LINUX Unplugged - 352: Three Course Battery

Episode Date: May 6, 2020

Manjaro has a new hardware partner so Phillip joins to share the details, and we have the Lemur Pro in house for a battery endurance test like no other. Plus an Arch server update, and Chris orders the new Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera. Special Guests: Brent Gervais, Drew DeVore, Jeremy Soller, and Philip Muller.

After a little over three years in development, the Inkscape team has launched the long-awaited version 1.0. And I think Cheesy Bacon over there would be the man to talk to about this. What do you think, Cheese, of their 1.0? Anything really jump out at you as like a great new feature? Well, I mean, they have done a lot of work in three years, it seems. Better high DPI support. We all want that on our vector art applications filleting and chamfering corners so if you say converted some text to

a shape and you wanted to round corners or chamfer corners you can easily do that now he's got some new png export options they've got this really cool split view of x-ray mode and your art mode. So you can basically split the screen to see where all of your lines intersect in a crazy busy piece of vector art. And then you can reveal your actual piece of art kind of at the same time. Just a bunch of really cool new features. Variable fonts have been included. There's some additional extensions that have been added in. Pro-level features that you would expect to see in, you know, an Adobe or Affinity application for sure. Yeah, pro for sure. It really does seem like it's truly a pro-level app. It's completely

cross-platform. And speaking of extensions, Brent, I know you're excited to see this Python 3 support now. How'd you know that was my favorite? Really? Hello, friends, and welcome into 352 of your local Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Oh, fresh from the woods episode right here for you all. It's a big show today. In-house, we have the System76 Lemur Pro. In my hot little hands, I barely can even feel it. It's so light.

Let's play Toss, Wes. Catch! And we'll tell you about the incredible endurance test I put this thing through. I thought to myself, it seems to me System76 is really signaling that this laptop has an impressive battery. So let's see how impressive it is. I took the laptop and I took my cell phone and I went into the woods and spent a 12-hour workday in the woods with this laptop. I'll tell you how it all went a little bit in the show. So that's why there's moss in your beard. Yeah, I'm going to keep it. I'm going to keep it.

But before we go any further, I've got to say a big howdy to Mr. Bacon that's why there's moss in your beard. Yeah, I'm going to keep it. I'm going to keep it. But before we go any further, I got to say a big howdy to Mr. Bacon. Hello, Cheesy. Hey there. You know, they need to contract you to take their product photos too, because you were taking some awesome photos of that lemur.

Well, thank you. I mean, there's a lot coming from you. Well, I appreciate that. I, yeah, I posted them on the old Instagram. I got a link in the show notes to the album. So if you want to see what the sucker looks like out in the woods, so just a man with his laptop and his camera phone.

She's a beautiful thing. It was beautiful. And of course, a huge, massive time appropriate greetings to that virtual lug. Hello, mumble room. Hello. Wow. We're hitting 40 people just about in there now when you combine in the quiet listening to. And I'm happy to say that Philip from Manjaro is here today to cover some cool Manjaro news.

Hello, Philip. Hello, hello, hello. Thank you for joining us, sir. It's great to have you here. I'm excited to get to your news here in a moment. But we have a little bit of follow-up we need to do on the show right here at the top, because it's something the audience has been asking about. It's something we committed to, and there has been some recent developments. Are you ready, Wes Payne?

Standing by. Wes Payne, it's time to live update our Arch server right here. See how it goes live on the show. Now, recently, behind the scenes, we switched this box to the LTS kernel. It was left on the cutting room floor from a previous version of the show, but that recent change was made. Our ARC server is now powered by that LTS kernel, but it's time for a big upgrade, including SystemD,

a new version of WireGuard, and much more. So, Wes Payne. Logging into the server. Good man. Now, this wasne. We're logging into the server. Good man. Now, this was our commitment a long time ago, and we decided to, for no good reason, build an Arch server and then have it run our critical infrastructure. We thought we'd let you know how it goes.

Now, this is our minimum viable approach to Arch. Most of the applications are in containers. But one thing we didn't do originally, I think because of WireGuard potentially, is we didn't go with the LTS kernel. And, you know, why not just try full rolling? Yeah. We decided after not being able to boot one time

that it'd probably be better to switch to LTS. We made that change. Yeah, I mean, we're really dependent on ZFS for the system not to boot but for all those containerized applications and as great as the ZFS on Linux project is doing, the Arch kernel's just moving a little too fast sometimes. All right, so where are we at over there?

It's updating. We've synchronized our package database, pulling down new packages. Snapper is taking a pre-snapshot. Really? We're that far into it already? And here's where it gets interesting. We do have a new point release of the LTS kernel.

So DKMS is currently removing our old ZFS module. There's no going back now. Now, do you know what version of LTS kernel? Last time I checked, it was 5.4. Is that what we're sticking with? Yeah, let's see. It was 5.4.33.3. Yeah.

And what do we got now? Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. 5.4.35.1, maybe? 5.4.38. All right. And we also, along with this, are going to get a new version of ZFS and WireGuard and SystemD. All right. You want me to let you proceed with the reboot, version of ZFS and WireGuard and SystemD. All right. You want me to let you proceed with the reboot and then we'll check back in?

That sounds good. All right. Very good. All right, Wes. We'll be right back. Let's see how it goes. In the meantime, on the other end, from server to light and portable, Philip and the team at Mangero today announced a new partnership with Star Labs

for two different super tiny portable machines, really lightweight laptops. And I also noted, too, that there's a 10% sale going on right now. The price is unbelievably low for both of them, Philip. for both of them, Philip, this seems like more, not even more choice, but like a more aggressive style of choice that the Manjaro project is pursuing in this partnership. Exactly. Because we found a new partner and it's Starlabs and they produce their own laptops. So it's no Clevo branding, something like that. So since 2018, they came around and said, just doing rebrands, it doesn't work out. So we designed it ourselves and pushed it out there. And we are happy to be part of that. Let's start with the details here. So we have two laptops, an 11-inch and a 13-inch. The 11-inch

starts at 424 US greenbacks, and the 13-inch starts at.S. greenbacks. It's an aluminum anodized chassis. The display is LED backlit on both of them using IPS technology. Both of them are 1080 displays. The 11-inch has a Pentium N4200, I think, which I think works out to be a 1.1 gigahertz quad-core, where the 13-inch has a slightly more powerful, well, noticeably more powerful i7 in it that works out to be 1.8 gigahertz quad-core. Both of them are coming with a pretty good amount of storage, 240 gigabytes, 8 gigabytes of RAM in these suckers, and Intel graphics 505 and 620, respectively. With USB-C connectivity and charging.

