup on a freaking 19.10 because I got LTSs everywhere and I'm pretty happy with Fedora on the laptop.

But I can't remember the last time I've come on the air and been this enthusiastic about how something performs and looks on my screen. The fonts are so perfect. The performance is so butter smooth. The Yaru theme is perfect now. Like it just looks like a professional grade desktop theme. I like

both the light version and the dark version of it. I'm not going to change it. I'm not changing the defaults. And that doesn't happen. I always mess with the defaults. So for me, this is

the release that brings me back to GNOME. After two years of jumping from Plasma and then XFCE, I can't go back. I really like it. So for me, and maybe

it's the time I've spent in XFCE that makes it such a strong contrast for me. But the animations are no longer detraction. They are an improvement to the experience. As before, I found them distracting and aggravating. They now give the desktop a sense of direction. Like things are smooth. It's just –

What about stability? Because that's been one of your problems in the past. Yeah, I can't fully speak to that because I had to kind of nuke and pave halfway through this for the ZFS stuff. So I will have to give you maybe more on that next week. Initially, pretty good. However, I do have this issue that plagues,

I think, just DisplayPort on Linux because it's been an issue on Plasma, it's been an issue on XFCE, and now it's an issue on Gnome Shell, where when my screens go to sleep, they just completely get crazy because I've got two verticals and then one horizontal in the middle.

Windows move around. Sometimes one screen doesn't even turn on. Orientations just go crazy, and that's still an issue. See, the problem is you're getting up from your computer, and if you just didn't do that, then you wouldn't hit this button. Well, I do have a workaround, and I thought this was because I had this dirty NVIDIA graphics card,

so then I switched over to an AMD graphics card, and I was hoping that because it was a fresh install with no other previous drivers, just always the free AMD driver, maybe it would... No, no, no. So my workaround is I have Caffeine installed as the extension. So I use that during the day. So the screens just stay on during the day.

And then when the computer goes to sleep at night, I have a X-Render script that I run because I'm back on X with Ubuntu, which has been fine. Yeah. that I run because I'm back on X with Ubuntu, which has been fine. So yeah, I'd love to hear your impressions of Amate and then we'll go around the horn. And I know Drew ran into a few issues, so I definitely want to cover those, but I'd love to get your Amate experiences. I feel like I've been on the opposite journey

in some ways because I've been sticking with KDE Neon and Plasma for the past year or so, and it's been great. It's making me think about some of those animations because playing with Monte for the past week or so, it's been nice, and I will say I frequently just feel like it's so snappy and quick. There's a few areas where it's almost too quick,

and it feels like there could be a little animation there. So I'm not sure exactly what I want out of a desktop. It's making me question a lot of things. I'm not sure I get the most benefits from all of the fixes in Mate because there's a ton of work going on for better support of high DPI in particular and better support for NVIDIA graphics and gamers. Of course, you're on Intel with low DPI. Yeah, and I haven't tried gaming on it yet either.

Battery life, pretty decent. But battery life has been great. And even then, as someone who's deployed Mate mostly for family members, you know, people with either like an appliance type application

or just are used to a more traditional desktop. It's the best Mate experience I've had in a long time. And kind of the first time in a while I might consider using it every day. Wimpy, we recently talked a lot about the improvements in this 1910 release, this paper cut release, but kind of now getting to this point,

when you look back at this 1910 release, what's the feature for you that I think will stick with you the most? Well, there's not one, but so I think the notification center is a big deal for me personally uh and i actually made use of it at ubu con last week with great success i was able to put it into do not disturb mode and i gave my presentation and nobody saw the telegram messages from my wife. So that was a massive win. You know, that's a simple thing, and I've been wanting that for ages. So Jason, who implemented all of that stuff, I can't thank enough. You know, I really like that notification center. I think I've got a laptop that does – well, two laptops that support high dpi so the high dpi improvements are

hugely obvious to me and anyone that's got a high dpi machine and has used mate in the past you will immediately see the improvements and we've not finished all of those yet we're very very close we've got some more visual quality improvements to come in the next release which will land in time for 2004 i particularly like the fact that now we've got invisible window corners so you don't have to have pixel perfect you know grabbing on the window corners to yeah thank you yes that's great you know seems like a simple thing turns out to be actually incredibly difficult to implement properly yeah and then the ubuntu mate has uh adopted indicators you know app indicators from ubuntu for several releases now and this release is the first time it's really all nailed you know

they don't scale weirdly they all work the date time indicator and you know interacting with evolution and everything you know it's just it's just lots of those improvements and then there's a ton of fixes you know it's just it's just it's not perfect but we're really getting close to where we want to be now so i'm very very happy with this release looking Looking over Wes's shoulder, it does seem like it's been really solid. And I noticed that when we install Chromium, if you do like a sudo apt install Chromium, what is it? What's the package?

