LINUX Unplugged - 326: Dell, elementary, Fedora, oh my!

Episode Date: November 6, 2019

Dell expands their linux hardware lineup, why elementary OS's Flatpak support sets the bar, and we chat with Christian Schaller of Red Hat about Fedora 31 and what's around the corner. Plus an update on Ubuntu on the Raspberry Pi 4 and a pick that's just for Wes. Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, Cassidy James Blaede, Christian F.K. Schaller, Danielle Foré, and Martin Wimpress.

Rumor has it Mr. Bacon has himself some new hardware. I do indeed. I recently got in my new Pinebook Pro. That's exciting. Yeah, it's an interesting little machine. I haven't had a lot of time to play with it yet. But I will say that out of all the delivery drivers, the DHL guy seems to be the most courteous.

Yeah. Like he gave me a nice little knock on the door. He didn't like cop knock the door or anything. He actually knocked. I gave me a big hug the other day. Just a big old hug. This geek you also just got your Pinebook? Yeah, the DHL guy. He actually knocked. Mike gave me a big hug the other day. Just a big old hug. This geek you also just got your pine book? Yeah, the DHL guy bought it this morning.

Did you give him a hug? I didn't get a hug from him, but he did comment that his wife had the same car as me, but that was about it. That's your move right there. That's the window. He's asking for a hug. That's what it seemed like to me. You had a delightful DHL delivery man as well. That's great.

Yeah, it's great. Yeah, it was great. Oh, hello, friends, and welcome into the Unplugged program. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Well, hello, Wes. Hello. Who brought this big show? I think you did. Yeah, I think you did. Uh-oh. Someone did. Maybe it was a team effort. High five, Wes. We have so much to talk about today. In the community news, there's new hardware, there's new software, and there's things to discuss. 31, as well as we'll be joined by a special guest in the Fedora 31 section to talk about some of the underpinnings of the Fedora operating system, as well as what's coming up in 32

and 33. There's a lot to look forward to. Yeah, it's really something. But there's much more than that as well, including the picks and the housekeeping and our community. Let's start off by saying hello to Cheese and Alex. Hey, guys. Hello there. Hello, internet.

Oh, hi. Oh, hi. Don't say hi to me. That's fine. It's just me. I thought you spoke for the internet. I do now, Wes. Also, speaking of the internet, we have our virtual lug.

Time-appropriate greetings. Mumble Room. Hello. What's up? Good evening. Well, hello. Hello. It's nice to see all of you. I see, of Hello. What's up? Good evening. Well, hello. Hello. It's nice to see all of you.

I see, of course. Let's see. Let's lean into this one here, Wes. I'm going to say Ace Nomad. You got it. I thought you were going to mess it up on that time. No, it's not. You're on point today.

It's not Acne Nomad. No, it's Ace Nomad. Not this week, anyway. The one, the only Brent photo. Hello, Brent. Oh, hey there. Mr. Bite Bitten, good to see you as always. Hello there.

Carl, every time I see you, I just get hungry. Good to see you, Carl. I'm hungry, too. Cassidy's here from Elementary OS. Hello, Cassidy. Hey, Cassidy. And the one, the only, Mr. Dan the Rabbit, one of my favorite podcasters in the universe. Hey, Dan.

Hey-o. Hey-o. How about that? And Frank's here. Hello, Frank. Hello, Mini-Mac. Hey, Dan. Heyo. Heyo. How about that? And Frank's here. Hello, Frank. Hello, Mini-Mac. Hello. Hello. And this geek and coming in right in as I'm calling out names. Hello, Mr. Martin Wimpress. Hey, Wimpy. Hello there. Just in the nick of time then. Yes. Good job. You got the shout out. Good to see you as well. Well, we have a lot to get into this week,

so let's get started. We, I think, need to acknowledge yet another milestone for our beloved desktop. This week, Dell has really increased their range of selection of hardware for their preloaded systems with Ubuntu. Their XPS 13 line has gone from like two or three options to something damn near 18 options now, depending on how you configure it. This is big, Wes. This is like Dell goes big on Linux and they're betting on this developer workstation. It has felt like, I mean, just more and more configurations and you've seen some of the

precision line as well. Clearly doing well enough there. They're willing to continue to invest. And I like having a lot of different Linux laptops to choose from. Yeah, this is a large range from systems with four cores, six cores, 1804 pre-installed. Also, like more Wi-Fi options than I ever expected them. That's an area I didn't expect.

And actually paying attention to Wi-Fi and Linux play nicely together. That's always good. I'd love to see more than 16 gigs of RAM. Would love to see that. But these are beautiful systems with that gorgeous Infinity Edge display. Mm-hmm. I think I really have enjoyed using my T480,

and I really do like a ThinkPad for work. But if I could be fancy enough to own multiple Linux high-end laptops, my T480 would be my work laptop and an XPS 13 would be the laptop I buy for myself. It just feels kind of friendly and approachable. It's light. You can throw it on the couch and not worry about it. Yeah. So how's the trackpad? Because, you know, the benchmark, in my opinion, of trackpads is or was the MacBook glass trackpad. Like ThinkPad trackpads are definitely a step down from that. Like where does the XPS fit in that kind of hierarchy?

So I think it depends on what ThinkPad you have as to the quality of the trackpad. So my ThinkPad has got a glass trackpad and it's very good. And now I have a MacBook Pro, albeit a 2015 model i can make an objective comparison and certainly the macbook pro is better but probably it's better because the gesture support is just so much better and i would say that the xps i've got a xps 15 and a couple of xps 13s their their trackpad is, you know, as good as you can get for a Microsoft Precision trackpad, but it's still not to the level that the MacBook trackpads are.

Yeah, that's basically my assessment as well. I thought it might be fun if I configured one of these new XPS systems. I think I'm going to go. I think, you know, I used to hold back on 4K. But you're ready now. Oh, well, the desktop's kind of caught up. Yeah. It's not me, Wes. I've been ready.

My body's been ready for a long time. I think Wimpy's ready. That's what it is. Yeah, if Wimpy could get mate together. No, actually, that's actually my point, is things are getting to be in pretty good shape on high DPI now. But that's actually my point is things are getting to be in pretty good shape on high DPI now. $1,499.99 is my config.

What's with me? Am I so much of a fancy boy? But even that, that's not that bad. No. I mean, you're going to keep it for three, four years. Well, let me tell you what you get. let me tell you what you get. So for 1500 US greenbacks, you get 16 gigabytes of DDR3 RAM, a 13.3 inch 4K 3840 by 2160 Infinity Edge touch display, 512 gigabyte PCIe MVNI drive, which is fast as hell, killer Wi-Fi, which is pretty damn good and actually really good Wi-Fi matters to me and a 52 watt hour battery for sale.

