LINUX Unplugged - 327: Distro Disco

Episode Date: November 12, 2019

Get to know our Linux Users Group a little better and learn why they love their Linux distros of choice, and the one thing they'd change to make them perfect. Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, and Neal Gompa.

Guys, I just got a new little surprise at the door here. Some new hardware. It did not arrive via DHS. That is what I was going to ask next. But Alex did help me get this. Alex, you don't even know this yet. X-250 used just came in my door. And I unboxed it.

And it has a Pro Windows sticker on it, which might have to come off right away. And my display port looks like it has a dent in it, but I'm not very happy about, but, but we'll see. So this is a new, uh, upgrade for me. I'm going from X two 20 to X two 50. And Alex and I, uh, when I'm there later this week, uh, in Raleigh, we're going to switch out the monitor to an IPS and do a whole bunch of stuff to it. So we'll see how that adventure goes. Are you telling me you're going to crack open a brand new ThinkPad and replace the screen with a different one? Yes. Yeah. I don't even know if I'm going to boot it first. I'm just going to kind of... I love you guys. Why wouldn't you do that? What possible reason could you not do that? You know, I think we have some work to do, Chris. I know. I want to see what it looks like when it's all said and done. Here's the thing, right? I mean, in terms of bang for buck, we were looking at two, I think an X270. And that came out at $500 or so. This 250 came out, I think Brent, correct me if I'm wrong, like 250, something like that. 220, 220 US. Okay,

so even cheaper. Great. And then by the time you've done the upgrades and stuff, you know, you're looking at just approaching $300. And for Brent, this is like a 60% speed bump over his X220. Yeah, we did the comparison and it's like, it's easy to say yes to something like that. And who doesn't love an old ThinkPad? Hey, it's new to me. What do you have on your existing system CPU-wise

and what are you going to? Well, right now I'm on an X220. It's got an i3 in it. I am hoping Alex can remember the exact. It's the potato version of the i3. The really, really like the baby one. Yes, the potato. And therefore I have lots of room to grow, I guess.

He was surprised that I could do as much magic as I can on a potato, but it seems potatoes are pretty good. Alex is not alone. That is one of the number one things I probably haven't vocalized when I've been around you is I am amazed at the work you get done on that, the machine you have now. Well, thank you. It's not what you got, it's how you use it.

I'll be curious if you get sloppy now that you've upgraded a bit, you know? I think the improved screen is a big deal. I think that IPS display is going to make a huge difference for you, Brent. Absolutely. As a photographer, the IPS was a must. And it's hard to find things that are IPSs that are also in good condition and all this other stuff, right? So when Alex suggested that we could just swap it out and upgrade the resolution on the monitor, I was all in. swap it out and upgrade the resolution on the monitor.

I was all in. Yeah, you currently have an i3-2350M chip, which is from Q4 2013, and you're going to an i7-5600U, which is from Q1 2015. So it's still two cores, four threads, but it's going from Sandy Bridge to Broadwell. So there's a significant architectural change there. And like we said, a 60% speed bump. So I think you're going to enjoy it.

This also gives you a bump in RAM, right? Yes. When RAM currently I'm using 8 gigs. I know this X-T20 can handle 16 and 8 gigs allows me to suffer quite regularly. Therefore, I will be looking towards upgrading quite quickly, for sure. It is quite, isn't it? This week, we're just talking about one thing, which is two things, technically three things, but just this one thing. If there are just two things you love about your distro, I want to know about them. But if there's one thing you could change to make it perfect, to make it better, what would it be? That's what we'll ask everyone on our panel today. So let's bring them all in. Hello there, Cheese and Alex. Hello, guys. Hello. Hello, Chris. I'm going to say hello to you directly today instead of last time where

you got all upset because I said hello, internet. Alex, I don't even know what you're talking about. It just sounds ridiculous. Who could possibly be upset by that? Ridiculous. Hello, mumble room time appropriate greetings. Hello, hello. Good evening. Howdy.

Hello. Wow. Whoa. Oh, my. room time appropriate greetings hello hello good evening hello hello wow whoa um oh my uh west said after the show last week he said how many people do you think will show up and mumble for the special recording and i said five people that's not what happened i think you were wrong there buddy you guys are so awesome so thank you so much for being here this week uh we wanted to do a special recording because i am traveling taking taking care of the business, as I do, Wes. You know me. You're important. Yeah, we know. I got to take care of the business, Wes. I don't know what that business is.

I believe you say TCB. You're saying that all the time. Yeah, take care of the business. That's what I say. I say it, but that's also a yogurt, isn't it? I think. I don't know. So this week, we're going to do something a little different than the regular show. We're going to just focus in on what we love about the distributions that we use. And we're going to kind of go around the horn here and see what each of us loves about the distributions we've chosen. And maybe the one thing we could make, just a small tweak. Maybe if we had a magic wand, we could change something to make it better.

Now, I want to make it really clear here at the top. There is no perfect distribution yet. Now, by the time we're done with this episode, I'm pretty sure we'll have a perfect distribution. I mean, clearly. We're going to solve it right now. We can do it, I believe. But I just want to keep that in mind. We're really just here to share.

This is going to be positive stuff. This is what we love about the distributions we've chosen to use. Having really myself started with Red Hat, tried Debian. I think I really fell in love with Linux once I started using Debian.

With Red Hat, it felt like a tool. And with Debian, it felt like it was solving problems for me. You know what I mean? Just flexible enough that you could use it for anything? It was apt. 100% apt. That's an interesting theme.

I think we'll hear more about package management today. When did you start? Like, how new were package managers? And were they any good at that point? I think he just called you old. I think, Chris, he's trying to date you. I know. I know.