Chromium-desktop? I can't remember the exact package name. It kicks off a script that then installs the Snap version of the package. Very seamlessly, though. Very seamlessly. And I'm pretty impressed because that makes

Chrome and Chromium probably make some of the most sense for an application. But I did a little digging and I think this now makes it possible to install Chromium on versions of Ubuntu that basically would no longer be able to run Chromium. And of Ubuntu that basically would no longer be able

to run Chromium. And that must be applicable to other distros too, like 14.04, for example. Yeah. The tricky thing here is not so much running Chromium on 14.04, it's actually getting the tool chain required to build Chromium for 14.04. Yeah, I guess it's a chicken and the egg, yeah. Yeah, so 14.04 is now in its extended security maintenance, and we've got 16.04 and 18.04 and 20.04 just around the corner. So let's take 19.10. For each of those four versions, that's a separate build of Chromium that we have to build.

One on 14.04, one on 16.04, one on 18.04, one on 19.10. And of course, there's 19.04 as well. So there's actually five different builds. And because the tool chain has changed significantly between 14.04 and where we are today, there's several different build configurations that you have to manage along the way there. So by just building the snap, which runs a single build, runs on all five of those versions of Ubuntu, plus 50 other Linux distributions, we cut our, you know, investment in time to maintain Chromium considerably, you know, four or five times. So that's the motivation for doing this with Chromium, because there's a new release every six weeks, it's fast moving,

and now we have a mechanism to continue to deliver it across the entire family of supported Ubuntu. And the shim had been done before, right? Like things like LexD already, if you installed the package, just gave you the snap? before, right? Like things like LexD already, if you installed the package, just gave you the snap? Yes. So LexD, I think, was probably the first package where we did the same thing. And for similar reasons, you know, it means you can maintain one version of the thing rather than, you know, half a dozen. You know, when you do something like this, which to Wes and I makes a lot of sense, especially with something like Chr Chromium you're going to get people that react in the extreme they're going to extrapolate this to mean

everything's going to snaps and the really sinister thing about it is when I pseudo apt install it's still installing a gosh darn snap I didn't do a snap install, I did an apt install why didn't I get a dep and they're going to construe that to mean

everything's going to snaps. Yeah. You know, obviously there are people who will react in that way. I pasted a link in IRC, you can include in the show notes, a blog post on the Ubuntu blog that Popey wrote that details this in some detail to explain what I've said and a few other things in much more detail. But the plan is not to replace everything in Ubuntu with snaps. We've done this with Chromium because we have to choose wisely how we invest our time. And for the desktop team, which is relatively small, this represents a big labor saving. And it means we can invest our time in other improvements in the desktop, such as, you know, improving the fluidity and performance of, you know,

GNOME Shell and other things. Sure. Well, we tried it out on the Ubuntu Mate install here. shell and other things. Sure. Well, we tried it out on the Ubuntu Mate install here, and I was happy to report that we had native open and save dialog boxes. We had access to the webcam. We had WebGL. So, I mean, it was a perfectly usable, perfectly functional.

I'm doing the show from it right now. Yeah. You really wouldn't know. And I think that's the type of application where they have a custom toolkit like that, that is also kind of funky that sometimes you can't guarantee will look right. And whereas this snap actually gets the right GTK theme and everything. It was a great experience. Yeah, I'm impressed. So I think it's not bad. And I wanted to now move over to Cheese and Drew, because I know they both had very different experiences.

