LINUX Unplugged - 345: Don't Go Viral, Go Virtual

Episode Date: March 18, 2020

It was the first of its kind, and the first forced to go virtual. We get the behind the scenes story of WSL Conf from the organizers. Plus our impressions of the latest GNOME release, community news, app picks, and more. Special Guests: Hayden Barnes, Neal Gompa, and Sohini Bianka Roy.

I got great news for anybody that's feeling retro right now. Linux's floppy disk support isn't just going away. No, no, it's getting better in 2020. Yeah, that's right. It doesn't make any sense, but the same kernel where Intel stabilized Tiger Lake graphics, AMD added support for Zen version 3, and we got that new exFAT driver. It's seen floppy work. I kind of love this.

Yesterday, Wes and I were just talking about how I wanted to set up an LTO tape drive here in the studio and just start putting stuff on LTO tape. But maybe this is a better way to go. And it's not just like a keeping things kind of fresh. It's a full-on bunch of code fixes, 586 lines of new code,

and 613 deletions. That's how you can tell it's good. Hello friends, welcome into Linux Unplugged, episode 345, your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello Wes. We have a really fun show to get into today. Wes and I have been running Ubuntu 20.04 and GNOME 3.36,

and we have many, many things to share with you. But also, I don't know if you can tell, I'm not in Denver this week. I'll tell you what happened. I was surprised to see you in the studio this morning. Crazy series of events, which we will get into in a moment. We've got a bunch of community news, and we're going to go behind the scenes of the just completed WSLConf, the first of the tech conferences to pivot to virtual only in the light of all of the recent healthcare stuff. They were really at the forefront of that, and so it makes for a fascinating story. But before we

get into that, I got a couple bits of business to get into. Time-appropriate greetings, Virtual Alug. Hello, hello. Hello, hello. Hello, hello. Howdy. Hello. Happy Linux Tuesday.

Yes, that is a great showing. Hello, everybody. There's so many in there. I'm going to do it. Are you ready, Russ? I'm going to do it. Come on. Hello to Anther, Byte, Carl, Conan, Emaxer, Frank, Jill, John, Colonel, K-Strazz, Mini-Mech, TechMav, and all of you up in the quiet listening who are just hanging out and listening.

We have 20 people in there this week, and it is awesome. But, of course, in studio with us, rocking as always in the corner in the big, comfy chair is Mr. Cheese Bacon. Hello, sir. Hello, everyone. It's great to see that we have the continued turnout each week. It just seems to be getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger every week. It's awesome. I know. You know, one of the reasons I came back a little early was because I was thinking everybody's at home.

Yeah, if you're hunkered down at home, why not hang out virtually? They're going to show up and it's going to be a big show. And we have a big chat room going right now. Hello, everybody. We've got a lot going on in the mumble room. Before we get into why I'm not in Denver, how about a couple of fun floppy facts, Westpain? You want to razzle dazzle us with a few fun floppy facts? Floppy facts. Razzle dazzle us, sir. A blank CD would take roughly 487 floppy disks.

Okay. That's the size comparison. It's not as big as I thought, really. CDs aren't that great. Yeah, but when you're installing an operating system, it really makes all the difference. Yeah, it gets a little better when you go up a level. A blank DVD would take roughly 3,264 floppies.

Could you imagine watching a movie and then pausing to swap a disk or something like that? It might look nice on the shelf, though, just you have to have so many laying around. Oh, yeah, especially if the labels could all complete a picture when they're all lined up next to each other. Now you're thinking. Yeah, that'd look really good. What about a big disk? Yeah, okay, well, a single one-derabyte drive, that's nearly 700,000 floppies.

You know what was interesting about the code cleanup is that some of it was specifically for ARM support of floppy disks. So ARM devices are getting floppy drives? I'll admit, that's not anything I've ever tried. No, that's not where I expected that to go. But, I mean, why not? You know, if you're using it somewhere mobile or in the field, IoT-based, perhaps you don't need that much storage. Floppies are around. There are still some legacy applications and equipment out there. I'm looking at you, old-timey oscilloscopes that only output by floppy.

So I wonder how many people are here for the first time. I think, Anther, you're here for the first time working from home. Welcome to the virtual lug. Thank you. Glad to have you here. Who else? Anybody else in the virtual lug this week joining us for the first time because they're working from home? That'd be me.

Welcome. Awesome. I'm glad you made this on your list. I'm glad it worked for you. And shout out to everybody in the chat room, too, who is joining us for the first time. And if you didn't know, podcasting and listening to podcasts, it makes you more productive. Yeah. And welcome to the low latency feed of the show.

So why am I here? Why am I one of those low latency contributors? Because as you may have seen, elementary OS folks had to cancel their sprint because of all of the COVID-19 restrictions and concerns. And of course, just safety precautions. And they had team members who had been traveling from Europe, and they just wouldn't have been able to get back. So those minor details. Funny enough, though, and they told me as soon as they knew.

The guys told me immediately. I found out the evening before I was getting ready to leave, I was already packed up, ready to go. Everything was set. And so I decided to head out anyways. Yeah, I mean, you're ready to go. Yeah, I mean, I coordinated, ready to go. Everything was set. And so I decided to head out anyways. I mean, you're ready to go. Yeah. I mean, I coordinated with work and you.

Like we were planning for me to be remote. Angela had decided that she could watch the kids while we were gone. And we had arranged some friends to also help watch the kids. And we made time. Like it had sort of worked out just sort of beautifully. And I thought, okay, let's go anyways because this time is available. Wow, did that turn into an adventure. There was a winter storm that rolled into the Pacific Northwest that chased me around. And so I decided, because I

figured we'd have a good showing, that I should just try to come back and try to make it back by Tuesday, which turned into an incredible adventure itself, which, since we're here to talk about Linux, I will spare you all from. But you can find it at worklifeandrv.com. It's episode four, Eager Beavers versus the storm. We'll have a link in the show notes. I tell you what, I thought I'd go work from the road for a week or two

and then come back all refreshed and recharged. And it ended up being essentially a struggle to survive and also not crash my home. It was a hell of a journey. And in the meantime, the elementary OS guys got together virtually. They started working on a few different goals. It's not necessarily the same thing. Yeah, I mean, a pandemic is not going to stop them. No, and they've already made some improvements and contributions.

Daniel Foray and Cassidy have been tweeting about some of their improvements. So I invited them to come on the show after they're done and tell us where they got. But, you know, maybe they might reschedule this to an in-person thing. We just don't know at this time. It's all up in the air.

Also, since we've gotten together last, Linux Fest Northwest is officially canceled. So obviously we won't be making it to LinuxFest Northwest this year. We need a sad clip for that. Oh, man, it's a bit of a blow, huh? It is. It really sucks. Yeah, especially after not making it to scale. I'm not sure.