$1,500 for something that is also putting a vote towards shipping something with Linux preloaded that is a nice tight package that I have now owned

two different generations of XPS's so I know they're good stuff. Yeah, I think that's a fair price. I actually thought I'd come on here and say it was too much, but now going through it, I think it's actually fair. Right, I mean, it's not the best, and you unfortunately can't

quite seem to get everything all in one package. It'd be nice to have more RAM or a little more configurable or horsepower in there, but it's a really shiny Linux laptop that you're not ashamed to bring into any environment. And, you know, it's just going to keep getting better. So if you invest now, we can look forward to more good things. To that note, Wes, I tweeted at Barton George this week saying, if it was 32 gig, it would probably be an instant buy from me.

And he and several other people on Twitter were very responsive, I've got to say. So I think the more people can tweet Dell and say that we want more RAM, it sounds to me like it might happen one day. For now, they're pointing people at the precision line, but I don't think it's an impossibility because that 10th-gen chip that's in there, the CPU, does support up to 64 gigs. I guess it's just a case of finding somewhere

to fit the other chips on the board. Right, yeah, updating the platform to include it. Or the power board. Right, yeah, updating the platform. Or the power usage. Oh, yeah, could be that. Yeah, I recently reviewed a Precision 3540, which was pre-installed with Ubuntu on the Ubuntu podcast. And I have to say, they had to wrestle that laptop back off me. I absolutely loved it. Yeah, you did.

And that one you can put 64 gigs in. loved it. Yeah, he did. And that one you can put 64 gigs in. Okay. Well, so I'm the guy that has systems with 32 gigabytes of RAM, but I'm also going to play devil's advocate here for a moment. I, this morning, as I was using my workstation and my mouse was chopping across the screen, like it was a system from 1992, I really wondered if it was worth having 64 gigabytes of RAM. And I thought about if an audience member came to me and said, I have a limited budget, what's the most I should spend on RAM? I think I would have to advise them 16 gigs because performance on Linux starts to shit the bed

way before you use up all your memory. Now, if you have 4 gigabytes of RAM or 2 gigabytes of RAM... Yeah, 16's pretty comfortable these days. I mean, I've got 32 right here, and I have 28 available. I can bring my fairly high-end system down to a leggy desktop mess by simply

playing a YouTube video and browsing the web and loading other web pages while I have a couple of chat applications going in a terminal. And I'm sitting there using 5 gigs of RAM. So I've got literally 59 gigabytes of RAM unused. So it's not a memory thing. So I think we've got other problems we have to solve before we really address the memory. Not all desktops experience this issue, I grant you. But it was a little disappointing because

I felt like, I've gone to this, when I built this system, I went to this effort of separating out the disk I.O. So my scratch disk, my home directory,

my game disk, my operating system OS, they're all on separate very high speed disks. I got high end graphics, like I said, 64 gigabytes of RAM, six CPU cores.

I thought this will be the fastest computer I have ever owned. Just a machine you can work on and not have to think about anything else. It'll just crunch through it. But screw me, because I open up YouTube in another tab and then tab out while I read news stories and scroll web pages, and my whole computer lags out. And heaven forbid something gets a little excessive in Slack, like maybe an animated emoticon that really pings one thread, because then if I'm watching a video

browsing a webpage and somebody's done something in Slack well, then my mouse jumps across my screen every few seconds it's just like a... it's unusable so, there's other problems. Not to go there, but... You know, I hear Linux runs great in a virtual machine. Well, what I was going to say is maybe we should just hit the reset button and switch to the ARM platform.

No, I mean, I know we'll get these things fixed up, and I know it's the worst on Gnome Shell, and that I'm really on the cutting edge, and this is what you get. So I put all that into perspective. But I am very impressed in what we're seeing, not just in the Pine book, but also just from the Raspberry Pi 4. It is significantly more powerful than the Raspberry Pi 3. It's definitely entered an interesting sort of territory of keeping up,

being able to perform a number of tasks that the previous gens just couldn't quite get to. I have a significant number of things I'm using Raspberry Pi 4. In fact, I go into some significant detail in the self-hosted that comes out later this week. But I haven't really seen any distro except for Raspbian step up to the Raspberry Pi 4. So that's why I was very happy to see a post on the Ubuntu.com blog on November 3rd that talks about Canonical's plans for support for the Raspberry Pi. They write, With 1910's release of Ubuntu Server,

Canonical has announced official support for the Raspberry Pi 4. The latest board from the Raspberry Pi Foundation sports a faster system on a chip with a processor that uses the Cortex-A72 architecture. Additionally, it offers up to 4 gigabytes of RAM. We are supporting the Raspberry Pi 4 to give developers access to a low-cost board powerful enough to consolidate compute workloads at the edge. That sounds pretty great. Unfortunately, they go on.

However, our official support for this board is currently limited to the 1 gig and 2 gigabyte versions. Due to a kernel bug, USB ports are not supported out of the box in the official ARM64 image on the 4 gigabyte version. Kernel fixes have been identified by Canonical Engineers, and we're currently testing these fixes extensively. Yeah, I ran into this with my testing. I talked about it a little bit during our 1910 review. I ran into this with my testing. I talked about it a little bit during our 1910 review. And I did discover, too, that if you limit the memory to less than 4 gigs or if you just simply use the 32-bit image, it's fine.

But then it also turned out there was a KVM bug in there. But they're getting pretty close to having this fixed. And it's really kind of taking some work upstream as well as Canonical kind of keeping on top of it. Right. It is kind of a reminder that these are special, unique little devices, right? And you might have good support running in Raspbian because they've spent a lot of time getting that to work right. And it takes a little longer for that to filter downstream. Yeah.

It is kind of a cool reminder that you can just limit the amount of memory your system uses too in Linux. It's just so easy and so cool. It is really neat. Wimby, do you have any insight into this process, either for Ubuntu Mate or for mainline Ubuntu LTS or whichever? Yeah, so the hardware enablement that's in 19.10 will become the next point release for 18.04. So around that time, the Raspberry Pi 4 support will roll into an 18.04 version as well.

Obviously, we want to get that bug fixed where all of the USB ports go away unexpectedly. And obviously, having a Raspberry Pi 4 with four gigs of RAM, that makes the 64-bit story a lot more compelling there now. So we want to get that right. a lot more compelling there now. So we want to get that right. And then, of course, you know, when 2004 comes around, we'll have Ubuntu core images as well for the entire family of Raspberry Pis. It seems like a pretty serious commitment.

The quote here that I highlighted for our saving is, Canonical is dedicated to offering outstanding support for the Raspberry Pi boards. To achieve this objective, we are listening to feedback from the community and acting upon it to improve our delivery process. We want Ubuntu to become even more compelling option for an operating system on the Raspberry Pi boards.