I'm like, wow, man. Well, it did feel like computer magic. Like the fact that apt could just figure out that one package depended on these other packages, which could possibly depend on additional packages. That felt very new. It was definitely mid to late 90s. Apt was introduced into Debian in 99. The first release was in 98. Okay, sounds about right. It was definitely kind of magical because just a year later,

it got forked and ported to RPM distros, which is how Connectiva had it. They were a fork of Red Hat that used apt instead of up-to-date. And I remember Yellow Dog Linux had like the, there was two things, there was two distros back then that really had solved RPMs. Like Debian had a totally different approach, but Mandrake had URPMI. Yellow Dog had the Yellowdog update manager,

Yum. And those two had really kind of solved using RPMs, whereas Debian had gone a totally different route. And looking back at it, Yum survived and then became DNF. But URPMI, which was the Mandrake approach, kind of just died off. So here's an interesting factoid that I think a lot of people don't know. Your PMI and Apt were released the same year within a month of each other. They were the first ever dependency-resolving repository software managers for the Unix world, or arguably all of the computer operating system world. They're obviously predecessors of different types and whatnot, but of the specific kind

that we understand as package managers today, those two were the first. And Yellow Dog had the Yellow Dog updater, or YUP, which got forked to become the Yellow Dog updater modified, YUM. And that one was the one that, as we all know, won out in the RPM world and eventually became, we have the dandified yellow dog updater, which is DNF. All right. Now, before we go too much further down the package route, because I think it's going to come up again in the show, let's talk about what some of our favorite distributions are and what it is about those distributions that we love. And I wanted to give each person in the mumble room a chance to chime in. So Ace Nomad, let's start with you. What distribution is your distro of choice and

what is it about it that you love? I'm running a Kubuntu on pretty much all of my main machines. And I, for the most part, just use it for KDE. I'm kind of distro agnostic. My passion comes from KDE. I can understand that. I mean, it's a great desktop environment. Mr. Brent Photo. I imagine a bit of it has to do with Plasma yourself. Well, it's actually your fault. You kind of dared many of us to give Plasma a try,

I think like a year and a half to two years ago. And at the time, uh, using Linux Mint Cinnamon version, uh, which was working fairly well for me. And I am more in a production style system, I'll call it. Um, but I was like, Oh, well, I haven't tried KDE in like a decade. And so gave it a try, uh, using Intericos and basically fell in love uh and i've been in love ever since and it's been quite an amazing ride so i've really enjoyed that setup same he showed me his laptop at texas linux fest when i met him last year this being him being chris by the way and okay and yeah he had a really really nice. I think it was an XPS 13 at that point he had it on.

And KDE Plasma 5 since then has just been my desktop daily driver ever since. It's been really, really solid. I have typically reached for XFCE or Cinnamon generally for the lower resource part of it. Agreed. And I was really surprised, really surprised with Plasma 5

and just how wonderfully it runs on this potato. It's just so solid. I know. And yet, customizable in a way that I really appreciate, especially with some

of the photo workflow that I do. It's nice to have Windows always coming up in the right places. You can almost grow closer to it than other managers

because you can change it so much, right? You really make it your own. It fits like a glove. Yeah, certainly. I feel the only problem now is that because I'm needing to move to some new hardware, I'm feeling very afraid of changing the setup because I've grown into it so much. It's almost like I know everything about it and it knows everything about me. It's like a pair of comfortable shoes. I actually think that something that is worth commenting about is, so about two years, right? About two years of using it, that's several

different versions of that desktop environment. And it's mostly carried forward all of the settings, I would assume. So it hasn't really disrupted your workflow, even though it's been updating pretty frequently. One thing I wanted really fundamentally from a rolling release, I was a little bit tired when I jumped into this from doing upgrades and having that disruption in my production, which is also, you know, comes with a little bit of fun too. But there's something about having this solid machine that I can depend on all the time. And I wasn't quite sure how that experience would go, but now two years in I'm, I'm, you know, I've hit very few problems that have really brought me to my knees, uh, in that respect. And so it's been a real treat to see it evolve

because of course new features are coming all the time, but not evolve in a way that makes me dislike it. It's been just more and more features and more pleasing really. I have a question for both you and Alex. Brent, you first. How often are you running updates? Yeah, I'll give you the best case and the worst case. So how often typically I do about once a week if I'm in a place that has good wi-fi now as many of you know i travel quite a bit and uh so i tend not to do the updates while i'm traveling both because i don't want to eventually introduce problems but mostly because i'm relying on some mobile wi-fi um and usually i can wait like a week or two to do updates in a place where I can have time and space

and a good internet connection to deal with that but I will admit these days I'm running out of disk space in a way that I need to desperately fix and so I haven't run an update Chris you're gonna love this I haven't run an update it's embarrassing it's almost like since maybe the sprint, which really, I didn't, I did not expect that, which is in August, late August. And I'm afraid now I'm just, what are you doing after the show, Brent? I mean, it's probably time. What do you say about the post show there, Brent? Yeah, really. I will bring up how many packages are in need of update, and we can talk about that. What about you, Alex?

How often are you hitting the old update there? Every single day, multiple times a day, honestly. It's Arch, so that's why I have it. I just have a muscle reflex that I type yay every time I sit down at a blank terminal. I don't know why. I just do it. You're kidding me.

Multiple times a day? For real? Yeah, why not? That's not that bad. I mean, yeah, there's always fresh stuff. You don't even want to see what updates. Because, I don't know why I just do it. You're kidding me. Multiple times a day for real? Yeah, why not? That's not that. I mean, yeah, there's always fresh stuff. You don't want to see what updates because I don't know. It makes sense. It reduces the amount of churn you have to deal with each day.

You're doing it multiple times and taking them in smaller chunks makes it more manageable. But every now and then it's something massive. I don't do it before I need to record a show, though. I'm not I'm not OK. I'm not crazy like that. It almost sounds like it's a tick. Yeah, it is. So, Brent, you're worried about not updating since the end of August, okay?

When I put this system, when I emigrated last year, I put this system in a box and then I put it on a container ship for the best part of four, four and a half months. The Arch install that came out the other end was like a time capsule it was really strange like i went back into my home directory and it was exactly as i left it in august and i just logged in at the beginning of january i ran update and there was something like 2000 packages or something crazy that had to be updated and it was fine. It was just fine. So give it a go. Okay. Thank you for that. The last time I checked, it was at about five to 600 packages needing, and I just ran Pac-Man now and it's not looking good.

