LINUX Unplugged - 328: My Mighty Fine Pine

Episode Date: November 20, 2019

The Pinebook Pro gets put through the travel test, while we get an update on Pine64 projects straight from the source. Plus a few surpises from the System76 Super Fan event. Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, and Lukasz Erecinski.

Pre-ordered me a Pine Phone. The Braveheart Edition. That's exciting. Did you get one, Cheesy? I did. I did, in fact, get one. I'm really looking forward to it. What about you, Wes?

No. What? No, it's okay. You know, I'm going to let you guys deal with all the first-run defects, and I'm going to pick one up later after they've solved all those issues. So what you're saying is you don't have a Braveheart. Yeah, that's right. He's going to geek vicariously through us, Cheesy.

It's okay. I'll be fine with that. Hello, friends, and welcome in to Linux Unplugged, episode 328. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Well, hello, Mr. Wes. Hello. Things feel different today, but still the same. Yeah. A little fresher. I think so. Yeah, I think so. Energetic. Well, and it Mr. West. Hello. Things feel different today, but still the same. Yeah. A little fresher. I think so. Yeah. I think so. Well, and it might just be that we have a great panel.

Hello, Cheesy and Alex. Hello, hello. Hello there. Hello. Hello. We have a really fun show today. So we have some community news we're going to cover right here off the top, and then we're going to jump into Cheesy's experience at the System76 Superfan event.

And it's like Cheese unplugged this week. Because on top of that, Cheese has been rocking the Pinebook Pro full time. So we're going to get his take on that and what he thinks. And to sort of round all of this off, the Pine64 community manager, Lucas, is going to join us to chat about the status of the project, where things are going, a little bit about this, a little bit about that. And then we're going to wrap it all up with some cool picks and all that kind of stuff that we always do. It's how we roll. Absolutely. I mean, we may not do a pick.

We may. We may not. Sometimes I just sneak in there. Something I've been thinking about adding to the show, and so I'm soliciting emails now, is I think I want to make a follow-up or reoccurring thing for a little while, like a follow-up sprint. I mean, we've been doing this long enough, right?

We should take advantage of that. As we round out 2019, I want to hear what the folks have to say. LinuxUnplugged.com slash contact. If we get some emails, keep an eye out, Wes. If we get some emails coming in that are like, you know, like follow-up items, in that segment, what I'd like to do

is cover people's follow-up to what we've talked about. But also, if we have any, like, additional notes to add, I want to talk about it in that segment, what I'd like to do is cover people's follow-up to what we've talked about, but also, if we have any additional notes to add, I want to talk about it in that segment, too. Maybe we were running something for a little bit after we talked about it on the show, and we discovered something additional. That'd be where we'd slip that in. Something we might try.

We'll give it a go. But it all depends on what you send us at linuxunplugged.com slash contact. So let's kick things off with the news. But before we do that, we got to say time. Appropriate greetings to that mumble room. Hello. Hello.

Aloha. Happy Linux Tuesday, everyone. Wow. You know, a big thank you to Brent, Byte, Neil, DM, Jill, Colonel, Minimek, Stefan, and TC for joining us on a new time. New time. Noon Pacific over at jBLive.tv on Tuesday. Same day, though.

We won't leave you Tuesday. And also, we have an awesome IRC showing, too. I'm getting, like, good first impressions. I was super nervous about this. All right. So let's talk about the news, starting with the good folks over at KDE. KDE EV, the corporation, you know,, the entity, I guess I should say. The legal entity behind KDEE. Is looking for a project manager to help them reach their goals.

It's a PDF we have linked in the show notes. And in there, Wes, they say what their ideal candidate is. Yeah, well, hopefully the ideal candidate is able to help the community in achieving its goals by being a reliable support system for all organizational matters. I mean, that includes delivering reports to the board, sort of being the person who's keeping track of all the things and making sure the projects got everything they need. You could really see how they could probably use somebody like that. That would improve communication.

It would probably improve cross-project collaboration, help them unify some of their efforts. So if you think you might be a candidate that could help take the project to the next level, go check it out. I've spent the weekend again with Plasma just recently. It really is great. You know, I thought— I can tell.

I mean, you're glowing. I kind of—I just—I rediscovered just how wonderful it is because I've been spending a lot of time with Gnome Shell because I need to do these things. Of course. I need to try it out. And so I had an opportunity to try. I need to try it out. And so I had an opportunity to try out Manjaro Plasma Edition.

I'm very impressed by what they've done. They've pre-installed some really great fonts. They're not necessarily all turned on or selected by default. But they're available for you to customize. Like some of my favorite editor fonts, my code editor fonts, and my favorite UI fonts,

they're all there. It's such a great experience. You put it to me earlier editor font, my code editor fonts, and my favorite UI fonts. They're all there. It's such a great experience. You put it to me earlier that you avoided a whole day of tinkering just because. Manjaro just had such a great out-of-box. It's really nice when you see a good preset at Plasma. When you install just the Plasma meta package on a distribution like, say, Fedora, you get all of the bits and pieces, but maybe not all of the right default applications are set. And the UI is certainly atrocious. And it's just, it's a,

it's a very different experience. It's not living up to the potential of Plasma. And then you see something like Manjaro and it's, it's remarkable. And you, I'll tell you what got me kicked off on this whole Plasma thread, other than I thought it was probably time I just gave it a fair, a fair check again. I don't know if you recall, but years ago on this show, I challenged you to get Linux working on a MacBook Pro. How could I ever forget? It was like a late 2013 MacBook Pro. It's one of these MacBooks.

