LINUX Unplugged - 353: Feeling Elive

Episode Date: May 13, 2020

We're blown away by the Enlightenment desktop, and its little known features, and we share a quick way for you to try it out yourself. Plus our experience with Pop!_OS 20.04, Telegram's recent embarrassment, and some feedback. Special Guests: Brent Gervais, Drew DeVore, and Jill Bryant Ryniker.

This was a fun tweet that was sent my way. If you're stranded in a weird shell and you're only allowed to bring three commands, which ones do you choose? Boy, there's a lot of good choices out there. You see tons of folks answering with, you know, you need an editor of some type or maybe I'll just bring C. My favorite answer was just give me Common Lisp. Okay. All right. What about you, Cheese?

What would your, if you had you could bring up the three commands with you which one did you bring probably pseudo um less and um ls sure come on where's the net cat what about you drew which three commands would you bring uh probably cat echo and ls arcacy says i'd bring hollywood that'd be good you know that that uh What about you, Drew? Which three commands would you bring? Probably cat, echo, and LS. Archesy says I'd bring Hollywood. That'd be good. You know that. You're not going to get much work done, but you'll be entertained. How come no one has said apt? It feels like that's the obvious choice or whatever your package manager of choice is, DNF. Well, if you have Netcat, you can just, you know, bring the archives across and you need to live archive or untar or whatever. Isn't the real answer Emacs?

It's got a package manager built right in. Hello, friends, and welcome into your friendly Linux Weekly Talk Show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hi, Wes Payne. Hello. Welcome in to 353, sir. Oh, I like that number.

I know. Feels so official. Well, we have a really great episode. It's something we've wanted to touch on for weeks, and that is your feedback. We got a whole batch of listener feedback this week. Also have our thoughts on the new Pop! OS 2004. We've been kicking that around,

and we'll give you our take on that. And we have a new machine that just arrived in the studio, still in the box. We'll take that out and tell you what laptop we're reviewing next. Plus, we have a bunch of community news and so much more to get into. So first, let's start by saying hello to the gentleman on the over-the-internet mic line. Hello, Cheesy and Drew. Good to have you guys on board. Hello, guys. Hello.

Hello. Hello. And hello to our virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello, hello. Hello, everyone. Good evening. Time-appropriate. Hello.

Happy Linux Tuesday. So let's start with some community news. There's a story that I wanted to bring up to the top of the show, sort of flag it to everyone's attention. If you have recently installed Ubuntu 20.04 server and chose the encrypted storage option, it is possible that that password you chose for encryption was stored in plain text in a log file. Uh-oh. So the fix is out. Fix is in, Wes.

So the fix is out. The fix is in, Wes. And if you grab the most recent 20.05.2-1874 of this subiquity, I think is what it's called, package, it will fix the problem. It's an installer issue. Just a bit of an oversight, I guess. Oopsie doodles. Yeah, one of those rather big oopsie doodles, actually. And it wasn't an intentional thing.

It wasn't like some breach or anything like that. And there's, as far as we know, no examples of this information being used. In the wild, it was caught during a check and then submitted as a bug. And then, of course, Canonical jumped on it. I might have the timing wrong, but I think they went from discovery to fix. Took them 17 hours or so. You might be able to check, Wes, in the launchpad bug. Well, yeah, it looks like it was reported here 18 hours ago, 19 hours ago,

and the fix was in five hours ago. So that's 14-ish hours or so. Wow, even better than what I was told. Clearly something they're taking seriously. Yeah. So very good. But just so you know, that is pretty critical, and you should probably get that updated now.

And go check if you've already got your system installed. Maybe just go see if those log files are hanging around and remove them. Hello to Alan Jude. It's good to have you back on the show, sir. Hello, hello. Hello. Was just saying on the pre-show before we actually hit the record button that I've been really enjoying Two and a Half Admins, which is a new podcast with Alan, Jim Salter, and Joe Resington at 2.5admins.com. Is that what it is? Yep. That's our clever domain hack. It's so clever. Really good show.