So Cheese, why don't we start with yours? I know you spent some time with both of them. So start wherever you think is probably best. Well, let me start with saying the bare metal that I was testing it on is a potato. So it's a Dell Inspiron 3147. Not much better than some of the older Atom chips. So it's not a very good machine it's one of these two-in-ones initially i tried pulling down the gnome version the stock version and for whatever reason gnome likes to default with the uh hid gyro and hit accelerometer kernel modules and stuff like that so again i was faced with a rotated 180 degrees and flipped 90 degrees login screen. So quickly ditched that, jumped over to the Mate beta, found a couple of

little bugs in the installer, which were just like VLC and Google+, which have since been fixed in the daily. They were fixed, I think, well before I'd noticed them. Another little bug that I noticed when switching to the Redmond theme in Mate was that some of the mounted icons were pretty large. I don't know why anyone would necessarily want to switch to the Redmond theme, but it's there if you do. But that was really the only kind of graphical glitch that I saw. I did also have, whenever I tried to use the experimental ZFS install from the installer, the installer did crash on me, which I wasn't expecting much. And it's on this little laptop.

And it's also still in the development cycle. So when we do this phase of the first look, that kind of stuff is expected. We'll do our follow-up thoughts next week. We went through several days with the ZFS install not functioning on the dailies, so we know that's fixed now. Yeah, and when you do a regular extended four or whatever, it's totally fine.

But my overall experience was really great, and Mate works great on that older hardware. I haven't had any real issues with it. I love that I'm given the choice now between the full install and the minimal installs. So immediately, you know, I picked up on that. I love how Mate gives me a welcome screen. gives me a welcome screen. I'm just a nerd like that because I think anyone that's going to be new to a system coming from Windows or Mac or something like that, that's going to give them

kind of that little extra help. Nothing beats the boutique. Yeah, dude, it's great. So I've had overall a really good experience with it. You know, I will likely keep running it. And then once the final version comes out, I'll switch to the final.

Played some installed uh, played some installed steam, played some steam games, uh, ran great. I have also heard issues with people, um, that have had their audio inputs or output switch from HDMI to their USB headset. And I'm guessing that's just something on enumerating. Um, I loved watching Popey's live stream the other day where he installed Kubuntu live. I noticed what was really cool about that. And thanks, Popey, because now I'm in the land of looking for ThinkPads. Oh, my God. You got him going on ThinkPads for like a solid few minutes.

It was, I never, I mean, you want to see Popey light up, ask him about ThinkPads. I know, I'm waiting on him to like one day just lay them all out around him and just go through each one and talk about it. That would be a great video. Don't encourage him. I know. I know. I actually think it's a problem.

I think the – nah. Nah, dude. Linux and ThinkPads, it's like hand in hand. I mean, it's not a problem. Jeez, you're not alone. The number of people that are in the Ub ubuntu podcast telegram channel exchanging notes about thinkpads they're buying on ebay you know popey needs to be on commission i think there's going to be no thinkpads left on ebay as a result of i know these live streams absolutely all the

off-lease thinkpads have been bought up now in the last two weeks uh but i did notice i think he was on the 220 the x220 or the x240 i don't remember which one he was using it was the 220 okay the fingerprint scanner works out of the box now oh yeah i've got news about fingerprint scanners yeah oh go on oh go on yes yeah so um that was something that happened in the 1904 cycle 1904 cycle and has been improved in the 1910 cycle. And it's still the case that the more modern biometric chips used in fingerprint scanners are not supported by FprintD because they have a proprietary driver, effectively, and FprintD will only talk to an open driver so i don't know when we're going to conclude this work but i was talking to my colleague marco about

this over the weekend and he was saying that um he's got the fingerprint reader working on i think it's the t480 or something like that um and he's written a shim that wraps around the proprietary driver so f print d can talk to it and he's got that and he was he was showing me this because i was saying oh yeah problem isn't none of the new ones work and then he unlocked his laptop with his fingerprint reader. So I'm not quite sure what the scheduling is around that, but I know it's something we're working towards. Is there a, you don't have to say who, but is there an enterprise client that's driving this need? Because this seems like, ah, yes, it seems like that's one of those things.

Well, good. That's what I love about open source. One particular really important enterprise client can drive something that the rest of us benefit from. You know, right here on us last week makes me feel super old, but I'm proud to be, you know, a user of Ubuntu and have been for a long time. And I really appreciate all the hard work you guys do. Yeah, I think you're really nailing it with the 15 years. Like, this is amazing. And here we are back on GNOME 2. All right.