It's got a retina screen. It's got an i7 processor. It's got like a 512 gigabyte SSD. From the day when MacBook Pro's were like nice. It's got ports, right? It's got all these things. And it's still a very nice machine. And mine happened to get a replacement battery

a couple of years ago. So it has a, it says the battery when I ran a test is like at 94% capacity. Not bad for a 2013. However, it's not the greatest machine around and Linux on a MacBook had some limitations. Right.

I mean, it's never the best experience you're going to get. And so, it just really didn't get used much. It got put on a shelf and about a year went by and then we had our team sprint

and we cleaned out everything in the studio and it got set out in the living room but like a mixer got set on top of it and some cables got set on on top of a small mixer, and it just got buried. And I was going through the stuff Friday, and I see this old MacBook, and I'm like, is this the MacBook that's got Linux on it? And I pull it out.

Literally, I have to dust it off, right? Like it's that dirty. I open it up, and it's, you know, dead, dead. So I plug it in, it boots for a second, and then dead. Yeah. Okay, I got to let this one sit for a while, which I knew. It's just I didn't, I don't care. So I plug it in, I let it sit for like a couple hours,

open it back up, turn it on, and Arch boots up. Now, this Arch install, it says it's from 2016. Does that sound right to you? Is that possible? Yeah, maybe. 2016? It feels like it was just like a year ago I challenged you to that.

Oh my god. So anyways, I mean, the install says 2016. It's got, but it had been updated several times since then, so it had a rockin' kernel 4.16. Hey! The current kernels we record this as 5.3.11.

So it hadn't been updated since before the merger with Linux Academy. It had been a long time. So it was like opening up a time capsule. That's wild. It was really weird. So it didn't have any of my credentials logged into any of my Linux Academy accounts. I'm like, how am I going to work on this thing? And so I think to myself, is there any way this thing will upgrade?

You didn't reinstall it. You just. I thought, no way, right? Because it's literally every single package has to be upgraded. And I thought, if I can run this upgrade and it takes this install from over a year, maybe two years ago. Three years ago. Well, yeah. But I mean, the last update was probably two years ago, maybe a year and a half.

If it can successfully do that on a frickin' MacBook, I will install Arch on my workstation. Because that's the ultimate benchmark. That's quite literally like your forever install right there. You're done. So I ran it. I had to answer a bunch of questions about replacing packages and resolve some conflicts.

But once it got up and going... The Arch Linux main site for a while. Yeah, and even just going through my history, like, how did I solve this before? You know, that kind of, like, going through your bash history. It took all day. But at the end of it, I rebooted that sucker. And it rebooted and logged in without a single error message. To the latest Plasma kernel 5.3.11, the latest graphics drivers.

No big deal. Everything. Wow, the latest graphics drivers. No big deal. Everything. Wow, dude. Everything was done. Not a single error message, like no Plasma pop-up that says this can't load or anything. Just, and I've been using it since, well, Saturday, basically. I mean, Friday evening, Saturday morning, as my work machine.

And so I was like, well, all right, I'm going to put Manjaro Plasma Edition on my workstation here at the studio and I did that and just just a reminder it's they're just there's so many great choices out there

and as part of this process I've made a pledge to sort of document like if I hit any rough edges or bugs I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to take the time now

because I've gotten so fast now setting up these desktops I'm saving days of time that I used to spend so I'm going to take some of that time to actually sit down if I hit bugs I'm going to go file a bug report, you know, kind of do that part and try to get more out of this process than I normally do. But it has served as a good reminder that we have some really, really great options. And the KDE

folks are really onto something. I don't know if it'll be my daily driver forever, but I really enjoy it. And so if you think you could help that project, we'll have a link to the show notes on how to apply. I'd love to see them take it to the next level. So fun. So speaking of great desktop environments, Gnome Shell. They're starting something that I think is a brilliant public PR strategy. And a lot of projects should consider this. It's really kind of explaining their thought process on why they do what they do,

what decisions they've made, and where they're going. They've launched a new blog, the development blog for specifically Gnome Shell and Mutter. They've just launched it, but they say on here, for a long time the development of Mutter and Gnome Shell and Mutter. They've just launched it, but they say on here, for a long time, the development of Mutter and Gnome Shell was surrounded by silence. This blog is a humble attempt to bring those two critical components

of the Gnome desktop to the spotlight, even if only a tiny bit more. They do go on to note that it would be naive to say that posts will be published in a consistent frequency, but the initial goal is monthly development reports and eventual one-shot deep dives into various bits and pieces of both components, which I'm really looking forward to. Yeah, I love learning the thought processes behind the decisions developers make.