It's great to have you and Jim on the same show. And I've been enjoying the first two episodes. Let's go check that out. Definitely don't mention ZFS at all. No, that never comes up. I love it. You know, like always, Alan, you do a great job of explaining the stuff that people are the most interested to know and sort of deliver it in a great, in the way you've always done a great job of delivering it since early days of tech snap.

Clear, clear breakdown. I love it. And so then you add that with Jim in there. And then Joe has the perspective that maybe a lot of people in the audience have, which is they haven't yet learned about this. You need someone to ask the questions. Yeah, he's the dot five in the two admins right there. If you didn't catch it. I crave ZFS.

There you go. So go check that out. It's good to have you here. We have a whole bunch of people in the virtual lug, over 30 people in there today, which is really cool. Maybe the best one yet. If you'd like to join us, it's on Tuesday at noonpacific over at jblive.tv. And then there's instructions.

If you just Google search Jupiter Colony Mumble. Mumble.jupiterbroadcasting.org. Oh, okay's instructions. If you just Google search Jupiter Colony Mumble. Mumble dot Jupiter Broadcasting dot org. Oh, okay. Okay, thank you. So it's Mumble dot Jupiter Broadcasting dot org. And that has the setup guide. The trickiest thing about our Mumble server is it's using the old default port, not the new default port. And if you are going to join, maybe just show up a little bit early, make sure you can get your mic checked out, get through all of our staging. It's great to see not a guy at work back in there there because that's one of my favorite nicks of all time.

Not a guy at work. Totally innocent. One of the things that got us chatting in our back channels just between Wes, I and Cheese and Drew and everybody else on the team was this sort of bold statement made by Fedora, I guess. I guess you could attribute it to a statement on Fedora's part. This kind of came out, well, not kind of, it did come out of a Fedora AMA that was conducted on Telegram and Ask Me Anything, where a question was asked, why is GNOME Shell the default for Fedora Workstation? And then I guess after some reflection, they realized, you know, we didn't really challenge that underlying assumption. And so then a post was created saying that GNOME is not the default for Fedora Workstation.

GNOME's not the default, Wes. Whoa, that's news to me. But let's dig into what they're actually trying to say here. I get it, but I think it will provoke a conversation that I'd like us to get into. What they're essentially asserting is that Fedora Workstation isn't a box of parts where you choose default options and then blast it onto the hard drive. They say, no, instead, it's a carefully procured assembly of an operating system aimed at developers, sysadmins, and makers in general. If you replace one or more parts of it, then it stops being Fedora Workstation. It's not the

thing they've created anymore, and it starts being a build- own operating system. And that's okay, but it's not Fedora Workstation. Right. And they say this is an important distinction to make. It's not that they have some specific goal of creating this exact GNOME experience so much as it is an entire Workstation product that is tightly integrated that they test as a whole. And it's developed as a whole. It's a mindset of how they create the distribution, how they test the distribution, how they verify the distribution. Yeah, this post is over on Christian Schaller's blog, and he writes, Having been in the game of trying to provide a high-quality desktop experience, both commercially in the form of RHEL and through the community efforts around Fedora Workstation,

I have seen and experienced firsthand the problems that the mindset of interchangeable desktop creates. For instance, before we switched to the Fedora Workstation branding, and it was all just Fedora, I experienced reviewers complaining about missing features, features that we'd actually spent serious effort implementing because the reviewer decided to review a different spin of Fedora than Gnome. Other cases I remember are customers trying to fix a problem by switching desktops, only to discover that while the initial issue they wanted fixed got resolved, now that they've switched, well, they have a whole bunch of problems and never saw the fix to the first one. Yeah, and so for now, RHEL only offers Gnome as the default desktop, and the same is true in Fedora Workstation.