Ooh, I love that. Yeah, with all the typical wireless things you would expect, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, USB-C video out, seven hours of battery life on the 11-inch and seven hours of battery life on the 13-inch. The weight is super low too. These things are 2.54 pounds and 2.65 pounds. Comes in the box with a USB-C power adapter as well. You know, I've been thinking about maybe building a new desktop,

and having a light little to-go laptop to support that, these seem perfect for this. So what's the partnership look like here, Philip? Did you guys work on having to customize the image for these laptops? Is it running stock manager? What's that aspect of it like? Well, we partnered up, so we had a meeting with sean from star labs and they actually wrote out several times we had the station x in 2017 and star labs also wrote us but we thought hey a new startup with no home page is not a pretty deal so we went for station X back then and they kept on writing. And now this year we said, okay, we have time for them and started the meeting and

we connected right away. And two days later we had the laptops can worked on and optimized everything from Manjaro. And yesterday we did this little Star Wars teaser, may the force be with you. And today we did this little Star Wars teaser, May the Force Be With You, and today we released the news to the world. Yeah, that was great. I didn't expect to see it so soon, but it's fantastic to see the news out already. My question for you is this, as a project, it seems like you guys are jumping at the opportunity to work with hardware vendors to offer Manjaro systems preloaded. Do you have a sense that is a high demand from your community? And also, like I note, the recent efforts around the RockPro64 chip and how Manjaro has become just exceptionally easy to deploy on the Pine64 or RockPro64. And that again is kind of partnering in a sense with a hardware vendor. Is this,

do you think an area of importance for the project well mancharo is a desktop linux and we try to get as much hardware out there but when we choose a hardware it has to be a partner who can ship worldwide which starlabs does and they have also the possibilities to repair this stuff so if you had a broken laptop from them you can buy parts from them. So repairing is a huge demand from our end. And yes, they're a cool bunch of guys and happy to work with them. Well, that's great. I mean, that's really nice to hear that it's been an easy partnership there. Do you have one of these guys kicking around yet? Yes. We got two devices from the 11-inch, the 13-inch we might get as well. And there is a new plan for a 15.6-inch laptop,

which is not yet finalized, but we will get redesigns of everything. And the community and the Star Labs community decided to have a little bit hardware upgrade and such, but this will come maybe late summer to winter, so to the seasons, and we might have even more laptops to go with them. I'm curious to know what your first impressions are, and if you prefer the 11 or 13-inch. I fell in love with the 11-inch because it's fanless and long-lasting, and it comes in a little box. We have sleeve we have our skin protection so they've designed everything

from the chassis to the internals and the power supply is also designed by them and it comes with the small little changes so we can plug it out for each system if it's uk if it's european or is it the states you have the little small adapters with you. You simply plug them out and plug them in and go with it independently. And it's USB-C charging in both ends. You can even charge your laptop. So one connection to rule them all. I really love that it's fanless. That's exciting.

And, you know, like you were saying, Wes, you have a desktop system and then you take this 11-inch with you. It is, at this price point, cheaper than an iPad with a keyboard. Wow. And it runs Linux and it runs Manjaro Linux. So you have the entire Pac-Man software library repository. That would be really easy to get my WireGuard VPN up back home. Perfect. Yeah.

I mean, seriously, if you know people out there that are looking at, like, the iPad, especially if you get the iPad with that new Magic Keyboard, that keyboard alone is $300. So it's almost the entire price of the Alexa E. You get a couple of them. Wow, Philip. Well, this is awesome. So are they available now? Are they shipping soon? Yeah, you can order them, of course. And if you have to update your firmware, it's done within Manjaro,

so you don't have to even reboot. You simply get the firmware automatically with GNOME firmware software. And if you want, you can deactivate wireless and webcam, of course. That's great. This sounds like a great machine, and that 13-inch looks pretty nice too, especially if you need a little bit larger working space and you want that i7 processor. Very cool.

I'll be keeping an eye out. I would like to see if anybody ends up with one of these. Please write into the show. I'd like to hear your thoughts. LinuxUnplugged.com slash contact. I think it's going to be a pretty good year for Linux users that are looking at hardware right now. I mean, just Manjaro alone, Philip, has several options now.

And it sounds like more down the road. Exactly. Yeah, I think it might be one of those, you know, it's a slow burn right now, but in a year or two, we're going to look back and it'll be a wildly different landscape with a ton of options compared to before, where you just had to, you know, buy some off-the-shelf Windows machine and hope for the best.

That's true. All right, Mr. Payne, well, you're not off the hook. How we doing over there? Did the system come back online? Not yet. Really? Not yet. Really? Not yet. How long ago did it reboot? Well, just a minute or two.

And it does take quite some time to post, as we well know. I could make a run to the server room. Oh, nope. Here we go. Here we go. Aculas is going down. I don't have to get up. That's always right at the moment.

That's how long that's exactly what happens every time. Yeah. It's almost like how you got to get up to go to the bathroom for your food. That's how long that's exactly what happens every time. It's almost like how you got to get up to go to the bathroom for your food to get delivered when we used to go to restaurants. That's how that server is when it comes to boot time. I was just going to float this out there. Here's a crazy idea.

You know what another safe way to run Arch as a server would have been? To put Proxmox or something on that and then run Arch server as a VM. Where's the fun in that, though? Then we could have at least gotten the console from here. All right, so we're back up? Looks that way.

I see VFS file systems. You do, huh? I think we're still starting up. Okay, applications seem like they're starting. Let's see. Final seconds, Wes. Did everything come back online? Yeah, here we go.

Really? You got it? Are you declaring victory? I am declaring victory. We've got the new systemd, new kernel, continuing to work with ZFS and WireGuard. Congratulations, sir. That is, I think, longer than I expected it to last at this point. I think we have crossed that threshold.

What I'm really happy about, too, is that we've got rid of the DKMS for WireGuard, which is great, but we still have that for ZFS, and we will for the foreseeable future. It just keeps working. We haven't run into a problem where we had to go futz with getting the ZFS systems remounting, cleaning up all the stuff that gets kind of broken when that happens. It's

just rock solid. I'm still loving it. Lean, mean, and when you do the updates, it's not hundreds of packages. It's 15 at most, maybe. It's pretty light. You know, I will also say we've been, we switched it up. We've been using the Yay AUR helper written in Go. And that's been really a dream.

It's just fast, works well. It's easy to update and hasn't broken yet. Yeah, I'm using that on my Manjaro workstation too. And then I get all of the AUR updates done at the same time. I like it. And it's actually really good, too. The only thing it's really smart about is it realizes that sometimes there's AUR apps you want to skip. And so right before it does all the AUR updates, it asks you, would you like to skip any of these?

And it gives each one a number value. And you enter that number value. It can be several with commas. And then it will skip those packages, which is nice because i have a couple of things that do take quite a while to build that i don't need i don't need that right now i'll do it later yep and i saw that i like that about it as well i'm wondering cheese did you see that the raspberry pi foundation has released a high quality camera and the kind of special thing about it is it has a standard camera mount as well you see this sucker i you know i didn't it was kind of special thing about it is it has a standard camera mount as well. Did you see this sucker?