What if I could tell you there was a way to have fresh software and not worry about breaking changes until major version releases occurred what if well it would be all ears in many ways but that's such an anti-pattern argument because major releases by their very nature require you to have a risky upgrade whereas i'm doing i'm having the very small risk okay over the length of a, over the lifespan of a system of two, three, four years, whatever, the cumulative risk is the same, I believe. But I'm taking that risk 0.01% every day instead of 100% every nine months.

Definitely possible. It is also possible you're playing Russian roulette with a gun that just happens to have 22 bullets instead of 14. Right? You're getting every now and then there's a possibility that there's a change in there that's going to be really disruptive. I think you've been away from Arch for a while. I think you have some PTSD from your Arch dance, from breaking things. No, I ran Arch for years. I think it's actually really great. I also really appreciate the idea of, say, you're going to make a breaking change, hold

that, and then make it really clear at a certain release cycle. Although, the Arch system does definitely try to communicate changes. Here's a great example. You know the Linux VFIO stuff that we talked about in LUP? Was it 3.1.4

maybe? A while ago anyway. Linux kernel 5.3 came out and had some breaking changes in it for vfio do you know how long it took me to roll back and i mean maybe kernel's not the best example but you know rolling back a package because i know it's only a couple of packages that have changed every day it takes five minutes if that as opposed to spending an entire weekend debugging why my major upgrade didn't work i mean maybe that's maybe i have ptsd from that in the past same as you have arch ptsd you know right i mean both ways it does mostly just work as we've seen in the recent 31 upgrades you know i will say it's actually an important discussion like i i have approached arch knowing that problems may occur if you are updating as frequently as say alex's um but one of the reasons i do or have done updates ignoring

this last little piece have done updates on a weekly basis at least um and only when i'm not you know obviously in need of production uh is so that those sort of problems get fleshed out by some people who are more risk tolerant, such as Alex, or have the tools to, to easily deal with problems. And so I found that to be a really nice cadence for me. Um, I, I will run into things, you know, maybe once or twice a year that I really have to put some time towards, but other than that, it's been, it's been really smooth. I've been really impressed. I got to say, I used to use Arch myself and I worked with a lot of people that got into it. It got real popular right around that time. I know Chris was talking about it a lot on the shows.

And the thing is, if you can religiously update every single day, it's a lot smoother experience. Not everyone has that discipline. A lot of people, if they go a week, a month without updating, they'll end up running into problems. And I've had to help a lot of people fix broken Arch installs just because they went five weeks without updating and then things didn't work. And the Arch upstream, they don't test any scenarios like that other than you better be up to date all the way with every package all the time. And because the Pac-Man package manager is somewhat stupid compared to a lot of other ones. Oh, it's very dumb.

But it's so fast. Well, it's fast because it doesn't do a lot, right? It's the easy way. Yeah, because it doesn't do a lot. One of the major things I've seen trip up people who are Arch users is that the package, you do an update and you break your system because, well, you didn't go to the Arch website and go check, oh, wait, you need to do a manual transition yourself before you can run the package manager,

because otherwise you will just break your computer irreparably, right? Those kinds of transitions are painful and they're really difficult to do, especially when your package manager cannot help you. Yeah. Isn't there one actually pending right now? I can't remember. We're tracking it, but we're not tracking it super closely. There's about like if you use like an old version of compression, which was people were warned about a year ago, but if you're still happen to be using it on Arch, you're about to get broken. Yeah. So if you haven't upgraded Pac-Man in a while, you're about to get broken.

Yeah, so if you haven't upgraded Pac-Man in a while, you're kind of screwed because they just switched compression from XZ to Z standard. And so you're broken. That's what it was. Oh no. They do say you've had a year. So we expect you already did update.

This is one of those rare instances where they've actually done a good job of like preparing you for the worst. But, you know, like take, for example, when the C++ ABI change happened, lots and lots of people wound up actually getting really hurt by that because the mixture of ABI has caused things to not link properly at runtime. And then things just blew up. And so there's all kinds of unexpected side effects that come from things like, oh, you're running programs, but it's after your loop standard C++ was updated.

But before everything else that linked to it was updated. And because there is no order dependency resolution at that level, you can't make sure that everything that leads up to that package is actually installed first. So pretty much every kind of package manager is going to check that type of linkage other than pac-man there it is i will give a quick uh update on my pac-man situation here on my upgrade all right real time here i like it uh so this is error failed to prepare transaction oh you don't satisfy dependencies and the next line you'll love installing pac-man to 5.2.1-1 breaks dependency pac-man so you would all think i'm in a bad situation probably best to just uninstall pac-man completely and start again oh okay that's the best you wanted you wanted new pac-man so i broke your pac-man to

make your pac-man so you could have your pac-man pac-man install dnf all All of a sudden, I feel it's important that I play the Arch Defendant for some reason. I'd mentioned that I'm sure if you search that error message on the forum, you'll probably find a resolution pretty quick. Do you want to try that next? Try that. All right, I'll pitch you guys. Yeah. All right, so Byte, I want to give you a chance to tell us what your favorite distro is and what it is about it that you just love so much.

Well, so as many of you know, I'm a Debian Ubuntu guy. And on my laptop, my daily driver is Bungie Ubuntu. I got a bit hooked on Bungie when I tried Solace. And then you eventually wound back on an Ubuntu base, but with the same desktop environment? Oh, yeah. Now, I have to ask you, if you could change one thing to make it perfect, what would it be?

Well, I did notice a bug, and I'm trying to describe the bug, but no one can replicate it. So that's an interesting thing. Yeah. Yeah, I follow you. Yeah, I feel that way with my glitchy mouse up on my desktop. Meanwhile, I hear from everybody,

it's great on my machine. That's what I keep hearing. Meanwhile, it's getting worse than ever. Meanwhile, I hear from everybody, it's great on my machine. That's what I keep hearing. Meanwhile, it's getting worse than ever. Like, I open up tabs just in the background. Like, say you're reading something, and you, like, you middle-clicked, like, open something in the background. Yeah.