And that's not because they don't understand that people enjoy experimenting with other desktops, but because it allows them to work with their customers and users and hardware partners on fixing the issues they have with their entire operating system, because it's a clearly defined entity. And adding features needed going forward and properly supporting hardware and vendors going forward, as opposed to spreading themselves thin, they say, this is their take on it, and just run around putting band-aids on problems that have been reported. Yeah, and maybe in the long run, this is actually beneficial for people who do want to end up customizing their operating system because the team is just focused on, you know, a narrow set of things like high

DPI support, getting Wayland ready for the desktop. That's what we talk about all the time or making Thunderbolt work properly on Linux. And when you do have this giant mass of things to focus on, it's not just not the same as having a precise goal that you're trying to polish and get ready to ship as Fedora workstation. Yeah. And you see this manifest in Fedora as Fedora Workstation. Yeah, and you see this manifest in Fedora almost in every release in some way. Like a recent example, I think, has been how they use SystemD

for the terminal sessions in GNOME Terminal. Oh, yeah. Which is, that's a clear from the GUI all the way down to the low levels of the OS integration. And there's been other things when they rolled out, like the example he makes, Christian makes here, is Thunderbolt support. When Bolt and ThunderboltD and all of the security stuff rolled out for Fedora, there was a user-facing GUI component in GNOME system settings.

There was a user daemon in the lower levels of Linux. And there was even some hardware firmware changes for some vendors. It was literally, like he's speaking to here, hardware vendor assistance, lower-level Linux cooperation, and GUI implementation. And it was executed as a whole singular product. Right, and without that, I mean, it's kind of the Linux curse in many ways because we have all these interchangeable parts.

Yeah, sure, you know, the Bolt daemon gets created, but you're left on the own for the desktops and, well, maybe eventually Plasma does it and who knows who spares the effort on the GNOME side to do it. But when you think of it as a shippable product in this big vertical stack, you're like, well, no, we need to make this work from the bottom on up. Seems obvious, but it's not generally how we assemble something of a bunch of different parts. And so I guess I can see their point that if you go with this spin of Fedora, it's not so much that it's a default. It's that's how that spin is developed. I guess I can get that. And it's not like they're

not making the plasma spin or other spins available. Those are still perfectly valid options. But there was something that came up and this is really hard to quantify. And I almost debated not even saying it on air because it's so silly. in our love blog we were talking about how when you use fedora you can kind of perceive that it's one cohesive product that there's something about it that makes it feel like gnome is part of the whole system where most the time when i use gnome or any other desktop on any other distribution it's like i can perceive there's a separation between gooey and lower level. Right. I mean, compared to like a Fedora install to just installing GNOME on Arch.

It's not the same. It's not the same. You could put the same theme on there. You can have the same version of GNOME shell. You can have the same version of the kernel and the same version of systemd, and it still somehow doesn't feel like it's all a single product. That's why I debated not even mentioning it because I can't really even describe what that experience is, but I bring it up because others also felt like they noticed it in the Lug Hangout and I thought, okay, so it's not just

me. It's not Crazy Chris. Right, and we talk so much about all the great work that Fedora does, sort of, you know, shepherding changes in from upstream and taking them together. I think it'd be easy to forget that there is this holistic approach that's going on. Fedora 32, it's so good. Just, if you haven't tried it yet, go give that a spin because it's a great release. Maybe you can tell what we're talking about here, that sort of full cohesive product experience. Now, something that was going to be a cohesive product that is

completely dissolved is Ton, or Ton, I think it's Ton, which was the whole cryptocurrency experiment that Telegram was hurtling towards for the last two and a half years. They write on their blog, our best engineers have been working on the next generation blockchain platform called Ton. Right. It was Telegram Open Network, right? Yeah. A cryptocurrency that they were also going to go with that was going to be Gram. So you had the blockchain component Ton, and then you had Gram, the coin, and that grand plan for Telegram is now over. And I think this is really noteworthy because the Linux community is pretty large on Telegram. And for the last two and a half years, the best engineers, as they put it on their very own blog, have been focused on a

cryptocurrency that by all outside accounts was never going to go anywhere anyways. Why do so many of the messaging apps seem to want to have a cryptocurrency? Like I remember, was it Keybase has been working on one and making pop-ups in the app and annoying people that didn't care about cryptocurrencies about it, although they just got bought by Zoom. So who knows? Oh, that hurts so bad. I know. Yeah. The other one that gets me, and it's also widely embraced by our community,