I'm kind of postulating what I might do, maybe a mini meetup, because there are some folks that just already have travel plans locked in. And it really all just depends on where the pandemic is by that point. I've been talking about it on the Chris Last cast, and I'll probably just keep people posted that way. I kind of look at that as, it's almost like my personal newsletter, only I would write a horrible newsletter, let's be honest. Could you imagine how atrocious that would be? I'd kind of like to see it, but no, no, podcasts are better. Yeah, I just, I do a lot better verbally.

So I'm just kind of keeping everyone posted on my plans, what I'm doing off air and that kind of stuff at the Chris Lastcast. So if I end up doing a Linux Fest sort of pirate meetup or something like that. Skip to BellyBam. Mm-hmm. I'll keep everybody posted there. But I may not. I mean, if this thing, if the health situation continues to get worse and worse, we'll see.

We'll see. We're just going to play it by ear. Why don't we talk about some great news, assuming that manufacturing isn't too much of, you know. Impacted. Yeah. That could always change things here. Manufacturing isn't too much of, you know. Impacted.

Yeah, that could always change things here. But it looks like we're going to see a new Pinebook Pro run. And this time, they'll ship with Manjaro KDE Edition as the default operating system. And pre-orders, as we record, will go live tomorrow, March 18th, 2020, for early shipping in May. What do you think about the choice of Manjaro as the distribution of choice on the Pinebook? It's kind of unexpected to me, but I like it. Honestly, it seems like one of the few options I might actually keep around

without immediately reflashing after I got one. All right, that's a pretty fair point if you're talking about you and I personally, right? What about you, Cheesy? Personally, I'm a huge fan of Manjaro, and I've been using it on the Pinebook since I think it was the – well, I've tested all of the betas. So the initial build and now I think it was beta 3

was the last one that I've installed. It's still currently running. And I paired that with – because it is the KDE version, I paired that with a lot of the tips and tricks that you had given whenever we did the basic to brilliant video uh oh yeah the plasma live stream yeah the plasma live stream so to me it's that perfect little machine that I reach for when I'm just kicking it on the couch laying in bed you know checking out my octoprint server to see how my 3d printer is going or something right it's a perfect little machine for that. Yeah, good point.

And it is also kind of a cutting edge device. So having an operating system that stays very current and has the latest upstream drivers. Seems like a nice idea. Yeah. TechMav, I'm curious, what do you think? If you look at Manjaro and you look at them sort of expanding their focus into Pinebooks, does this make sense? I personally use the Manjaro KDE Plasma on my Pinebook Pro.

I love it. I mean, it stays up to date. It's minimal problem. I run off a 128-gigabyte microSD card. I prefer it much better than the default Debian MixMatch that did. and Mixed Match that did. I still think that this product has a wider ability if we can just put all those tiny little pieces together between the community and the businesses.

I think an Ubuntu install would be an option for it. This is a great place for education. I mean, great product point. Try to put community together with something like Landscape or some of the other management systems out there. Like an Ubuntu 2004 machine that is managed by Landscape

and set up as a package for education. This could knock out Chromebook. Yeah, I could see that. I could see that. Anther, what do you think about the price though? Is this the right device for the money when you could go on eBay, you could spend $200 to $300, and you could get a pretty great x86 ThinkPad? Yeah, I agree. I usually use an x270 for the couch machine and a little remote terminal server.

But opening up a Pinebook with that good power efficiency and brand new plastic is appealing. I do like the idea of power efficiency, especially for my, I'm sitting at the couch, surfing machine. The thing that stays in your bag all day. You just know it'll be on. You never know when you might need the machine and the Pinebook Pro fits that. Sort of the iPad role for me right now where I just need a really quick go-to, always has battery life machine. Colonel, you think maybe there's some concerns

about the power behind this thing and building packages from the AUR? Yeah, my only concern would be if there's a lot of packages that may not be available, so people build them from the AUR, and does the Pinebook have the horsepower and the RAM and et cetera to be building those packages every time you run your updates.

Sure, that's a good question. And then Minimek, you have a question too that's sort of related that I think Cheese could probably answer. Why don't you go ahead, Minimek? Yeah, my crucial thing on the new couch computer laptop would be the speakers. So just watching a YouTube video like that, you need some speakers that have some quite good sounds so how are the speakers

not good at all to be quite honest the speakers are pretty horrible there have been a few people on the forums that have modded them and replaced the speakers uh and they've gotten a few more db out of them and stuff like that but they're're still not great because they are down firing too. So let's say if you're, you know, relaxing with it on your lap, as people do with laptops, then the speakers are going to be down firing. What I normally do is I pair that with a set of Bluetooth headphones. And I haven't had any problems in that regard. But personally, the reason that I, you know, another reason that I choose Manjaro is simply

because the availability of packages, as Neil had stated, there are so many more packages available in the Manjaro repos. So one of the things, for example, was Telegram. I could snap the Telegram down, but then it was an outdated version and would crash anytime someone dropped a GIF into a channel. That makes it like triple annoying. Yeah, exactly. So you don't know if it's this new hardware or what's going on. But as soon as I switched over Manjaro and then pulled down their build, which is the

latest build of Telegram, I had no problem. So I think it's a smart decision for them to use Manjaro to ship these with. Especially if they're working together, even at any kind of degree on the phone aspect of the PinePhone as well, you could see sort of the cross-pollination benefits here. And to Wes's original point, this would be a distribution that would ship on this that I would probably keep. I mean, I would absolutely love to be able to just have an image I could download of Ubuntu 2004 and run that when that's released.

Oh, yeah. But I love Manjaro as a workstation OS, especially on something like this that, like Neil made the point, really benefits from cutting edge upstream drivers. I think it was just weird at first to see an Arch-based distro coming on a laptop. And then I think back to those arguments that we used to have about rolling versus long-term support and that version of me is like, yes!

Like that victory kid meme. And then now the older version of me is like, I don't know about this. So we'll just watch where this goes. But I think the one takeaway from this is it's great, actually there's a couple takeaways it's great for Manjaro

good on them, I'm really proud might not be the right word but I am really pleased to see them continue to work with different industry players that seem like they have similar interests as the Manjaro core audience very intuitive, very clever of them and it seems like a sign of maturity of the project itself as well similar interests as the Mangiero core audience. Absolutely.

Very intuitive, very clever of them. And it seems like a sign of maturity of the project itself as well. And I think all of those same things could be said about the Pine folks for recognizing Mangiero as a potential partner to work with. Yeah. It's good. It's a good sign that these two, I guess you could call them companies now, but really it's projects, are getting their core audience. And can grow together.

Mm-hmm. Okay. Now I'm actually, now I love it. The worst part about this is if it's going back, I have to think about ordering one. I know. Yeah. Cheesy, you still recommend it?