And it often, I think, leads to a much more informed conversation around those changes, where a lot of times when the project announces a change, it's met with strong reaction. Right. I mean, it may be something the developers have been thinking about for a long time,

but the community has no way to know. And now there's a blog to check out. Yep. So we will link to that in the show notes. But more importantly than that, we're not keeping an eye on this. So I'll watch this for future developments. And if they have something really interesting, I'll try to do a breakdown here on the show,

and then, of course, like we always do, source link it so you can find out more. That's how we do it. Links for this episode, linuxunplugged.com slash 328 for everything we're about to talk about. I think it's time to talk about cheesy going to Denver. So, Mr. Cheese Bacon, you were our representative at the System76 Superfan event, an event I've attended in the past. And it's always a unique insight into a company that we talk a lot about in this space. They play a bigger and bigger role as their market grows. And so I'm really curious to hear some of your takeaways from the big Superfan event.

Yeah, so the event was wonderful. some of your takeaways from the big super fan event. Yeah. So, so the event was wonderful. And before I really get into any of that, you know, I just wanted to give a couple of shout outs to, you know, Carl, Emma, Mariah, Josh, Thomas, Aaron, Ian, Nate, Jeremy, Kate. I'm sure there's another 20 or 30 or so that I'm forgetting, but everyone there is so awesome. And it's so cool to be surrounded by people that are so passionate about what they're doing and every single person there has that passion so um it's just great getting to meet everybody for one but yeah i mean there were there were some great takeaways uh really three big ones um i was lucky enough obviously to be able to you know go and represent jupiter broadcasting in linux academy and um they ended up giving us all a Thaleo, which was phenomenal.

You're kidding me. Totally unexpected. Absolutely unexpected. You're talking about a computer, right? I'm talking about the computer, yeah. Wow, that's incredible. It's great. And AMD donated all the chips, and Samsung donated all the NVMe drives. And this is their revised version of the case, which is one of the takeaways. So, you know, there was a little humbub about, you know, the Thaleo having this

resonant noise with the fans and stuff like that. So what they've done is on the bottom of the case, now they've stretched the bottom of the case a little bit and included this flange that goes up along the side of the chassis itself, which reduces the decimal level. And under load is supposed to only be 33 decimals now. And to kind of put that into perspective, a whisper is about 30 decimals. So, you know, it should be considerably quiet. They've also adjusted the fan curves and they're doing that with the IO board, which is pretty neat. So, you know, they're able to push different fan curves to that. And one of the things they told me was, you know, whenever you get it, you need to update it. And, you know,

so that you get that new fan curve in there. I think I'm not going to update it at first just to see what it's like, right? And then update it to see if there's an audible difference there. That's a pretty remarkable thing. They custom laser engraved them too. But that wasn't like the only surprising announcement. It sounds like they have some huge plans for GNOME Shell. Yeah, so moving on, they have PopShell is what they're calling it. It isn't yet on their GitHub, but it's supposed to be released with 2004.

And essentially what it is is it's a GNOME extension to create a tiling window manager experience in GNOME. I3-like experience? Very much I3-like. And while they wouldn't let us necessarily film that or take pictures of that, we did get kind of a sneak peek and it's super duper slick. Really? Something you'd be interested in trying? Absolutely. They're calling it pop shell though.

Yep, pop shell. Oh man, that's a bold move. Wow. You had me at tie lane. I don't know. Yeah, if you're used to working on a, you know, without necessarily having to move your mouse around and stuff

and you're used to i3, I think it's going to be just one of those things that's going to be a natural extension for everyone to pick up and start using or if you just want to get into kind of a tiling window manager experience i think that'll be a great place to start sure and you know on the on the hills of that like that so within the next couple of years one of the one of the other things they revealed is that they're going to start making their own laptops.

So they had a big round table of what everyone would kind of like to see in a laptop. And of course, by the time it got round tabled by all of these Linux nerds, the laptop would have cost about $8,000 to make. But it sounds like my kind of machine. Yeah. I mean, it was everything, right? They really wanted to know what what users want and what the fans would like to see in a laptop. And whenever I say they're going to make a laptop, yes, they already do make laptops, but they're actually going to use their new laser cutter, which you can add additional tooling to. So they will really be making their own chassis and putting this inside of there. There's even hints of maybe including a little touch of wood accents like they do with the Thaleo. Oh, that'd be sweet.

Yes. So they're really thinking about all of that. And I think with the Gnome, with the PopShell paired with a new laptop really makes sense for them. And I think it's the next logical step for them. You know, they've their their new laser new laser machine is called the, I love it. It's called the, the TruMatic 1000. So I'm really looking forward to what they have coming down the pipe. If there's one company that could do amazing things with the laser cutter at System76, I've been a customer for 14 years and I, they don't sponsor us. They haven't been a sponsor since last. And I still recommend people go to System76 and check out what they have

because the culture behind those products is one that it's going to endure. I mean, they're users themselves. They care a lot about what they make and it really shows. You know, the thing I've noticed, and this I think tells you something, over that 14 years

is I'm still talking to a lot of same people I was talking to, like, you know, back then. Like people, they stick around and they really become part of that company. And what I've been fascinated with, and it really comes across in Brent's brunch with Emma that was just released, I think, this morning, is how she has been able to build new roles and grow while staying with that family and that company. And that's also a really unique opportunity. So you get a really great insight into their company culture with that extra that just came out. If you're fascinated at all, I really recommend it. Extras.show. This company is an important part of the Linux ecosystem. And Brent, your chat with Emma, I think, really gave us a new level of insight into what somebody we talk about, Emma, who's been on the show a lot, does day to day. Well done, sir.