Wow. That seems like it's a pretty serious effort. Yeah, there's lots of people lined up behind this initiative. It's nice to see. Nothing against Raspbian, but it feels so foreign. It's so specialized and localized. And one of the things I love about using Linux is I can use the same thing on the server or the desktop or on my little Pi platform, but it's not there yet. Well, I feel like I'm the silly one right now that's saying you can use a

Pi 4 in production. And the thing that makes me the most uneasy about that recommendation is Raspbian. Nothing against the project. So far as I have used it, it seems to be a great distribution, and I get why they make it. However,

when I have put so much effort into building the perfect home setup and I'm sitting there doing an OS upgrade, there is just a bit of confidence I have when it's an operating system that is a daily driver for me, like Ubuntu LTS.

And there's a lot to like about Ubuntu right now. And I have faith in its process to upgrade. And I also know there's a certain scale factor that's safe there, but so far Raspbian's been fine, but I would be much happier running something that I use on my other systems in production already.

And so I'd love to see this. In the meantime, there is some workarounds for the bugs until they're sorted, but it's nice to see that the LTSs will be getting it. In the future, there are ways you can do it, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend them yet based on my testing. And the other thing I should just point out, because it might not be obvious, but the images we prepare for the Raspberry Pi

are subject to the same security maintenance as every other Ubuntu version. So kernel patches and libraries and everything, all of that stuff in the Raspberry Pi images moves at the same cadence as everything else. Have you had a chance to play with the Raspberry Pi 4? I have two of them on the desk behind me at the moment. I am not blown away as a desktop. They seem quite good as a desktop, but I am legitimately impressed what they are capable as, as a headless Linux box running home servers services. Yeah, it's definitely a huge step up from the

Pi 3 and 3 Plus, you know, and that era of Raspberry Pi. You know, every time these boards get revved, I think people have expectations that are unrealistic. You know, if you follow the SOC developments closely, you'll know that, you know, they're never going to compete with, you know, contemporary Intel or AMD-based parts, even at the lower power limits. But I really quite like them. I'm obviously working on Ubuntu Mate for the Raspberry Pi 4.

That'll probably be available available sometime near christmas um so that's a fun project for me but i'm also i've just got an arcade fighting stick and i'm building a new emulation station system so i'm using the pi 4 for that oh that's great you know the only thing that really scuppers the pi for me at the moment pi 4 in particular is the sd card requirement i don't want to put something into production that relies on an SD card. Use a USB stick. Can you boot from that though?

No, not yet. It's not available yet, but it will be coming. Yeah. I, on the other hand, I find SD cards pretty easy to manage because, I mean, you're talking to a guy

who used to make custom boot floppies to play video games. Right. So I can duplicate them fairly straightforwardly. They are of a reasonable cost, and you can use them to just essentially bootstrap the system and then use larger storage elsewhere. It's a compromise at this point, but I have faith that they'll get there. You're right, though. It is, I think, the way to put that, Alex, it's definitely something to be aware of because those things do have a certain endurance

and then they start to fail. And that's a bad morning. Wimpy, you've had a lot going on. There's been some changes for you in life. Probably a good time to mention that you recently sat down for brunch with Mr. Brent. I did have a lovely brunch with Brent. It was a high point of my week.

Extras.show slash 29. I really enjoyed it. Really, a really great episode. And Brent, you just got to keep it up because I learn more about folks when they go on Brunch with Brent than I would have otherwise. It's like you get there, you know,

you get down, you get deep, you get the details. Don't worry, it doesn't hurt at all, Brent's very gentle. Yeah, and it's delicious. You know, I've been having a lot of fun with these chats, and the chat with Wimpy, of course, was a lot of fun while we were doing it. And it sounds like a lot of people are really enjoying it on their commutes and stuff like that. So I'd say if you enjoyed it, spread it widely. Yeah, and also, Wimpy, just congratulations.

I think anyone who's been following your journey on this show knows that it's a bit of a remarkable journey. And now here you are as the director of the Ubuntu desktop at Canonical, which is just incredible. And some of that journey is talked about there in that extra. Yeah, and my time here, particularly on Linux Unplugged, has been pivotal in getting to where I am today. And, you know, I talked about that with Brent. So if you're curious as to how all that unfolded, that's one of the things we talked about. But yeah, thank you for Linux Unplugged.

It really has had quite the profound impact on my life. And it's always a joy for turning up. Oh, stop. No, no, you stop it. Thank you for being here. Extras.show slash 29. Go listen to that. It's a great additional little thing

that you might call an extra. You might just call it that. Well, Cassidy and Dan from Elementary OS are here, and I think this is the perfect opportunity for us to discuss some major updates

for Elementary OS. This is the one where we see a lot of flat pack support land. So what does this look like? Because Cassidy, I think the takeaway that I've seen the internet at large discuss is they're calling it sideloading. So what are we talking about here? Yeah, so we've heard from users that there's a lot of these like cross platform apps or just apps that don't fit the other requirements for being curated in App

Center that they want to use on their machines. So we talked a while ago, like in the spring, about Flatpak being the future for our stack, and we're going to be moving our App Center apps over to Flatpak. But since Flatpak is our plan, it means we can support a more secure way of getting third-party apps on the system from outside of the app store. So that's what we call sideloading. I like the screenshot you have in the blog post that we'll have linked in the notes, because you get an idea as an end user what this is going to be like from an implementation standpoint. You get an idea of how big the download is. It really kind of helps you understand that

this is only being backed solely by the developer. We as a project have not vetted this. And when you add this, this is the tricky part that I think I was really curious how you would parse this, and I think you nailed it. And the last line is when you add this app, it may add its entire repository, and so you will see other apps by this developer. And that's the hardest thing, I think, when it comes to this kind of thing for end users to wrap their heads around. So this dialog box, it seems like one of these things that would be so obviously a clear thing you should do for end users.

But the reaction, and I saw your tweets today, the reaction has been, oh, it's so much like Mac OS calling it sideloading. They're just locking it down even more. Do you push forward and just try to ignore that completely, or do you feel like that's worth addressing on the show here? It's funny because with this update, we're bringing a ton of new capability to the OS and a ton of new software that you can install with one click.

And it's using an open-source technology that the other desktops have kind of standardized on. It's a very open process. And we're being very, very honest and realistic about expectations. And that's actually something we've heard from our existing users is they want to know what the implications of installing apps, whether it's from Flatpak or from the Ubuntu repositories. They want to know what the difference is between these curated apps and these third-party, you know, side-loaded apps.

So we're addressing that. And I think, of course, we'll always get blowback from people who probably don't even use the OS. And, you know, that's fine. That's part of building an open-source product. Oh, man, you just so nailed it right there. It's frustrating, too, that, you know, the comparisons fine. That's part of building an open source product. Oh, man, you just so nailed it right there. It's frustrating, too, that, you know, the comparisons are always there with the Apple stuff. I know. To me, it seems much more just like, you know, you guys are bringing some modern OS paradigms that the whole world is exploring and, you know, here on the Linux desktop.