is Library or Libri or whatever. Library. Their whole system is really, it comes down to a coin. And when you cash out that coin, it impacts negatively your search results on library. Look this one up. Go look up how you exchange the library coin. It's cute. You basically have to sell it

to a completely other cryptocurrency, something like Ethereum or something. Something that's more widely traded that you can actually then trade elsewhere. And Bitcoin's too expensive, so go screw yourself. You better go with one of the lower tier priced cryptocurrencies. Then if you're lucky, you can either sell that directly into your currency, but more likely what you'll have to do is then sell that cryptocurrency to buy Bitcoin, and then you will have to sell the Bitcoin to actually cash out from library. library. And this was the same direction Telegram was going down. But unfortunately for them, but maybe fortunately for the users, the U.S. court decided that grams couldn't be distributed

not only in the U.S., but globally because they said it's possible U.S. citizens would just find another way of accessing the platform after it launched. So to prevent that, grams will not be allowed to be distributed anywhere in the world. And while it seems like an excessive extreme overreach that the U.S. law could somehow block free cryptocurrency trade in other countries, there is a pretty established network of interest that is going to enforce that ruling. Yeah, it turns out the dollar is still pretty important, as are all the financial institutions here in the States. And the way they write about this kind of, I think, betray you're not alone. But this is exactly what's happened with TUN. The mine, which is TUN, the blockchain, it's investors and grams, which is the gold.

A judge used this reasoning to tell people that they should not be allowed to buy or sell grams like they can buy or sell Bitcoin. They look at this as a gold mine. He writes, many people invested in the gold mine because they were looking for profits. They didn't want that gold for the gold themselves. They wanted to sell it to other people. Because of this, you're not allowed to give them the gold. That's how he's thinking about this. That's from him.

This cryptocurrency thing, which is kind of cool, but it was the peak hype when this launched, was maybe seen as this path to monetization that so many projects seem to be struggling to look for. Clearly it's not going to happen for Telegram. We're writing this post to officially announce that Telegram's active involvement with TUN is over. You may see, or may have already seen, sites using the name or the Telegram brand or the TUN abbreviation to promote their projects. Don't trust them with your money or data. Of course. Of course there's a sketchy stealing your money angle to this whole thing. Just fork the blockchain, man.

Is there any cryptocurrency that doesn't have a sketchy angle? Truth. That might just be true of currencies, now that I think about it. Hey, when you put money on the line, I mean, there's a lot of incentives. That's how you know that Bitcoin is like real money, because there's just as many scams around it. Amen. That's very true. Yeah, it is very true. We got to get to the unboxing here in a moment. But I wanted to talk about a little discovery I had over the weekend, thanks to Minimac and Jill in the Luplug this Sunday, and also a news item that we thought we could cover here. So you remember the Enlightenment desktop, right, everyone? Enlightenment. Of course. Oh, yeah. It is still going. And just this week, they launched a new set of their frameworks, EFL. Think of it as like their version, perhaps, of GTK, but they would argue quicker, better, faster, and better looking. And they've released a new set of their

core libraries. We thought, well, what a great opportunity to kind of just take a look at Enlightenment. And I was chatting with Leplug, like I was saying, and I was kind of praising how the things I love about Plasma are some of the KWin window rules and telling Windows to go exactly at this desktop, exactly in this space every time I open it. And Minimek and Jill were nodding, yep, Enlightenment can do that. Enlightenment can do that. And then Jill, you shared with me one of the features that you found Enlightenment to be just maybe tops as far as Linux desktops go for all of them is the monitor management. Oh, yeah. They've been far ahead in that area. They have a wonderful screen utility. Your monitors come up out of the box.

And this was like 10 years ago before distros, multi-monitor worked really well on distros. Right now, I have three monitors, one 43-inch Ultra HD, and then two 30-inch monitors on the side in portrait mode. And Enlightenment, I've got it all configured in enlightenment and it works just beautifully out of the box. I think you need a little more screen real estate there, Jill. That's great. Next up, she'll be full VR. That sounds like a brilliant setup, but it must get tricky when doing gaming and stuff. You know, I'm a big gamer. I like to game spanning the three monitors. So it's a big deal for that to work because most window managers, that does not work out of the box. And with Enlightenment, it does.

