LINUX Unplugged - 350: Focal Focus

Episode Date: April 22, 2020

The latest Ubuntu LTS is here, but does it live up to the hype? And how practical are the new ZFS features? We dig into the performance, security, and stability of Focal Fossa. Plus our thoughts on the new KWin fork, if Bleachbit is safe, and a quick Fedora update. Special Guests: Brent Gervais and Drew DeVore.

I wonder if you could place what that sound is. I would not be able to, but it's something actually pretty nerdy. There is a post by Dan Maloney on Hackaday about how they were able to connect a CrunchBang Linux box to a teletype, a 1930s teletype, and print out the console information right there on the teletype. Here's what it sounds like when the dude logs into his machine. I should do it. I put myself in lowercase mode here. I put myself in lowercase mode here. So.

I have a shell prompt. And that's where we'll see if my work test works. And you're seeing right there character returns and every command prompt that would come up. You have to sit there and wait for it to print. Yeah, it turns out at 45.5 BPS, things are pretty slow. Also, this was way before ASCII was invented. It was the Bado code. So they had to use a custom little mega chip or you could use an Arduino or something to do the translation because ASCII didn't exist yet. Pretty wild. It's really worth the link in the show notes.

Linuxunplugged.com slash 350. You got to check this out. It's super nerdy. Hello, friends, and welcome into episode 350 of your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. 350 feels good, Wes. It's an achievement, that's all right. It feels real good. Coming up on today's program, we're taking a look at Ubuntu 20.04,

the next big LTS from Canonical, the Fuchsia, if you will. We're going to look at the main release as well as some of the details and the flavor, some goodies you can expect in there, our experience of it on the kernel, my experience with the Raspberry Pi 4, and as well as just our general impressions using this new release. Plus, we have a whole bunch of community news, some picks to get into, and a lot more. So before we go any further, I got to say hello to that virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Yay!

Linux Tuesday happiness. Howdy. Oh my goodness. Whoa. I mean, how incredible is that, really? I mean, you can't make heads or tails of it, but you can tell it's impressive. It's sheer Linux passion. It is so much passion. There are like 58 people in here. It's a record, I think. It's pretty great. So hello, everybody. Glad to have you there. It's a fun episode. And some of you were there for our virtual lug hangout on

Sunday that wrapped up after, I think, Computer Kid was saying eight hours. I was only there for a couple. Wow. But that was a lot of fun. So we have a lot to get into today. I wanted to start with the news like we usually do, pulling in a few more headlines these days that may have made it in LAN into Linux Unplugged to try to give them some attention. And one that got my attention is some improvements that Tuxedo is making to the user experience with a new power and thermal control center for their Linux systems. Yeah, if you don't remember, Tuxedo is the German Linux PC vendor,

and they've launched the Tuxedo Control Center to provide a GUI-driven control plane for managing thermal and power settings on your systems. It provides a basic dashboard and control area for creating power and thermal profiles, tuning the CPU power management behavior, and related features. Now, of course, much of this functionality has already been available via third-party utilities, but it's nice to see this sort of baked right in, especially for maybe new Linux users, right? Yeah, especially maybe their exact customer base who wants something that's a little more out of the box and ready to go.

The Tuxedo Control Center is open source. It initially will be available with easy access for Ubuntu and OpenSUSE users, but there's no reason it really couldn't be packaged up more broadly. I'm not sure what they've used to build this, but what you end up with is icons that represent things like cooling and power, and then you just sort of click around to get the desired configuration. Taking a look at GitHub, it does seem to be an Electron app. Now, there are some downsides there, but it should mean getting it running

on whatever distro you eventually choose to use. Should be a snap. I see what I did there. I do. And it is actually even simpler than that. So you probably will see it. And like we were kind of thinking, it's using just backend tools that are already available,

but it's bringing it all in one place. So it seems like that should be portable. Speaking of Linux laptops, though, we got me a Lemur Pro from System76. What? It may actually arrive while we're recording. So if you hear a little ding-dong on the door, that's probably my laptop. And then I'll be

very distracted. I know, right? I went through and kind of did like a pre-configure on what I would buy if I was going to get a little more pro. I decided I'd keep it with the base 4.2 gigahertz i5. It is tempting to go to the i7 4.9. It's only $200 more. But I just don't know if I'd really notice the difference.

And I might save a little power and temperature this way. Look at you being reasonable today. I know. And because I'm a gentleman, I went with 24 gigs of RAM. I don't need 40 gigs of RAM. Oh, come on, but today. I know. And because I'm a gentleman, I went with 24 gigs of RAM. I don't need 40 gigs of RAM. Oh, come on, but 40. I know. How could you resist?

What's the price difference there? It felt like the sweet spot. It was a $60 upgrade. That's not bad. Yeah, and then to go to 40 gigs is like a lot more than that. And then for OS, I upgraded from the standard 240 gigabyte SSD to a 1 terabyte MVME. That's what I would go with. And that was a $280-ish bump in price, but that seems like it'd be worth it. You can get a second MVME drive, but I didn't bother. Again, going supes reasonable. And I didn't tweak anything else with it. That's

all I changed. I just adjusted those couple of things. So I kept the one-year warranty. I didn't buy the extra power adapter. Actually, you know, I almost always buy the extra power adapter. I mean, you're going to lose one of them. Yeah. So I'll go ahead and add that. I mean, let's be realistic here. If I was going to buy this, my grand total for the new LeMouer Pro would be $1,564.

Not too bad. No, it's really not. When you consider you can hardly even get into a decent MacBook for less than two grand. I mean, this will be a multi-year machine for sure. Yeah. So that's coming and I'll have a review for it. I don't actually know what configuration they sent because it's a review unit and I did not spec it, but I am very much looking forward to trying it.

It's good timing for me right now. I'm sort of in the zone for a new laptop. You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. ThinkPad's great, but that screen. Yeah, that's really the limiting factor. And those speakers.

So bad. And you know what? I use my speakers. I use my speakers. Turns out there's a lot of audio clips to listen to. It's just so bad. Like, we still laugh

about how bad the speakers are on our ThinkPads. Almost every week, really. I mean, it's a great machine. Powerful. Gets work done. Great battery life. I love it, but

there could be some improvements. Yeah. So Gets work done. Great battery life. I love it. But there could be some improvements. Yeah. So I checked the old UPS shipping tracker and it is in our town right now. So it's supposed to

get here today. It's coming for us. So listen for the ding dong. It may be here. Wouldn't that be great if it just got here during housekeeping

or something? The LEMUR Pro will be probably in next week's episode or the week after just depending on how much time I get to spend reviewing it properly. If you've got any questions, linuxunplugged.com slash contact or at chrisles on the Twitter. Start sending them in now and let me know, and I'll try to incorporate them into the old review.

Now, we don't always talk about software forks here on the podcast because, let's be honest, there's a lot of them. But when we do talk about software forks, we talk about the good ones. And this seems like one of them. I have so much appreciation and respect for what the entire Plasma project team has done, but specifically the folks that work on KWIN. However, in this last week, a new fork was announced. It's called KWIN-FT, with a goal to accelerate the development and better improve Wayland support. And maybe the more interesting thing about it is who's doing the fork? Yeah, this was announced by Roman Gilk, the same developer who became a contractor for Valve last year, and part of his work there was actually to improve KWIN. So it looks like this may have come as a result of that previous work. What's interesting about KWIN-FT, as the fork is known,

is that it's supposed to be a drop-in replacement for KDE's window manager KWIN and the accompanying underlying KWALAND library. So for the moment, this may break as more changes are added to the project, but right now, you can just drop it in. Okay. So that drop in replacement thing, I guess that makes sense. You know, if you're just starting to fork, you're making probably minimal changes at first, so it would be compatible. And you want it to be sort of easy for developers to actually get it running on their system and test those changes. That said, it's pretty freaking cool that if you're on Manjaro and you have the unstable repos turned on, you can just replace KWIN with this, and it's supposedly

in a lot better shape. Essentially, what the developer says, what Roman said was that he looked at making these changes directly in mainline KWIN, but the project has a very real world constraint, and that is people use it. A lot of people use it. I mean, it can be really difficult to totally re-architect, fix, you know, things that have been assumed and at the base of the project for years and years, especially when there's so many passionate Plasma users out there. And you have what we all love to call as stakeholders. You got lots of stakeholders with a project like KWIN. We love KWIN, but wouldn't you be pretty mad if you just upgrade?