You know, I didn't. It was kind of like Christmas whenever I opened up the dock and I started looking and I saw it. And I was like, this is really freaking awesome. The fact that, yeah, you can add, which is a 24 megapixel sensor. So I would imagine this would make for a great project where you're wanting to hook the Pi up to a camera for, I don't know, security system or something like that. That's what I was thinking. And you can also output raw, which is great. But I think it might be a little bit much for like the Pi Zero. So you may have to use something like Pi 3, Pi 4

with a little more horsepower to get full resolution out of the camera. Yeah, I think so. But it's such a cool looking little device, man. Brent, I found out about this because I was scrolling through Twitter and I started seeing these cool pictures of a farm. And then I clicked on the thread and realized that they had several tripod setup where they had this with a big lens mounted on a tripod and then the tripod next to it. They had essentially a Raspberry Pi in an enclosure with a screen and a keyboard. And they were taking pictures kind of using like a desktop UI on the computer.

You know, I'm talking about these kinds of setups where it's like the camera's connected to the computer and the computer is actually managing the photography. We call that tethering. They're essentially tethering with this camera. And I think the Sony IMX 477 sensor is just a camera phone sensor, but you can put real glass on it. What I'm really interested in is something I've been dreaming about for like a decade now is could this be the beginning of open source like pro cameras because we haven't seen anything like that ever but that's a dream of mine so I wonder if this is just the very tip of the beginning of that that would be very very exciting that's the exact thought I had when I looked at this setup at the farm they had there and they were

basically taking some of the promo pictures for the announcement of this thing and it was a Linux desktop. That's wild. It was great. I'm like, wow. And I thought, you know, as crazy and hokey as this looks to have cables running between these two things and all of that, it's not beyond what a professional would do anyways. No, I know a bunch of people who they're tethering 100% of the time just because of what the computer can offer above and beyond, you know, a camera device. So it's not unheard of by any means. It's very exciting. Especially in a static setup at a studio environment where you're taking portraits of people and

whatnot. I could see that'd be really, really useful. And it's a reasonable price. It's 50 bucks. Wow. Oh, yeah. Yeah. The price is pretty price. It's 50 bucks. Wow. Oh yeah. Yeah. The price is pretty good. It's 50 bucks. But beyond that, I was thinking too, recently I was looking at a lot

to park the RV. Didn't work out, but my thoughts were, wouldn't it be great to have something like this mounted on the shed that had decent optics and a couple spots and it'd be some low cost, build it yourself security cameras. I was thinking that too, or maybe even if you got like a solar power setup. You ever seen those wildlife cameras? They drop out in the woods. Do that with a Pi. Absolutely. You could pretty easily get a USB-C battery on a Raspberry Pi 4

that gets charged by a solar panel. And, you know, as long as it could keep it running overnight, probably good. Yeah. Really neat to see them doing this. Yeah, and the price is right, 50 bucks. Can't really go wrong with that. So I might end up doing this with one of my pies. I've been waiting to do the camera thing because the camera was so low quality.

It does appear that it is sold out from the three of the five vendors. So Micro Center and Canna Kit have it right now currently. I ordered one. Oh, you got in already. I did, yeah. Sneaky. I got to do it for the show, right? That's always like one of those, those, one of those where I'm like, am I, am I tricking myself into buying this or am I actually going to re yes, I'll review it. Yes.

I really will review this on the show. That really will happen. Very neat to see that though. So I will have a link to that. And so when they do get back in stock, if you want one, maybe we can get like a live stream shot set up with it. I don't think it comes with the glass. So remember, you do need a lens. But wouldn't that be cool? Or like if we did like a barbecue cam with a Raspberry Pi? Because I have Canon lenses that would work with it, I believe.

So I already got the glass. Not a lot, but I got some of it. So maybe we'll give it a go. Hey, Wes. What do you say we do a little housekeeping? It's about time. So we have some things to get into. So the platform for training on CloudGuru has now support for Playgrounds, where you can go run a server.

And check this out. Already, they've added Ubuntu 20.04 support. When I started Linux Academy, I was like, guys, we've got to stay current with Ubuntu. We've got to stay current. It's important now. And it's so cool to see that. So that's out there now. If you have a Cloud Guru or Linux Academy platform account,

check that out. If you're going to learn stuff, you might as well learn on the latest and greatest. Also, I'd love to have you live. We have a great, great time with our live stream. Sometimes we hang out. Sometimes we're waiting for a guest, or sometimes we've got a technical issue. Sometimes we hang out. We got like, sometimes we're waiting for a guest or sometimes we got technical issue. We'll hang out for a little bit and do a little millionaire or something like

that on the live stream. It's really just like getting some extra show. It's extra show. Yeah. Some people will put it behind a paywall, but here we just give it away for free. JBLive.tv, noon Pacific,

JupiterBroadcasting.com slash calendar to get that converted to your local time. Now, Drew has got a little side project that I think some of you out there are going to love. Televised table reads. The first episode is live on Thursday, 8 p.m. Eastern, and Brent will be narrating. How did he talk you into that, Brent? It's Drew, so I'll collaborate with Drew on anything, pretty much. Drew, rumor has it that you're in the back office. Drew, do you have anything to say for yourself back there?

Yeah, this is something that I've been wanting to do for a little while with all the social distancing. You know, nobody can go out and, like, see live theater or anything. So I thought, well, I'll bring it into your living room. So we're going to do it on YouTube Live. First episode, Thursday, 8 p.m. It's If You Go Out Into The Woods Today by Liz Sauer.

And it's really great. I'm looking forward to it. So that'll be Thursday 8pm Eastern and you can get updates at TVTableReads on Twitter. I know what I'm doing on Thursday. Yeah. I mean once Brent was in, I was all in. I'm watching. Oh you guys.

No pressure Brent. Yeah, just don't mess it up. There's a bunch of other people collaborating. We did a little bit of a read-through a few days ago, and man, did we ever have a lot of fun. So it's cool to collaborate with some really great voice actors and writers and everything. You guys practiced? Wow, we never do that. No.

Wow, okay. All right. We better No. Wow, okay. All right. Maybe we better up our game, Wes. Well, this Sunday, like every Sunday, there was a love plug. You hear us talk about our mumble room and our live stream, but I know it's the weekday, so it doesn't work for everybody. We do get together every Sunday, same bat time, just a different bat day at noon Pacific. Same mumble room set up, so it's a good chance to get Mumble rocking,

get your audio dialed in, and then if you ever could join us during the week, you already have it set to go. But if not, we're getting together every single Sunday. Man, did we get into a lot last Sunday. Yeah, also to clarify, we're just hanging out in the lobby too, so no need to get any special room. Just connect to the server and you'll hear everyone there. Yeah, you can also find details in the dedicated Geek Shed IRC room. So on the irc.geekshed.net server, there is a dedicated channel just called Luplug. You go in there and do that. Also, shout out to Colonel.

During the lug, we were just sitting around yakking, and this Logitech TrackMan MarbleFX controller, I think it's a trackball mouse thing. It's just this crazy thing that Drew was just going on about. He said, oh man, I wish I had one. And Colonel says, hey, I got one. And he's going to send it to you. Did you get it yet, Drew? I got it. Yeah, I got it just the other day. What? Yeah, I need to get a converter because it's still an old PS2. They never did release a USB version. But yeah, it's sitting on my desk waiting for that part to come in and I'll be using it.