What do you think? Like if you're going to spend the money, like say you get a little tax return money or something, would you spend it on that? Yeah, if you're debating a Chromebook or a Pinebook, I would say go with a Pinebook. All right. If you're debating a decent little ThinkPad that might be a little bit over 200 bucks or a Pinebook, I would say go with the ThinkPad. Yeah. So I have both. I have a T440 ThinkPad that I use. I mainly use that for the 3D printing stuff that I've been doing lately. So modeling and that sort of stuff. And then whenever I'm done with that, that goes down and I pick up the Pinebook. I get it. I always like to ask Jill sort of the long-term perspective because she and I have been watching this stuff for so long. This seems like a pretty clever partnership, doesn't it, Jill?

Oh, most definitely. And, you know, I think it's also a really good source of revenue for Manjaro. So it's a win-win. Great point. Nobody's brought up the money aspect of it, but this makes the project more sustainable and probably going to sell a few Pinebooks. So they're going to make some money too.

Well, and then isn't the Manjaro also shipping with some other hardware vendors out of Europe right now as well? Those guys are killing it. Yeah. And there's more to come. I just don't know if right now is the right time for me to talk about it, but there is more hardware in the works. They have, yeah, they got more stuff going on. Yeah. Let's talk about another sale though. Yeah, they got more stuff going on. Yeah. Let's talk about another sale, though.

This one I'm definitely still processing. And I think even the wording of the announcement has my conspiracy bacon tentacles tingling. I'm excited for this. I got tingling tentacles, Wes. NPM is joining GitHub. NPM is joining GitHub. NPM is joining GitHub. There's something missing in that title, right? Yeah. Comma also means Microsoft.

Yeah. Which immediately, now I think GitHub has done really well under Microsoft's leadership. And I think that is really, I think you attribute a lot of that to Nat. I think Nat has really had a steady hand with all of this. And he is, in a sense, with this announcement, taking a leadership role here, a very public leadership role. And so I think that's part of the framing of this message.

Instead of saying Microsoft, they're saying GitHub, because what they're really saying is Nat. And that GitHub is still operating as its own sort of entity within Microsoft. And from some of the things I've read, it sounds like, if anything, Microsoft has been adopting some of the GitHub-isms more so than the reverse. Yeah, I mean, we're well into this now, and I can't sit here and think of a single thing they've screwed up. But I wonder if the wording of this announcement isn't still trying to be super sensitive to that concern because the idea of Microsoft owning NPM sits – let's just practice for a moment.

Let's just – do you want to do like a thought experiment with me for a second here, Wes? Yeah, let's do it. Let's pretend like we could rewrite reality and that we're reading an entirely different news headline. You ready? This is CNN Breaking News. Breaking News, as we're recording, Wes, NPM has been acquired by Microsoft. Sounds a little different, doesn't it?

Microsoft now owns and controls NPM. That sounds a little bit different. It does. However, when you say NPM is joining GitHub, that's not so bad. And I just think the wording... Oh, they're teaming up. Oh, when you say NPM is joining GitHub, that's not so bad. Oh, they're teaming up. Oh, great. The wording there is choice. But I think it's pretty intentional because

they're trying to say, look at what we've done here. We've had a steady hand. We'll have a steady hand with NPM. I think that's the message. And for millions of developers who use the public NPM registry every day, there's not a lot that will change. In fact, I think they'll go out of their way to make sure what you expect to remain free stays free.

In fact, Nat writes on the blog, our focus after the deal closes will be to, we've got three items, invest in registry infrastructure and platform. Who doesn't like hearing that? Improve the core experience. He writes, we will work to improve the everyday experience of developers and maintainers. And number three, got to have this, got to have this.

Engage with the community. We will actively engage with the JavaScript community to get your ideas and help us define the future of NPM. Looking further ahead, we'll integrate GitHub and NPM to improve the security of the open source software supply chain. Okay, that sounds pretty nebulous, but I like this part. And enable you to trace a change from a GitHub pull request to the NPM package version that fixed it. And to their credit, I mean, they have been adding a lot of, you know, vulnerability scanning and tools to assess open source projects, which is great. Yeah, I find that to be a uniquely actionable item. In an otherwise pretty high-level document, yes.

And not something you generally see in this type of announcement. And that's like, this is a specific thing we are going to execute on. And to allow somebody like a developer who is trying to figure out if this is a safe thing to incorporate into an overall project, to trace it all the way back to a GitHub pull request to make sure that things are fixed, that's a big deal. That's actually something I would love to see just from a show research standpoint.

I mean, we know the NPM ecosystem could do with some improved security. Linux headlines.show. Okay, so what about paying customers of NPM? Because if you remember, I mean, this was a business here that got purchased. They say they're investing heavily in improving GitHub packages, which is the package system built into GitHub. Later this year, we'll enable NPM's paying customers to move their private NPM packages to GitHub packages. Although they say, allowing NPM to exclusively focus on being a great public registry

for JavaScript. So if you're a paying customer, sounds like you're getting rolled into the GitHub version of these things. NPM public, stay in put for the time being. That's how I read it. I was curious if that's how you read it. I think that makes sense. I think I see that all

changing in about 12 months. It seems like they're going to redo all of this. There's something brewing here. When you look at the whole picture of checking in your code, publishing somewhere, putting it up online via Azure services, there's something really kind of coalescing here that I don't fully appreciate yet, but I can see the edges of it. Also think about this. here that I don't fully appreciate yet, but I can see the edges of it. Also think about this. Think about outdated

Internet Explorer, the bad one, with not supporting the latest JavaScript standards or any of the latest standards, to now the world where Microsoft made TypeScript and owns NPM and is this major JavaScript player and VS Code,

which is a huge editor in that ecosystem. Wild. It is. And of Yeah, it is. And of course, you and I are coming off of WSLConf, where we watch people write Linux applications on Windows and run XFCE on top of Windows 10. Crazy. It really has been. Yeah, 2020 has been nuts for us so far, which we'll get more into here in just a moment.

I think this is one of those stories I'm going to just digest and see what happens, but I would really, really appreciate some sort of perspective, any perspective, really. I just want to think about this from all the angles, linuxunplugged.com slash contact. You knew where I was going with that. I'd really like to get people's input on this one. Now there's another story that I feel like in another era, I would be all over this story. If Unfilter was still a show, this would be something that I could sit here and I could just tell you everything off the top of my head about this. But you may have heard, quote, unquote, the government is trying to ban encryption, quote, end quote. Have you heard that? I have heard that. Well, the EFF and their action center is trying to raise the alarm about the Graham-Blumenthal

bill, which is called something ridiculous. It's got a name. The Earn It Act. Yes, the Earn It. Earn It. And the high level is it, in the United States, would make it mandatory for companies to enable backdoors into encryption. Which is something we've seen being pressed time and time again. You know, it comes and it goes.