Well, thank you. Yeah, I mean, her and I had a great fun chat, but there's also, yeah, a lot of really cool transparency about stuff I learned about system 76, all the stuff that happens sort of behind the scene about making people feel amazing about the work they do, which is great. I mean, she's the happiness manager there. I think she's onto a few life secrets to tell you the truth. She's got a few things figured out. Yeah. There's some true gems in there for sure. I think the audience might recall if you've been listening to the show for a little bit that she had

quite the medical situation at the beginning of summer, and that's why she had been absent for the show for a long time. And that's covered in there too now that she's on the other side of that. It's good to hear. Extras.show slash 33. Well, how about that? Mr. Cheese breaking the bacon there with the news

with the i3 tiling window manager and the laptop prototypes. Like, there you go. It was smart of us to send our best person over there. Yeah, Mr. Bacon will have to keep us apprised on all future Denver things that develop as our correspondent over there. And maybe some follow-up about how that Thalia ends up performing. Oh, yeah. That would be good.

Yeah. Well, yeah. Yeah, good thinking, Wes. You know what? You know what else is a good idea? A little housekeeping. You got to do it. You got to do it every now and then.

Keep things clean. We got a new show time we want to let you know about. You probably already knew, but it's worth mentioning again. Repetition's the key to success. We're now doing it noon Pacific time. You can get that converted at jupiterbroadcasting.com. Slash calendar. JBLive.tv is where you watch it.

IRC.geekshed.net. Pound. Hashtag. Jupiter Broadcasting. Yeah, join us live. It's a whole other level of experience. It's a lot of fun. I mean, there's probably a show on each end of this that doesn't make it out on the recording.

I also thought I would tease a little something something. Coming up soon in the extras feed, we were just mentioning the interview with Emma. Right. Brunch with Emma. Brunch with Emma. Cheese and Popey sat down and talked about ThinkPads. We've all been waiting for this. If you want to hear

Popey in his truly happy place, it's when he's talking about ThinkPads. Nerdin' out. I'm really nervous because I just pulled the trigger on a gift for a family member and it's a used ThinkPad and I want to make sure I got the right one.

So I will be listening carefully to that extras in case I got to return it. So that'll be at extras.show. It's coming up probably later this week. I say probably like we don't already know. But stay tuned. You got to wait expectantly. I'm just like if I say it, then it really has to happen. I say probably like we don't already know. Right. But stay tuned. You got to wait, you know, expectantly. I'm just like, if I say it, like then it really has to happen. So I'm like, probably even though we already have it scheduled to launch.

You know, that's how I play it sometimes. So extras.show for that. And I'm really, really looking forward to the ThinkPad thing. And that brunch was fantastic. You got to go get that. All of it's available probably by about now as you're listening to this. And that's the housekeeping this week because it's not much. We got to talk about Pinebooks and Pinephones.

On this trip to the System76 superfan event, Mr. Bacon took only one machine with him, and it was his Pinebook Pro. How's that been living with, I mean, honestly, a pretty nice machine, but let's be honest, you got nicer computers you could take with you, cheese. You got nicer machines. Yeah, I mean, I definitely have more powerful machines, and, you know, machines that might be considered nicer per se, but the Pinebook really is a solid device.

Yeah, maybe nicer is not a fair way to say it, is it? It's almost maybe powerful, but design-wise, feel-wise, is it pretty nice? It is. It's a really solid little machine. I think a lot of people could get behind it. The Chromium OS build that I was using for just, you know, YouTubing and the likes worked out great. I was able to actually bring the device to System76 and put it in front of Carl and Jeremy and Emma and let them kind of nerd out on it a little bit.

And they all appreciated it and where it's going. So it was really cool to kind of cross bounds between one hardware software vendor with another hardware software vendor and put these pieces in front of these other people. So I've had pretty good success with it so far. I haven't had really any major issues with my sole device. So it's about what, two pounds. That makes it pretty nice for travel. Yeah. Super lightweight. How'd the old battery do on the flight, watching videos and stuff? Oh, it did great, man. It really did wonderful. Um, you know, averaging six to eight hours of battery life um i only charged it up once while i was there so and that was with everybody else tinkering with it and playing with it and you know the commute on the flight and all that sort of stuff as well and it felt pretty solid

in the bag like it wasn't going to get bent or no absolutely not absolutely not all right and no fan while you're watching the videos no so it's passively cooled So you don't have to worry about any fan noise or anything like that. I will say you probably want to use some headphones because the speakers are down firing and they're just not that great. It's rare to find a laptop that that's not true for really. Hey, Cheese, how's the monitor on that thing? I know you and I were talking about it. It's really great, man. It's a 1080p IPS display. Viewing angles are solid. You know, 4K video playback, 60 frames a second. I think you can even bump, the screen is even rated at 120 hertz.