He also sent a couple N95 masks over for me, too, which was just super sweet. What a nice guy. Yeah. Thanks, Colonel. How about that, Colonel? Just the incredible community connections when you can, you know, hang out with like-minded folks. That's amazing. So that'll be going on this Sunday as well. I experimented, too, sending my mobile.

Mobile mumble. Yeah, so that way I could, like, be moving about and joining. You know, so that way I could, you know, be washing dishes and chatting. Who doesn't want that? Sometimes you got chores on Sunday. That's just how it goes.

Sometimes. Sometimes you got to work. All right. That is the housekeeping. So this week in studio, we have the lemur or lemur, or perhaps properly pronounced lemur. I think that's it. Yep. Thanks. studio, we have the Lemur or Lemur or perhaps properly pronounced Lemur. I think that's it. Yep. Thanks. Yeah, that confirms it. This is the Lemur Pro from System76.

And I think the most striking thing about it is the 14-inch screen and thin, lightweight aspect of it. But this unit comes in a couple of different configurations. This unit is, as sent to me, an i7 at 4.9 gigahertz. It's the 10510U. What a clock speed. So it's a 10th generation and it can peak up to 4.9 gigahertz. Insane. Yeah.

My brain barely comprehends that. This unit, as configured, shipped with 40 gigabytes of RAM. Wait, what? So it beats the new MacBook Pro 13-inch, because that can only go up to 32. This goes up to 40 gigabytes. It has 8 gigabytes soldered into the motherboard. And then it has an additional user-serviceable slot.

Whoa. That is wild in a laptop that thin. Yeah. Unheard of. Yeah, it also has two M.2 NVMe slots that you can put to storage, and those are also user serviceable. This one is configured,

came with 500 gigabytes of M.2 storage and a 1080p matte display, which is pretty nice. And I have some pictures that are linked in the show notes if you want to see what it looks like. It is one of those, hey, somebody in the chat room asked earlier,

could you mount it to the wall like you can with a ThinkPad where it opens up completely flat? In fact, it opens up so far that it kind of even bends backwards if you want to a little bit. A little over 180 degrees. Yes, I did put a picture of that in the picture album if you want to see that. So it is that style of hinge, and the hinge feels pretty sturdy.

It stays wherever you put it, even when you're carrying the laptop around and whatnot. It's funny right now. It's, it's, it's, it's complaining because the battery is very, very, very low right now with, um, there it goes. I was gonna say with 5%, I think it's not gonna last much longer, but yeah, I think it just died on me, but that's fair. We'll get into why that's fair is it absolutely should be dying on me right now because I have been punishing this battery. So I'll tell you about that. But I want to give you a little first impression information. Oh, you want to give it some juice?

Yeah, sure. You can absolutely USB-C charge that thing. Gosh, I love that. It has both the barrel charger and a USB-C charger. So, yep, there you go. Good idea. We'll give it a little juice. It deserves it.

It has earned it. So a couple of first impression items. It's an aluminum-C charger. So, yep, there you go. Good idea. We'll give it a little juice. It deserves it. It has earned it. So a couple of first impression items. It's an aluminum style housing. Is that actually aluminum or is it a really glossy, hard, whatever it is. It may not be aluminum or not, but it's very lightweight. And it has a backlit keyboard. And I would rate the keyboard as better than the butterfly-style MacBook keyboard. Not quite ThinkPad level.

What's in between? Usable. Yeah, definitely usable. Actually, on day four, my space bar started to stick a little bit, but I just sort of rapidly— Rapid fire. Just banged that sucker for a little bit and did the right thing and just hit on it for a bit and it fixed it. The 720p webcam's mostly fine. It's all right.

People specifically wrote in a few questions, so I'm addressing those right now. Eddie wrote in. He said, I'm curious to hear your folks' opinion on the speaker quality of the Lemur Pro. I had a previous generation, and my expectations for built-in laptops, speakers aren't high, but they were underwhelming at best. I wonder if any attention was given in the new Lemur Pro. What's your impression of it? You and I both listened to it. What's your take on the speakers? as bad as i expected honestly i mean um i think better than the

thinkpad that i've got right here but i'd say by a titch yeah not not amazing that's not a macbook quality speaker or anything like that but it was listenable it's probably just a titch better than thinkpad and the thinkpads are barely listenable and this is you're definitely going to hear the video you're watching. You'll be able to make out the vocals just fine. It has two down firing speakers on the side. So if you have it on a hard surface, it sounds a little bit better versus if you have it in your lap, it's a little bit harder to understand because the speakers are down firing.

So that's one thing to consider if you care a lot about that. But it does have a headphone jack, so you could go that route. Like I said, USB-C, it does USB a headphone jack, so you could go that route. Like I said, USB-C. It does USB 3.1. It has power delivery support, display port support, but no Thunderbolt support. Aww. Yeah, yeah. And not too uncommon, I think, in this form factor.

I would love to see it, though, because then you could eGPU this sucker, and that would be really, really nice. A couple other things that you'll notice after more than maybe this is your second or third impression after you've been using it for a bit. System76 advertises that this thing uses their open firmware in it. And practically speaking, I think the biggest way you notice that is unbelievable boot time. It resumes from sleep freaky fast. It boots at warp speed. I don't know how to describe it. Like, you power it on. Actually, this is how fast it boots, is I powered it on. Wes, you were sitting there, and I was like, did I get it? And we looked at it, and the OS had booted. And we're like, oh, wow, I guess I had gotten it. It just... We were confused about what was going on, yeah. When you would expect about your screen to be lighting up for, like, your post screen,

that's pretty much when you're at the OS. You know, and I got to say, folks at System76, Jeremy in particular, they've been really doing a ton of work. I mean, there's Coreboot on here, there's their own embedded controller firmware, as well as a whole bunch of other gadgets. And I think that's partly why it's just such a nice, slick experience. Right. So that kind of comes into play when you're doing like the OS selection screen. And that is very simple and clean and easy to read. And then when you're doing the firmware updates, the screen that it goes to is also very well, easy to read, well-designed, clean, and all of that is nice and smooth. So no complaints at all in that regard. And then the embedded controller firmware itself is GPL3 licensed. And what's so great about this is you

combine that with the fact that this thing is 2.2 pounds. So it's the lightest weight in its class. So walking long distance carrying this thing is just no issue at all. You barely feel it in your bag. And you combine that with the super fast on aspect of it, it pretty much checks all the box that like a tablet would check too, because it's fast on, it's lightweight, it has a good all the box that like a tablet would check too, because it's fast on, it's lightweight, it has a good keyboard. It's really something. You know, also nice when all these customizations is the Intel management engine has been disabled. And that's a nice little plus that you don't get from most laptop manufacturers.