My main concern, obviously, is the implications from a security standpoint of this. But secondarily, the other concern I have is the conversation is within the context of commercial platforms the conversation talks about iOS and Android and Google and Apple and Microsoft and them working to provide the federal government with a legal means to break encryption

but never in the conversation is how this impacts free software how does this affect developers who are writing software all over the world, and the majority of their users are in the United States? I have extremely deep concerns about how this could affect open source software. And that is not part of this conversation. And I think it could be a fundamental game changer for free software. So I will have a link in the show notes for the EFF's Action Center. They write,

Members of Congress have mounted a major threat to your freedoms of speech and security online. Senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal, which Graham is a Republican, Blumenthal is a Democrat, so it's, quote, bipartisan, recently introduced a bill that would undermine key protections for Internet speech in the U.S. It would also expose providers of private messaging services like Telegram, WhatsApp, iMessage, etc. to extreme legal risk, potentially forcing them to undermine their tools of security. The so-called EARN IT Act, Senate 3398, is anti-speech, anti-security, anti-innovation, and unnecessary. Let's tell Congress to reject it. I couldn't say it better myself. I honestly have not been as informed on this because of the crazy amount of corona news going on. And, you know, that's

probably the exact condition they're relying on for nobody to notice this and let it just sneak right through. Well, if you think about it, right, we'd had this conversation around between law enforcement and security experts around like, I mean, what's possible? We all know that no one's going to all follow the laws. And when you break encryption, it creates problems basically for everyone. I don't think that changed in the last six months, right? Yeah. Yeah.

And it's like technology doesn't understand borders. It doesn't, source code doesn't necessarily appreciate your silly nation-state government. You fundamentally make something flawed here. It makes it flawed everywhere around the world. And maybe listening to this, you think, well, what's to worry about? I have nothing to hide. Perhaps you have full faith in your United States government. Congratulations.

That must feel great. But how do you feel about China? How do you feel about Iran? How do you feel about the United States, say, in 30 years? Are you concerned that then it could be abused in those situations? If you are, then we have to do something today. That's it. I think, too, that one of the underlying things that we haven't mentioned here

is the serious flaw are the people, right? The people that are in control of gathering this data, what prevents them from gathering data from a company that's using some sort of encrypted communication? You know, when they're trying to figure out, should we go with Azure or should we go with AWS? Well, let's tap into their private encrypted systems and see what they're saying about us about the deal, right? So I think that it really comes down to you're giving this power now to humans who are notably flawed

and are going to end up using it for, you know, really anything that they choose. And the issue with the EARN IT Act is it itself does not necessarily lay out the banning of encryption or any specific things like that. What it does is it designates a council of 19 people, half of which, most of which, mostly, mostly, mostly, most of which. I think we should go with that, dude. It's new. It's accepted.

You're using it. It could be my version of not a mean. You know what I mean? This is my version of it. I think we should go with that, dude. It's new. It's accepted. You're using it. It could be my version of not a mean. You know what I mean? This is my version of that. I like it. So it's got 19 people on the council, almost half of which are law enforcement. Now here's the fun thing. Two of the people on the council have tech experience.

Now this council will be formed. It will determine a list of best practices, things that remind you that you got to think about the poor children and terrorism and any other kind of agenda these people want to push. And it's only two of the people on this board have any technical experience at all. And they will make the rules that Apple and Google

and anyone distributing software in the United States of America that wants to be lawful has to follow. That's what's about to happen. This council of 19 people, and two of them are tech people, are going to decide if you can use encryption or not, if this passes. We don't normally talk about this kind of stuff on the show, but I just, I can only wonder what the ramifications would be for free software. How does a developer in Germany navigate this? I do not know. And you know, it's so silly is imagine, imagine a developer who is in Vancouver, Canada, or in Mexico, just miles from the border, and it fundamentally changes the legality of the free software project they're working on.

It's so silly. It is legislation of a bygone era, just like Blumenthal and Graham. They are of a bygone era. So let's talk about something of a more modern era, GNOME 3.36, which Wes and I have been using for the last week, essentially via Ubuntu 20.04. Well, it was just so easy. We loaded that up after our week with Windows. And I'm going to save as much as I can for our review of 20.04, which is not yet released.

But it has been wonderful. Now, I'm curious. I could say a whole bunch, but I'm curious what your take is because you've spent a year and a half now in Plasma. It feels very refreshingly minimal. And I like, I've sort of installed Ubuntu 20.04 five or six times now in the past couple of weeks. It's also really nice how fast I can get going

in that fresh install. Like I tweak a couple of things. I've got that down now because I've done it a few times. And then I have a totally usable system. So that's been nice. Yeah. How fast does that feel, though? Super snappy.

Very appropriate animations all over the place. And that new lock screen. Oh, boy. Oh, man. The lock screen is very pro. It is very, very pro. I'm curious, though, if you feel like it's, quote, unquote, snappier than Plasma. In some areas, yes. In some areas, yes.

In some areas, no. I will say running it on Wayland has been very nice. Pretty much flawless. Look at you. You're going all in now. Well, I mean, it's 2004. That's right. Got to find out if it'll work.

It's very nice. GNOME 3.3.6 is, and as somebody who talks about this stuff a lot, I try to think of something new I can say, but it is the best, it is the fastest release of the GNOME shell that I have ever used. It is the best, it is the best version of GNOME ever. It really is. It simply is the best version of GNOME ever.

And I wish I could stop saying that in a way because it's almost become cliche for me to say this new release is better. I feel like since GNOME 3.11, I've been saying. Yeah, accurate. Every release is better. But they're hitting a stride. The project's just doing great. I got to say.

So, you know, I spent some time on the Mac and I was like, oh, this is great with all these third-party apps and the windowing environment is very snappy. Then I went to Windows and I'm like, oh boy, this is a little rough, but I can understand if I needed a commercial-grade application, I can see the appeal. And now with the subsystem, it's actually livable. And that's a big admission coming from me because I have issues with Windows. And then after all of that, on the same hardware,

I came back to Ubuntu 20.04 and the latest GNOME Shell, GNOME 3.36. And what you have here, without spoiling our review, is the best product Canonical has ever made for the desktop. And the best version of GNOME Shell that has ever been released.

And those two things came together in one product. It is the best release of Ubuntu ever. And I have been using it since the very first release. I think we were impressed just from the moment we booted up the flash drive. Absolutely. And now I have been using it for a week and I am going to just keep it on there. I just love it.

It looks beautiful. GNOME has come so far. You were mentioning the system settings, how great that is now. Oh, the system settings are beautiful. Gnome has come so far. You were mentioning the system settings, how great that is now. Oh, the system settings are beautiful. I was so surprised, especially coming from Plasma. I was like, it's all in one place, it's unified, it's sleek, and it just is easy to use. And how long have

I wanted just one spot where I just click the dark mode? Just click dark and everything. It doesn't have to be like a special theme where I go change the GTK theme and the shell theme and the Cursor theme. It's just dark mode. Boom. And everything switches and it's elegant and it's refined and it's well done.

And then you combine that with the just incredible performance of GNOME Shell 3.36 and the new updates they have made to it. of Gnome Shell 3.36 and the new updates they have made to it, like my favorite is Do Not Disturb mode in the notifications. Halla frickin' lulia. It is by far the best version I've ever used, and I enjoyed every moment of using it. And I was legitimately a little worried after really enjoying the Mac, not really liking Windows.