You didn't realize these major changes were in there and suddenly your desktop starts crashing? I would be. Yeah, there's all those use cases they have to accommodate. So I think when the developer, Roman Gligg, or Gilg? Gilg? Gilg? Gilg.

When he came up against these constraints and saw what he classified as really significant problems. And I don't know how true that is, but when you read his actual post, his original post, in his estimation, there were alarmingly, like, I think he used the word shockingly bad. It is always a little difficult to tell. I mean, one developer's shock is another developer's like, yeah, we know about these problems, we're working on them, but it's hard to fix. One developer's shock and awe is another developer's everyday technical debt. Right, yeah, exactly. There are some interesting things that have already been included, including a rework of KWIN's composition pipeline. That sounds like a big deal,

especially since according to some early feedback, it improves the presentation greatly on both X11 and Wayland. Plus there's a new timer that helps minimize the latency from image creation to actually getting it on your screen. And we all want things to be fast. The other thing that's nice is support for the Wayland viewporter extension. I'm sorry, what? Wayland viewporter extension, which enables better presentation of content, for example, video players, and with the next ex-Wayland release,

emulating resolution changes for older games. So if you've got some older game that expects to be run at some super tiny resolution, that should just work better under Wayland. Oh, that actually will be nice. I have ran into that. In fact, I was just talking about in our Luplug meeting on Sunday

why I had to stop gaming on Wayland after months of it working. And that was one of the reasons I ran into an issue like that. This is an early thing. I mean, we're talking about the very first release. It's basically packaged for Arch systems at this point. It's very early days. But this fork phenomenon is both a bad thing and a good thing. But I want to talk about why it's a good thing just for a moment. It is a bypass switch that does not exist in other forms of business or software development. When you in business or in regular commercial software development, when you hit a group of stakeholders who are unwilling to make changes because of justifiable reasons, insert whatever they might be here, you're dead in the water. There's nothing you can do about it. There's no alternative choice. But with open source and free software, if you get to the point where you feel like the organization is perhaps hampering the

future of the actual software development itself, you can fork it. There's not copyright law and IP law. I mean, in some cases, but in most genuine free software project cases, they can't come after you for it. Right. I mean, there's no guarantee that your fork will be popular or anyone will use it, but you totally have the freedom to go explore. And sometimes those changes eventually make it back upstream or things re-merge, or you just end up with two healthy projects. But think about how empowering that is for software developers. Because imagine yourself, imagine maybe you have a situation at work or with family or your church or whatever it is where you've been advocating for something to be done differently, but for justifiable reasons,

quote unquote, nothing's happening. Nobody will do anything. And you're just dead in the water. You can take no action. How empowering is it that as a software developer, you can fork in these cases? And I think we can all think of some very, very, very, very successful forks that have eventually become the main project long term. I mean, it also sort of underscores to me that it's not, you know, this isn't the KDE

project's code. It's not some developer's code. It's everyone's code. It's free software. That's a good point, too. It's the people's code, Wes. I say fork away. And I'd like to see where this goes.

Maybe eventually some of these things get incorporated back into mainline KWIN. Who knows, right? Right. And it might just end up as an experimental project to sort of explore the possibilities for future directions without committing to those changes in the upstream project. Now, of course, it's not perfect with forks. There are downsides that we've talked about all the time, including splitting labor and might just end up with no one using the fork for a lot of wasted effort. Right. It's not a guaranteed thing, is it, Minimac? Yeah, it's always the same with these forks. You have to find some other developers supporting you, otherwise it stays a one-man show.

Yeah, and you've got to get users. It's not a slam dunk. It's an interesting feature of free software that I don't think is very prevalent in other software development, or even just general business practices. It's certainly fascinating to watch. Yeah, it is. All right, I want to debate something with you guys, see what you all think about this. Are you familiar with BleachBit? That sounds familiar, but no, not really. When I heard the name BleachBit, I was thinking it was like, uh, like D-Ban, you know, somebody

went in and wiped, you know, a hard drive wiper. But now I remember BleachBit is, it's like a, think of it as like a Linux desktop maintenance program. Oh, like something you might use in Windows to clean things up. Yeah. Like CCleaner was. Yes, exactly. Yeah, like you would see in Windows. Bleachbit is a Python application that goes through and cleans out your Firefox, Chrome, your Opera cache. It'll go through if you use gpotter and clean up some of the old files there. If you've got some VLC caches that haven't been updated in a long time. I didn't even know that existed. It'll do some small fixes to like fixing some pop-up notification things. It's all just specific to the Linux desktop. And they've added specific support for different distros to try to accommodate the way they lay things out and whatnot. And the

idea is, is you run Bleachbit. It says, all right, I've detected this software on your Linux box. This is my recommendation to go clean it up. You're going to save 2.3 gigs or whatever. What is your opinion, Wes Payne, on using these kinds of tools on your desktop? I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you've never run this on your computer. I have not, although I did just install it. I've never run it either. I've run CCleaner on Windows boxes before, though, so I kind of get

the concept. I also don't think that Linux is immune from needing some kind of maintenance, especially a box you've been running a while that's collected some files. Hey, we've all looked under.config and been a little horrified. Yeah. Or surprised that things are still alive in some temp directory years later.

I've definitely done that, too. It does seem a little more difficult on Linux just because there's so much more variation than on the Windows platform. But a lot of this stuff is integrating with things like Firefox and Chrome, which I'm sure are huge offenders, and those are at least standardized.

In some sense, it might be nice to see because users coming from other platforms who are not yet familiar with the strange directory layout in our Unix world, these are hard to find. You might not know if they're safe to delete. So if this is the sort of helping hand you need to feel like you can actively maintain and administer your system, I guess I'm all for it. What do you think about these types of tools, Jeezy? Is Linux too much of a moving target for something like this to work?

That's exactly it. I mean, personally, I would never use anything like this, but, you know, it does raise a valid point that if you're coming from another operating system, you might find a tool like this helpful. But for me, it seems like the ever-evolving state of Linux prohibits this, and you always just end up chasing your own tail. And the devs just have to keep going back over top of these things. And here's this latest iteration. Here's KWIN FT or how do we handle this? How do we handle that? So I think that it's, for me, it's not something I would use. I guess if you feel some sort of, you know, provide you some sort of safety net, use it.