That's so cool. And Minimac, there's a performance aspect to it, too, that seems to be super palatable, even in a VM. I lose Enlightenment as Jill. I lose it on all my multi screen environments but also on computers that have low specs so enlightenment comes handy because not only does it use quite a small amount of loam so my system now on that toshiba has about 100 megs of rom it's using and enlightenment is so scalable you can use it on that 1024 to 600 pixel laptop, and you can use it on a huge machine with like four screens. A little tidbit you shared with me is there's a reason why themes are slightly trickier on

Enlightenment, but the net result is much better performance. There is a very, very special thing that the themes are in fact binary. There is a very, very special thing that the themes are in fact binary. So that has a very positive aspect. So the whole thing is really, really bleeding fast. But it also has a negative aspect that you don't have so much themes available. For now, you have an official ARC theme that I use that is pretty good, pretty stable. Yeah, ARC's great. I love Arc.

But you don't have all these fancy themes that you can use without a desktop. But these themes that you have are binary, and they're bleeding fast, and you can use them, and it's a breeze to use it. It's really a breeze. Computer Kid, you have a question that I bet is on the mind of a lot of people that are a little skeptical of Enlightenment. How would it stack up speed-wise to something like i3? As I never use some tiling window managers, I can't really tell you. What I can tell you, it's bleeding fast.

And when we talk about tiling managers, you have a module in Enlightenment where you can use the tiling options. where you can use the tiling options. And the coolest, cutest thing is you can, in fact, define virtual desktop to use tiling functions and others use not. So you can say my left monitor using tiling functions and my right monitor does not use tiling functions. Oh, snap. That's awesome. So you can see my virtual desktop on screen one uses tiny functions and my right screen doesn't. So you have possibilities you can't even imagine. You can choose for every application you use,

you can choose if yes or no you want the window decoration. Then you can use stacking. So you can have like an IRC terminal open, remove the window decoration, and put it just on always low. And so you have like a living background, and you have all the other windows that you can over your living background. And you can roll in windows, so you don't have to minimize them. You go into Windows title, and you roll up your your window mouse and you just see the title bar. Or window shading as it is on Plasma. You have so many options.

You really have to discover and you have to be ready to really crawl through all the settings. But there's a lot of it. And some of the possibilities you have are rather cryptic. You really have to work yourself through the settings. But once you have your setting, you will never change it and you will love it. So this is where eLive came in. It was recommended to me by you and Jill. And you can find it at eLiveCD.org.

It is a Debian-based pre-setup Enlightenment environment. There's a stable version, which I believe uses Enlightenment 17, and a beta version, which uses Enlightenment 16, I think. And you can throw it on a VM or on a box and try it out immediately. And it's a pre-configured with a nice theme, some default options. And it walks you through the basics of using the environment with a help walkthrough. And it is a blast to try this distribution out. And I say this in the most affectionate way. It in some ways reminds me of an older era of Linux setups.

Yes. Where they really kind of, they let you sort of set a lot of options at install, but then nailed the experience when you do it just right. So I'm installing it right now. I have it up right here on this computer. And it's asking if I'd like the compositor, if I'd like Konky for the resources embedded in the desktop, if I'd like a dock. And you walk through these kinds of questions about package sets.

Would you like Chrome, Chromium, Firefox? Hey, I've detected that this thing supports OpenGL. Would you like me to turn that on? Some of these things are just killer for new users, too. I would have never known how to go figure that out. And I used to love that stuff. And now Linux distributions, they just do it all for you without even asking, really.

But when I install this, I was like, you know, maybe I will try Pale Moon this time. I will try. And I just checked that box instead of Firefox. And it was a really fun experience because it reminded me of the way it used to be installed distributions. And at the end, you end up with something kind of a little bit unique for you. And it was so fast. So Wes and I were playing with this.

You got a chance to try it. I did, yeah. Wes and I were very impressed by it. And I thought for myself, I know immediately where I would use this on a daily basis if they made an ARM image for the Raspberry Pi 4. I knew that's what you were going to say. It would be so good. It really would be. I mean, it makes you reconsider what you can get out of a machine because it feels pretty modern, right?