I think too, the other kind of still hard to get these days is the user serviceable aspect of this thing. Right. There is 12 screws you remove from the bottom panel of this laptop. You can service the drives. You can service the CPU fan. You can easily install. In fact, there's even a guide on System76 support website

on how to refresh the thermal paste if you live in an area where maybe that might be necessary. Wow. And then, of course, the storage and the RAM and all that is very accessible. So let's talk about heat for a moment. There is the benchmark side to this, and then there is the practical day-to-day use of it, which I did a lot extensively. I did want to throw this sucker at some serious benchmarks,

and luckily, just a couple of months ago, we had the most recent XPS 13 in-house. Right. And we benchmarked that, and we had all of that on file still. So I was able to take the Lemur Pro up against the XPS 13 and see how they perform. Now, there was a bit of a lead that the XPS here had because that XPS had six CPU cores, where this Lemur has four physical cores, eight threads versus 12 threads. So there's that aspect of it. In these benchmarks, which are primarily focused around software compilation, whenever you're using something multi-core, this thing can really, really,

really haul. However, when you're using something that seems to peg a single core and peg it as hard as possible, it does tend to tap out at around 2.8 gigahertz after about 15 minutes of full-fledged, complete hard out running. You're getting the temperatures up into the 170 degree range. At that point, the Lemur Pro doesn't seem to really bring the clock above 2.8 gigahertz. So you're not reaching that 4.9 under extreme thermal load. However, if your workload is bursty or even like bursty for a couple of minutes and then drops back down, you will reach that four gigahertz level very frequently and sometimes beyond, but you will touch four gigahertz quite often. If you keep the thermals below like 165 degrees Fahrenheit, I think the highest I saw going during the

benchmarks was 185 degrees Fahrenheit at that point. The fans are not actually all that bad. I do have a take here. Keep in mind, this is actually on my phone because this is while I was at home. The phone is sitting on top of the laptop keyboard. So this is not at full out, but I explained the situation, and you get an idea of the noise level. Okay, welcome to the punishment zone. The microphone is right up against the laptop,

and what you are hearing is the laptop under fairly significant actual day-to-day load. Currently, the CPU is clocking in at 166 degrees Fahrenheit. I did max out at 185 degrees Fahrenheit temporarily. What I'm doing now is I still have OBS going, but now I'm actually doing the screen cap for my coworker. So I also have them on a video call. I'm capturing my camera and I'm capturing a terminal window with a video loop playing behind it, a 4k video loop, I might add, and it's a 1080p canvas. I'm sending that to my coworker, and I'm also monitoring that video in my own VLC window. There's a lot happening while the video conference is going,

while OBS is recording all of this to disk as a x264 file. So what I'm witnessing here, and this bears out in the benchmarks too, is the laptop really walks the line between fan noise and thermal throttling. So it will gently thermal throttle constantly around this range to keep the CPUs around this temperature. I can push it and it will let me go further, but if possible, the laptop, the firmware, and the CPU all working together, try to keep the thermals and the fan noise around here. So this is about as loud as this thing gets during real life punishing use. If you don't push your laptop

this hard, you won't even hear this. It stays completely silent. So that was my using it impressions of it. And I thought that was extremely reasonable because I, you know, like I said, it's on the keyboard. So when you move your head further up, it's even quieter. And Jeremy, since you've been able to join us now, I'm curious on how that firmware is walking that line because right as I received the unit, there was a firmware update that seemed to kind of adjust that curve a little bit. We wanted to maximize the wattage that we could get out of the CPU. What we're looking at is not frequency, but wattage. And the reason for that is when

you're doing multi-core labor, the frequency is much lower, but the wattage is much higher. So if you have something that only uses one core, you can get up to that 4.9 gigahertz, and you can stay there for a very long time and never hit thermal throttling. and you can stay there for a very long time and never hit thermal throttling. But of course, if you're at a multi-core workload, you can't get that high in frequency before you start to hit power limitations and thermal limitations. So we try to keep the CPU indefinitely around 20 watts. These CPUs are typically supposed to be at 15 watts. I kind of missed the comparison with

the XPS 15, but I believe that they're setting their power limits at 25 watts for short term and 15 watts for long term. Ours is set at 30 watts or 35 watts and 20 watts. So we have a much higher boost when we're doing a short workload and much higher thermal output when you're doing a long-term workload. And then on the fan side, we want to keep the CPU around 88 degrees. That makes the skin temperature reasonably comfortable. We don't want to burn people, but we want to get as high as possible while maintaining a skin temperature that's tolerable. So what we did is set the thermal throttling at 88 degrees, and we were able to run with the fan speed that we use as the maximum fan speed indefinitely at 20 watts thermal output. It can actually go up to around 22 watts indefinitely.

So the first fan curve we released was basically the same fan curve but boosted a lot higher so it would reach 100% fan speed. And that fan is a very powerful fan, very high RPM fan. We don't need to utilize its entire range to remain performant. You'd be able to push the thing up to 25 watts, but then the skin temperature gets so high and the noise gets so high that it doesn't really make a lot of sense. So we found a nice balance, having the fan max out around 60% RPM, having the CPU throttle at around 88 degrees, and having the power limit set at about 20 watts. That ended up being a really good balance. I have to agree because in my benchmark testing, you know, I could really see

that kind of that balance happening. But in my actual day-to-day, actual fairly aggressive workload where I was really trying to see what it could do, but I wasn't trying to artificially push it, it really did a good job of walking that line to the point of where most of the time I could never even hear the fans. And Cheesy, to that point, I think you had a question about sort of how the thermals were monitored during the design of this thing. At the super fan event last year, you guys had just built the isolation booth so you could measure the Thaleo fan speeds and the new fan curves. Did you put the new Lemur in that same isolation booth to measure those fan speeds and noises? We did a few times, but the final fan curve was not developed there

because, well, all of us are in our own isolation right now due to coronavirus. Of course. Yeah, right? The situation is, yeah, we brought the decibel meter. I have very quiet spaces here in my house, too, and we have hardware spread amongst us. So we were able to achieve the same effect without using the completely sound-isolated booth. Colonel, you have a bit of a theoretical question regarding the firmware and those fan curve thresholds. Yeah. So if you guys are running a custom firmware, would you be able to expose those thermal thresholds and the fan curve algorithms

to the users and make those user configurable maybe by going into the UEFI somehow? Absolutely. Right now, the configuration is completely hard-coded, but I would expect to be able to dynamically set those as part of the system 76 power daemon. And we already do that on our Thaleo line for the fan curve. It's set in user space. But the important thing for me with OpenEC was that it would work regardless of the user space or kernel running on the machine. So the Lemur Pro, the firmware design, and the EC firmware, both of those are designed to be as driverless as possible. So you install, for example, on some of our other laptops, you'd need to have System76 software installed in user space to get 100%

hardware support for things like keyboard backlight or the airplane mode button. In this model, everything defaults to a hardware-managed, embed controller-managed setting before being overridden by the operating system if the operating system supports overriding it that makes sense so that's that sounds like a pretty safe way to handle it i mean really nice too if you're going to do some distro hopping and don't quite know how to set everything up right yeah that's true too or if you want to go to windows you don't have to get any drivers to install windows this is the only core boot system that has good Windows support, as far as I can tell.