But I would never personally use it. So, Brent, I'm curious to know what you think. You probably often are managing disk space with lots of photos. You could probably eke out a few gigs here and there with a tool like this. Is this something that would appeal to you? Well, I would say in the past, it felt like, you know, those two point whatever gigs that you get back felt really important. But I just feel like these days in the last year or two, maybe three, four for some of us, hard drive space and solid space is just so cheap that

I don't really think about that anymore. Like it's, of course, with my photos, I end up filling up directories pretty quickly, but the effort, even with a great tool like this to kind of wrap my head around cleaning those little files up, it kind of doesn't seem worth the time for me. So I don't know, maybe that's just me. just me yeah disks are cheap and there's a ton of space on there um what about new users computer kid this seems like it could be used for people that haven't really learned the file system yet yeah i would say that if we're gonna have with um linux go mainstream as a um like desktop platform we're gonna need tools like this because for new users this would be

a very nice thing to have especially new users with chromebook level ish under storage filled devices this would be helpful but probably not for like production and stuff right i could see that oh colonel you're you're not necessarily a new user but you've used i believe bleach bit in the past and liked it, right? Yeah, so where I've used Bleachbit in the past is it makes it really easy to find caches for certain programs. And I've had desktop environments glitch out on me, and I've used Bleachbit to go and wipe its caches, and it fixes the problem. Same thing with a few other programs. You know, like Cheesy was saying,

I think part of the problem here is that Linux is a big moving target, and so this application would have to get updated all the time. However, that's also perhaps an argument for the application, because you could then say, well, Linux is a moving target all the time. I don't have time to learn where stuff's getting relocated, so I will just trust that these developers, who will probably probably know more than me will problematically solve this for me. So I could see that as a justification for it too. Does seem to have some nice safeguards. Like I was going to select some stuff to clean up Firefox

and it warned me that I was about to delete any save passwords I have, which I don't manage them that way, but it's good to know. How does this registry cleaning function work? Oh man, Windows. It really seems more necessary on Windows, but a nice to have on Linux, basically. And I do wonder if there isn't maybe two or three or four things it does that are actually pretty handy

that you couldn't then just go do manually. Well, yeah, I mean, there's one here, like clean up broken desktop files, which I'm not auditing those things. That's nice to have a tool for. Yeah, I've had.desktop files that just sit around forever. Why doesn't something check the path of those things? What an obvious idea.

Yeah, okay, I can kind of see it. You know, maybe that's what Fedora needed to do, because unfortunately Fedora 32, which I think was going to be releasing today as we record, has been bumped as of right now to the 28th of April. So a week from about now, a week and change. We'll find out more. There's going to be another meeting to sort of talk about if that release date looks plausible

this coming Thursday, the 23rd. If you missed our fun with early out-of-memory killers, OK, Oomer, go check out that episode of Linux Unplugged, because we did play around with one of the more fun features of Fedora 32, and that's going to whet your appetite, I think, for this new release. Episode 348. Thank you, Wes. So you just have to wait a few more days to get Fedora 32. And we will actually, it kind of works out for your humble Linux talk show

because now we can do Ubuntu this week and we can do Fedora next week. It would be a little awkward otherwise. Yeah, putting two distro reviews in, it's do Fedora next week. It would be a little awkward otherwise. Yeah, putting two distro reviews in, it's just not really very doable. It's a lot. So the target release date now, of course, things can change. They will meet together. They have a no-go-go meeting, kind of like a space launch for an Apollo rocket. With similar consequences.

Go-no-go flight. Yeah, very similar similar and then they decide if they're going to release and they'll meet again and it looks like the target really release date is april 28th uh carl did i butcher anything in there that you want to fix before we move on does that sound about all right to you i approve okay good thank you sir with no authority yeah no but you're at least closer to the grapevine than I am. Carl says go. You'd probably know.

How about a little housekeeping? Yes, please. You down for that? I'm down for that. Yeah, there's kind of a smell in here. Yeah, we needed to get this done. Go check out Linux Spotlight episode 44. Our very own Drew DeVore, editor of this year's podcast, was featured with Rocco on Linux Spotlight.

Drew, you're on the line. Is there anything you want to tease? Really, I just want to say thank you to Rocco. It was a really good interview. His style is fantastic, very laid back. And we had a lot of fun talking about really just everything surrounding Linux and the community and the future of it and really where things stand. So it was really nice to sit down with him and yeah, go check it out. I like that. You can tell, can't you, Drew, when you're working with him that Rocco works really hard on Linux Spotlight. Oh, yeah. It is a fantastic program, and he has put a lot of love into it.

Also, longtime community member Tyler Brown was interviewed on episode 43, so you can go check out that, too. Lots of good stuff in that feed. Yeah. Yep. So go check out Linux Spotlight. We'll have links in the show notes. And I encourage you to join us live.

We do this here show on Tuesdays at noon Pacific. Get it converted at your local time at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. Also, I mentioned it already, but we're doing another get together on Sundays at the same live time. So noon Pacific, but on Sunday, we're all jumping in that mumble room. We're having a good time. I think you and I, we were there for like maybe two and a half hours, two hours. And it was really just getting started by that point. I'm like, I'm going to go eat. I should have just brought the pizza because the guys just had a

great time. Popey showed up a little bit later. Computer kid ended up buying a 3D printer, like the whole thing. So it's like, it was a lot of fun. It's a really nice way to sort of break up the Sunday, just chat with like-minded folks. I think if people keep showing up, they're going to keep doing it. And we're going to make an attempt to show up from time to time, just like I'm sure everybody else was. You know, if Sunday opens up for you, jump on Mumble and come hang out. If you can't make it during the week, it's also a great opportunity. But there's something really nice about having just prolonged conversations with people that know what the hell you're talking about.

When you're talking about Linux and things like that. A nice casual atmosphere, no pressure. Yeah. Say what you want. And if you want to join us in a text conversation throughout the week when the shows are off the air or send us some quick feedback, check out jupiterbroadcasting.com slash telegram. That is our official telegram channel. You know, maybe Brent should tell us too.

A brunch just came out this morning. That's right. Mr. Brent, I believe a new brunch has landed. And for those of us that are fans of the Gnome Persuasion, it's a definite must listen. Yeah, I had a lovely conversation with Sri Ram Krishna. He's been part of the Gnome community for since 98, which I can't fathom. So we kind of explored his, well, things he's seen since then, little shifts in community, the different bridges that have been building in the last year and a half between a bunch of communities. It was a really great chat. So I encourage people to check it out. I love a fresh brunch. Extras.show slash 71. Thank you, Cheese. Yeah. So go check that out.

Also go check out chrislast.com. I got some projects that I'm working on there and any future projects, you'll probably find them there at chrislast.com. If you're ever wondering, hey, where's Chris? What's he up to? chrislast.com. So go check that out. The Unfilter Show's back. It's linked over there as well as a few other things. Check out chrislast.com. That's my personal site. Also, I should have mentioned this earlier. That virtual lug meeting on Sunday also has their own chat room. It's on geekshead, irc.geekshead.net, and it's in pound, lup, lug. Hey, that's easy. Super easy. Sundays, noon Pacific. There's a lot to check out, a lot going on these days, and more down the pipe. So be sure to check back. chrislast.com, Linux Unplugged,

Virtual Lug getting together on Sundays. A lot of cool projects going on right now. I like that. The Lug self-organized. They did this on their own. Very cool. Super cool. And now we just get to show up as members of the community. We don't have to be the ones that are putting it all together and figuring it all out. We just get to be be, it's not about us. It's a community thing. It's very cool for us. So I'm really glad you guys did that. All right. That's all the housekeeping we have.

You ready to talk a little Ubuntu? Finally. A little 2004. So we got the, uh, the focal here. I want to say focus. Is that,

why don't I, why don't I always want to say focus on focal? Why? Yeah. Let's fuck. Yeah. Hey, let's focus, yeah, hey. Let's focus on focal real quick, Wes. What do you say? Now, what is a, what is a fuchsia, Wes?

Do you know what a fuchsia is? Well, I didn't before, but thankfully we did some research. Not a lot of people know about the fuchsia. The fuchsia is the largest carnivore on Madagascar. A fuchsia is a pretty unique animal. If I had to imagine what the common ancestor between the mongooses, the cats, and the hyenas looked like, I imagine it would look a lot like a fusa. You've always said that, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Turns out Madagascar is a weird place full of strange animals. So let's talk about Ubuntu 2004. It is the next long-term support. It'll be supported for five years. There's a couple of big headline features with this one. You're getting baked-in ZFS snapshots if you choose that option during the installer.