And it's nice to see. One of the things that actually inspired the idea originally is that Android comes with a built-in APK installer thing where you can sideload apps. That's what I thought of, not Apple. Yeah, so it's really funny that there's this weird obsession with people comparing us to Apple. And it's like, we draw inspiration from all over open and closed platforms and kind of build the best product that we can from those ideas. Well, actually, I would imagine this is probably never going away because your motivation is to sell a good operating system product. Apple's motivation is to sell expensive hardware. In both of those, you think about what makes a good customer experience first.

If you're not trying to sell them into a bundle of services, you're not trying to sell them into an ecosystem so much as you're just trying to sell them a product, the user is not the product, the product is the product. So how do we make this the best? So a lot of times, there will be a process of thinking of how do we make this best for the end users that will be reflective of how Apple looks at things. And so those comparisons will probably never go away just because of the nature of the product being a product and not the user being the product. But there's something else you touch on in this update that I just wanted to get more information on because it's like super light.

You write it towards the end here. You write, the end of the month, we will finalize our brand new automation-powered release process, meaning we will easily queue up the release of several apps and desktop components. I don't know what you mean there. Could you tell me more about that? Because that sounds like really cool high-tech stuff. Yeah, so this has been an awesome, awesome bit of work over the last month or so with several people in the community coming together to help automate this stuff.

Basically, we have completely rebuilt how we build elementary OS. We're using, we've been adopting CI across all of our over 100 repositories on GitHub. We're doing things like, you know, testing builds, validating with Houston CI, which is our App Center test suite. So the same standards that we hold third party which is our app center test suite. So the same standards that we hold third party developers to our apps are tested against. And then we're also linting the code to, you know, keep up with code quality standards. And now we even automate translation template updates. So a lot of these things that kind of used to be a lot of manual labor for release or for just maintaining the code in

general have been automated. And along with that comes automating the package release process. So when we actually want to send out an update to users, like we mentioned in the monthly update posts, there's a whole big long process of preparing that release. And the majority of that now has been automated with continuous integration and continuous delivery, which is so, so cool. Hopefully that just frees you up to spend more time on the things that actually matter. Exactly. Yeah. We were spending a lot of time on these release processes and now we can do more releases faster. Oh, that's great. Oh, that's so cool to hear. So there's one thing that really strikes me. So

Dan, I want to give you a chance to jump in here. Kind of wondering why this isn't all being held for just like the next elementary OS release, because this is the blog post. We've touched on three of like a dozen things. So much more. That are landing. That looks like it's just an update coming to the existing OS. Is this a strategy change?

You know, it really isn't a strategy change for us. This is something we've been doing for a while. And it's funny because we hear from people who are outside of our community talk about like, oh, well, you know, I don't want to use an LTS-based distro because that means I won't get updates. But we're totally opposite of that. You have that stable base of the Ubuntu LTS underneath, which is really great. But we're also continually delivering updates to all of our own applications every single month. And we've been doing that for over a year now.

And all the apps in App Center are released whenever those developers publish new releases. And now you can even get the latest versions of third-party apps because of the great Flatback support. I think we're just continually pushing that we want to be the most stable but also most updated distro that you can have. And you get kind of that best of both worlds. You guys better be careful or else people are going to start figuring out what you're doing.

And then this thing's going to blow up out of control. You're not going to do it with success. You better be careful. Because yeah, this is great. This update, it's definitely worth a read because there's a lot more coming, including just nice tweaks to the look and feel, the drop down date menu, like just nice things for the date and time indicator, just all kinds of small quality of life improvements, as well as tons of new third-party software that you can now get in the best designed app center out there.

So hashtag check it out. Is that what the kids say, Wes? Did I get that right? Yes, you did. Thank you. I defer to Wes on those things. Anyways, thank you, gentlemen, for joining us and keep up the great work because my family appreciates it. I love it.

Thank you. I do. I do. I really think it's just so great. All right, Wes. We've got to do some housekeeping because everything changes. Everything changes now. Everything.

Everything and nothing is changing. Well, we're changing everything, but then the stuff in the middle doesn't really change. And stuff at the end doesn't really change, except for it'll be sooner. Faster. Faster. So we are experimenting with a new live time slot for this here Humble podcast.

We're going to attempt to move it up a couple of hours in the daytime. We currently do Linux Unplugged live every Tuesday at 2 p.m. Pacific time. Now, we're going to try moving that up to noon Pacific time. Still on Tuesdays. Still at jblive.tv. We really need the sun right above us when we're podcasting. It helps a lot. Yeah, it's the solar panels we installed

in the top of our heads, Wes. So we really would love you to show up because we're petrified this is going to go horrible. We're just really terrified. And we love doing the show live. I mean, it's kind of the whole thing. Well, and we got that virtual lug. And we'll miss you if you don't come join us.

We've been at this live time since the show's inception, and people built a routine around it, so we're completely paranoid, but it is something that would work better for everyone involved in the production of the show. So, we're going to try doing Noon Pacific going forward. Now, next week, I'm traveling, so we'll pre-record an episode.

So, next week, we're just throwing everything out the window. Don't bother showing up live, but do check your feeds. Yeah, we have a new episode. Just won't do it live. Then we're coming back at the new time, noon Pacific. What's that East Coast time there, Wes? Well, you just got to add three hours. I know.

That's why I thought you would just say the time. Yeah. You're supposed to like, you know, flex your math muscle over there when I do those kinds of things. I don't want it to be too easy for you. I got to keep you sharp. Thanks. Yeah.

So this is the last, the last two. I know. It's weird. It's weird. Savor it. So let us know what you think. And if you haven't had a chance to make it before, and maybe the new time works a little better for you for some reason, please, please come.

Because like I said, we're terrified that nobody's going to show up. Vote with your presence. We've had our lug time at a certain specific time in it forever. And it's just scary. So let us know. Now, also, we mentioned Brunch with Brent over at Jupiter Extras. But while you're there, check out Threat Hunting 101. There's a lot of lingo these days when it comes to protecting your network

and the whole quote-unquote cyber security end quote industry. Well, just sort of with a big sharp needle to pop the hype bubble, Elle has a chat, you join her, with a guest, special guest. And I thought it was really good, Threat Hunting 101. Actually, you've got two special guests. Yeah. That makes it an extra special extra. And there might be some more stuff in the works.

In fact, there might be some other things in that feed related to the topic that are worth checking out, too. Indeed. It's possible, Wes. It's possible. You know, that extra is becoming something of a goldmine. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And I guess while we're here, in celebration of Mr. Daniel Foray, submit your hashtag askerrorquestions.