I was like, what if I switch to GNOME Shell again and Ubuntu, and I hate it? What if I don't enjoy it? What does that mean? I got to say. Not a problem for today. Brilliant. Brilliant.

And I don't do as Chris does, but I'm going to just stick with this release, even though it's not done yet. I'm going to leave it on this machine. The only downside was their cool ZFS automatic partitioner roofing yep totally has to re-wipe the drive

so no more windows on there had to give up windows I was going to try to dual boot that S you know try that out for a little while so I could keep playing

with Windows Terminal and Subsystem but to have all the fancy automatic snapshots yeah then you got snapshots who cares about Windows ZFS stuff

I was like yeah it's not worth keeping Windows. So I had to wipe the whole drive and put Ubuntu on there. But it is great.

And the upgrade is worth it for the lock screen alone. And think about, when have I ever said that? My favorite part was that they finally made it so you could

suspend without having to know the magic key combo to get it to show up in the menu. I think you just had to hold shift, but now it has just an option to suspend. I think it was alt. I don to show up in the menu. I think you just have to hold shift, but now it has just an option to suspend. I think it was alt.

I don't know if it was shift. I think it was alt. See, I don't even know. And I suspend my laptop all the time. So, I will admit, it took me a really long time to realize that was there. I think that's true. It was just not accessible. I just would close the lid. But then I was on the desktop, and I'm like, well now,

what if I want to suspend? And I'm like Googling it. I'm like, oh, right. Okay. Yeah, now it is right there. The whole thing is just so great. It's so great to see it coming along. So if you haven't yet, go give the live environment a try. Go give it a try.

Even if you're a longtime Plasma user like old Wes Payne here, go give it a go. I know. I guess I'm back unknown for a while. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. You know, at the end of the day, you just want to get your work done and your plasma environment is looking good. It's all set up. It works.

It hasn't failed you yet, so I don't know. But I want to be on 2004. It's just I can feel it. It's a good one. You think it's worth a whole reload? Oh, yeah, it might be. I think it is. That old ZFS, too. Mm-hmm. Well think it's worth a whole reload? Oh, yeah, it might be. I think it is. That old ZFS, too. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Well, how about just a little brief housekeeping

before we get into the rest of the show? That's probably the responsible thing to do. We should clean up around here. I agree. Well, we just released a behind-the-scenes of Linux Unplugged on Jupyter Extras. If you go to extras.show slash 64, we looked back at episode one

and then went over the arc of the show and essentially ended up making fun of me the entire time. I was so mad. We played an old sponsor. I didn't even know we had that sponsor. That's that. It was so embarrassing.

It was a different you really, Chris. It sure sounds like it. Yeah, I know. I sound 10 years younger. Anyways, if you're curious what goes into making Linux Unplugged, extras.show slash 64, we released Linux Unplugged behind the scenes. Also, if you're, maybe you're at home now.

Maybe you got a little extra time during the day. You could listen to our show in the background. Would you like to know when we're live? jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. Converts it to your local time. jblive.tv is where you watch us. It's more fun live. Now, you heard me mention Linux Headline,

linuxheadlines.show, three minutes or less every weekday, and we give you just the news you need to know about. I'm constantly discovering stuff through headlines that I wanted to know. And then, officially, no LinuxFest Northwest this year. Whew.

That hurts. That hurts. That hurts. And we'll let you know when we know what they're doing. There has been some rumblings of maybe working with some of the speakers to record their talks and post them online. If they do that, we'll keep you posted. We'll let you know what's going on there. And then last but not least, that Telegram group, 1700 users strong. Kip, stop it.

JupiterBroadcasting.com slash Telegram to get in on the conversation, the persistent conversation that continues even after the show. JupiterBroadcasting.com slash Telegram for all of that. All right, Mr. Wes Payne. Well, we had the opportunity to attend WSL Conf last week. When we recorded episode 344, it was in the midway point. We were actually breaking from the conference to record the show. Now it's all done. And the thing that is particularly unique about WSL Conf is, A, first WSL Conf ever. And that was kind of a unique opportunity

for a bunch of Linux users to show up at Microsoft. And B, it was one of the first tech conferences that had to pivot to an online format because of the developing COVID-19 situation. Right at the start of this wave, yeah. Yeah. And so not only was having WSL Conf for the first time ever an interesting thing worth talking about, but being the first tech conference to have it to go to have to go online only also was a very interesting kind of let's talk about this moment. So we invited two different individuals on the show. Sohini.

I'm Sohini Biancaroy. I am a product manager at Canonical. And returning to the show, Hayden. Hi, I'm Hayden Barnes. I'm a senior developer advocate at Canonical. And they were fundamental to pulling off WSL Conf and converting it to an online conference. Now you'll note they're both Canonical employees. They were working in partnership with Microsoft to do this, but this was a community driven event and they were the spear of that community. And so we wanted to have both of them on the show to talk about some of the dynamics of that, what that was like to kind of reach the point where we're going to have a conference about the Windows subsystem for Linux. Really? Why?

Sponsored by Canonical? Yeah. Like this isn't a Microsoft thing that's happening. Like what's going on here? And having attended it, feeling like we learned something, it was worth having these individuals on to really kind of chat about this and maybe even get some advice for future conferences that are also going virtual. So Hayden and Sohini are joining us now to talk about WSL Conf. And I, as an attendee, thought we should probably start at the very beginning and ask, why WSL Conf now? So, Hini, do you want to start with that one?

Sure, I'd love to. I think it actually started, well, it started in 2016, really, when Microsoft announced at Builds that they were going to invest in a partnership with us for Bash on Ubuntu for Windows. And now here we are many years later, but the community around it is just growing. And we've seen so many people who are thanking us right and left for supporting this. And we decided to get together a little bit to see what they're up to, to figure out how we can better support them. But it's also, they're really innovating really impressively in the space. And I think there was so much that we could have learned from our open source partners. And we wanted to get everyone together to figure out what happens next. And it also feels like the impending official release of WSL2

played a role in the timing of this. Certainly that demonstrated momentum in the platform. We announced WSLConf in the fall after WSL2 was announced at Build. So that certainly kind of rolled into the momentum and had something to do with the timing. Yeah. Well, and watching a lot of the presentations, it really seemed like a lot of it was individuals that are heavily using the subsystem, digesting how WSL2 will change workflows or improve workflows. And that was like a big part of the conference.

Absolutely. WSL2 unlocks a lot of new possibilities for developers. And, you know, with that full Linux application support on Windows. So I have a question for both of you. So Sahini, let's start with you. Have you observed much pushback or skepticism from the community around Canonical working with Microsoft on this? Because I get a sense of pressure

from a portion of our audience that it's a little suspicious, the whole subsystem thing. And so I imagine if you're heavily involved with this, it may have come your way. I'm curious about that. Yeah, I think we live in a community that just loves the authenticity of open source and community-driven activity. So it feels natural to be suspicious when companies are working together to build something that affects the community in this way. But I think all I see is the potential for our resources combined together. So I'm hoping that when we continue to build these community events, that we are really showing how much the community impacts how we build what we're doing together.