And you probably should, even if it's experimental. Yes. You're getting GNOME 3.36 with the Yaru theme installed by default. Beautiful. As well as kernel, was it at 5.5 5.4 ah yes 5.4 but with wireguard uh yes that's right backported right in so let's start here let's start at the zfs snapshots let's just get this out of the way because i think this is this is a big part of what is

in 2004 is the work they've done here. Like a lot of, I think, software engineering, a lot of the software engineering that went into 2004 was around these ZFS snapshots. I crave ZFS. Yeah, I know, Leo. They integrate in at the grub menu level. They integrate

in at the package or manager level. So when you're installing a package, they take snapshots and things like that. And I'm very, very happy to report that on several, more than two occasions. Oh, I don't even know about all these. I used the snapshots to fix something that went wrong on my beta process. And that does happen when you're using pre-release software. Absolutely. And so having these snapshots was very, very useful. And the way they present themselves is you restart and the Grub menu comes up and there's like an advanced option that you

go to in the Grub menu. And there you have all of your snapshots listed. Not super intuitive, not super obvious, like which ones are pre-upgrades or not, because it's all kind of date and time based. Right. So you kind of have to have a sense of when did I last upgrade and when did this break? Which did actually bite me because I at one point went back, but I didn't go back far enough. And you have two options, essentially, when you go back. There's more than that, but you essentially have two options. When you want to restore, you can either go back and just restore the system state, or you can restore the system state along with user data. And you were digging into how that actually functionally works.

Yeah, I mean, they've done a lot of interesting work. There's a whole sort of grub function in there to go find all your snapshots and list it out. All that stuff's integrated with the use of their new ZSYS tool. So anytime you're saying install in an apt package, that triggers a ZSYS call. ZSYS goes and saves the system state. And then if you want to restore user data as well, if it's just the system, you boot right into that snapshot, right? And it just swaps it out, the magic of ZFS. And then they've added some hooks so that if you want to do the user data, that just triggers ZSYS once you've logged in before, you know, as the system is coming up,

and then it'll roll those back too. So ZSYS is a ZFS system tool for targeting a CFS on Linux experience that right now is tailored towards Ubuntu, but in theory, any project could modify this. It's open source. It allows running multiple ZFS systems in parallel on the same machine. How cool is that? And the great thing about snapshots, correct me if I'm wrong, great thing about snapshots is they're differentials. You're not bombing your disk, taking up 30 gig snapshots every time you back your system up. It's a differential and it's almost like pointers in a file system directory.

Yeah. I mean, that's really the magic of copy on write is that you have all these references. And yes, it still does take up some space and you will need to clean up those snapshots eventually, but you're not having to make a whole new copy of every single file unless it actually changed. I actually am not totally clear on what the cleanup process is with ZSYS because I've just not used it long enough to see it auto trim. And on top of that, I've been rapidly installing updates because of the beta period. I will also add that the setup is not necessarily simple.

To make some of this magic work, you've got a root pool and a boot pool and a whole bunch of data sets underneath each. So if you're not familiar with CFS and you're not willing to maybe go poke around a little, do consider that this is an advanced experimental feature. But honestly, so far I haven't had to. Zsys, you almost don't notice it exists besides a couple of messages when you're installing a package that tell you that it's taking a snapshot and these new grub options.

There's really nothing else you need to worry about. You wouldn't even know you're on ZFS. Right. Yeah. I think it would be possible to install an Ubuntu system with ZFS and give it to an end user, and they would never have any idea unless they really dug around. A couple of caveats, though. It requires full disk partitioning. The current implementation, it needs to be set up by the installer to use ZSYS, and it needs to take over your entire disk. And they have sliced things up considerably. Like they've really kind of sliced things up to manage how it does snapshots. And it can be a little complicated when you look at it just as a layman. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of different data sets each mounted, right? So stuff for your home directory, all kinds of different things for

the different root folders. And that makes sense. It gives you more granularity as you're taking these snapshots so you can actually roll back what you want and not one big, huge rollback. Right, like for example, I can roll back just the system software, but my user home directory, all my user setting up app settings, all that remains.

That's pretty freaking nice, Wes. That's where I've been really impressed is it's just for being experimental, for being new, I mean, Zsys hasn't been around that long and it's a brand new app written in Go from Canonical. It all just sort of works. Yeah.

Now, what about, so like, Tyler, you want to use ZFS, and you want to use this new ZSYS system they have on your next server build, right? I've not looked into the new ZSYS system, but I definitely intend on using ZFS as the file system for my server build next month. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting to see what is now possible. I think there's a lot of speculation way back in 1604 when we very first had ZFS built into the kernel. Were there going to be lawsuits? What's going to happen? Is it just some option for, you know, really experienced administrators?

Right. Canonical clearly has some long-term plans here, and that's awesome. So before we move off CFS, I got to touch on what I think is the big picture aspect of this. Because it's not just CFS, it's the snapshots too. And it's snapshots done in a way that I think are a little bit better than anybody else has done them before. Other distributions have had snapshots integrate with their package manager before. This feels like a more comprehensive solution. snapshots integrated with their package manager before. This feels like a more comprehensive solution. And

because of things like ZSYS and the overall approach they're taking and the integration with Grub and the package manager, the entire picture, when you zoom out, what you get, and you know this is a big deal for me, this is legitimately Canonical's first crack at a truly

bulletproof Linux workstation. You knew it. But you're right. This matters so much to me. I want Linux to get to the point where it is absolutely bulletproof. And that's why projects like Silverblue appeal to me. And that's why Canonical integrating these snapshots the way they have appealed to me. Because it means as an end user, my first step towards getting a bulletproof Linux distribution

isn't hours and hours of reading wiki and forms and listening to podcasts. It's not figuring it out from a technical level and building software. It's none of that. I just install the frickin' distribution. Well, it made me think about when we were trying TimeShift out on Linux Mint, and that was great, but you could really tell it was sort of bolted on, hacked on at the end. Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful it exists, but this is designing it from the ground up. By the people that are making the OS.

Right, and powered by ZFS, which, I mean, can you pick a more rock-solid file system? And it's portable. You know, I mean, it's true that they're doing the disk layout and all of that, but at the end of the day, these ZFS snapshots and file systems are portable. Right, you can start taking advantage of things like ZFS send and receive now too. So I really can't underscore how critically important this is as a first step towards the Ubuntu desktop becoming bulletproof. It isn't bulletproof because of this, but man, is this a huge step. I mean, I'm sitting here using my daily driver laptop, my ThinkPad, on a beta because of this. Like, I had things blow up. I will tell you, this was not the smoothest

Ubuntu beta I've ever had. That does seem to be the case, which with a lot of neat new features, you know, there's a lot of things to tweak before you can get it out the door. with a lot of neat new features, you know, there's a lot of things to tweak before you can get it out the door. And if it wasn't for this recovery system and get right back to work, I would have had to nuke and pave. In fact, did you end up having to go back to Plasma?

Yeah, I was planning to do the show on 2004 because why wouldn't I? But having it lock up right before the show was not very encouraging. Yeah, and that was a flat pack thing. I mean, it was something we're going to look into after the show. And if we need to file a bug, we will. I think it's a double-edged sword. I think what happened was is Canonical ran a very successful testing week. At the flip side, that meant that right towards the end, a whole bunch of bug fixes landed, which is good, but not always the recipe you want for an LTS.

but not always the recipe you want for an LTS. So if I was going to run this in production on my server, I might, might wait until a point release or two for 2004. And I might stick with 1804 on my x86 hardware. That being said, as often happens on this show, I'm not actually doing what I preach. I am running on my Raspberry Pi 4 Ubuntu 2004, and I will not run anything else, at least for a while. I will try other distros soon, but frickin' A am I so happy with Ubuntu 2004 on the Raspberry Pi. When Canonical came out and said they're going to make the Raspberry Pi platform a first-class citizen for Ubuntu, they weren't kidding. Big deal. a first-class citizen for Ubuntu, they weren't kidding. Big deal.