It's a great part of the show. Yeah, you want to listen to Dan say something hilarious. Oh, my God. You got to start that chain. I really appreciate, Dan, how you are willing to take a ribbing from those guys and stay true to yourself. See, I was going to say bring reason. Well, that too, actually. These guys are so nice.

They are, aren't they? So get your questions into the crew. Hashtag ask error. Anything about Linux, the universe, life itself, ask them and they'll answer it in a future episode. All right, there you go, Wes. It's so clean in here. Housekeeping is a great moment in time. It really is a chance to clean everything out.

So we have been really enjoying ourselves. Everything Fedora 31. It's a great time of year. You've got right before the holidays, you get to celebrate the Linux days. You get Ubuntu 19.10, which is really like your first visceral look at the new GNOME shell and all the improvements of the different flavors. And then Fedora usually ships somewhat on time. And this time they nailed it. And it's really a great opportunity for those of us who just love Linux and love the different desktop implementations to try it all out. We've been running Fedora 31 for over a week. And we have some questions about some of their bigger changes, and maybe just what the future

holds for 32 and 33. And we knew just who to ask. Christian here is the Senior Engineer Manager for Desktop Graphics at Red Hat. First of all, I love that there's a senior engineer for that. Might not have expected that. So welcome back to the show, Christian. Thank you. Thanks for having me. I love your blog posts that you do kind of midway into the development cycle of the next Fedora workstation. They are so packed full of information that these really could be the release announcement notes.

So on September 23rd, you posted what's coming in Fedora workstation 31. And there's actually quite a bit that didn't really make it into the official bullet points of what's new. a bit that didn't really make it into the official bullet points of what's new. One thing you guys wrote in here that I thought would be really kind of interesting to get some insights is you wrote, an item we feel is important is reducing the need for xWayland and

having Firefox run natively on Wayland. Why did you feel like that was important and why do we need to reduce our use of xWayland, do you think? I think there's many reasons for that, but I mean, I think for me, the major thing is, of course, that even though we're working very hard to make sure X-Wayland is like a really great solution and works really, really well,

I mean, it still adds overhead and it's sort of like an abstraction layer where you're sort of abstracting in the old X system. And of course, you also maybe lose some of the advantages that Wayland is meant to give you by having to rely on on X in terms of security and so on. So we invested in making sure that Firefox would get a native Wayland port. And I mean, I think it's actually worth mentioning that I think for the last five years, at least, Red Hat has more or less single handedly maintained Firefox for Linux. So but anyways, we did the work to make sure that we could get a native port. Also because a browser, right, is the most critical application we have today.

I mean, I think often, at least for me myself and I think for many others, there are days where I literally don't open any other application than a browser. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. So we wanted to make sure that, you know, the browser works really well and is a top-notch experience under Wayland and that it runs natively and not only this old layer. And of course, not starting X-Wayland eventually will also be a resource-saving thing.

If you don't need to start it, then we free up that overhead that that causes. You're also in this post talking about X-Wayland on demand. Does that play into that as well? Yes, exactly. So at the moment, right, because, you know, after 30 years, everything had like a lot of hard dependencies in X and we're assuming things are based on X.

Yeah. So even though Fedora has been running Wayland as our primary display server for years now, you know, it was only very recently that we were able to get rid of the last remnants of code in GNOME that still assumed there would be an X session available. So that meant that X Wayland has always been running.

And if there was a problem with X Wayland, of course, it affected your whole desktop session. But now that we are at a point where GNOME can run on just Wayland and don't need X at all, we will also then do this X Wayland on demand so that we only start it once an application actually requests it. So if you don't have a legacy application that still uses X, that's when we start X-Wayland,

as opposed to ramping it up for every desktop session you have, even if you don't actually run anything on X directly. No need to have it hanging around running if you're not using it. My battery thanks you for that. Yeah, no, because there's a lot of discussions about performance in general, and of course there's a lot of work, right, about performance in general. And of course, there's a lot of work on making, you know, animations smoother and these kind of things. But I think often people tend into the performance term to also put resource usage. And of course, so that's another thing we've been looking at, right, is like, how can we get rid of processes and to keep your session as small as possible, especially if you don't need them. Yeah. I want to get to Pipewire because this is something that it feels like things are getting lined up in 31, but things really start to shift in 32 and 33. And maybe it's good to just recap a little bit of Pipewire history here.

So Pipewire initially was a project that started to really provide remote video solutions for Wayland sessions. Yes, correct. I mean, the original name, actually, if you go back

and get history, you can probably still see that it was originally called Pulse Video. So the idea was like, hey, we need something like Pulse Audio

for video because, well, both for Wayland but also for, as we went to Flatpaks, we realized that when you sandbox applications we wanted a secure way for you to be still able to access things like your webcam and so on. So it's all like hey you know let's put together what we call Pulse Video

at the time and then I guess as we kept discussing and looking at it we thought like well you know we could make the whole architecture or desktop a lot easier to maintain and deal with if we could start centralizing things by, instead of having Pulse Audio and Pulse Video next to each other, basically have one thing that handles both. And then we also said, well, maybe we can bring in Jack to this too, because that's always been the ugly

stepchild of the Linux Universe. It's this extra thing that you have to tweak and twiddle to get going. And we thought, let's look at it, if we can get the performance into Pipewire that enables it to also replace Jack and basically provide a drop-in replacement for both Pulsolio and for Jack and of course provide this new video functionality we needed. Now, as things have evolved, it's not so much replacing Jack, but more like working alongside

Jack? No, still the goal is to replace it. I mean, we will be having a separate, it basically drop in a replacement process

so technically speaking, no Jack application will need to be rewritten. It will still, you know, find a quotation mark

Jack server there, but it will actually be Pipewire providing that Jack server, not the native Jack process. So is it sort of

like a Pipewire Jack library that the applications will just be able to communicate with? Yeah, well, I mean, you know, this is Don't Subbing a Manager, I don't know the details that well, but... Yeah, I'm obviously a little outside my pay grade, too.

But, you know, Jack is well, just like PodSolo, it's a server, right? So as long as you have the server there, and you know, then you speak to Jack protocol, basically, and can communicate with it. So it's essentially creating a Jack-compatible server for Pipewire. Yes, exactly. And of course, the same on the Pulse Audio side,

that it will be a Pulse Audio-compatible server for Pulse Audio applications. So my question that I just desperately need to know is, will there still be some ALSA in the stack? Like at the low level, are we still going through ALSA in the stack? Like at the low level, are we still going through ALSA to get to the hardware? Yes, yes, we are. I love it.

Okay. All right. Very good. Yeah. I mean, ALSA, of course, is still going to be the driver's stack. I mean, I guess there's definitely parts of ALSA that, of course, is not so needed anymore.