I hadn't thought about that old Windows OS. Because we're using UEFI as one of the things. Other core boot vendors, they're using something else. Chromebooks use DepthCharge as a payload. Purism uses Heads, which uses CBIOS, I believe.

So we're the only ones that are offering basically the same level of compatibility across distributions as proprietary firmware offers with this Lemur Pro. I got the sense just by some of the positioning, but also, I don't know, maybe by the way it was sent out and whatnot, that battery life was a pretty big focus of this laptop. It's got a 73-watt-hour battery, but the focus really is on how long that 73-watt-hours lasts, it seems. I would, of course, want a bigger battery no matter what. I know some 15-inch laptops are able to fit a 99.9-watt-hour battery in there. I would love to do a 15-inch after this as a 99.9 watt hour battery. But there are some important things, especially with 20.04, that increase the battery life significantly. You've got much better CPU frequency management with the 5.4 kernel.

And you may notice that if you move between 1910 and 2004 or move between any older distribution with an older kernel than 5.4, you'll get much longer battery life on the 5.4 kernel. Also, we've done optimizations on the embed controller side to improve power usage just at a platform level. Well, it really all kind of comes together. You know, how often do you get a machine like this, you know, just to try out? I mean, I have to send it back, but you know, like it's a great opportunity. So I thought, well, let's really see what I can do with this kind of a shaggy dog story here. But I'm a member of this program called Harvest Hosts, where you can take your RV and you can stay on land at wineries and breweries and golf courses and farms. And we found this local farm

in the foothills of the North Cascades of Washington, and it's got 580 acres of forest. Ooh, beautiful. So we took the RV out there, but there's no electricity, there's no hookups, it's all off-grid. There is cellular signal, but it was a no-power situation, every watt counts. but it was a no power situation. Every watt counts. And I had the lemur with me as my weapon of choice because I needed to just get as much battery power as possible. And they have built like these log seats and workspaces. So I grabbed the lemur and I headed out into the forest for an entire workday with just my phone and the laptop. I'm not kidding you. And I recorded a couple of thoughts. The audio is not incredible because I just had my phone with me,

but I wanted to capture stuff as I was experiencing it on a laptop where every minute of battery life mattered. And I had some complicated work to do that day. I have arrived at my working spot for the day. I think this is probably about as far away as I could get from Lady Joob's and still have decent Wi-Fi performance. So I'm 100% battery right now. I kept it charged all night. And we'll kick off the Electron apps,

the infamous Electron apps, and see how they do on the old battery life. I realized I sort of scheduled my day around meals. You probably knew that about me already. Yeah. But as I recorded this, I started just after I ate breakfast, and then lunchtime, it was time for a break and time to get down to some more complicated tasks.

Well, I have to say, I'm impressed. It's midday right now, just after lunch, and I left the screen on over lunch at my outdoor workspace and perched on a log, and I thought, you know, I need to do a screen cap. So I'll set up OBS and then go have a sandwich and come back. And I have the webcam going with screen cap of my terminal and a background video looping. And the CPU right now is at 135 degrees Fahrenheit, which is not bad.

I've seen it get a lot higher than that. And I literally have my recorder right next to the laptop. It's closer to the laptop than it is my face. And it's totally silent. I thought I'd come back and hear these fans just blasting on this thing. But what's also really impressive is the battery life is at 64%. It's estimating three hours and 59 minutes left. I also figured that OBS, now it wasn't recording, but it was just sitting there capturing nothing, burning CPU and GPU cycles, but no, seems quite fine. In fact, OBS is only using 10% of the CPU. So I am very impressed with the

battery life. This is what I would expect from, I'm not even joking, maybe an ARM Chromebook. But this is a full-fledged Linux box with OBS. So I just was sitting out here and like, you know, I need to do something for a co-worker. Let me do a screen cap. At first when I started setting up, I thought, well, I'll probably get a few hours, especially once I start launching OBS because I hadn't even installed it yet. So I had to like download the packages.

But then once I got the packages installed, I'm like, well, I could tether from my phone. So I moved a little bit further away each time. And I kind of felt like towards the end of it, like I was challenging myself to drain it down because the little estimator changes sort of in real time depending on what your workload is. So I ran net data in the background to kind of capture the battery life on a longer term graph. And there, one of the things I noticed is that it has a very predictable discharge rate. Like it seems very consistent. Like you could really kind of rely on it kind of consistency. And so then I felt safe. I mean, I know that sounds silly, but I felt safe to like, I grabbed the laptop and I just carried it. I didn't have a bag with me at the time because it's super light. And I went on for like a mile hike with the laptop and set up and kept working.

It did it. It made it three meals. It's just about dinner time. It's just after 6 p.m. And I walked down to the river because I thought I'd finish off my day, which is about a 10-minute walk from the campground. And that was my moment of confidence when i realized i i could walk 10 minutes away and i'll be fine and sure enough 30 left now with an average cpu load for the last um

hour around 20 thank you chrome um and it says i have two hours and nine minutes left with 30% power. So when I've looked at the different aspects of this laptop, the battery definitely is one of the standout top performing features. I seem to recall many System76 reviews where we said it's a great laptop if it could just have a little more battery life. Well, I think they took all the times we asked for that and they put it all into this one laptop. It's truly exceptional here. I don't need to keep working, but I absolutely could. And what's impressive about this is certainly there were times where it was a light load. It was email and chat, but there were also times where it was pretty consistent OBS screen capture and recording and a video chat. And I also recorded an episode of the self-hosted podcast, which includes not only a VoIP session, but also recording a local FLAC file for over an hour.

And just wrapped up a bit ago, and I still have, according to this, over two hours of battery life. I really couldn't ask for any more. I've had, oh, also, I should mention, I've had the screen cranked to 100%, because outside, it's a matte display, so it works, but it needs a little extra support, so I cranked it. I cranked the speakers, and I cranked the screen brightness, and it's been like that all day long. Okay, System76. All right. You made your point.

We get it. I eventually turned it down to 75% and then closed up, brought it back, didn't charge it, brought it to the studio this morning, came back out of the woods literally this morning for the show, and got here, and it still had 14% battery life. And then it just died just a few minutes ago. It was on and off bursty workload. I was able to carry that thing all day round. All day. I looked at my watch. I walked a total of 1.8 miles that day around the little trails and stuff like that, carrying the laptop the entire time.

Very lightweight. So when you combine that battery life, which is just outrageous, it really is great in 2004. I didn't really spend a lot of time with Pop! OS 1910. I mostly just wanted to hop on the new. I asked them for access to the beta a little early so I could play with it. But it really seems like it's System76 laptops at their best with this. There's been some genuine engineering to make it a pleasant experience, combined with the basic ODM hardware platform getting really, really good.