2004 on the Raspberry Pi 4 with 4 gigs of RAM in 64-bit mode is the best experience I have ever had, even compared to Raspbian, on a Raspberry Pi. And they've fixed some things that have yet to be fixed in the Raspbian kernel that have landed in the 2004 kernel. So for the Raspberry Pi platform, I'm immediately switching to 2004. That said, on the x86 server side, I think I'm going to wait a little bit because of some of these issues I had during the beta and release candidate period that I think suggest, if you can, give it a few weeks, maybe a couple of months. That's kind of the nice part about a new LTS,

too. There's no rush to use this. It's going to be around for a while. Right. And 1804 is still getting updates. Still great. Still great. So let's talk about some of the flavors here, because as always, there's a lot to talk about in the different flavors when you add it all up. Of course, Kubuntu 2004 is seeing Plasma 5.18 land, which is nice.

That includes things like the new emoji selector which i admit i actually like but more importantly in my daily use i've noticed a much improved gtk theming support oh definitely a lot nicer a lot nicer and there's better options for toggling uh notifications which are for me probably the bane of the largest source of annoyance. And now that both Plasma and GNOME have decent notification management, quality of life has actually gone up on this one. And of course, there's Ubuntu Budgie 2004 seeing their typical release. Yeah, with a brand new application menu inspired by Slingshot. Yeah.

There's also a new native network manager applet for managing wired and Wi-Fi connections. That's nice to see. Are you ready for the big feature in Zubuntu 2004? Oh boy, I mean, it's got to be big, right? Come on, XFCE, they're making changes all the time. Ladies and gentlemen, after years of development, tons of anticipation, I am happy to report that Zubuntu 2004 features a brand new dark theme. You know, I'm surprised you're not more excited considering you are a dark theme kind of guy.

I know. I know. But like, that's just not the kind of thing that's going to get me excited. Because I can just, I was already, that was like, within 30 seconds of using Ubuntu, I would change that. It is nice to see it bundled in there. See, but you got to switch your mindset here. The advantage is there's not too many things changed. So you can just roll on to the next Ubuntu without having to deal with all these interface changes. Suddenly your apps don't work the same way while getting all the underlying 2004 stuff.

Yeah, that's it right there. And that's the point I was going to make. I mean, I was poking fun. But the reality is, is if they just keep the lights on and they rev everything and they just ship a 2004 ISO, they inherit all the improvements of 2004. So, like, job done. You know? They don't need to do much more.

Rock solid. Yeah, yeah. And, of course, Ubuntu Mate sees its update with this one. It's going to get all of the new Mate 1.24 features. Of course, you're going to see better high DPI rendering throughout the entire UI. Lots of nice notification improvements there as well. But, and I thought this was a mistake at first when I was going through the 2004 Mate edition, but then I confirmed it with Wimpy.

They've removed Compass. It's gone. It's gone. Wow. Yeah. At the same time, the Marco window manager has seen significant improvements. They are really working on that thing. Big time. Lots of gaming stuff is in there, so it just kind of makes sense it would land in the LTS

release. Right. Plus, a new GTK front end for the FWAPD application. Sorry, what? Yeah. FWAPD! But I just love seeing these GUIs for the firmware updates. It just makes Linux feel so first class, like a real system where you can actually manage the full life cycle of whatever machine you're on.

Finally. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So, Ubuntu, this is a big deal for them. This is their first LTS release using LXQt. So that's a big deal for them this is their first lts release using lxqt so that's a big deal and then wow ubuntu budgie um they've made a bunch of changes uh a new menu so those are both two that you need to take a look at i do think lubuntu this was also they're pushing on to 64 bit so i don't believe there are any 32 bit builds of ubuntu of 20 20 or 4 either what a heck of a

time it really is it's gone now it's a great time to be a linux user it is though now uh drew you may have noticed that ubuntu studio has landed with a improved ubuntu studio controls can you explain to me what this is and why it kind of matters with ubuntu studio you use something called jack for your audio server and ub Studio Controls is essentially an easy mode for setting up Jack. At least that's the way I look at it. So it lets you control various aspects of how this Jack server runs so that you can get the lowest latency possible without having to do nearly as much fiddling in the back end. It just makes it super easy.

You know, the number one problem with Jack is people getting started with it, so something like that's really nice. Yeah, and most people don't really want to load Pulse Audio modules from the command line, so a GUI makes things a lot simpler. They don't? Well, I do, but you certainly don't. No, in fact, thankfully you can, because Wes has scripted a whole bunch of stuff for us in the studio.

So you do load it from the command line, but I never have to bother with it. However, keep that in mind when we get to our app pick later, which is a command line audio utility, which I picked. So what is happening? You know what? Every now and then there's room for it. Also, something to consider with 2004 is this is a distribution now that ships in a post-Spectre, post-Meltdown world. Right. And I think it's worth talking about what that means for us as end users.

There is some performance impacts because of this, and it's the new normal now. And so Michael Larable over at Pharonix did, as you would expect, a comprehensive benchmark of the impact that the out-of-the-box protections against Spectre, Meltdown, and its friends, that's a good way to put it, are how they impact the 2004 default release. And it turns out there's a kernel command line just called mitigations equal off, if you just want to turn all these off. Maybe not advisable, but it's definitely doable. But he ran it through 2004 through a series of real world tests on a bunch of different xeon cpus as well as an amd epic cpu and the results are not what

i expected in some instances in i repeat some instances in some of those the mitigation version actually pulled ahead weird yeah and most it didn't. Sure. But in some it did. And when you look at the benchmarks, he did 42 different average server workload benchmarks, just for server workloads. He did 42 different benchmarks. And he found that on the Xeon E5 Haswell and the Kaby Lake Xeons, on average, you're getting about a 12% hit to your performance on Ubuntu 20.04. It's going to be the same for all Linuxes, right? On the Epic Roam server,

it was more like a 5% impact. Hey, that's not so bad. Right, that's almost noise at that level. Which is really nice to see this, right? You know, there's probably tons of places, especially if you're not running a server or anything, where, yeah, you could safely or relatively safely disable these.

You know, you could turn the mitigations off if you wanted to. But if that's the only difference, just don't bother. Yeah, it might be worth it, especially on the Epic CPU. Right. You know, on the Intel CPU Xeons, he tried a couple of different Xeons. It varies more. I guess the word there would be

it's just worth running your own benchmarks. And it's pretty easy with the Pharonix test suite. You could just actually run the exact benchmarks Michael runs because of the comparison feature and see how your system fares. You know, in Pharonix test suite news, I was happy to see that they've now got a WireGuard benchmark, which you could use because, of course, WireGuard is included in 2004. Let's talk about the 2004 kernels. It's sort of a special kernels version 5.4, and it might be worth recapping what landed in 5.4 because it's just now going to hit users. Yeah, well, you get that original exFAT driver, if you remember, the first one based on some old Samsung code. You'll have to

wait for kernel 5.7 to get the new updated one, but hey, that's there. It's probably good for read-only, though. Yeah, right. I mean, at least you can read stuff. You'll be pleased to know faster large directory modifications on XFS, as well as a new read-only file system that Huawei uses on their devices. So lots of file system love this time around. Plus, of course, better support for AMD hardware.

If you're not familiar, IOU Ring is a new kernel feature for doing fast, asynchronous IOU, and 5.4 ships with a lot of good improvements there, and just outside, we've seen that really getting picked up for people that need really good disk performance, and there hasn't been a great option on Linux before. And as you know, I.O. load on the Linux kernel,

that can do some nasty things to your desktop. Yeah, yeah, that's very true. I also recall that one of the really big headline features of 5.4 is one of the security features that I believe Canonical is touting to the server customers, and that's kernel lockdown mode. Lockdown! Intended to strengthen the boundary between root and the kernel, once you've enabled it, various pieces of kernel functionality are restricted.