So you can bump it to 120 hertz. I mean, it works great. It's a pretty reasonable price as well, right? Yeah, 200 bucks. You could make it a Chromebook if you want, using builds that are available. Or you could run, for example, we'll have a link in the show notes. Manjaro just released a third preview of their Pinebook Pro Spin, which you can use Plasma or XFCE. Right. And I've been using, I've been working with Fred from the Manjaro team that's been helping with these builds. And I've been

testing it out since the first preview and each iteration it just gets better and better and better. So it's definitely a distribution I think a lot of people would gravitate to just because of the Arch64 support. Well, and they have a great Plasma experience. I can testify to that. But that's sort of what appeals to me about the Pinebook. $200, great travel machine. It could be as simple as a Chromebook or as advanced as a Manjaro workstation. So the question is, where is this at as a project?

Where are they at in the pipeline? Well, Joe and Cheese had an opportunity to sit down with Lucas, the community manager over at Pine64, and talk about that and many other things. So hey, Lucas, how's it going, man? Good. Hey, what's up? Oh, not much. Glad to have you on here. So Lucas, I know how's it going, man? Good. Hey, what's up? Oh, not much. Glad to have you on here. So Lucas, I know that you guys have been shipping a ton of Pinebooks. I believe I was in the second batch. But what exactly is going on with the batch numbers? And where are we at right now in the process of shipping that hardware out to people? So we're currently on the

third batch. It's also happens to be the batch, which ships with a choice of both ISO and ANSI keyboards. So that's for our UK and US end users. And starting from early next year, we're going to take a break. There's the Chinese year coming up. And then next batches will follow in March of 2020. And that's the ones that are being ordered at the moment? Those which are being ordered right now should be shipping in December and January. All right, cool.

One thing that I was curious about, I know that there's been a few hardware issues reported, namely the trackpad, and that you guys are currently working on some firmware patches for that. Can we expect when that'll be fixed? And are there any other, you know, hardware related issues that you've seen now that these are landing in the hands of people? So in terms of the trackpad, we have been now aware for a couple of weeks, there's an issue with it.

So there are two sort of separate aspects to the trackpad problem. One is more of a luxury problem, which is that it's not very precise at this point in time. But then there is a more serious problem that it cuts out the functioning of the keyboard. Now, we already have solved the core problem, which is that it cuts out people when they're typing. So when your palm touches the trackpad as you type on the laptop, it basically cuts out the keyboard, preventing you from typing. So we have that done, but we still are working at improving precision of the trackpad because this is something we know people also want. Now, because you are effectively flashing an SPI chip that is on the keyboard itself, we don't want people to do this

too many times. So now that we have the fix, we're going to work for a little bit longer, for a couple of days, maybe a week or so, to improve the precision of the trackpad. And then we're going to think of a way so that it could be bundled in some simple way across different distributions and push to end users. So I'll vaguely say it should be out there within 10 days. But this isn't an actual hardware problem. It's just a software problem, right? It's specifically a firmware problem. Right. So it can be fixed. Oh, absolutely. And we have, as we promised, the flashing utility has been open sourced under MIT license.

It's already available, compiled, and we know that it's working. So it's just a question of getting the firmware right. And I'm very confident we'll be able to get the correct firmware working at its optimal within a couple of days. So moving on from the Pinebook itself, I know a lot of our listeners are extremely excited about the Pine phone. And I know that dev kits have been going out

and you guys are starting to ramp up production for that. Who currently has one of these development devices, and when can the rest of us expect to get one? So currently, there are a handful of developers from the core projects. That would be Ubuntu Touch, from PostMarketOS, Sailfish, who have the actual finished phone prototypes. More developers will be getting their phones

within a week or so from now. We expect to have them all shipped by the 20th of November. But development has been going on. We have had development kits out for about half a year now. So development has been ongoing. There have been some changes from the dev kits to these dev phones. And therefore we need to provide developers with hardware which reflects these changes so they can adjust the software. As for when end users can get their hands on it, in general, in March of 2020. But if you are one of those people who enjoys beta testing and giving feedback to developers, want to be a part of the process,

then on November 15th, the Braveheart edition, as we call it. So this is an early adopter edition. It's opening with a limited amount of phones. I don't know exactly how many, but about 4,000 phones. And we expect those phones to ship by end of January 2020. So that was the end of last week as people are listening to this. So it's already available to order, except that it might be sold out if you've only got a limited number of them available then i expect that it probably is sold out now in the future yeah in the future of when this goes out so what's the default os going to be on these phones and and what kind of state is it going to be in are you asking specifically about the braveheart edition then yeah there. There won't be an NOS default on these phones.

I mean, we expect that those people who will be getting these phones are, first of all, capable enough to interact with the developers, find the builds, and flash them themselves. So as I said, this is for enthusiasts who know that they want this phone months ahead of everyone else.

And there is no such thing as a finished OS at this point in time. They're all lacking something. So I think that currently, perhaps the most polished operating system that I've seen is probably either post-market OS with KDE Plasma Mobile or Ubuntu Touch. But they are not daily driver ready by any means then? As of today, I probably wouldn't advise anyone to use them as daily drivers now.