I mean, back in the day, right, we had all this software mixing done in ALSA. And these days, I think Pulse Audio usually do that and, of course, Hyper do that. So, of course, in some sense, we're maybe stripping back ALSA a bit to be a pure driver layer, right, as opposed to having all these sort of

more high-end features over there. Yeah, that's a fair explanation. That makes sense. And it's kind of what it's doing best right now anyway. Yeah. Let's talk about 33, though. So some of this lands in 32, but in 33, the idea is to ship Pipewire

as the default audio handler with a way to hit a switchback function somehow. Is that, do you think, too aggressive? Or is that jealous on the edge? Is this going to be like the rollout of Pulse Audio all over again? Yeah, I'm curious. Because as production people,

we're really curious to see where this goes and very excited. Yeah, so the way we, I mean, this was me and Wim sort of sitting down and hashing out the plan for how to do this. And I mean, you know, originally, I think probably when I talked to you guys the last time, our plan was like, let's say roll out Jack support first and then do Pulse Audio later. I think we actually concluded in then that that created more problem than it solved because you suddenly then have to deal with interacting across the pulse audio and pipe wire boundary. So we decided, okay, we just need to do roll out in one go. And so the plan always, right, for 32, we will have a feature complete or at least close to feature complete pipe wire there that you very easily can turn on. And then of course our hope is, you and other people start hammering on that and testing it and giving us feedback like, you know, hey, everything is perfect or, hey,

here are the problems. And then our goal is that for Fedora 32, we can say, hey, everyone has now reported things are really good. And, you know, we've been able to fix a lot of bugs during the lifecycle of Fedora 32. So we feel confident about switching on default. But, I mean, we will do the same here that we did for the Wayland rollout in Fedora

where we had a plan of rolling it out at least two releases before we actually did. But we kept finding issues that we felt were major enough to delay the release. And of course, if you experience the same here, that, you know, because I mean, what I don't want is, as you said, the Pulse Audio situation where, you know,

it literally took people years to stop hating Pulse Audio because the rollout was so bumpy. And I don't want to repeat that experience for Pipewire. Lesson learned! Yeah, well, very good. We will bang on it for sure. And we will

try to report anything that we find amiss. I mean, Wes has already been attempting to give it a go on 31, so we're very excited. Because listening to the talks and just looking at the way it's laid out, this could be an improvement in latency, like a reduction even further than what we have now. Right, I mean, we already have Pulse applications,

so if they can just sort of talk to our Jack applications through Pipewire and not have to use all the gross bridging we have in place now. We could see an improvement in real-time processing, which could be great for us for effects for our live stream. So it's pretty exciting. We've got cool technologies like Toolbox and Silverblue. You've got Wayland and Pipewire and Flatpaks. It feels like the underlying technology stuff is getting really, really solid.

And don't forget tools like Podman. Right. So I wonder if when you look at this as a developer workstation, being that you're on the desktop team, do you see that Gnome Shell is like the next big frontier of work that needs to be done? Is that what you're seeing after this? Or what's your opinion on that? Yes, we're definitely looking at if there's ways to improve Gnome Shell.

And we actually have, I don't think I talked about it in the public blog yet, but we have been actually doing this effort with a lot of students that we are getting in every year, both in Brno in the Czech Republic and here in Boston at the Boston University, where we're trying to basically do a lot of surveys and do automatic data gathering to basically try to figure out what are their likes and dislikes. And especially for many of them,

they come either from Windows or Mac. So they're set up with GNOME Shell desktops and then you're capturing their experiences? Yes, exactly. Wow, that's fascinating. We're trying to sort of build up our capability and figure out exactly how to do it better so that we can start

capturing the feedback and then improve our user experience. And that, of course, we hold to that feedback into, for instance, Gnome Shell and say that, okay, here's how we can make Gnome Shell an even better option for developers. But, I mean, of course, in the short run, for me, the developer killer feature that we're pushing hard is, of course,

the Fedora toolbox, which, of course, is this new tool we have created and we are putting a lot of resources into to make PET containers feel natural and easy to use. And, I mean, it's not an advanced project in many ways. I mean, Wes, I think you mentioned Podman. I mean, Podman, of course, is a tool, right, for creating and running a lot of your containers.

So Toolbox is basically using Podman to make that process even simpler so that you know we don't need to sit there reading documentation to figure out what our commands and how they pull things and stuff instead our plan is that you know you can do toolbox create and it creates you a pet container and then you know you can much more easily find and interact with your pet containers. And at the same time, you're doing UI integration, like the idea is that, for instance, when you have a terminal opening into your toolbox or into your pet container, the prompt will be slightly different from, let's say, your host,

so that you don't sort of jump to, let's say, your 10 different terminals, you're not sure where you are anymore. Also, there's some integration with Gnome Shell Terminal to remember what toolbox you're in as well, right? Yes. So the plan is, of course, that you very easily can find the terminal corresponding to a certain toolbox.

Yeah, that's great. It's nice kind of features, you know. There's like high-level user experience features. Like all the technology is there, like you're talking about, but no one's going to find it if it's not right there in their face. Right, what's kind of thrilling about it, it's taking stuff that's super low level and bring it all the way up to the user experience from, from like the top of the

layer all the way down to the bottom. But not even just using it like the tool, you know, the command line, whatever the dot the man pages, it's the whole workflow. That seems a big, big deal. Yeah. So I, I agree. That seems like I I'm already using it. I am. As soon as, as soon as I started reading what it was, I just started using it and I love it. But I mean, I'm thinking about Gnome Shell itself, like architecturally, the transition to Gnome Shell 4. Is that a near-term project or do you think those are longer-term projects? Well, I would call it medium-term. I mean, at the moment, I mean, we had a meeting just today and I said,

my focus now is that I want to, in some sense, be able to sign off saying that, hey, you know, Wayland is done. And I want us to focus on, you know, getting toolbox up and going. And of course, there's also various other polished items related to Silverblue that I want us to cross off. And I said, like, only once we have these in place and I feel the time is to maybe start is to maybe start moving into at least more serious GNOME shell tweaks. I mean, I'm sure that you will see smaller things coming in going forward, but like Alan Day, who's sort of leading that effort to try to research what could sort of be GNOME shell 4,

it's still a sort of exploratory phase and trying to get use cases and discuss with both our student focus groups, but also with some existing RHEL customers and so on to just make sure that we don't want to sit in our own little echo chamber and say, oh, here's the new perfect design and then we ship it. And it's like, oh, but

this really breaks things for me when I try to use GNOME Shell with Maya or something. Good job on you because it makes sense to wait for the user survey data, wait for some of these tools that fundamentally change how someone can use their workstation, wait for those to develop, tackle the Wayland problem that's going to have to be completely solved for the next GNOME shell.