Oh, my mouse just... Bip, bip, bip, bip, bip. That's how it moves across the screen. I can't believe you haven't changed something. I mean, you're just sitting here suffering. What am I going to do? Go to macOS? What am I going to do?

I mean, there's a lot of other apps. Have you tried Arch? Well, no, I think I'd have to go to Plasma? Go to Mac OS? What am I going to do? I mean, there's a lot of other apps. Have you tried Arch? Well, no, I think I'd have to go to Plasma. Go to Plasma. Come on. You won't regret it. I know the thing that really needs to be fixed, the toolbars. You can shove them to the right or the left, but they're still the full size if you hit your mouse on the bottom. Ah, okay. All right. Good one.

You know what? You ought to, you know, maybe always submit that there's a bug report. if you hit your mouse on the bottom. Okay. All right. Good one. You know what? You ought to, you know, maybe always submit that there's a bug report. Okay, Carl, I've got a pretty good idea. Your default setup is Linux Mint from two years ago and you love it. Am I right? Absolutely.

Okay. Tell me about your current setup. What is your love about it? And if you could change one thing to make it perfect. Sure. Well, I know your little joke there. You know that I run Fedora. I know you love it too for your servers.

Yeah. I'm using it pretty much everywhere. Servers, desktop, laptop, everything. The very first thing that really attracted me about Linux was package management in general. Started getting into it more. Was able to get a job doing a lot of work with that with the iOS project there at Rackspace. And just got real deep into the RPM ecosystem. At that time, I was still running Arch on my desktop.

And I was doing a good bit of Arch packages in the AUR just for scratching my own itches, things that I wanted to use. And rather than just doing a one-off install, I was like, no, of course, it needs to be a package. And I'll just make it myself and upload it to the AUR. it needs to be a package and I'll just make it myself and upload it to the AUR. Learned enough about the, around Pac-Man and their package format to realize just how much better RPM was in it. I mean, it's new and it's fast, but there are just so many edge cases, things like the linkage stuff we got into earlier that, you know, all of that, all those years of robustness and maturity just really comes in handy for a lot

of things. And especially at Rackspace, you see those kind of things all the time where customers add random repos or do different kind of updates, break things. And just having a robust package manager is absolutely essential. That's one of the things that I really like about it. And the way that Fedora is changing now, the thing that's really great, besides just being a total RPM nerd around this stuff and liking it a lot, they have a real low barrier to entry to getting updates to changes and updates to their packages. They've got it set up now where once you get your Fedora account, you can actually send pull requests to update RPM spec files, which unlike Debian packaging stuff is actually one file understandable that you can just look at and see what it's doing in a snap. It's not quite as simple as a bash script like Pac-Man stuff is, but there's other problems there with that simplicity.

I think RPM spec files strike a really good balance between simplicity and capability and flexibility and robustness. So being able to send pull requests just to change things. A good example, I think it was a week or two ago with the Fedora 31 show, Cheese noticed that the Pharonix test suite was a major version behind. During that show, I forked the repo, sent a pull request to update it to the latest version, to version 9. That just got accepted and built today. So pull requests are the way to do open source stuff now.

And with Fedora getting that natively integrated with the low barrier to entry, it's awesome. That's great. That really is great. I can't argue with any of that. It makes a lot of sense. And I echo a lot of that as well. So, Neil, what about you? What's your distro of choice?

And what's your favorite thing about it? Oh, Carl, you actually, hold on, Neil. Before we go to you, Carl, you didn't say if you could change one thing about Fedora, what it your favorite thing about it oh carl you actually hold on neil before we go to you carl you didn't say if you could change one thing about fedora what it would be to make it perfect the thing that bugs me and i've gotten away from this myself being a problem for myself just by switching everything to intel and amd but nvidia drivers it's comes up time and time again for new users and it's just a bad experience having to add other repos to get it working. And I know that there's all kinds of licensing and firmware problems around it.

A lot of it honestly is well over my head. But what I do know is that Fedora has exceptions for firmware, for proprietary blob firmware in their kernel to get things working. I know that Red Hat puts a lot of proprietary software and kernel binary blobs in their kernel to get things working. I know that Red Hat puts a lot of proprietary software and kernel binary blobs in their kernel to get enterprise hardware, especially storage solutions working. And I just think Red Hat should be able to put their weight behind getting this problem fixed, whether it's a partnership, some kind of exception,

some kind of licensing deal. I mean, Red Hat and Canonical, I know they did something with Microsoft to get UAFI working. And I just feel like that there's some kind of solution there if everyone put their weight behind it to get NVIDIA drivers working correctly out of the box on Fedora. From your lips to their ears, Carl. From your lips. Neil, what about you? So your favorite distro and, of course, what you love about it and the thing you'd love to just sort of tweak, change, make different to make it perfect.

So I've got two favorites, but I'm going to talk about the latter one since Carl did a great job with the former. So I run Fedora and OpenSUSE pretty much all over the place. I've got a little bit of Magia sprinkled right here and there, but the two major ones I run are Fedora and OpenSUSE. major ones I run are Fedora and OpenSUSE. What I really like about OpenSUSE is, honestly, I like that I have a rolling release distribution that actually gets tested and integrated. And like, I get a good feeling whenever I'm doing, whenever I'm using Tumbleweed versus like the brief time I've used Arch or the time where I ruined myself doing Gen 2, time I've used Arch or the time where I ruined myself doing Gen 2, you know, stuff like that. It makes it having a little bit of a peace of mind when you're doing a rolling distribution really goes a long way. And the KDE experience, because I've been a KDE guy for several years now,

the KDE experience in OpenSUSE is mostly amazing. It works really well. They've got a good visual experience. They've got a design language around it. They've got good backgrounds and all that stuff. It feels like it's a loved part of the distribution. And not to say that Fedora doesn't have a great KDE experience. It's just that they've, in OpenSUSE, they've tweaked it. They've made it their own.