And I don't know if that directly answers the question, so feel free to push on me a bit there. I get what you're saying because I think I observe that. It's sort of what I observe is there's people that are getting the work done that are seeing this as another tool that they're going to use, and then there's people that are just expressing an observational concern and maybe are not directly involved with the actual work getting done. Do you know what I mean? It's fair. So I might let Hayden push back on any additional perspective there, but I think we're just excited to keep working together because we just keep hearing so much great feedback from clients who are just excited about what we've been put out there.

So I think I'm holding on to the positivity and I'm going to keep doing great work for everybody else. Good for you. There was a lot of excitement about things at the conference. So clearly people want to get work done. I think that is just the way you get it. You get to go forward is you just focus on the people that are getting the work done. And Hayden, I'm curious on your observations on concerns or suspicions or your overall thoughts on it. We've talked about this in the past, and

there's a certain segment of the Linux community that is going to be resistant, if not a little upset by what we're doing. And I think the vast majority of open source contributors understand that there's a role for community, there's a role for corporations. And we really tried to balance that at WSL Conf. A lot of, you know, what you didn't see is that all the parties working on that took a lot of steps to make sure that that remained an independent community event. And that's what we're focusing on. So the concern that Microsoft

is somehow going to influence, you know, how we do things here at Ubuntu is just not founded. Yeah, it's sort of like implying that DigitalOcean is impacting the way that Ubuntu images are created. It's another, actually, I think, very clever target for Ubuntu, and I think you guys are going at it in a really kind of aggressive way, which I congratulate you for. So let's pivot a little bit to the actual event itself. Before we get to the big change to virtual,

I'm not sure who might have the most experience, but I'd love to know what it was like interfacing with Microsoft to set up space on their own campus for a Linux event. A lot of the images were, you know, Linux arrives at Microsoft and it felt fun and unique and it felt like a real moment. Microsoft actually sponsors reactor spaces. And I think there's about seven or eight throughout the world and open source projects and communities can reserve those spaces free of charge. And they let us reserve a space for two whole days. And that's open to meetups, user groups, other small conferences. So they were very welcoming and opened their doors to us and hosted us.

And we were appreciative of that. They did a lot of work for us that we ended up, of course, not having to rely on. But, you know, we still we made the best of it. And we look forward to having an in-person event down the line. Yeah, I could see it still. It seems like the virtual one was pretty successful. So I could definitely see it still. It seems like the virtual one was pretty successful, so I could definitely see that happening. Let's talk about the internal decision process that must have just been. Couldn't have been easy.

It must have been super hard. And especially the timing of this whole COVID-19 stuff is this was a few weeks ago where this discussion must have started. Now it seems inevitable from where we sit now. But how did this begin and how difficult was that conversation? And really kind of at the end of it, ultimately, what made the decision to go virtual? You know, with toilet paper, a highly coveted item and quarantine memes just all over my social media, it seems kind of like you said, inevitable and obvious that we would have switched to a virtual event. But if I take a moment to go back to the mentality of March 2nd, which was eight days before our conference was supposed to happen, the mentality was a little uncertain. before being like, it's 80% sure we're doing this right in person. And that morning, Seattle, King County public health and communications leadership came out and they actually said,

you know, we are not recommending widespread cancellations of gatherings or schools. KubeCon sent an email saying we're definitely going forward. Emerald City Comic Con, which is obviously in Seattle, said they were going forward. That decision switched March 6th. But things changed really quickly. And we, I think, just had a conversation together and we were like, will we take the risk of having people come over, maybe their visa is being denied, maybe people getting stuck in Seattle or Redmond, and then the risk of further infection for people becoming hosts of this virus was that risk worth the collaboration that we could achieve and some of the melding of the minds that we could have achieved in that personal, intimate environment in Redmond. And we decided that

we could switch the intention of the event, make it virtual, expand access to people, get the world out about what people are doing with WSL, get that energy, and then reschedule for that in-person event for later in the fall. So that was really tough. And we had to kind of change our mentalities. We've been working towards this event for months. and it was so exciting to finally be able to meet all these people we've been chatting with online for forever. I feel like one of our presenters is one of my best friends now because we're just constantly in contact now. It was a hard decision, but I'm excited again that we were able to expand that access the way that we did. Yeah, and having attended the virtual conference, I expected it to be much rougher, honestly, because of the last minute nature

of having to make this pivot. And it sounded like there was even a change out of which technology platform was going to be used to doing it. That must have been a complete scramble. Oh gosh, yeah. There were three really critical pieces that we had to be really strategic about.

One was just the presenters. We wanted to make sure they were comfortable and confident in presenting to a different kind of audience, a different cadence, different tempo. So we had presenters come in. We did one-on-ones with a lot of presenters and making sure their audio was good, they felt comfortable with all the new technology. And in one of those sessions, we were trying out Microsoft Teams and some folks just, we had kind of unexplainable issues, things that we weren't able to pinpoint.

And I'm sure Microsoft Teams had a little bit of a backlog and we had three business days to make the switch. And we realized on the Friday before our event teams had a little bit of a backlog and we had three business days to make the switch. And we realized on the Friday before our event that Microsoft teams, there were just too many glitches and the risk was too high. We just, we so wanted it to be a really smooth event, not filled with mic taps and, oh, you know, forgot to install something. So we, it was a tough decision going away from Microsoft Teams, but we already had a relationship with BlueJeans and we were already set up to go

with a pretty large event through BlueJeans. And we figured that would be the right step for us at that time. You both were very active in the community during all of this, answering questions from attendees. Hayden, I'm curious if you have any lessons learned from replicating the hallway track in a virtual conference or any other thoughts on lessons learned from both of you. But we'll start with Hayden here because a lot of things are switching virtual. It sounds like our beloved LinuxFest Northwest

is going to go at some version of this. What can we pass on to them? We felt like trailblazers here because not only are we a WSL conference, but as far as I know, we're one of the first open source conferences to pivot this quickly to a virtual event. Some of the lessons that I've taken away. So for example, we had a round of testing with teams, with our presenters, and we identified some issues and we worked through those issues.

And then we had a second round of testing. And then we determined that our solutions to those issues were not effective. And that's when we made our pivot. Had I had, you know, the advantage of the perspective that I have now, we would have engaged a team sooner rather than later. would have engaged a team sooner rather than later. And I will say from that, from now on for any in-person event, I will always have, how do we pivot this to a virtual event in the back of my mind?