But they're not far off, to be fair. Their performance is very good already, and most of the key functionality is there. I think that as of today, the one thing that is not functional is the front-facing camera. Now, core functionality will differ from one distribution to another, functionality will differ from one distribution to another, but there are at least two distributions which have the modem working. And I think that voice calls have been activated at least in one specifically in Ubuntu Touch. So in March, when these ship out to the rest of the world, what default OS are you just going to kind of wait to see how they all start to flush out and what's ready to be a daily driver? This is one possibility. We said some time ago that what we want to do is run these OS-specific campaigns where we would customize the phones ever so slightly maybe you know use the projects

partner projects color or something to this effect and ship the phone with that os on it so this would be you know so if we were to ship post-market os it would have a green back cover. If it would be Ubuntu Touch, it would be coming with an orange back cover and Ubuntu Touch pre-installed and then a portion of the money from those shipments would be going to these developers. So we're exploring if it will be possible. We hope to ship with one of these bigger OSs from partner projects. But by and large, it's up in the air. We'll see how it all shapes up at this point in time. You went into this phone project, presumably with your eyes open,

knowing how difficult it was going to be. But has it proven even more difficult than you thought then? That's a good question. I think the answer is both yes and no. I always thought that software is going to be, in effect, harder because people, regardless of the price tag on this thing,

people will want to have relatively good performance. But developers have really stepped up the game and things run as well as they'll ever run on this hardware. It's really good. I don't want to say that, you know, it rivals a modern day Android phone, but it's absolutely smooth enough for testing and trying out Linux on phone. And, you know, I can conceivably see people using this on a daily basis now. This is how good these distributions have gotten. Now, we knew that hardware is going to be difficult.

But if you haven't made a phone, you just don't realize the complexity of it, even if you're told how complex it will be. It's extremely difficult. I'm just really happy that we didn't go in a route where we would make some really complex and difficult phone, which would definitely prove to be, you know, an unimaginable challenge. How free is this phone going to be in terms of drivers and binary blobs and stuff like that? How open source is it going to be? So everything on the root file system is completely free. This includes the graphics driver. So that's running Lima.

On the phone itself, the modem is running proprietary firmware. There is some code in the outer focus of the rear-facing camera that is also proprietary. The firmware for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, not the drivers, but the firmware is proprietary. And it is my understanding that a part of the boot ROM firmware, which lives actually on the SoC, is locked down as well. And that's the extent of it. So some of this can conceivably in the future be freed,

such as the camera. And if somebody decides to take a crack at the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi module, then presumably it's possible. In respect to the modem, we know that it is running Linux, but it's locked down. And this portion of the first stage bootloader, it's a part of the SoC, it can't be freed. Well, that's just pretty much how it goes with any sort of mobile hardware, right?

You can't expect it to be completely free. No, absolutely. any sort of mobile hardware, right? You can't expect it to be completely free. No, absolutely. And, you know, if there would be alternatives that we could choose that would be easier to free or otherwise, then we would obviously have gone that route. But this is the reality of things. This is our first sort of step in understanding how phones are made.

And this is a very ambitious project. So, you know, in the future, there's also room for us to try out different things and different modules and, you know, alter the existing PinePhone, maybe, you know, a year or two down the line. Well, thank you very much for coming on the show, Lucas. And you'll have to come in and update us as things progress. If people want to find out more about what you're up to, where's the best place? So we do run a monthly blog on pine64.org. And we also have a Twitter and

Mastodon account at the Pine64 so you can find out what we're up to on there. Great, well we'll put some links in the show notes. Thanks a lot for joining us. Thank you so much. You can tell it's an ambitious project but they're matching that ambition with

a genuine level of transparency. You really know what you're going to get, right? I mean, at the start of the show, we talked a little bit about the Pine phone, and they're very clear even there that, hey, this is an early issue of the device. And that's true for all their devices, so you're not going to have bad expectations. So Cheesy, you've talked a lot about the pros of the Pinebook Pro. Is there some cons to using this device? There must be some drawbacks. There must have been a moment you were missing your main rig. Yeah, I mean, there are a few

drawbacks, right? Like no piece of hardware is perfect, or I've not found a piece of hardware that's flawless. So like we mentioned in the interview, the trackpad does have some issues with palm rejection, which can be extremely frustrating when you're using it. So what I found is that I turn it off with the hardware key. And then once turned off, I just use a USB mouse and it works great that way. They are working on some firmware patches for that in fact they already have a patch that's out and it's currently being worked on so you know your mileage may vary they've been working on it really hard i think there's a team of eight people working on getting it patched and that will be essentially a spi flash to Um, and you'll have to reboot the machine. And then once

you reboot the machine, the trackpad should, should be operable and everything should be better. That's nice. So I've yet to try it, but that after the show today, I'm sure I'll jump in there and chat with Lucas and give it a go myself. Um, it ships with Debian nine, right? So you've got an older kernel, you've got the 4.4 kernel, and along with that, you've got Debian, right? Which I love Debian. In our previous episode, I talked about how much I love Debian and all of its variations and spins and everything. But you don't really have a huge repository of software, especially compiled for the Arch64 ARM platform. Or I suppose another way to put that is you don't have a huge selection of desktop software that you need.

Right. Because it probably has plenty of server-side packages, very large repos. Absolutely. But let's say you want Telegram or Quassel or something like that. You're probably not going to find it there. I do want those things. Exactly. You do.