They've done... Right. Feels more a part of it and loved. Right. As far as what I really wish I could change, I don't like the package manager. I don't. Zipper has bitten me enough times now and done enough weird things that I actually, on my personal OpenSUSE systems, have switched to DNF.

So I use that everywhere. I even patched package kit to switch to it. I just cannot see them having the will to go through yet another package manager transition. They haven't done one in 10 years, so why the hell not? You got to be kidding me. It feels like it's been two months ago. You're telling me we've been using Zipper for 10 years?

Zipper was introduced in 2006. Oh, I remember when Zipper was around, but I don't, I mean, no way has it been the default package manager. Yep. Really? I feel like that's sort of when they started to lose me to tell you the truth is when, when they went through a series of package manager changes, I just couldn't really be bothered. Remember how I called you out for being old, Chris? It took longer in SLEE than it did in OpenSUSE. Huh, okay. All right, I remember Zipper as a tool to manage software across multiple Linux systems.

I don't, you know, that's how I remember Zipper. I want to hear from Frank S&B over there on his favorite distro, what he loves about it and the one thing you would change, Frank. So I use Ubuntu Mate. And to be completely transparent, I do a little bit with Wimpy and the team. Fair enough. Why I chose it.

So I've used Linux for a while. I took a break, came back to it on the desktop. And I was using Subuntu because I've used XFCE for a long time. And I got a little tired of a few issues with sleep. And I'm not trying to throw XFCE under the bus at all. And I started looking at Mate. And when I looked at it, I did not like the advanced Mate menu.

For me, a menu is a big deal. And as soon as they brought the Brisk menu in, I got really interested. Sure. Started using it and really kind of figured out this is where I wanted to be. The balance of performance to like battery power is really great. And there's, especially with what they've done in 1910, a lot of the key binding. So it's, you can either do it really mouse-driven or keyboard-driven, which is really awesome. And the amount of work that Luke and Wimpy have put into the Welcome and the Software Boutique is just wonderful. So I think it's really something that's great for ease of use for a new user and for someone that is really experienced.

Completely agree. Yeah. And if you could change one thing about it to make it perfect? So there's two things. One is a little bit outside of the scope and that's to have more of a scalable, high DPI setting.

And maybe Wayland will get that for us. My biggest one is to do some work on the panel. So right now, it's kind of a little bit more difficult than it should be to make the panel look exactly like you want it. So you have to go in and make some changes that are not exactly for a new user, the best experience. But doing that opens up another can of worms. But that's my really my only thing that I would really want to have changed. Yeah, fair enough. I love it.

You're making me want to try it out again. Yeah, right? It's such a great environment. All right, Mr. MiniMac, I'm curious to hear what your favorite distro is, what you love about it, what you'd change. I think I can say I'm a first Ubuntu user. So when I started, it was the late 90s, started with Zeus A64 I even bought a distribution I had a 300 page book that came with it then I switched to Mandrake and I really love it and then I felt

ready for Debian and just after a year of Debian I felt really at home Ubuntu started with their releases and then I switched to Ubuntu. Mainly the graphical stuff was much nicer, and configuration was a little bit easier than Debian. And for most of my machines, I stay in Ubuntu now, and I love it. Yeah, that's how I really got into Ubuntu early on, too, was I was a pretty happy Debian user, but wanted just a little bit more. And yeah, Ubuntu had that. A little bit special for my main desktop, I don't use a little bit more. And yeah, Ubuntu had that. A little bit special for my main desktop.

I don't use a default Windows environment. I use Enlightenment for decades now. So I guess if you could change one thing, would it be to ship Enlightenment by default? No, no, no, not really. I just love the way they handle dual screen setups or multiple screen setups. Not really. I just love the way they handle dual screen setups or multiple screen setups. But on my laptops now, I use GNOME, and that is no problem for me.

For me, it's easy to switch between the different interfaces, so it's no problem. I do a lot with shortcuts, so it's very easy for me. What is it that Enlightenment does about the multi-monitor that you like so much? Enlightenment treats the screens completely independent. So I can switch screens on the left and have the same screen on the right, so it's the same desktop and all that stuff. You can add desktop and you have completely independent monitors. That is really cool.

So you know Gnome Shell does that now, where you can have, monitors. That is really cool. So you know Gnome Shell does that now, where you can have, so in my case, I have a center horizontal 27-inch monitor, and then I have two 27-inch vertical screens. Those remain static. So whatever I have on the 27-inch vertical screens remain static, but then I can switch virtual desktops in the center screen. And I like that quite a bit. Okay, okay. Well, that was a try then. So at the time I started using Enlightenment, Enlightenment was the only one I think

rather developed desktop environment that did that. I could give it a try, but I really fell in love with Enlightenment. I'm also a minimalist user when it comes to my graphical layout. So I have a hidden panel and I have a hidden enlightenment shelf and the rest of the screen is blank with the background. Oh, that's nice and clean. And if you could just tweak something or change something or even

wave a magic wand and make it perfect, what would it be? It's in fact an experiment I like to start. It's having a Debian based rolling distro like using Debian SID and then just try to use it as a rolling distro that would be cool. The thing is I guess they would need to give a little bit more love to

the packages when they first put it into their SID repos because when I used Debian well it was decades ago when you used SID youos. Because when I used Debian, well, it was decades ago, when you used SID, you often had some package breakage. Yeah. Now I guess we could give it a try

and now it could work because then you have a running distro. All right, that's a good one. I like that. All right, so let's now go to Mr. Tweets over there. So Mr. Tweets, what's your favorite distro? What do you love about it? And what would you change to make it perfect?

So on the desktop for the last little while, I've been using KDE Neon. You know, it's kind of a nice rolling plasma user land and gets out of my way and it's customizable and I can just do what I need to do. It kind of forces me into knowing a little bit about, you know, the way to set my machine up and I can kind of grow into it.