So it could break some stuff. You're going to want to test this before you use it, but it helps keep things secure, especially maybe you're in a secure boot environment. You've got some certain controls or auditing that you need to do, and you have to's so much more than that. What it developed into was a lot more than that. It started trying to ensure the basic protections of secure boot and developed into something a lot more. It's also nice because a lot of distributions had their own out-of-tree patches for this. And so now we can standardize all of that with the in-kernel version. Right. It's just normalized now. That's also really good to see. So it reduces the differences between Linux kernels and Linux distros. We've talked a lot about 5.6 recently and 5.7

because of WireGuard and things like that. 5.4 was actually a pretty great release too. Yeah, the last thing I'd like to touch on is the virtio file system. Lots of file system stuff there. And that's a Fuse framework-based file system that's designed to speed up copying things in and out of your QEMU guests, which, hey, that's pretty great.

You will need a newer version of QEMU to get the support on the QEMU side, of course, but it's way faster than using, say, like the Plan 9 file system that lots of folks are using. And that's just great because virtual machines, Linux virtualization capabilities, top-notch. Yeah. I'll put a link in the show notes. I did a visual comparison of GNOME 3.4 to GNOME 3.6. It's not huge. It's a quality of life improvement between GNOME 3.4 and GNOME 3.6. The menus are better. It's faster. Tons of bug fixes. Tons of GPU fixes. of GPU fixes. Take a look at the link I have in the show notes to Imgur where I just, I took two VMs and I just did two stock Ubuntu VMs side by side on my 27-inch screen and then just did A-B comparisons and did screenshots of that. And I have an Imgur album of that. And what you'll see in there is refinements to the main function menu for a log out and log in. Incredible improvements to GNOME system settings.

And a significantly nicer lock screen and log in screen. Oh, man. It's really first class now. Very pro looking. Better than anything on the Mac or Windows. I mean, they really, the new GNOME lock screen and log in screen are quite choice. And they're just worth checking out the screenshots alone. On everything else we've just talked about, you've got this new GNOME release, which, in my personal opinion, having some experience with GNOME over the last decade, I would say this is far and above the best release of GNOME Shell ever.

Yeah. This might be the best GNOME desktop, and I'm even including the two-version series with that. This might, 3.6 might be the best. It just feels so fast and rock-solid and smooth. I mean, we were talking about this before the show. As much as we love Plasma, going back and forth between Plasma, even the latest version here on Neon and the latest GNOME,

you feel the difference. Yes. I mean, like I said, I was doing an A-B side-by-side, and I could tell, just totally stock, both of them, I could tell the difference. I think it shows, you know, to the GNOME team's credit that a lot of work has gone into the underpinnings there to just

smooth everything out. Yeah, and there's been some good work by Canonical in that regard. There's been good work by just people, like you say, on the GNOME team. Let's go around the horn. So, MiniMech, I'm curious to know what your experiences with 2004 and your testing were, if they were all that dramatic or not. One thing is that Ubuntu, with the new LibSSL

version they used in 2004, they deprecate some encryption models. So you have TLS 1.0 and 1.1 that are deprecated. So if all of a sudden you can't connect to your server anymore, you know where the problem lies. Oh, that's a good tip.

We had that in Mumble. So our Mumble server was TLS 1.0. And all of a sudden I had problems to log in to the Jupyter Broadcasting Mumble server. Right. In fact, I'm very, very grateful that you guys got all that resolved before 2004 actually landed. No kidding. Tyler is pointing out in the chat room that we've missed probably one of the more obvious and important things about the GNOME setup with 2004. Yes, the new Yaru theme is absolutely gorgeous, especially the dark variant and the new icon set in 2004.

It is also gorgeous. It's so nice that I'm installing it on every distro I use. Right. And even if it's not Ubuntu, if I'm on Manjaro, I'm installing Yaru. It helps that I love me some purple.

Also, and this is in my visual comparison, something that Canonical has added is a super simple appearance pane, I think is what you call it, in the GNOME system settings that just lets you toggle between light and dark mode. Just boop. Another one of those things that instead of going into some hacky submenu to change these sort of unofficial settings. Or maybe even knowing that like in the past, you'd probably have to install GNOME tweaks.

Right, right. Now it's just right there in the settings where it should be. Yeah, yeah, that is really cool. And it looks good. And it's really easy to turn on, which I appreciate. And it's really easy to turn off as well. Same with night shift. Very easy to turn on and off. There is potentially a bumpy road for a set of users that we don't directly address right now in this show, but is going to be a growing part of the Ubuntu base. And that's the WSL users, the people that are using Ubuntu on the Windows subsystem for Linux. And it seems as of now, until patches come down for Windows,

the WSL 1 version 1 and Ubuntu 20.04 may have some compatibility issues. And this is actually pretty well documented and outlined on the Ubuntu discourse that you can read. We'll have a link to it. But it appears that there is some problem with WSL 1. There's a patch for it, but it appears to be like a GLIB issue. Well, right. So 20.04 has a new version of GLIB-C 2.31, and that's implemented a new NanoSleep library call based on clock real-time. Unfortunately, as you recall, WSL 1, while very technically cool,

is basically a shim layer that takes all these Linux kernel syscalls and has to go translate those down to Windows syscalls. And unfortunately, emulating Unix-style system clocks on an NT kernel, well, to say it politely, that's tricky. That's why WSL 2,

which is using a regular Linux kernel in a full-on VM here, doesn't have the same problem. So if you're on WSL2, no problems at all. Just give it a try. You can use 20.04 whenever you like. WSL1, you'll have to wait for that patch to come down in a future update. Yeah, and it's a little complicated because WSL2 isn't technically

available to everybody. Right. And so you kind of have to go through some hoops to get the insider builds to get that. And WSL 1 has some advantages over WSL 2. And WSL 1 is essentially less resource intensive because you're not emulating an entire system. You don't have this little VM going, yeah. So Canonical estimates that people will probably continue to use WSL 1 even after WSL 2 has shipped.

So I will say some credit should go here to the Windows team because despite clearly working on this, you know, this whole new version of it, they're still doing patches and fixing for these things for WSL 1. So be aware if you're on Windows. If you're a Windows user who uses the Windows subsystem for Linux

and that's why you listen to this podcast, let us know. I'm wondering how many are out there these days and if they're searching out Linux content. You know, I also have to say that Hayden Barnes has been doing a great job communicating some of this stuff. That's how I found out about this. Right. There's a great Telegram group you might want to go join for chatting

about all things WSL. And we'll link to the Discord thread where they're talking about it too in Discourse. Also kind of fun is Game Mode, which is that Feral Interactive tool to optimize your Linux box for gaming will be default in 2004, which is that Feral Interactive tool to optimize your Linux box for gaming will be default in 2004. Which is nice, because in the beta period

I had some hard times. I initially was not able to get it working. And troubleshooting is the last thing you want to do when you're already late for playing a game, or you just want to relax. You're not trying to do any work on your system. You just want to have fun. I like how you phrase that, because that is so, like, when you're quote-unquote late for playing a

game, that's me. How do you show up late playing video? But I do like I get there. I'm like, oh, man, I was supposed to start gaming 10 minutes ago. I don't got time for this. I got a half hour window. It's hard to find time when you got a busy day and you just want to get right to it. So cheesy. I know you had a chance to kick the tires. You had a few experiences, too. I'd love to hear what you what your overall takeaway was, 2004, and any snags you hit. You know, a lot of you guys have already mentioned the new themings. They're really polished, so the new dark theme is super nice. I also really like the standard theme because it's kind of a blend between the dark and the light modes. The new icon set is, again, super nice, and it works well in both dark and light themes.