Exactly. You do. Exactly. But one way to kind of extend that, and you can extend that on the default Debian 9 build, or there's like some Ubuntu Mate builds and stuff like that for it out already. And to kind of get a little more extensibility from the software, you can install Snapd. So you can install Snap packages on the default Debian build or the Ubuntu builds to kind of give you that get you over the hump with some of that stuff, say Telegram, for example. So, you know, you can extend it a few ways like that. The Manjaro build, you know, that we've talked about is one that's going to be, I think, fantastic because you're pretty much going to find everything you need there. It's going to be bleeding edge.

You're pretty much going to find everything you need there. It's going to be bleeding edge. I think a lot of people will gravitate toward Manjaro once they get everything dialed in. It's bright days for them there. Absolutely. You know, Cheese West and I have a Rock Pro 64 here in the room, which is essentially what the Pinebook is built around. Slightly newer version. So I want to talk about this. book is built around.

Exactly. Slightly newer version. So I want to talk about this. In Mumble Room, if anybody has any questions about the Pine book for cheese, I'd like to give you a moment to get your questions ready. Now's the time. Tag me in IRC. Just mum tag me. While I tell everyone about Laka, which is our pick of the week, which I think will turn

that, if you've managed to get yourself one of those Pine 64 boards like I have, this one was $60. Doesn't come with a dang power adapter, I might note, just so you know, you'll need to get a power adapter. And it's a barrel plug. But once you get it set up, load Locka on this thing. They've talked about it on Choose Linux before,

but it's a lightweight Linux distro from top to bottom that turns your Pine64 into a retro gaming console. Yeah, it's like running RetroArch, but they've got images for all kinds of different single board computers out there. So whether you've got basically any version of the Raspberry Pi, or you've got one of these

Rock Pros like we do, you can get this up and running. Minimek, you had a question about the Pinebook. Yeah, yeah, I do, in fact. What about GPU performance? So performance so geez as i understand you had chrome mls on it running did you run any linux distribution on it and how was the gpu performance when it comes to composites and video and something yeah so i mean it ships with the default debian 9 build. I was able to play back 4K 60 frames a second on that Debian 9 build on YouTube. It was a little stuttery whenever I was streaming through YouTube.

But whenever I pulled down like Big Buck Bunny and ran it in a few variations that the, you know, 1080p 60, 30 frames and then the 4K 60 and 30 frames. There was a little stuttering there, but it wasn't... I felt that it was just... It's not a test. He just really likes that one. Yeah, it's my jam, dude. Oh my god, I've seen that video so many damn times. I know, me too. I'll note, though, the fact that it can play 4K content may be a bit

irrelevant since the screen is 1080p, so if it can successfully play 1080p content, you're good to go. Can I ask a dumb question? Go ahead. Go ahead. Does it charge over USB-C by chance, or is it a barrel connector? So it has a barrel connector and Type-C.

You can charge over Type-C. And you can put display out through Type-C, which I've yet to try. I will say that, say, using my, I think it's a 45-watt MacBook Pro charger, Type-C charger, doesn't work very well. It basically flickers back and forth. So I think it has to be 5 volts is the max. And don't quote me on that. That's how the Pine64 board works is it's five volts right yeah but for an example i have a an anchor uh battery that i carry with me whenever i travel and i was able to use that same type c cable you know that i was charging my phone with

plug it right into the pine book pro while i was on the airplane just to get a little bit of juice so i mean i think it it's you know, like a 14 watt, five volts. So another one that worked was my Pixel 3a charger worked great with it. I note too that it has a 10,000 milliamp battery. So that gives the audience a little bit of perspective. One thing I'd like to know more about down the road is the PCIe 4x slot, which requires an adapter, they say, but you could use it to load an SSD in there or other things. That seems like it has some potential too. Yeah, so they're working on the adapter.

They had a little bit of an issue with it, and I think really what it came down to is the ribbon cable was a little too short. But you can buy an adapter, an NVMe PCIe adapter, for I think it's like five bucks or something like that. And then you can hook up an NVMe drive to it. I know that some of the NVMe drives are a little different in their height, which can cause like the trackpad to kind of shift and stuff.

But I think, like I said, they're redesigning that adapter. And I believe that they're going to bring that profile down a little bit so you shouldn't have any problems. Now, do note that if you do add an NVMe drive, depending on the drive, and you need to double-check this if you're going to do this, depending on the drive, you could get a significant more power draw, so you could reduce your battery life. So there's kind of a tradeoff there on what you're wanting to do with it. The age-old thing, performance versus battery life, cheesy. Well, keep using it. Now, not only are you our Denver correspondent, but you're our Pinebook Pro correspondent now. Also, again, thank you to Lucas for taking time to join us on the show today.

We'll have links to the Pinebook Pro in the show notes if you're interested. And I was researching up, just familiarizing myself again with Pine64. I didn't realize one of their co-founders created the Popcorn Hour media player. Which for people that have been around for a very, very long time, I used to talk about quite a bit on Lass. It used to be like my go-to media solution before the days of Ambienplex. And really, Cody, I was really impressed by that. That's a good lineage.

Really love that device. Another device that they created and I believe they're still selling is the Rochambeau retro console, which is, I don't think, super huge here in the States, but it's pretty big over in Asia. Looks really cool. Yeah, that does look like a neat device. All right, well, let's wrap it up there. We have something in the post show that I want to get to. I know that's a weird thing to say that I want to get to the post show, but I got something special. Go get more Wes Payne along with Jim Salter over at TechSnap.Systems.