The all-day battery life gives you tablet-like confidence. And the crazy lightweight means you could carry it around the forest if you want. I mean, and the USB-C charging is really nice for flexibility because I do have a DC bank of batteries that I could charge from USB-C off of. Right. So that's nice for me as somebody who's charging off of a DC source to a DC laptop. I just keep it all DC. You've still got the powerful CPUs and as much RAM as you could possibly ever need. So you could really get some serious work done wherever you might be.

If your workload depends on really pushing the CPU as far as it can, and you're buying this because you consistently want 4.9 gigahertz, that's not going to happen. But that's also not a, it's not a realistic workload. You can play it out in the benchmarks, and I did that. I'll link it in the show notes if you want to see the comparison. But in my book, that's sort of a phony test because... Get a server for that. What are you doing? Well, I did that test, and I did three hours of that benchmark test on battery to see what the difference would be. I did one all plugged that benchmark test on battery to see what the difference would be I did one all plugged in one on battery and after three hours of the laptop going full tilt GPU CPUs cores all going crazy with the screen it set 100 brightness on it still had 24 battery

after three hours of that so when I saw that and I thought to myself, well, if I'm doing like a workload, that's mostly web browser, electron apps, a little OBS, maybe compile a kernel here or there. I didn't do any of that on this particular workday in the forest, but I thought I had a shot at it. But what I learned is when you do more real world stuff and you don't do the synthetic benchmarking, it actually performs even better than you'd expect. And that's so I give you, you know, Jeremy, I give you some credit for that in the team there, because I think you guys really figured out that real world balance in a way that is not necessarily benchmarkable. But when you use it, you definitely notice it. Jeremy, do you have any insights to share on the keyboard? I felt like it was a pretty good keyboard. It wasn't like my favorite keyboard I'd ever used, but I had no

issues typing on it all day long. When we get to doing our own chassis, I think we definitely want to have the replaceable keyboard there. With it being, so the depth is decreased a little bit from the Galago keyboard. I think my favorite keyboard is the Oryx keyboard. We're looking into designing desktop keyboards, and actually part of that goes into designing laptop keyboards and designing the laptop chassis. Looking into some innovative ways to do layout and do reprogrammability. And hopefully we come up with something better. Because I don't think I've ever met a laptop keyboard that I've really been attracted to. Anytime I'm at a desk, I want to hook up an external keyboard to it.

Any laptop I've ever had. It doesn't matter if it's a ThinkPad X220. I just don't believe that there's ever been a laptop keyboard that's really been comfortable to work on for an entire day if you're doing stuff like I do, programming. Well, you know what I think? I think that's just the kind of thing I want to hear a guy who's working on replacing a keyboard say. I agree. None of them are as good as they could be. I think my T480 gets

there close, but if I'm being honest with you, I'd still take a full-size desktop keyboard. Once you pop over to the mechanical keyboard, you're just too spoiled. I can compare, though.urs the lemurs pretty good um compare it to the xps 13 i actually have one of those from before i started working at system 76 and it's it's way better than the xps 13s and of course it blows the the macbook 2018 out of the water i don't know i haven't tried their magic keyboard

but i'm pretty sure magic you can't just throw the magic adjective onto something that you were selling in 2010 decide not to sell because it was too expensive and too thick pretty sure that's exactly how it works i think you just nailed it and i I agree. It was a great experience. And I think it's easy to say, okay, yeah, that's not so crazy. You know, the Surface Book could get XYZ or the MacBook Air can get this. But this is a fully integrated Linux solution from the vendor OS and the firmware that obviously was relevant and I received frequent, pretty close after I received the device, to the nice firmware boot experience where you're choosing a boot device, to the choices that were made in the fan curves and the thermal curves,

to just the selections in the brighter screen and some of those aspects, plus the nice slick System76 and Carve logo, which looks extremely nice. All of that kind of comes together with the updates in 2004, with the improvements in Pop!OS, which we'll talk about next week, all kind of lands to make something that is, in the past, I think, unachievable for Linux users. And now I think it's close to almost being what we should expect. At the same time, it's actually here in a real package that you can buy today. And this is one of those things where you can get this thing. You can charge it with USB-C. That's remarkable.

You can hook it up to a monitor that does power pass-through and essentially have a complete dock-like experience with this laptop. And it'll stay quiet when you're on your conference calls. It's got a micro SD card slot in there. So when you want to download your photos, it's not a big, huge hassle. And I'm really impressed because someone who's been buying these types of laptops over the years, you know, trying to run Linux on them or either because they came loaded that way, or I loaded on there myself. I don't think I've ever had an experience quite this smooth. I, for a bit, you know, jumped around. I put vanilla Ubuntu 2004 on this, ran perfectly fine. And then when I got my hands on Pop! OS 2004, switched over to that.

And of course, that was super smooth. The recovery environment's nice. The setup is super slick. Pop! Shop! and all of that we'll talk about next week is in there too. And it all comes together in quite the package. Like never before before seen and i actually legitimately mean that really it seems like quite a balance you know there's been there's been a lot of thought on system 76 side to where this machine fits and what it's good for and it's nice to have something that answers that all day work battery life i mean like i said i put in the bag showed up here at the studio still had like 14 battery and i just don't understand how that's practical it just seems seems ridiculous. Especially with 40 gigs of RAM in that sucker, of DDR4 RAM. Also really nice to have, I don't know about everyone else,

but sometimes you leave your house and you realize you didn't grab your charger. Oh, that never happens to you, Wes. Well, all right. Do check out the pictures in the show notes because it's also, it's a nicelooking machine as well. It can be a bit of a fingerprint magnet, but I just wipe it down. Took the pictures and wiped it down, and it's not so bad. It could also be that I'm a little messy. A tip came in from Mike on Audio Recorder.

He says, regarding the conversation about recording different audio sources on your PC in Episode 350, you mentioned there's a GUI tool for the Mac. He says, are you aware of Audio Recorder for Linux? It's on Launchpad. He says it offers the capabilities you discussed, and it also allows for user-defined audio sources. For example, you can select both the Spotify app and your mic input if you would like to record your own karaoke session. I mean, assuming that's your thing. We did know, actually. But only just recently. We'd been talking a little bit behind the scenes. Obviously, the team is, we're all audio geeks over here

and always looking for easier ways to grab clips and just quickly record audio when you don't want to get a full DAW out of the box and set up. Audio Recorder is super handy. Yeah, well, I think the Choose Linux team picked it, like, as a pick, like, forever ago. Right! Yeah. So we kind of know it internally, Well, I think the Choose Linux team picked it as a pick forever ago. Right.

Yeah. So we kind of know it internally, but we didn't really remind ourselves about it. But what I have been finding that really works well for me is it's a, I can't remember the command now, but it's an FFmpeg command, I think, that takes an input audio device. Yeah, you can just choose the pulse device. And then you just tell it to encode to FLAC or whatever you want. And it's just, it's a single command line. And I like that just because it's super fast. And thankfully on that system, my audio devices don't change numbers. So it's always audio device two.