Cause you never really planned for a worldwide global viral pandemic. You sure don't. So we planned for a lot of things and we had a lot of great things lined up. But honestly, this one caught us by surprise. And I think moving forward, there's going to be a whole proliferation of tools and best practices kind of coming some of the things that I've built that I'm most proud of, they've been over a beer or over dinner or some weird offhand exchange with people that I met at a so important because I wanted to still create aspects of networking, of connection, of jokes, of some personal human interaction from a virtual event. And so we had a few polls, we had the Telegram channel, and I think those were good starts. If I were to think about any future virtual events, I'd want to maybe facilitate maybe like topics that people can sign up for in small groups and just share things that they're

working on or ask questions in a smaller controlled environment so people feel more comfortable engaging and sharing what they're up to. Because I think presenting or being a presenter is much harder than networking or having these side conversations, if that follows. Yeah, it does. And maybe facilitating little virtual birds of a feather type sessions that seem to be popular at events.

As great as Telegram can be, you often have the loudest and most communicative folks sort of dominate there. So yeah, smaller sessions. Sounds like good lessons learned, but I mean, really, hats off. I expected it to be so much rougher and the core value of the event was truly there. It really was. It was a great conference.

I feel like it shifted my whole perspective on the subsystem for Linux and made me kind of appreciate the fact that ultimately it's going to mean more Linux applications and more things written for the Linux platform and more people learning Linux commands and Linux syntaxes. And ultimately, it's going to be a good thing for Linux. Absolutely. I think Hayden and I, when we were first checking together, was what do we want out of all of this?

And it was Linux for everybody. And I think WSL has been a great way for us to expand that mission, that project. Absolutely. We just got, Microsoft just announced today that they've passed 1 billion Windows 10 devices. And we see that as 1 billion potential WSL users to get them into the Linux ecosystem and trained on those Linux skills.

And contributing to the code, open source. Let's get more. Let's get more. Boy, I couldn't say it better myself. Well, thank you both very much. Thank you for the great event. And thanks for coming on and telling us a little bit of the behind the scenes from it. Thanks for having us. It's been our pleasure. Thank you so much. I won't lie. It's not quite the same not being there in person. And as we were wrapping up that conversation, my thought was, I wish I would have been able to have this exact conversation in person with them. Oh yeah, I was really looking forward to meeting you.

Yeah, but at the same time, the core thing was actually still very useful. I attended this thing and I learned something. And if that is something, that's a decent return on my investment of time. I think they both talked about it there,

recognizing right away that you had to approach this thing from a totally different angle and philosophy about what you. Well, and I think they both talked about it there, recognizing right away that you had to approach this thing from a totally different angle and philosophy about like what you were building. And I think that helped make it a success because it wasn't trying to be a physical event. It really was a virtual event to teach and get the word out about WSL. It's also a lot more possible when you can leverage tools like BlueJeans and Telegram and Twitter to kind of get the word out about a very changing event.

But if they were to say, hey, you know what? We've decided to have a September or October WSL Conf in person, I'd go. It was sort of perfect timing since we were running Windows 10 as well and using the new terminal and using the subsystem. So we were kind of hip to everything they were talking about. All right. Well, how about we do a little epics before we get out of here?

We've got two for you this week. Number one is something that I think might be useful for those of you who are working from home and need to manage a VPN and want to do something at the network level, or maybe it's just time to try out WireGuard. Friends, check out PyVPN, want to do something at the network level, or maybe it's just time to try out WireGuard, friends, check out PiVPN, the simplest VPN installer designed for

Raspberry Pis. Of course you'd like this. You just wanted an excuse to get another Pi stuck in your RV somewhere. Exactly. And say WireGuard. You know, whenever I have an opportunity to say WireGuard. WireGuard. I have an opportunity to say WireGuard. WireGuard.

WireGuard. And it also actually supports OpenVPN as well, which turns out people still use. But this is kind of nice, right? It's OpenVPN or WireGuard on Raspbian, and it just walks you through all of it. Really simple. You can just, if you want, you can just curl a command, pipe it right into Bash, and you're off to the races. I only laugh because what could go wrong with those kinds of approaches? But it's a really neat idea for network-level VPN. And seeing WireGuard get one step closer to implementation,

you know, to make it a little bit easier to use WireGuard. This is more of that tooling on top to help make it easy. That's going to make WireGuard magic when that happens. And this is one step towards that. It's when you can just forget that it's

there at all. Yeah. Kind of like, is it a subspace? The application to... You know, there's a couple other ones now. Oh, yeah?

We should give them a try. Oh, yeah? I'd like to because now that I've been like reloading all my systems, I don't have like any of my

WireGuard stuff set up. So we need to fix that. We should totally fix that. But Cheesy, you also have something for the folks that might be working at home and suffer with RSI like I do. It's called BreakTimer. Yeah. So BreakTimer.app is a great open source. Basically, BreakTimer is exactly what it is.

It's available for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. So if you're working at home and you're just glued to your screen, instead of getting up and taking a break, well, this is a super simple app that'll help you. It'll give you reminders to go take a break. So you can skip the reminders if you'd like. One of the things that I thought was really neat that I haven't seen some of these other apps do is the idle rest. So if there's no activity going on, you're not moving your mouse, you're not typing anything, the timer will restart itself whenever you get back to your machine. So say if you took your break, you set your break for two minutes or whatever, and you come back in five minutes, your timer won't automatically start. Your timer will start again

as soon as you start being active on your machine. So really cool, really simple little app. You know, great looking little UI. You can schedule your work hours so it won't bug you when you're gaming on the weekends or something like that. Nice. I like that idle timer detection.

That's clever. And of course, it's GPL3, which is nice. It seems like just enough of a tool. You know, not too much, but just something to help you keep track and remind you to go stretch for a while. Yeah, I actually find this really useful when I'm editing. Yeah, that's an especially repetitive activity. Yeah, I get in the zone.

I forget to take a break. I can imagine it's probably similar for developers. You get in the zone, you're really in the flow. You don't want to stop. That's the last thing you want to do is stop. Yeah. And you can also have the notification be just, you know, a normal notification, or you can have it actually fill out your entire screen to say, start your break now, fool.

And of course you can set your text as well. So I would just go with the built-in notifications, you know, but I do like the full screen is like if you really want to be heavy-handed about it, be your own boss, you know. Go tell future self, do this. I'm making the rules. Yeah. I think that is actually a really good idea.

So it's called Break Timer. So those are two picks for you, Pi VPN and Break Timer. And of course, we'll have links to those and everything we've talked about at linuxunplugged.com slash 345. And we'd love to have your feedback and ideas, linuxunplugged.com slash contact, and join us in that ongoing conversation

at jupyterbroadcasting.com slash telegram. Anything you want to plug there, Mr. Westpain? Why don't you check out techsnap.systems? Mm-hmm. Wes and Jim Salter from Ars Technica breaking down things twice a month at techsnap.systems. I'll plug chrislast.com slash consulting. The hardest thing about launching a podcast now

is actually making a podcast that stands out. I'm taking my 10-plus years of experience and helping people with their shows at chrislast.com slash consulting. Check that out. Of course, the show is live on Tuesdays. Join us live. Makes the show, makes the show.