Great episodes these days. Just you guys are hitting your stride, and it really shows. I was really enjoying Jim's thoughts on Microsoft, too, after going to Insight recently. So check out techsnap.systems for that. Also, Cheesy goes on a little bit more and gets nerdy about single-board computers on a recent episode of Choose Linux. Oh, that's a great one. ChooseLinux.show for that. And, of course, the one, the only Brent with brunch over at extras.show.

If you dig around, you go to the tag, you may just find an RSS feed, and you can get just the brunches if you like. It may be possible. That's an exercise for the listener, though. I'm not saying it's possible, but I am just hashtag saying. You know what I'm saying? Oh, yeah. I'm at ChrisLAS.

The network is at Jupiter Signal. The show is at Linux Unplugged. And just one last reminder, we'd love to start incorporating some of your feedback and follow-up as the year wraps up. LinuxUnplugged.com slash contact. And that new time, noon Pacific. See you back here next Tuesday! All right, we've got to go pick our titles. JBTitles.com. If you're watching the live stream, it is your duty.

Before you go check, maybe just go throw four or ten title suggestions in there. You know, just do your duty. Is the noon crowd? Well, no. They're new. We have 14. We got 14 titles. They're new, Wes.

I know. And we didn't really recap the whole titles thing. It's a complicated notion. So you still have time. Bang suggests a great title, and then we will go vote here in a moment. In the meantime, though. Popping bacon. Guess what, Wes?

What? A little surprise for you. Uh-oh. There was some extra discussion between Joe, Cheese, and Lucas about future products they're working on, like the Time. Oh, the Pine Time. Oh, yeah. And I thought maybe we'd include that here in the post-show. So you've teased a few other devices.

Let's briefly touch on those. I'm aware of the watch and the tablet and even possibly a router router as americans would say so what's going on with with those three so the development kit for the pine time so that's the smart watch have gone out and there is an extraordinary amount of work happening within this sub-community. I'm absolutely blown away. I mean, I've already seen pictures of watch faces and all sorts of different operating systems pop up on Twitter. So there's clearly a lot of interest in this. And we have been contacted by both educators

and people who just like to tinker with these low-powered ARM devices. And we've recently reached the decision that this is just one of those things that we probably want to have in the store so that anybody who wants to have a go at it can have a go at it. So that's the Pine Time. In respect to the Pine Tab, which is the tablet which we're doing, it is taking a bit of a backseat right now. Getting the Pinebook Pros shipping and Pine phones into production has proven to be a lot of work. So we had to put one project to the side

for now. But there's a lot of interest in the PineTab. We get asked about it constantly. So we recently made the decision that we're going to start a very small production batch for people who are very interested in this. This will be akin to the Braveheart edition for the PinePhone. So only for enthusiasts, in other words. We haven't decided on when it will be available. Definitely next year in 2020, sometime in Q1. But we're still waiting for one of the partner projects to deliver an operating system that would be viable for the tablet.

And the router then? The router is something that I guess I can talk about it broadly. I really wanted to do a router for quite some time. I actually pitched this as an idea some time back, but then everything else took precedent. And then completely coincidentally, somebody posted a question on Reddit, would it be possible for Pint64 to make a router?

And this gained a lot of traction. And so I responded and I was clear saying that it's probably not going to happen, but if we were to do it, what sort of stuff would you want to see in it? And I've spoken to both a hardware networking engineer and a software networking engineer. And at this point in time, it appears to me that

we do not have the right SOC for the job. It wouldn't be the best router that can be. I actually was even contacted and a huge shout out here to PFSense who have been so lovely. They contacted me and said, do you want to talk? And we talked and they were just really good. And the audience, a real gentleman, just having a chat with me and trying to figure out if we could possibly, you know, take a stab at it. But as of today, the decision is no, we just don't have the right SOC for networking. And it would be silly of us to try to compete with the existing propositions, which are simply much better. I love that realism, you know, it's like, it'd be nice to do.

We don't have the tech right now. Yeah. It's not a big flashy show. No, it's not Neo Apple. It's just... Well, and I think that that's one of the things that's really cool about the Pine64 crew is that, you know, they're interested

in providing the best product they can based around the ARM platform. And so if it's not going to work and the hardware isn't there yet, then they're not going to put out something that's subpar because quite honestly, they know that we'll all tear it apart. It's perfect for a guy like me who,

I am perfectly happy to sit back and watch ARM devices get better and more sophisticated and more capable. I don't really have any skin in the game because I'm pretty happy with my x86 laptops. But I can see where... But all your Intel stock. Yeah, well, I can see where this...

Yeah, I wish. Maybe not, actually. I can see where this trend line's going, though. I can see where this trend line's going, and I'm like, I'm really glad folks like Pine are doing this. Another one I'd love to see, just keeping it on theme for this episode, man, I'd freaking love to see an ARM laptop

like the Pinebook Pro from System76. That would be neat. Absolutely. That's got to be in the back burner up there. They've got to be tinkering with that in their R&D area. PopBook Pro? Well, it's something that I might have mentioned too at the round table.

But did you call it a pop book pro cheese? Cause that's... I didn't, but I should have.