And as someone who knows a thing or two about designs that might be saying something. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I highly encourage you to, to check it out if you have it, because it's just, it's beautiful there and you can tell that they're kind of incrementally polishing every little bit. So Chris, you had mentioned like the login screen, it's super clean. It's super nice. Um, it's, it's not very distracting, uh, to me just with the new gnome, it seems a little bit snappier than, than old 3.4. Um, so all around, I mean, visually, I think it's a

really great system. Um, there are a couple of things in, in your imager album, which we'll link in the show notes. You know, there are a couple of things that did kind of annoy me when it comes to the design, which is they've changed the Nautilus icon now to be instead of kind of a file cabinet look to a file folder. But they put this kind of weird border around it, which none of the other icons have in the set. Yeah, you know, I noticed that too. It doesn't look great, unfortunately.

The new toggles, they've gone from the green to using this purple accent that Ubuntu is kind of famous for. I really like that. The fractional scaling, while I think it was baked in, is a lot nicer, in my opinion. They've even tweaked the store so that now they have the editor's picks and then the categories below that. Uh, so it looks a little less busy and a little less, um, hectic, you know, you can just get in and search for what you need, uh, and get out. A couple of questionable things I had was whenever you launch Nautilus for the first time

and pretty much every distro is like this. They give me the icon view or the grid view. first time and pretty much every distro is like this they give me the icon view or the grid view i'm one of those guys that always always uses the detailed list view thank you and why can't we set that as a default please what kind of monster wants these giant icons where they can only fit half of their directory content on the screen like and you can't even read the file name really right because it's all kind of truncated and stacked instead of just a horizontal line of text and how do you even sort by like date modified which is the first thing i want to do it's just it's monstrous they've also baked in a cool little to-do app and i've noticed this on a few of the apps that they've baked in but there's no hover over tool tips on some of these so you just have to guess that this icon is supposed to represent a checklist and this one's supposed to. Sounds small, but that really hurts the accessibility.

You're taking a designer's eye at this though. I appreciate that. Well, I mean, that's just how I see it, right? So I have to just take it based upon face value as I kind of read the layout and everything. I mean, I think it's great. And I think that they're heading in the right direction. And these are all like little minuscule tweaks that I don't think most people would even really notice. It's not in the final release, but you did end up hitting kind of a gnarly beta bug that we also saw, but I don't think struggle with as much as you did. Yeah, so I'm using this ThinkPad 440S, and I've got two disks in it. I've got one in the M.2 slot where the 3G radio modem used to live um and then one just an ssd hooked up as well

so on the ssd i have manjaro and then on the m2 i use you know basically whatever so that's kind of my drive to jump around on i I noticed whenever I installed Ubuntu and Mate, that there was a Grub boot menu bug. So once installed, whenever you would reboot the machine, you know, they're using the new EFI fast boot kind of system that the Lenovo logo would pop up.

Then it would, you know, pop up with a nice Ubuntu logo below that, load Ubuntu logo below that. Load Ubuntu directly to the login screen. Which looks pretty nice. It really does. Yeah. I think it's a step up for sure, you know.

But wouldn't allow me to get into the actual Grub Boot menu. Oh. Of course, you know, you can hit F12. And then just because it's in the BIOS there that you can just hit F12 and then boot into Manjaro. So, I mean, I still had access to that drive. It wasn't, you know, something that just stopped me in my tracks. But being a Linux user, it kind of drove me nuts. Where's my grub at? Exactly.

So, I went through all sorts of, like, leaps and bounds. And Bill helped me out, you know, kind of direct me, like, hey, maybe try this, try that. And come to find out, after doing a little bit of research, there was actually a bug out there already for it. And so, you know, looking back, it looks like it's something that's being worked through. You also had that same thing I had going up from Grub to the actual desktop UI, where when you search in Gnome Shell, some of the labels or the text of icons gets cut off or like the bottom portion of the icons gets cut off. You hit that too, right? Right. So if you open up the applications menu and you scroll down to any folder, and I think this is really just a Gnome Shell issue that's being worked on. Yeah. If you create folders, which is a nice feature, so you can kind of bundle apps together,

the last line of icons in that folder, and I haven't determined how many icons you have to have in the folder for this to happen or anything, but my example was the utilities folder in the Gnome Shell menu. If you click on that and scroll all the way down, the last line of text below the icons was cut off. However, if you launched one of those apps down there, it's the terminal. That's the first thing generally always open. If you click on the terminal, load the terminal, then go back to the Gnome Shell menu and scroll down, you should be able to see that last line of text. Really? All right, this is something I'm going to play with more, and I might see if there's a bug for it because that seems a little strange.

Once they get a few of these little bugs worked out with the Grub version, maybe a point release for Gnome Shell or something like that, it's going to be one of the best Linux distributions out there, especially for the desktop. I completely agree. Well said. It is already very, very, very close. And within a point update, I think it's going to be really, really in a good spot. I am thrilled with this release. I am really, really thrilled with the

performance. You guys know I'm always the guy that's on here saying, it's not fast enough. It's not fast enough. It just needs to be snappier. Well, they did it. I hate to say it like this, but if you're someone like me who's always felt like the interface wasn't snappy enough, the way I can put it to you is this. Ubuntu 20.04 with GNOME 3.36 is finally as fast as it always should have been. If you've spent real money on your PC, if you're a guy like me who has four or five dedicated, I put my home on its own disk, I put root on its own disk, I put var on its own disk, I put all of my editing scratch on its own disk, I've got 64 gigabytes of RAM. I've got 12 cores in this thing. I mean, this, my main system is, it's a rock star and it should be, it should be so fast that I never have complaints with its speed, right? I mean, you shouldn't be waiting around

for just about anything. Never. And so it finally feels like Ubuntu 2004 with GNOME 3.36 is as fast as it always should have been. That is not a backhanded compliment because software, it just takes a while to get there. And not very often do you get new versions of software and things get faster. So this is a compliment I'm making. Right. And I mean, you know, graphics compositing, that's a hard thing. Right.

And so the fact that years now into it, you can install something and it feels faster. In fact, I'd say it feels like I'm getting the actual metal performance out of my machine now. And that is so nice. It's just so, so, so nice because I feel like I'm finally getting my money's worth out of some of this stuff. And so I am thrilled with the release. Now, we got a question from Daniel that came in on Twitter and he said, Now, we got a question from Daniel that came in on Twitter, and he said, I'm migrating to an LTS very soon. Would it be the best case to go with 1804 now, or would I be better off going with 2004 so I don't have to touch it later? This came in on Twitter. And I think the answer to that is it depends on your threshold.

For a server, I might stick with 1804 for now. But for the desktop, I think you're good to go. I think the final fixes that have landed, it's really hard for me to say at this point because I need like another four weeks with it. But the last few days, it really seems like a lot of stuff has come together. And I think on the desktop, if you have a threshold of a little tiny bit of things not working here and there, if you can tolerate that, I think on the desktop, if you have a threshold of a little tiny bit of things not working here and there, if you can tolerate that, I think it's a go. On the server, on the x86 side, like I said earlier, I think maybe wait a bit. And on the ARM side, I think it's a go. So it's a complicated question to answer, Dan. So I'm sorry I don't have a better answer for you, but it's sort of one of those, it depends right now. Yeah, right. I mean, you got to tolerate

your own risk. and also how comfortable are you upgrading down the line, you know? And that process has gotten a lot better over the years, but isn't totally risk-free. And I'll add this, too. I don't know if the desktop question is fully answered yet. We're going to look at Fedora 32, possibly next week. All right. And we may have a different answer for you. What's great is a lot of the improvements you're getting with GNOME 3.6 will land in both of these distributions. And so a lot of what we've talked about here will apply

to Fedora 32 as well. But they have done some extra special sauce there. They've implemented that early out-of-memory killer by default. That's something that Ubuntu 24 does not have right now. And so there's some special sauce there. And I don't know which one yet is necessarily the better desktop workstation. We'll just get spoiled for options. It's a good problem to have. So Dan, let us know what you end up doing, what LTS release you decide to go with, 18.04 or 20.04, and let us know how it goes. I know a lot of people have asked us in the Lug meeting that we did on Sunday, are you guys going to put 20.04 on your Arch box? Not yet. Not yet. I mean, we've already got Arch. How much more do you need? I was thinking we'd do this, Wes. What do you think of this?