And the KDE PIM suite, I really like as well. Really, really good. Yeah. Boy, if that works for you, that's such a win. It is well-developed. Yeah. I love Neon as a workstation because I really have not had a single issue. This machine that I'm sitting at as to read the show notes is on Neon. And it's sort of perfect because the base of the OS just is a good old, what you get is what you expect Ubuntu LTS. And then it's sort of perfect because the base of the OS just is a good old what you get is what you expect Ubuntu LTS and then it's fresh desktop environment all the time but I really haven't had it break yet

and I attribute that besides hard work and bug testing and all those things, right? I attribute it to the fact that most of the developers that are creating Plasma are using this themselves. So if they break it, it breaks their desktops. Right, they've got to fix it. Silly Freak Quick. Yeah. How often do you update? That's one question I have.

Yeah. It depends on what the machine is. So on my laptop, like every couple of days or so. On my workstation at home, maybe once a week, just because I need it to be a bit more stable. Yeah. I like updating. I enjoy it. You've got that look in your eye.

I just like seeing how many packages are changing. And often it's a pretty insignificant amount of disk space that's changing. Or sometimes it goes down. Yeah. And it's just the coolest thing. I don't know. So I really enjoy updating. But I also enjoy a

computer that works uh but i'll save mine so mr pain what about you well don't we need uh well mr tweets here will change oh right yeah so what would you tweak uh tweets to make it perfect the one thing i'd like to see from the neon project and and it kind of goes for what i use on servers mainly as well is a base that i can use that's on the Ubuntu interim releases. Just because of, you know, hardware enablement that gets there a little bit quicker than it does to the long-term support releases. That would be really great if they could just make an ISO that was based on 1910, for example. I kind of agree. When it comes to a workstation that's doing, you know, a reoccurring task, maybe not.

a reoccurring task? Maybe not. But when it comes to my system that I use as both a workstation and a machine to have a little bit of fun, it's really nice to have maybe like the new ZFS stuff or have a little bit newer kernel stack. Great one. All right, Mr. Payne, what about you?

I've been thinking about this. It's a tough question. It's hard to declare a favorite. Oh, yeah, definitely. I can excuse you from that since we hop so much. Yes, thank you. It's a tough question. It's hard to declare a favorite. Oh yeah, definitely. I can excuse you from that since we hop so much. Yes, thank you. It's especially funny to say this because I'm not, I don't have this distribution installed anywhere on this laptop at the moment. And in fact, using KDE Neon for the show, it just keeps working. But I got to say Arch, I think. It's

just the, you know, it's the simplicity that I come back to. And despite what many people think, it's not, you know, it's not necessarily easy, but it just, it's aesthetically pleasing because it's so simple and then combined in a clean fashion. And I feel very much in control and linked with my system and feel like I actually can understand everything. Or, well, I don't pretend to understand everything, but I can understand as much as is possible about how my system works and is set up. And because of that, when you have the time to engage, I find it to be very robust.

So if you had to set up a system this weekend to, like, be a home server, Arch is the way you'd go? Well, it depends. I mean, it perhaps, depending on how you use it, may work less well in a case of a machine that you don't want to interact with very well. So for this case, I was really thinking mostly of the workstation. For the server, these days I've been using probably an Ubuntu LTS.

You're saying you've never built a router based on Arch? Oh, no, I mean, yes. That is absolutely a longstanding appliance of mine that works very well. And part of it is because it was very simple, right? I didn't have a lot of cruft to remove to get into the way. I could build it exactly as I needed it, so there weren't a lot of moving pieces. Yeah, there's really not. It's pretty surprisingly how light you can make it.

I totally get that. I wonder with our recent testing of Fedora, if it hasn't touched on some of those notes for you. It absolutely has. Fedora also feels just very modern. You know, it's well integrated with SystemD. All the new sorts of bits and pieces that come available in the Linux ecosystem, you can find them there

just like you can find them in Arch. I think I'm still a little less familiar. I'm growing more familiar with that ecosystem and some of the newer tooling as I've checked back in this time around. There's more going on. It doesn't feel quite as

individualized, decomplected, simple necessarily, but what's there is very well done and put together. So I find it very enjoyable to use. That also has been my experience with it as well. I enjoy both Arch and Fedora very much in a similar way. So if you could just tweak one thing about Arch to make it perfect, what would it be?

I don't pretend to think this is reasonable or in any way will happen, but ZFS and the kernel, just there, ready to go. Boy, can I get a ding for that? If I could change, I'm going to just, I'll just tell you mine right now. If I could change one thing about Fedora, it would be ZFS and the kernel.

I love you, Fedora, but we have Fedora on our NAS here. And every time you do a major update of just, not even like an upgrade to the next release, just an update inside Fedora 30, it's a real crapshoot. I mean, what were we down for, 45 minutes last time maybe? Well, we were distracted while troubleshoot. I mean, what were you down for? 45 minutes last time, maybe? Well, we were distracted while troubleshooting. But every freaking time there's a big kernel update, the ZFS stuff breaks. And it's like, you got to go through and really be diligent about the order that things come up in the system and how things respond to that. And you really have to make sure that you get your DKMS modules built and that your system can boot far enough to get that done before it needs to get to those other file systems.

And it really is just a freaking nightmare. Totally solvable. You can admin your way around all of those problems. It's just things you have to do. Blame DKMS. You really, yeah. You really just, if we were using XFS or we were using Extended 4, it would literally be a non-issue. But because we want CFS, it's a fight.

Or if we were using Ubuntu. So I'd really like to run Fedora on my home server, but because I refuse to use DKMS, that's still running CentOS with the KMOD packages from ZFS on Linux. All right, so I want to get Cheesy a chance to jump in here. So Cheesy, if you were going to throw a system together

this weekend, what distro would you go with? And what is it that you love about it? And what's the thing you'd change to make it perfect? Well, first up, I'd like to back it up a little bit and date myself maybe a little more. So you guys are talking about package managers. And, you know, Debian and Apt was a thing for me, obviously. And getting into Debian as my third distro to ever install.