That really does seem like the right approach. It just means we have to be a little patient. We've got to wait. But things are getting better in the meantime. It's not like there isn't active continuous improvement. Right. I mean, even so, I mean, even in the Wayland transition, I'm surprised how good it all is, right? There may be X servers running under the hood, but I never know.

It is flawless on my ThinkPad. It is completely flawless. Even playing Proton games on Steam, on Wayland, is flawless. It's great. Yeah. No, I mean, I think we're pretty happy with it. I mean, the one big... Well, I mean, there are some smaller items. I i mean i guess you guys have seen hans de goede uh who's on our team right working on trying to improve some things regarding scaling of old stl games but i

mean the one big item that we're of course waiting for is is to get things working perfectly with nvidia binary driver right and that of course is is something we we can't do on our own right this is this is a collaboration with nvidia and we're course, we've been trying to help them put pieces in place. But, of course, we need them to then try out and enable those features in their driver and tell us how it works. And then hopefully, you know, at some point in the not too distant future, you can say, hey, Wayland or other ex-Weyland on top of the Vina body driver now works correctly and is ready to go. That'll be huge. Wow. I mean, the one thing that actually delayed that a bit

was it turned out to be a bigger effort than we thought because a lot of these tools that, you know, for instance, a lot of our rail workstation customers use, all, for instance, are based on extension, OpenGL extensions, for instance, that NVIDIA are shipping with their driver that are, you know, custom to NVIDIA. And I mean, I think for a regular desktop user,

you don't even probably know about them or ever heard about them. But if you are using one of these applications and you don't get access to those extensions, then of course your desktop doesn't work for you. So we ended up having to do more work on enabling the binary driver for X-Wayland. But we believe we have the infrastructure now, but of course NVIDIA now needs to find the time

to do their testing and validation of it so that we can get the driver out that supports it perfectly. I'm amazed that we're even talking about this stage, though, because it does mean at some point there will be a point in time when NVIDIA binaries worked with Wayland and when it didn't. There'll be a marker in Linux's history.

There's going to be new Linux users who never had to go through this. They never had, we're right. People will adopt Linux and never have had to worry about this. Just works. And I put a big asterisk next to my, it works perfectly.

It works perfectly in the right scenarios. And I think that's where Wayland's at right now. If you, I had to switch a couple of apps that I use, drop a couple of extensions, and I happen to already be switching over to Firefox anyway, so it sort of worked perfectly for that. And on the right hardware, like my ThinkPad with Intel graphics, or when I hook up my AMD eGPU, it's great.

On my machine upstairs, it's a little more tricky. So there's some scenarios where it's not perfect yet, but it showed me that everything that's sort of been promised for so many years is really beginning to solidify. It's not 100% yet, but it really is beginning to get there. I mean, I think there's a lot of sort of unsung heroes here.

I mean, there's a guy called Olivier Ferdinand on our team who I think is mostly actually known as being the founder of XFC. But he's been doing, for instance, an absolutely stellar job the last few years, just keeping track of every, you know, Wayland bug that has come in and making sure we fix it

and then figuring out what is a corner case triggering this issue. And it's sort of like, you know, not the person we might sort of see in the headlines, but definitely some of those people who've been doing so much legwork and just making sure it becomes a solid experience for more and more people.

And, you know, even things that might feel obscure, that we actually get them resolved. And I mean, that blog post you mentioned, I wrote to me in the one feature, for instance, he wrote on there, which I mentioned was that he made sure that we got some of these accessibility features brought into Wayland that we used to have

and even improve them at the same point. So some disabled users have trouble with mouse clicks. So there's this feature you can turn on that when you just hover your mouse over something, it will, after a certain amount of time, click automatically. And this used to be like this timer up in the shell, but what he did was he actually turned it

into the cursor itself. Now you see this little almost cake diagram sort of swirl up as it ticks up before it does the click. Yeah, it looks really nice. There's a screenshot in the blog post, which we will link in the show notes. Thank you for mentioning that, because I think that is the biggest story

about free software in general, is there's so many unsung heroes behind the scenes, and some of them work on things that we use and love every single day, or some of them are solely responsible for making this free software accessible for an entire category of users. And that's such a massive impact.

And you're right, they don't make headlines. And that's something I'd love to try to change somehow. That could be a goal of mine for 2020. New Year's resolution. I mean, there's all these efforts that you might not see at all or have any idea are being worked on, but turns out are crucial.

Remarkable, too. Well, Christian, thank you. And thank you to the entire team for all of this. We've been enjoying Fedora 31 and we're looking forward forward to future releases too. It's been a solid maintenance release, and you can see things are getting lined up for the next couple of releases. I think it's great. It's really great to see this nice, steady progress happening. I know, and I can't quite even describe it, but over and over, I'm enjoying using Fedora 31. It's just a solid release.

Next week, we're going to dive into what we love about our favorite distributions. Like, what are the core things we really love about them? And then what's the one thing we would change to make them perfect? So we'll talk more about that. I, in the meantime, will give you something you can fix immediately about Fedora. I will have a couple of links in the show notes. Let's try to add them in order of priority. So I will start with a better looking fonts for Fedora as the first link. If you only do one thing, do the suggestions in that link. Then there's a second link where there's a, I love the Friar code or Fira code. Fira? Yeah, that's probably how you

say it Wes. Thank you. Either way, it's a handsome font. So go get that. And then the last one, if you really want to go into deep about the sad state of font rendering, not just on Linux, my friends, but on all platforms, there is an article that really nerds out on this. It's a fantastic read if you're at all interested in typography or fonts. And the nice thing is it wraps with a few recommendations on what you can do to fix it. So definitely worth a read if you're running,

well, really actually out of the gate, out of the box, the Ubuntu distributions are generally the better off on this particular area. But if you're rolling your own, setting up Arch or Gen 2 or your own Fedora or some of the other distributions, they may not have chosen some of the font options that make a difference. And that last link, that last link actually explains Dora or some of the other distributions, they may not have chosen some of the font options that make a difference.

And that last link, that last link actually explains why fixing your fonts matters. It's worth looking into. It's worth the effort, yeah. That's the Wes Payne recommendation. Well, Wes, before we run, let's just do a super quick mention of the pick because it's really a pick of the week that's just for you

and only for you, and that is called KExec Boot. This is a project that we have linked in the show notes that is a nice Linux bootloader implementation based on Wes's favorite KExec. Quick reminder, what's KExec, Wes?

Okay, well, KExec is a tool and an ability feature of the Linux kernel that lets you load a new kernel without having to reboot. So the hardware doesn't have to go through the reboot process. You just jump right to the new kernel. One could, in theory, be sitting here right now and be running Kubuntu and Kexec into Fedora. Yeah, exactly.