So, Drew had a go. All right. So Drew had a go. And what I love about Drew's perspective on this is he had a chance to really kind of look at it from a production grade workstation desktop. And some things were great and some things weren't so great. So everything that's gone into both the GNOME version and the Ubuntu desktop skin of the GNOME version are great. They are doing wonderful work there. Everything is smooth and just buttery and there. Everything is smooth and just buttery and really, really a joy to use. And as far as stability, you know, I've been using it a little longer than you have. I've been running it for about a week on the beta and I haven't had any crashes or really any issues under normal workstation use cases. The only time that I've had issues is when I start to go into pro audio land. And there I did have some problems. On my laptop specifically, when I would load up Jack

and start using my audio interface, which is connected via USB, every now and then, and I never figured out what triggered it, it would just drop the USB connection and switch over to the internal sound card. So not great. And I did, just because this is a production machine for me, go back to Fedora on this one, and I haven't had it happen again. So I don't think it's a hardware issue. I don't think it's an issue with the interface, but something either in Ubuntu Studio controls or something in the USB subsystem is causing some interrupt on that. Other than that, that's really, I mean, that's the only issue that I've really had. I will say that I tried a bunch of snaps as well, just to see how that's coming along. And I do think that snap

support is getting a lot better every time I look at it. They are still launching a little slower than I'd like, but I know that's still being worked on. And realistically, for application support, I think Snaps and Flatpak are both really great ways to deliver standard desktop applications. I'm not sold on it for like low-level stuff yet, but I'm getting there. Yeah, I completely agree with your assessment. They're really solid now, including the open and save dialog boxes, looking right, getting access to your individual devices

without making it a battle. But it's really down to the launch time. It's still not quite where I'd like it to be. Now, the nice thing with something like Chromium is I launch it pretty much once a day. Right, right. And then it's open all day long. But I can kind of see the groundwork for 2004. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. And this looks so much like an interim release between 1904 and 2004.

It's just crazy. Like you see all of the work that went into 1904, polished up, made better, and some other iterative improvements on top of that going into the 2004 stretch. It really looks like it's shaping up to make just a real killer LTS when that comes around. I'm really excited about that. Yeah, that's my take, too. Yeah, and I look at it. I mean, this is a stupid, bad, horrible analogy that I shouldn't make. But I kind of look at 1910 as a bit of, you know, it's a fun mod car. It's a race car. It's super fast. But sometimes the turbo is a little too powerful and you blow a bolt. And the LTS is like it's your commuter car. It's your safe, predictable.

It's going to turn every time you— It's your Volvo. Yeah, it really is just like it's your commuter car. It's your safe, predictable. It's going to turn every time you... It's your Volvo. Yeah. It really is just like a really predictable, reliable car. And that's where the LTS is. And it depends on which type of driver you are. Do you like to have a little fun and maybe sometimes drive a little too fast? Then maybe 1910s for you.

Do you want to know that every single day you're going to get to your destination? Then the LTS is for you. That's kind of standard advice, but it is more applicable with the 1910 release than I think it's been for a few years. And it's really something to see where we're at now with Gnome Shell and where we're at now with Snaps, where these have all been these concepts that we've been building to and we've been seeing get implemented over time. And 1910 is a representation of what I think Canonical had as a long-term vision. It's really close in 1910. We're not 100% yet, but we're really close. And so if you're interested in that at all, it's worth checking out.

Now, which flavors for you? Is ZFS slower? Is there other kind of overhead costs with ZFS like memory usage compared to XFS and extended for? That I can't tell you fully yet. That's something we're going to spend the next week investigating, benchmarking, and we'll follow up. Now that 19.10 is going to be officially released, we'll follow up with some of that stuff. Give some of those things a try. I'm thinking I might give Kubuntu a try. Yeah.

Kubuntu 1910 looks particularly good as well. I think I'm tempted to also try that. Oh, jeez. And then before you know it, the new Fedora is going to be out. It's too much, Wes. I mean, and then you're looking at like when 20.4 makes it. It's going to be a nice supported release, too. So it's just a great time to be a desktop Linux user.

It's true. Oh, hold on. A production note here from the back office. They're telling us to move on. It's time to mention the picks. Should we do that? Let's do it. We got some great picks today.

Well, I moved over to Gnome Shell, and I realized there wasn't a great menu editor built in. Like, basically all of the other desktops, you just right-click on the menu and you can edit it. Gnome's like, no, no, we don't got that for you. So I have two different picks for you. I have this problem with my monitors that I gripe about on occasion. And you can install an application called, what is it, A-Rander? Oh, yeah. Which just gives you, like what is it, A-Rander? Oh, yeah. Which just gives you like these really...