Apt was a great one because before that, it was tar.gz files. Oh, yeah. So it was that human package manager part. But no, you know, for me, Debian and Debian-based systems I've always been comfortable with. The software can be a little old, but all the derivatives that are available now. So I ditched Debian straight up for Ubuntu back when I think it was 4.10. So Wordy Warthog started using it there

just because, you know, it was bundled with additional pieces of software back then when we had like a CD and DVD burners and stuff. So it was nice to have that sort of software, you know, right out of the gate. But it's never really been a visually appealing. Debian really had never been a visually appealing distribution and desktop to use. And I think Ubuntu kind of filled that void. A little more polished, a little more focused on that. Absolutely. And then, you know, you push on through Ubuntu into other derivatives like Pop!

OS. They've done a wonderful job building a distro that, you know, they're shipping on production hardware. It's always nice to see that. And to me, I think they have one of the best setups for gaming on Linux overall. setups for gaming on Linux overall. So just jumping in with the nightmare that is NVIDIA drivers and getting stuff to work and pushing the FPS that you want out of your games. So I really appreciate Pop!OS for that. And they're also just a great group of people that are doing some fantastic work. And then sliding over into elementary, you know, who have really kind

of cultivated a really polished Linux desktop experience, which, you know, as a designer, I just have huge admiration for those guys. And it truly shows, you know, how much pride they take in their work. And so I keep bouncing back over there. And of course, I've got to give a shout out to Ubuntu Mate, because I really feel like as far as the Ubuntu spins or derivatives, it really does give you the most customization out of the box. So, you know, if you want to mix the mix pantheon with, you know, or if you want, if you want to throw in any sort of desktop configuration, it's just super easy to do with Mate. So I really love it for that. And then Arch has, you know, a special place in my heart because it's bleeding edge software, you know, which a

lot of distributions kind of are a little bit behind the curve on that. And I understand why that is. Also, the Arch wiki is fantastic. And if we really didn't have the Arch wiki, there would be a huge void in the Linux community. Because quite often, even if I'm searching for an Ubuntu derivative answer to some problem that I'm having, I can go to the ArchWiki and generally find that answer. But obviously, it's not always the easiest for a new user to jump in. So that's why I would also recommend Manjaro because those guys are doing fantastic work. They've really stepped up to the plate and given us that polished desktop, but also given us a ton of choices. So it's, to me, it's kind of a blend between Pop, Elementary, and Matei, you know, is, is Manjaro on the art side. You know, and from what, I haven't done any gaming, serious gaming under Manjaro, but I would expect that to be, you know, just as, just as excellent as say Pop OS would. As far as changes, it's more of an overarching theme for me. You know, I'd like to

see more commercial and or proprietary software come to Linux. Again, you know, working in design, I would love to see more design, commercially available design software, GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, Krita, Blender, they're all super awesome pieces of software, but they always seem like a step behind the commercial offerings. And there really isn't a substitution out there right now for say, After Effects. So we've got a way to come there, I think. And also going back to gaming on Linux, it's gotten a lot better in the last few years, but we're still kind of struggling. And I think that that will pick up as as more as as Linux gains a little more market share. And we start to have developers that are more interested in making sure that these games work under Linux.

I think that'll be great because it's just so it's so spread out right now. You know, you yeah, we've got Steam, but then we've got Lutris. I think that'll be great because it's just so spread out right now. Yeah, we've got Steam, but then we've got Lutris. So it's trying to get everything under one umbrella I think would be great. And then again, just kind of a global theme with all of this is within the community itself. I would like to see us just end this distro wars. I love the conversation that we're having now where we're not beating each other up about what we use or why we use it. We might be beating up different package managers, but we're not beating ourselves up over the actual distributions. So if we could all put our big boy girl and pants on and understand that what's always the best distro for you is not the best distro for someone else.

So just show a little empathy toward one another and lend a hand wherever you can and just really try to help out and help our community grow and thrive. And let's not cut each other down. Oh, there you have it. Wise words. I think we got to call it right there. I was going to go into mine, but you all know what my stuff is by listening to these shows. So let's do instead a little bit of housekeeping. I was hoping you were going to do Millionaire.

We could. Do you want to? We should. We totally could. We need Neil's questions, though. Neil's going to have to create some questions for us. Oh, we should totally have Neil play Millionaire in the post show. All right, we'll do just a little bit of it.

All right, so but a little bit of housekeeping before we get out of here. Check out Brunch with Brent. It's cooking up a storm these days. Wimpy was just on there. We talked about that last week. Jill joins this week. She's often in the Mumble room. And Brent, rumor has it, good chat.

Yeah, I learned so much about Jill, and we had an amazing good time. So I think everybody else will too. Extras.show for that. A new batch of Linux Academy community courses is out for November. Link in the show notes for information about that. And I think it's also worth calling out here. Closed captions have been added to the Linux Academy mobile app for some offline videos with closed captions.

Oh, fancy. I like that. That's my mind blowing right there. That's really nice. And transcripts are on their way to the iOS app as well as really everywhere. The web platform, everywhere else too. It's pretty great. It's like such a great feature.

So check that out. 110 hands-on labs added in the last month. That's incredible. Think about how much goes into one of those. I mean, whoo. Because that's really what makes the difference is actually getting your hands on it. Doing it for real. You can read it.

Messing it up a few times. Putting it into practice. And to have it all just curated for you and ready to go with the click of a button. Gosh. 110? That's nuts. That's really great. That is really great.

So check that out. Also go check out extras.extras.show. And that, my friends, just a quick little housekeeping right there. I think that's it for us. We did things a little bit out of order this week because it's a special episode. I enjoyed it, though. I feel like I learned a little bit about everybody this week. And I was going to go into what I love about my distros of choice,

which everybody knows at this point is primarily Fedora and Ubuntu. Yeah, yeah. But what would you change? That's really what I want to know. I mean, yeah, obviously we all know what you run and why you run it, but what would you change? All right, all right. That's fair.