Let's try putting that Arch box on the Arch LTS kernel. And if that goes bad, then maybe we consider going to 2004. All right. It's worth a shot. I know what you're thinking. Like, Chris, that's a lot of work. That's a lot of work. But remember, we separated out the data. So if we have to replace the OS... We'll be fine. We'll be okay. We'll be okay.

Yeah. So we'll let you know how that goes. But man, is it nice to see this release. These LTSs are something special. As Linux users, we get something kind of special every five years. I know, right? And there's this certain excitement around the LTS, sort of seeing what the shape of the future is going to be.

And it's nice for this little window. It doesn't last for the entire time, although that's getting better with things like snaps and flatbacks. Everything in the repo is just fresh. You know, that's worth talking about just for a second. So you get a new LTS every now and then, and then they're supported for five years, and it's kind of special. It almost could do an 1804 review of how usable is it now at at the release of the next lts how usable still today is 1804 because that wasn't always the case when i think it was mini mech city was still on 1604 you're like holy crap that's so old maybe we could try that too you know we'll split it out a bit yeah

i don't know if i have that sense with 1804. I wonder if we could, we should take a look at it and try to make an 1804 workstation that's totally up to date, modern, ready to go. The thing is, now that you have snap packages

and flat pack and everything, so 1604 was really a crucial release for that because you got snap packages and flat pack integrated. So it was easy for software that you wanted to keep in the newest state. You were able to have these packages or you had PPAs. So for me, using Enlightenment, so not the stock GNOME desktop environment, it was easy to live with that. No problem.

If you're not trying to use Gnome Shell, I bet it is, yeah. What do you say before we get out of here we do a couple of picks? Oh, let's do it. I teased a command line audio application that I like a lot. There'll be a few things that come out of

me relaunching on Filter, and that is essentially me trying to come up with a reproducible media workflow to edit and grab clips and all of that kind of stuff. And the net result here on the show will be cool tools that you get to hear about. And PA Cat, Pulse Audio Cat, is one of them. You can play back or record raw audio streams right out of Pulse Audio. You don't have to pull up VLC or MPV or any of these tools.

You can just do it right from the command line. PA Cat will essentially treat audio like it's a text file. And it's a simple tool for playing back or capturing raw encoded audio files from the Pulse Audio sound server. It understands anything that Pulse understands. So that's everything. It's everything.

And it all is supported by anything that the Lib Sound file library supports, PA Cat will support. And, you know, there's some YouTube stream I'm watching, and all of a sudden I'm like, I want to hear this. I want to record this. I want to clip this. You can use this tool.

Right. Especially if you just add a little easy bash alias or something. It has a ton of options for choosing. Maybe you even have multiple pulse servers. You can specify what sort of format you want to capture it in. It's great. You also helped me recently with an FFmpeg script that's crazy simple. You just say FFmpeg record, and then you give it an interface number,

and then it just starts recording. This is such a great way to record application audio on your Linux box. There's lots of ways you can record microphone audio and all that, but maybe you're just listening to something on your Linux box, and you want to record that yeah watch the live stream or something yeah or music or whatever you want to create you want to you want to you want to make like a a file that is maybe a spotify playlist and it's all one file it's one flack fmpeg will do it and it will you just have to give it the device name or number actually and there's do you remember the command was it oh yeah um, yeah. P-A-C-T-L.

And then you can just do a list command. It'll show you all your devices. P-A-C-T-L list. And it will show you all the devices that it detects. You give it the number. And then FFmpeg can just record right from that. And man, if I'm not using the heck out of that. So you combine that with P-A-C-T-L.

And it's really powerful. The Mac has graphical applications from Rogamiba to do all this kind of stuff, but it's all there on Linux. You just have to have access to it. Two months ago, I did like this month on the Mac, and then we did an episode about it. And I was talking to Wes, and I said, you know, one of the things they've really nailed is you can just hit a button and start recording application audio. And so you and I were looking at ways of doing this under Linux,

and together we found these couple of tools, and it's better than anything you do on the Mac. Right. You just have to know the commands. Right. And you can add some stuff. Pulse actually has some virtual devices you can add. I've been playing around with this a little bit myself.

So if you want to get complicated with it, you can, or you can just use a simple tool right from the command line. Yeah. It's pretty nice. We give Pulse a hard time. You know, it's sort, it's pretty nice. We give Pulse a hard time. You know, it's sort of like it's a meme to give Pulse a hard time, but it is extremely powerful. And it really has a lot of features. Now, that's my pick.

But Mr. Bacon comes in with three mucks. Tell me about three mucks. Well, actually, this was dropped by Mr. Noble Payne. He had dropped it in the Slack. You see that? He was going to let you own it. He was going to let me give you all the credit and let you talk about it, and he wasn't going to argue at all.

Well, Cheese seemed excited about it. You're such a good co-host, Wes. It's like a Tmux clone written in Golang, right, Wes, I believe? Yes, it is. Some nice, sane I3 key bindings. Scroll back. Awesome. That was the big one for me, right?

Like, Tmux, unless you do some configuring, you just don't, your mouse wheel doesn't do what you think it does. So I like the description here in the readme. Imagine Tmux with a smaller learning curve and more sane defaults. And I think that that really sums it up. You know, there are some Tmux bindings in there still.

So splitting windows, moving panes, those sorts of things are still are some tmux bindings in there still so splitting windows moving panes um those sorts of things are still available as tmux bindings but you know they they have a lot of sane like alt enter uh alt n will create a new pane so it's it's a great looking little multiplexer that i would i would like to actually get into and download and try out i just remember seeing it, seeing you drop it in there. So I was like, well, you know what? I'm going to throw that in for an app pick

because it looks super cool. I will note it is early days. It doesn't look like they have any packaged releases just yet. So you'll have to have go and be able to pull it down that way. How did you find this? It's 14 months ago,

the project was started, but actually I'm not joking when I say this, all of the work seems like it happened in the last, I don't know, six days or so. Yeah,, I'm not joking when I say this, all of the work seems like it happened in the last, I don't know, six days or so? Yeah, I mean, it seems to be a project that's picking up steam. Good catch, Wes. Yeah, it's called 3MUX, the number three MUX. And it is a terminal multiplexer that is essentially inspired by i3. And that is so much genius, I can't even with that. Right. I mean, it's sort of a proven paradigm that really works, especially when you have a complicated workflow.

And the terminal, I mean, that's the perfect place to help you manage that stuff. Absolutely. There you go. We'll have links to all of that in the old show notes. Linuxunplugged.com slash 350. Go check that out. Also, I'd love to hear your experiences with Ubuntu 2004. Let us know in the Telegram group, jupyterbroadcasting.com slash Telegram.

Or even better, come hang out on that virtual lug day. Sunday, 12 Pacific. Join us in that virtual lug in the Mumble Room. And let us know what your experience has been with the flavors or with the main Ubuntu release. We love that. And it really helps us calibrate our opinions about everything. Yeah. It's a great experience.

All right, everybody. Well, thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of The Unplugged Program, and we'll see you right back here next Tuesday! I love that the top title, which is not what we're going with, but the top title is Get Forked, Carole Baskin. That's great. Nice.