And it has a lot of features. It's got the nice dock right on the bottom, tons of configurability. But it's such low resource. Yeah, this thing right here with, I have a web browser open and a PDF viewer, and it's using 300 megabytes of RAM with the entire thing, the whole thing loaded. That's not bad because it's been sitting there for, I don't know, a couple of hours. So that's not bad. And it can scale down below that if you look at some of the screenshots they've got. Yeah, and it's one of those desktops that works brilliantly.

It sounds like if you have multiple monitors, but I've been really impressed with single screen on a laptop too. So we reached out to the developer of eLive, Thanatomesis, I think is how you say it. Did I get that right? Nicely done. Thanatomesis. Not easy for me. I had to write it down right here, but I wanted to get it right because this is an individual who is working on this distribution by themselves. Since 2005, I believe. And it really showcases what is, I think, such a classic story in open source where there is really, really great software out there that does amazing things,

but there's no marketing team, there's nobody that's pushing it in any particular channel, and it just goes undiscovered. That's the Enlightenment desktop and the Enlightenment libraries, which are used by people in the industry who know embedded markets. But outside of that, it doesn't have a lot of general user adoption or knowledge. And so something like eLive comes along and it showcases this brilliant work, which in itself is also a brilliant work.

So I thought maybe I'd share a little bit of the email exchange. He wrote back to us and gave us some inside information about the project. And Thanatomesis writes, It is developed by a single person, me, and it sometimes receives a bit of help from volunteers. In the past, I was able to pay someone, you know, a little extra for some development help. But at the moment, I'm alone, and donations are not enough to pay anyone extra help. And it's the reasons why donations are so crucial for the survival of the project.

And you'll notice that when you go to the download pages. It's almost like an elementary OS-style approach that really asks you to download. They have some free options, or you maybe wait a little while to get the ISO if you can't donate. Yeah, that's an interesting approach, is donate to get the ISO now, or give us your email and you'll get a link in an hour. And on the beta side, 32 bits are free, but the 64 bits version is a donation. But I think this is actually better, right, than the more insidious ways that distributions could try to make money with tracking built in advertising. God forbid some sort of cockamamie crypto scheme.

This, I think, is a more direct user supported approach but i think he's gotten a lot of pushback on this and people don't really seem to care a lot when you look at the numbers of donations that he's getting it's really kind of too bad because i think this is close to his full-time job is just trying to keep this thing going it takes quite a bit of work it's hard to position a specific role for eLife too, since it aims to be better every single release, he writes. This, of course, doesn't mean that it is the distro to pick for use for maybe developing Node.js or to use to deploy Kubernetes, but since it's based on Debian with good customization and compatibility, you can still use it for any purpose or transform it into other things.

Yeah, and I think that's true. There's actually a Linux Insider review just recently in May. To quote them, eLive is one of the most multipurpose and different Linux distributions you are likely to encounter. And it does seem, you know, there's all kinds of interesting things out there.

He mentioned specifically the very powerful customizations to the terminal, which I've not had a chance to try yet, but definitely piqued my interest. If you type EL underscore and press tab, you'll see a ton of functions that can turn your shell into a powerful framework for development. And I think he uses that to actually develop

the operating system itself. And also neat, Vim is customized right out of the box to be a full IDE suite. As it should be. And then like I was saying, sort of more in the era of classic distributions, but in a good way. When you're doing the installation, towards the end, you get asked, do you want to install extra drivers and stuff? You know, you're kind of familiar with some

of these. Some distros still ask you that stuff. And when specific hardware is detected, check this out. It will automatically configure the font sizes based on your screen resolution. A dynamic installer of the distro that optimizes for lightness and low-end computers or will enable extra features if it detects that you have a more powerful computer, and its own persistence system that saves different desktop settings per each different computer detected. And there's some default customizations for apps and ad blockers included by default in the browser with tools to automatically fix things like running out of space and watching for that, a possible stuck process, and detectors for hard

disk errors and strong shakings of the computer. There's this good multimedia support, optimized video playback based on your graphics card as well. He says, I'm sure there's more stuff, but that's some of the highlights. That's a lot of stuff. At the moment, we have the stable and beta versions. They're really different in many senses. For example, the stable version is very old, but offers the best user experience, intuitiveness, beautiful, and features included in the Enlightenment 17 desktop. Yeah, that's where it got a little confusing for me is the stable version actually has Enlightenment 17 and the beta version, I guess, trying to work on all the underpinnings,

that's using Enlightenment 16 for now. Yeah. Enlightenment 16 is loved by many people and deserves a good try for those who've never tried it before.