Yeah, you're right. Yeah, I mean, this show documents what I like, so what would I change? Okay, all right. Well, I already gave you mine for Fedora, which was ZFS. I think that's just copying me, but whatever. Oh, really? Copycat. Well, the one for Ubuntu is a little more complicated.

I would really love to see, and I know it's like the worst case scenario because Canonical can't really take this on without getting a whole bunch of pushback. But I'd really love to see apt modernized. And in the case of Ubuntu, I would love to see something that combines snaps and Debian packages together in one user experience but gives me clear indications what's a snap versus what's a deb package and lets me manage and update both of those two different things from one command line utility. Sounds nice.

That's really what I'd love to see. But I also, at the same time, I really appreciate what a tricky position that would be for Canonical to come along and be like, here's a replacement for apt because every keyboard commentator on the internet would be like, oh, what's the matter? Apt isn't good enough? Not invented here, Canonical?

You know, there'd be no winning. Right. And so it's sort of a hard flip side about Ubuntu. One of the things I love about it is how pragmatic it feels as an operating system. Right. But at the same time, yeah, going back, especially every time I'm on Fedora, like, using apt again is just unpleasant. What's Neon using?

Neon has replaced apt. Well, not replaced it, but has something that sits on top of PackageKit, right? Pecan or whatever it is? Yeah, you use PackageKit to make sure everything updates. I don't love that. It's not as great. I'd love to really see that addressed. So funny about that,

Gustavo Niemeyer actually moved to Canonical from Mandriva because they were considering replacing apt for smart because smart supported running on both Debian systems and RPM systems. He wrote it to replace apt

because he hated working on the apt code base and the frustrations of working with Debian upstream and trying to integrate the RPM backend into the upstream apt project back then. So like the whole point of him being at canonical initially was that they were going to replace apt with smart and then they didn't do it for, well,

you can guess the reason why they didn't. You kind of, you kind of mentioned it already. And there's some irony in it because one of the things that really took Linux to the next level for me where I was like, oh, this is way better, was actually apt. I mean, Red Hat, I started with, but when I actually put a Debian box into production and it was self-resolving dependencies and apt-get update and apt-get upgrade were so awesome back in the day when you were using RPM distros that installed their RPMs from CDs. It was really a game changer. And now here I am

at the end of 2019, and I'm the guy that's saying, I think it's time to replace Abt. And of course, obviously, because it's my fantasy wish list, this is a unicorn package manager, it would have the speed of Pac-Man with the endurance and efficiency and safety of DNF, but with the endurance and efficiency and safety of DNF, but with the speed and efficiency of something like Pac-Man with the AUR.

And the transactional kind of rollbacks that you could get with ZFS. Yes. There we go. Yes, exactly. So there you have it. That's what I would change, but otherwise gosh darn it, it's my favorite freaking operating system. And we just sat here and I just feel like I got to learn a little bit about everybody else, too. We'd love to hear your thoughts, too.

Let us know what you love about your distro or what you'd change. Linuxunplugged.com slash contact. Linuxunplugged.com slash subscribe. And don't forget about that new live time we're trying out. It's now noon JB time, which is Seattle time, which is Pacific time. Time is a construct. jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar to get it in your local construct. Thanks so much for being here.

We'll see you right back here. Not on Monday, not on Sunday, not on Friday. Oh, no, no, no. But on Tuesdays! All right, jbtitles.com. Let's go boat. And in the meantime, Neil, why don't you step into the Linux millionaire seat? Oh, yeah. Are you ready, sir?

I guess. For fake internet money that's worth absolutely nothing, Neil, when was Richard Stallman born? Now, hold on. I'll give you, you got a couple of choices. You got a couple of choices here. You ready? February 20th, 1955, April 13th, 1960, or March 16th, 1953? March 16th, 1953.

Is that your final answer, sir? Yes. All right. Locking that in. Sure. You are correct. You nailed it, Neil. You nailed it.

Good job. All right. Nicely done. You're stepping up then, going up in the difficulty here. Now, for $1,000 of fake internet money that doesn't matter, how do you save and exit a VI session or a VI session? Colon W, colon X, or colon WQ? Or shift ZZ?

Colon X. Final answer? Yes. The answer is don't use Vi. Well, duh. All right. And Nano, it tells you how to quit. All right, here we go.

We're going up in difficulty now. Now, see, we have a whole bunch of questions that have been submitted by the audience. We should put the link out again soon. This is pretty great. So we're going off of a list that the audience has submitted. So I do have to mention that the answers are also from the audience. But, Neil, for $5,000 of fake internet money, Neil, for $5,000 of fake internet money, when was version 0.01 of the Linux kernel released?

November 23, 1991 January 5, 1992 September 17, 1991 or Novemberth, 1991, or November 17th, 1991? September 17th, 1991. Ooh, you sound pretty confident. Is that your final answer? Naturally. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner right here. Neil, congratulations, sir.

we have a winner right here neil congratulations sir five thousand dollar winner of fake internet points i think you got everyone right so uh you are now our reigning champion of the of a game show that we don't well nobody else has played well the funny i like the i like the vimim question because there were two correct answers in there. I know. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. I think there were three correct answers. The only one that's like shift ZZ.

It was like, okay, now I've got to throw that in. Yeah. Well, you said write and then quit. So colon W is wrong. It's true. That's true. Colon W is wrong. I did just drop the link there for the form into the IRC.

So feel free to jump on there and fill it out. Do it. Do it. We need your brain, Neil. All right. So I don't, as a small update on my Arch system here, I don't have it fixed yet. Although there's lots of information out there. But I'm only 644 packages behind.

So not the worst. but I'm only 644 packages behind so not the worst I just did it I did a distro sync using DNF of my tumbleweed machine while I was talking about tumbleweed and it just finished and I just rebooted into it it's like oh yeah I hadn't updated since July and now it and I just pulled into the November one and everything came out fine oh good well that's nice yeah that does feel good