X-Rander. Well, A-Rander uses X-Rander to create scripts for X-Rander. Just like a nice little desktop. You lay out the screens how you want, it gives you the script. But then you have this problem where like you want to be able to launch it super easy

because your screens are all screwed up and you'd like a single click or a command you can execute. Well, that's where making a desktop file comes in and adding it to your menu. And my friends, if you have ever wanted to add something to your menu, to your launcher, this is where menu Libre comes in from Sean M. Davis. It's a menu editor, straightforward, basic menu editor that works on anything that follows the standard. Also a shout out to app App Editor if you are on elementary OS.

This is a nice looking menu editor that I'd love to have on every other desktop. But that's in the App Center. And either one of these two applications, depending on what fits your needs, allow you to add things that you can then search by hitting the super key, either on Plasma or Mate or Gnome Shell or XFCE, anything that follows this free desktop standard for the.desktop file. That's great because otherwise it's kind of like black magic to me, and I don't want to go messing with those files.

I can just have a GUI for it. How do you get stuff in that launcher? How do you make it searchable? How does this work? I got a shell script. I want to be able to search for it and execute it. This pick will help you do that. So check the show notes for that.

Linuxunplugged.com slash 323. But then Mr. Bacon coming in with the last-minute sneaky pick. He did sneak in there. He's got a sneaky pick. So tell us about Wavemon. So Wavemon is one of those curses apps that I previously used to use all the time. I found myself using it at Texas Linux Fest just to kind of check it out. But basically, it'll allow you to monitor your wireless networking via inCurses.

This gives you a nice little output, letting you know what your signal is, letting you know your throughput, what your rate is, what your drop rate is, letting you know what channels you're on, all those sorts of things, all those little details that you might need to know, especially if you're doing any other sort of wireless work. So I would highly recommend checking out WaveMon. BMON is also another, which is a bandwidth monitor, another tool that I quite frequently used to use all the time, But Wavemon's a great one. Are we throwing in Kismet too? Who just literally threw in Kismet here in a second? Drew, did you do that?

Yes. Nice. All right, let's do Kismet. I just wanted to point out that there's Kismet as well. Kismet is also for monitoring wireless interfaces, but it's more along the lines of long-term monitoring. So you can set up like little nodes in various spots. I used to use them for, you know, businesses where we'd have to make sure that Wi-Fi was solid every single square inch of the place.

You know, throw little sensors around and then monitor them with Kismet and make sure that everything was up and running properly. So if you need something with a little more power and a little more, you know, long-term monitoring in mind, Kismet's a good choice too. Sounds like my house could use that. Yeah. Four picks, the quad picks. How about that? Also, I got to take a moment. I got to take a minute.

Well, not really. But I got to take a moment. I got to take a minute. Well, not really, but I got to take a moment. Maybe like 40 seconds, I don't know. How great has Drew done on Choose Linux? You know, we hired Drew as an editor, and then when the situation arised, he stepped up to Choose Linux, and between him, Elle, and Joe, it has turned out so great.

Drew, you have done so well. I love it. I just want to take a moment here because I don't know how many people that listen to this show have checked you out on Choose Linux. But if you enjoy Drew on this show, he's really at home on the Choose Linux show now. So go check out Choose Linux as well. He often brings the much-needed voice of reason. You know, I mean, Joe's set in his ways sometimes. And Elle's a very passionate person. Drew,

you just get it right. That's my personal take. You know, I'll take it, and I appreciate it. Yeah, anybody who has any interest in Linux, I highly encourage you to take a listen. We've got a new episode coming out soon. I always do. Also, go check out Wimpy

over at the Ubuntu podcast, the Ubuntu podcast dot org. It is a staple of my week. I love every single episode. It's like hanging out with friends, Wimpy. Oh, thank you very much. Thank you.

Thank you for doing it. It's really nice to have you all back together now for a few episodes. Feels like we're back at home now. Everything's good. It does, doesn't it? It's nice and solid.

Yeah. Something's going to change now. I know it. I just know it. It is. Dang it! I totally call it. Well, I think that wraps us up, though. We'll move on to getting to testing, benchmarking, and just living with

Ubuntu 19.10 on a day-to-day basis. And we'd love to hear your experiences as we kind of conclude our review next week. So tweet me. I'm at ChrisLES. The show is at Linux Unplugged? I don't know.