In theory. You can use it for all kinds of things, between rescue. That facility is used for crash dump sometimes. You can boot into a crash kernel and then save that state off onto a file system somewhere. So there's lots of things. I use it for trying out new systems because you don't have to go mucking about with your bootloader. You can just go jump into any old, you know, kernel and inner MFS. And as long as you point it to the right partition, it'll boot.

Nobody wants to muck. So k-exec boot is a neat project I'd actually not seen before, but I got it installed and running today, and it is just kind of what it says. It's a bootloader for kexec. So it goes and talks to the kernel, goes and finds out about all the partitions you have, and then it tries to open them up, load them,

and see if it has any boot entries. And it's got a simple boot.cfg syntax. You kind of just say, here's the kernel I want, and a label, and here's the kernel I want and a label, and here's the command line to append to the kernel. And then instead of using, you know, booting into it like a bootloader would do, it kxx. That is neat.

But it's targeted to look like a real bootloader too. So it opens up on a TTY, and it's got like a nice little graphical menu, and it'll list out the different kernels you have available. So it opens up a new TTY on your existing distro that you're running, your main distro. Yeah. And I mean, you probably want to use this at a level, because it's

poking around at all the partitions, like I don't know how nicely it'll play with something that's up and running. You probably want it at a level where you haven't started all of your applications necessarily. I know, Wes. Hard shut down those things. Close them all out. Because it eventually just drops it all from memory and then loads the new system, right? Yeah, I mean, once you hit go, you're sick about everything you want to work on.

I love it. I love it. And so it's a package, and it installs, and then it just takes over TTY. Yeah, and then it's got a nice little GUI, and you kind of select which kernel you want, hit enter, and there you go. I'm going to break my system with this one, I think. I love it. I love it.

See, the nice part is you won't because you didn't modify your bootloader, so all you have to do is reboot, and you'll get back to where you started from. Oh, challenge accepted there, sir. Challenge accepted. All right. Well, go check out Mr. Martin Wimpress over at the Ubuntu Podcast because not only did he have that laptop review, but there's just something every single week it turns out that you could catch over at UbuntuPodcast.org. Thanks for being here, Wimpy. My pleasure. And of course, you can get more Dan.

Mr. Foray is one of three fantastic hosts of the User Air podcast. So go check out User Air. Thanks for being here, Dan. Thank you. No, no. No. Thank you. No, no. No! Thank you. Also, a big thank you to Cassidy for coming here and help us explain

what they're doing. I think it's great. I love it, Cassidy. So glad you could make it, too. Thank you, and thanks for having me. Thank you, sir. Stay a while and listen. And Mr. Westpain, thank you for making it. Indeed. I should say, yeah, since episode 100, I don't think you've missed, well, I mean, maybe you were traveling once or twice.

I've been traveling once or twice, but other than that. I mean, so, I mean, you've probably been here for like maybe minus two. So thank you. Not too shabby. Check you out over at techsnap.systems with Mr. Jim Salter talking benchmarks. Oh, yeah. You want to find out how slow or fast your disk may be and how you might measure it, check out TechSnap 415.

You need to know. You just need to know where you're at. I mean, I think with some of the tips in that episode, you might be doing some benchmarks before long.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, definitely. I love that kind of stuff. Go check out the network at Jupyter Signal. LinuxUnplugged.com

is our website. LinuxUnplugged.com is our website. Linuxunplugged.com slash 326 is the URL for all of our show notes this week. And slash subscribe for that. If you want to get, you know, maybe an RSS feed or something. Thanks for being here. We won't be here next Tuesday.

So there's that. But there will be a show. Yes, thank you. Yes. We already explained this, Wes. Do you have a good Halloween? Anything happen in your neck of the woods? My neighbor's door was open for a weirdly long time. So I just moved and I've not met this particular neighbor.

Yeah. But their door, I mean, like where I'm on the left in the hallway, he's like straight through. Yeah. So I sort of, I'd taken a small nap, let's say, got up at like 11 p.m. before doing some stuff. Went to go take the dogs out. And the door's just open. It's just hanging open. Yeah. And then I woke up the next the dogs out. And the door's just open. It's just hanging open. Yeah.

And then I woke up the next morning. Yeah. And it's still open. They had a Halloween party is what they had. I think they had too much Halloween. A little candy rambunctious. I did my Halloween the weekend before Halloween. Yeah, that's nice.

To my Halloween. Kind of get it over with early. Yeah, it was pretty uneventful. Can I tell you the most American thing that I've seen since I emigrated? Yes, please. There was a family on my street trick-or-treating in a golf cart. Well, you don't want to, you know,

you don't want to have to burn off of those candy calories. You don't want to get exercise. You've been working hard for those candy calories. Plus, think about how much more candy you can carry back, because your arms are too weak to really carry it otherwise. Yeah, you need that hauling capacity. It was amazing. And the driver was holding a big gulp just to complete the picture.

Stop it. Are you serious? No, I'm totally serious. Well, if you get it concentrated enough, you can just dissolve the candy right in it. I bet you it's booze. I bet you it's booze in a big gulp. We did get jello shots. That was cool. We got handed jello shots. Oh, that's nice.

That was pretty great. That's really adult candy anyway. Yeah, for sure. Wyatt wrote, hope you guys had a happy Halloween. I know I did while I was trying to get my local SampaShare to automatically mount on my machine this morning. A Linux kernel CVE stuck out like a sore thumb while I was viewing Dmessage. Dun, dun, dun.

All right, so go vote, jbtitles.com. Go pick our title while I read the rest of this. You can get the full information and links the whole CVE we'll have in the show notes. You can get the full information and links the whole CVE we'll have in the show notes. To summarize, this bug affects AMD, Centaur, and other non-Intel processors, except for the Intel Xeon PHI family and a range of Intel Atom processors. You have to disable simultaneous multi-threading SMT to mitigate this bug. Enabling the mitigation will cripple any hypervisors you are running under the affected processors.

My guess, the CVE comes out of the Spectre kerfuffle that happened in January. Unfortunately, when I read DMessage, I didn't get my Samba share to mount on boot, so I don't get Samba shares. Regards, Wyatt. What a weird, like, series. Like, because of this whole Intel Spectre mitigation stuff, he can't get his Samba stuff to mount. Didn't Jim just hit a weird series of bugs with WireGuard and the kernel? Oh, yeah.

That was an AMD bug. Yeah. Given, well, not so random numbers. Yeah, that's, yeah. With WireGuard was not so happy with. It's just sometimes the weirdest esoteric problems manifest in a way that. Well, it's so, you know, we have so many different levels. Everything's so complicated.

A violation of one of your assumptions way down below makes weird stuff happen. Right. What assumptions that are happening before you even know things are happening?