Great mumble, great chat room. The best. People tell me Linux Unplugged has the best. jupyterbroadcasting.com slash calendar for your local time. And jblive.tv is where you can go to get the embedded chat and the video. The audio, of course,

released later at linuxunplugged.com. The cleaned up, proper edition that has 99.9% of the viewer and listenership. But if you want a little extra fun, that's the live stream. Either way, we appreciate you. Thanks for joining us.

We'll see you back here next Tuesday. the unplug program you know just something uh something that's really cool about that pie vpn i don't know if you guys noticed, but apparently it also works on Amazon's free tier using Ubuntu or Debian. That's adorable. Yeah, if you need that AWS free tier, set you up some Ubuntu, some Debian, throw some PyVPN on top, man, you got you a good meal. You could do like a cooking show version of putting services together. Like you take a dash of it. Add some lager. With a little sprinkle of Ansible.

Maybe a dash of salt. No, Ansible is the recipe, of course, right? Right, right, yeah. Well, you use your Ansible. You make sure your thing has a dash of salt in it just to, you know, make sure everything's all gravy. Right. Make sure your thing has a dash of salt in it just to, you know, make sure everything's all gravy. And I'm curious, can we get like just can I get a sample consulting tip for free from Chris?

Yeah. Yeah. What would be what would be your free giveaway? Like free trial. Click on my link and this is what you get. Don't launch a podcast. Yeah. I think that's a great idea. But how about cheesy? I mean, if I was going to like consult with you, you know, so if you know you and I are going to have a call, what the way it works is,

of course, is first, if you had a podcast, I get links from you and I do like a full review. I'd listen to your show. I look at your site. I look at how you distribute the podcast. I look at your feed. I look at your social presence. I look at your show notes. I look at how you distribute the podcast. I look at your feed. I look at your social presence. I look at your show notes. I look at how you get audience feedback. I mean, I go all in, like you know I would do for one of our shows. And then we have the call, and I tell you what you're doing right. I tell you what you're doing wrong. But for you, what I would tell you is, well, number one, you've got a great design sense,

so you could really launch something that has a real visual style. But secondarily, I think you could clearly own that beer slash Linux space, you know, the Venn diagram where beer and Linux cross. You could completely own that market. And if you launched a podcast, I would definitely recommend for you, it's beers with Linux. Nice.

I feel reminded of something that you did long ago. That would be cool. Yeah, beer is quite tasty. Beer is quite tasty. Well, Chris, I forgot to talk to you about scale. Oh, yeah, totally. I'd love to hear. I'd love to hear.

Hold on. Do you want to do the official Jill, our reporter on the scene from Scalewell? We'll pretend like you're on the scene, okay? Sure. Because obviously you're no longer. Okay. All right. Very good.

Let's go. We'll go first. We'll bring in our star reporter. Oh, my gosh. It's Anderson Cooper, everybody. Ladies and gentlemen, reporting on the scene in California, it is Jill, the Linux girl, on our Scale livestream. Jill, what are you learning at Scale 2020? Oh, what's been awesome is because of, unfortunately, because of the virus, we had a very small community-like feel at scale, which was awesome.

It was kind of like scale six years ago. But one of the highlights was seeing Elle do her talk on Confessions of Assisted Men. Oh, that's a good talk. Yeah. Yes. It was really good. And it was the first time she had done it alone. Oh, that's a good time. Yeah. It was really good. And it was the first time she had done it alone. So, yeah. So, and it was really, really nice to get to talk to Elle, Elle more outside

of, you know, Twitter and, um, um, Jupiter Broadcasting. So that was wonderful. But yeah. So even though a lot of the big companies weren't there, they couldn't send their people out, but they were still sponsoring the event. Oh, that's good. But as a result, they sent to the booths, they sent all the local community there. So it was probably pretty much 50% of Los Angelinos because of that. Yeah. It sounds like it was kind of a special scale then. It was. It was.

It was. It really felt like scale, you know, was about, you know, like I was saying, six or seven years ago. But we still had, even though normally we have over 5,000 in attendance, we still had 3,500, which was really, really good. That is not, I mean, so that's about half, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. So what did the expo like haul? Like, you know, where all the booths are? Like how different was that? Cut in about 40%, which was a little weird because we're used to seeing that, as you know, Chris, that whole haul just completely full. Right.

But we still had a lot of people. Like I had a lot of people coming to the linux chicks la booth and i still was able to get a lot of good interviews for linux gamecast good which and lww so and it was just it it really everyone was very careful to not you know um uh you know touch these are others hands it. We were trying as much to do fist bumps and shoulder bumps. Really? Getting creative.

So it must have been like an ongoing conversation the entire conference. Yes, it was. And the fact that we were the only tech conference that hadn't been canceled and was still going on.

And I know if scale had happened the next week, we would have been canceled, you know, of course. So, but it was a very wonderful event, despite what's going on in the world. And what was also really cool is a lot of the speakers who had canceled, people filled in for them at the last minute. Oh, wow. Like the Kubernetes track was really awesome because the whole track was going to be canceled. And then everyone said, well, I can come in and do the talk literally like the day before. So it turned out I didn't go to that track, but everyone said it was wonderful

as a result of the spontaneity. That's nice. It's cool to see people step up like that. I know about that. I could talk about that. I wasn't planning to, but I'll do it. Yeah, that was just really cool. And it was, you know, again, it was really great to talk to Elmore and Nurtsy Sanchez as well.

I got to talk with her and she was wonderful. Her brunch with Brent was great too. Yes. In fact, oh man, I meant to mention that in the housekeeping. The last few brunches with Brent have been so killer. Oh, awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Oh gosh. Well, you know, has it crossed your mind that might be the last tech event of the year you attend? Yeah. I, cause I wanted to go to Linux Fest Northwest, of course, and was planning to and was just about ready to look into the trains. Oh, nice way to do it. Good for you. Yeah, but next year for sure.

Or if it's put off, who knows, it might happen the end of the year. Yeah, you never know. Some of them might reschedule. I feel like most of them probably won't. Yeah, unfortunately. The year without a conference. What about OSCON? Would you consider going to OSCON if it continues in July? Yeah, OSCON actually is one I've never been to. And the irony of it is scale is bigger than OSCON normally. You could take the train to OSCON though.

Yes, you can. Yeah. So I've been wanting to go there. Well, we'll see what happens. You know, it seems like every week it is an entirely different world we're living in right now. History is being made as we live right now. Yeah. But it's so awesome that our penguins are still marching. You know, we still have scale. We still have the Linux community and it's been my resp our penguins are still marching. You know, we still have scale. We still have the Linux community. And it's been my respite in all this madness. True. And we have our virtual look.

Yes. Yes. And Jupyter Broadcasting. Yay. Oh, and it was so cool. A couple people came up to me that had heard my brunch with Brent. Oh, that's wonderful. And what was really sweet is one of our Jupyter Broadcasting listeners, he wanted a picture with me.

Who wouldn't? Yeah, that's true. I wish I could have gotten a picture this year. Yeah, next year, Chris, for sure. Okay. You promise? Yes, I promise.