The network is at Jupiter Signal. You can also tweet Wes. He's at Wes Payne. And Cheese, what are you at? Cheese Bacon, for God's sake? At Cheese Bacon. We've also got like a contact page, right? What?

LinuxUnplugged.com slash contact. You're kidding me. Yeah, for real. No. And then that would be a way to like have a long-form response. got like a contact page right i mean linuxunplugged.com slash contact you're kidding me yeah no no and then that that would be a way to like have a long form response oh yeah if you want to like ramble in an email don't go on too long just for our sake because chris isn't going to read it wow you hostile wes you guys are you are you noticing this all right well that's true you're right about that. All right. One more thing before we get out of here, a little newsflash. Oh, wait, wait. Do you want, hold on.

Do you have a newsflash soundboard clip? Of course you do. If you're coming, yeah. I mean, if you're coming at me with that, we're going to do it properly. Are you ready? I'm ready. This is CNN breaking news. It's cheese breaking news. So at the beginning of the show, we were talking about core boot and I reached out to Emma and I asked her about the plans for core boot on future machines. And she has sent back to me that there are no plans to go backwards on their open hardware software mission. So it's safe to assume that they will be building a hundred percent core boot darters and galagos in the foreseeable future. That is great news.

Wow. That is great news. Thank you for the real-time follow-up right there. I appreciate that. That is so, so cool to hear. Let's end it right there on that good news. We can't top that. Join us live, won't you?

We'd love to hear your thoughts. You can always get right in our ear holes by getting in the Mumble Room. All the details are in our IRC room at irc.geekshed.net. Pound, hashtag, Jupiter Broadcasting. And then once you're in there, you can just do bang. That's exclamation mark. Mumble, and it will give you all of the info you need to jump in our Mumble Room and share your thoughts, or you can share them in the IRC room.

And don't worry. Every Tuesday, so just set that aside. If you can't make it next Tuesday, don't worry. We'll see you next Tuesday. Thank you. Well, there you have it. JBtitles.com. Let's go title. You guys remember that Archive.org has them emulators? Right. They added a whole bunch of more games, eh, Cheesy? Yeah, so they added 2,500 more games.

What? That's too many. That you can play within your browser, so super cool. I thought Popey and Wimpy also might appreciate that since they're retro gamers. And then doing a little more digging... Wait, did you just call them old? Old school gamers. you know, Popey and Wimpy also might appreciate that since they're retro gamers and then doing a little more digging. Wait,

did you just call them old? Old school gamers. Old school gamers. It doesn't matter which way you dice it. It's kind of accurate, right? It is. Well,

and this is coming from a dude who's old too. So, but I also ran across Exodus, which you can pull down their torrent and their 7000 DOS games. I'm assuming a lot of these 2500 that were pushed up to archive.org are there if you wanted to play them in your own DOS box. But they're already been they've already been configured to work under DOS box. So their freeware shareware games that I've guessed just have eventually gone free. So take a look at those if you want to get

your old school gaming on for sure. You guys are good for the rest of the show, right? Because I know what I'm doing with the rest of my day. Can I admit something? I have gotten into something that is shameful. And it's, I blame the algorithm. I blame YouTube.

So, uh, back in the day,'s, I blame the algorithm. I blame YouTube. So, uh, back in the day, I, back in the early, I don't know, whatever it was, 90s or whatever,

I played this game. It was my, it was the, it was the game that really drew me in, and it was called Star Trek, the 25th anniversary. It's one of those games I started playing at 8 p.m., and then I looked up at the clock the next time,

and it was 3 a.m., and I'd been playing all night, and I found this dude who has been playing them online in 35 minute increments. And I'm like on part 12 of his journey of playing this game at 35 minutes at a time. Do the multiplication there. It's so bad, Wes. So maybe I'll take a break and I'll go check out archive.org because I think, I don't know, it feels like after a while. So I, maybe I'll take a break and I'll go check out archive.org because I think, I think, I don't know. It feels like after a while, it's like, what am I doing with myself?

But what I do is I put it up while I'm working, you know? So I'm sitting working away, got myself a little extension for Firefox so I can do video picture in picture for YouTube. And I just go to work. I will admit I'm browsing the list right now. What I like too, that they all fire up within the browser. So it's all emulated within the browser. I'm not sure what they're doing there to do that,

but this might also be the moment you want to set up an emergency hotkey. So when your boss walks in, you flip off of the archive.org. My boss? My boss. I think you've got to worry about your boss.