I think audio device one is the HDMI output on my video card. Of course it is. Uh-huh. And then audio device two is the actual audio device I want. So I just put that into FFmpeg and it's just right there on the command line. We might have put that in episode 350. I'll double check. Yeah, so that could be in there.

That's worth checking out. And then another email comes in, says, I'm not sure if you guys have all covered it yet, if y'all have covered it yet, but I saw that Tailscale, I thought you would be interested in hearing that they have hosted WireGuard as a service. It's written in Go, has an open source backend, and it's made by a group of ex-Googlers.

Do let us know how that goes because I would be interested in how these hosted WireGuard services go. I have expected that once it hits mainline kernels, you'd start to see them crop up. Thank you, Jason. Well, we'll have another batch next week. We're going to try to get to the feedback. We've been meaning to do it for a couple of weeks, so if you've got one you'd like to sneak in the show and get in front of us so we can hook our peepers on it, go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact

and drop it over there. There's a form there. You fill it out, and then robots package it up and deliver it to Wes Payne, who takes a very discerning look at our feedback. Service you provide, Wes. Sometimes I'll even email you back. Yeah, I saw you were sneaking off a few emails before the show started. I knew that meant you were confident in the Arch upgrade, that you weren't like pre-staging.

Yeah, of course. All right. Well, if you'd like to get that feedback in, like I said, linuxunplugged.com slash contact. While you're over there, please subscribe. Just get the show automatically every single week. You'll also find links to guest information or links to things that we particularly covered in this particular perfect podcast. Got it. At linuxunplugged.com slash 352. I was going for the triple P there. Pretty proud of that.

Pretty proud of that. Thanks to Philip for joining us. Thank you, Wes. Check out Wes at techsnap.systems. He's always rocking it over there. Thanks to Mr. Cheesy Bacon. Drew in the back office. And, of course, our entire Mumble room.

The show is at Linux Unplugged on the Twitter. I'm at ChrisLS. And we'll see you next Tuesday. So so Before the post show proceeds, I believe we have a back office correction, real-time back office correction from Drew in the control booth. Drew, pipe in from the control booth, and could you update us on the mistake made at the end of the show there? Yeah, so audio recorder appears to be something different than sound recorder.

Damn it. We had covered sound recorder in Choose Linux, which is a GNOME project. Flipping the table over here. Yeah, yeah. Audio recorder looks pretty cool, though. Okay. All right. So those are two different apps to do a similar job.

That's amazing. So sound recorder is the one you guys covered and audio recorder is the one that Mike wrote in about. Alright. So sounds like we have something else to check out. Very cool. Alright. Thank you, sir. Did the Mumble Room have any topics that didn't make it into the main show that we wanted to cover in the post show before we get out

of here? Can I talk about my gnome frustrations? Yeah, I want to hear about a gnome frustration. I got gnome frustrations. Got this brand new video card, 5700 XT. Should be able to work no problem because it's AMD. Until GNOME 3.36 comes out. What I'm dealing with is that if I'm using GNOME 3.36 on any distribution besides Fedora, my system has this issue with intermittent freezing.

And I've isolated it to GNOME because I have the problem on Arch. I have the problem on Ubuntu. And I have the same problem on Debian Unstable. So would the Fedora difference then be that Fedora is just using Wayland? It happens on Wayland and X. Oh. Yeah, that's the problem. I don't know what the difference between Fedora and all the other ones are,

other than Fedora works a little bit closer with the GNOME team, maybe. During the freezing, do you have high SSD I.O.? No. Are you sure? Yeah. Because it happens mostly

when I'm just using the web browser. Oh, my friend. Oh, my friend. So, hmm. This is interesting, because i have an amd mine is not nearly as nice as yours mine's only a it's a 580 uh but this is a saga i have shared on the show on the show before so if you think about it it kind of makes sense but i ended up doing a lot of reading got some few pointers from the audience who've also run into the same issue. And what it kind of came down to is there is a IO contention issue when both your disk is getting some access and your

GPU is working at the same time. There is, for some of us, a lag effect that happens where it's like your entire system locks. Sometimes it just manifests as your mouse getting jumpy. Sometimes it's a full system lock. And if you're using a browser like Firefox or Chrome, they're rendering on the GPU and then they're writing the cache to your disk. And it seems to be as pathetic as the sound because mind you, I'm doing this on a system with multiple NVMe drives and SSDs. Everything is fast as hell. 12 cores, 64 gigs of RAM, AMD 580 graphics, and I'm getting these freezes, lockups, and stutters. And what I did is I got the profile, what's it called, Wes? The profile service demon, I think. Profile sync demon. Thank you. Profile sync demon. And what that does, as ridiculous as this sounds, is it syncs and then tricks your browser into using your cache out of RAM, which not only makes your browser noticeably faster, even on a fast system, but it removes that disk IO aspect and it solved my lag issue.

And so now I run my browser cache out of RAM. So that way I don't have this problem. It's only on that one system. I do not have the problem on any of my other Linux boxes. But I absolutely have it on that one. To the point where I nearly just went back to 16.04 because it does not happen in the Ubuntu kernel. You could test this on your system. But in the kernel in Ubuntu 16.04, it does not happen.

Like the older kernel, something's different. It is something that started happening in like the 5.0 series kernel going forward. Minimac actually done a challenge of changing over to using the Provo SYNC Daemon just this week, just to see what it would run like. What do you think? I listened to his last week uh talk about and literally during the show using manjaro i slapped it in in five minutes up and running haven't haven't done anything it worked beautifully now i use the overlay fs as well so

that you know to minimize um memory and to give the higher sync rate um it's worked perfect for me but i think mini mecha has an issue but But what I was wondering for that guy who's having this issue is, could you run net data and then you could see, even a couple of seconds after the phrase, you could look at your net data and see where your bottlenecks are? I tried that, just to mention it, and you may get some insights. I was actually going to suggest that too, Mullet, so that's a really good idea. But what I noticed

was, I think, just a big gap in the data during that time. You do experience the same problem. All of a sudden, I had the feeling that my browser was freezing, and I didn't have that before. Normally, I have my browser cached just in TempFS, and that worked pretty good. So I saw

no real speed increase by changing to PSD now. But what I realized, all of a sudden, I had a web page I was visiting. All of a sudden, I had that page freezing. I was not able to click the links or anything. And then all of a sudden, it came back. And did Profile Sync Demon solve that or not? I guess the SheMolot uses other

settings. The SheMolot uses it in overlay mode, how we told that. So I probably have to dig the settings and switch to that too. I didn't. See, for me, I did not have to use it with overlay FS. I think it is probably better longer term. I probably should look back at doing that.

Well, I didn't have to use it. It's just when reading through it, it said that it speeds up the sync and makes it more, slightly more reliable, faster, and it uses less memory. So, I mean, it was win-win. Why wouldn't I use it? Yeah, I think I'll probably circle back, as they say in business terms, and double down

on that initiative going forward. But right now, my go-to-browser strategy includes just the basic setup. I'll have to revisit that decision. Profile synergy demon. Yeah.