You can see there's so much pride in this work. Absolutely. A little bit of defenseness about the donations, which seems to be very common in open source projects, but the end result

is something that's brilliant and beautiful to use and feels like a desktop that is different and modern. And the funny thing is, it's been that way for quite a while. Right, Jill? Yeah. Enlightenment was the first kind of eye candy OS. It was the most beautiful desktop ever created at the time. Yeah.

at the time. Like you were saying, it lives in that world between a lighter ex-window manager like Flexbox and Windowmaker and XFCE. So it lives in that space between memory-wise, but it's so fast and beautiful, even though it's not one of the heavier desktop environments. I mean, if you've been running GNOME and you can't stand that there's JavaScript involved at all, here you go. Go for your binary themes. And I remember talking about Enlightenment back during Linux Action Show, and I think I had a bias set in. And I'm going to admit it right here. It was simply, I figured by now that stuff would have broken. Like, it was really good with the software compositor and the monitor support back when I was doing Linux Action Show with Brian. Like that's the last time I probably really looked at it seriously. And I thought to myself, well, I'm sure it's just bit rot over time

and that stuff still can't be good. Turns out, like they kept with it. That's kind of the amazing thing is, I mean, not many other communities would you see this sort of its own little ecosystem that can just continue to flourish. I mean, it doesn't matter if anyone's talking about it on podcasts or folks know about it. If it has a dedicated set of users who care about it and get great use out of it, that's enough. Yeah, you got users like Minimac and Jill who become advocates for it because they know it's

like, there's this really great thing over here. That happens so often in open source. Well, you got to think too that they also offer for free the 32-bit version, which if you have an older machine, you know, an old netbook or something like that, this would be perfect for it as well. Whereas a lot of distros are dropping that 32-bit support. So it made me want to fire up Manjaro on a Pi 4,

like a minimal Manjaro install, and then just build my way up to Enlightenment. But I know I wouldn't be able to create an experience as good as I witnessed with Elive because Thanner Tomesis has been working at that for a very long time and really knows how to work the backend configuration of Enlightenment. But I really want it on a Raspberry Pi because it is in that sweet spot of, like Jill was saying, of sort of where XFCE is, including sort of a slower release cadence,

but it's a slow but steady improvement cycle. Do you end up using predominantly GTK applications? Do you mix it all up? Is there one desktop toolkit like Qt apps or GTK apps that work better or look better under Enlightenment? I've had it installed alongside GNOME and KDE as well and haven't really noticed a difference. I mean, I run Kdenlive in it without any issues. The theme's not weird or anything?

No, no. The only thing that happens is when you boot into it, like I have it installed on Ubuntu Mate too, and when you boot into it, all your icons from Gnome come in. But other than that, no. It kind of exists on its own. Same for you essentially mini mac i on my laptops normally i use gnome so i'm pretty used to the gdk environment a cool thing about at least the latest versions of enlightenment is that you don't have a problem with a double title bar. So Enlightenment can very good adapt right now to the new inline declarations of the GDK applications.

Fancy. You don't face a problem that some QT users complain that you have two title bars and then you have to work through the problems to eliminate one of them. We're all a bunch of filthy multiple desktop users. Yeah, we are. Listen to us. of them. We're all a bunch of filthy multiple desktop users. Yeah, we are. Listen to us.

So ridiculous. Well, thank you to Thanatomesis for taking the time to respond to my questions. And if this has all piqued your interest, go check out Elive, elivecd.org. And if you like what he's doing there, kick him a few bucks. I think it's a great example of an open source project

showcasing other great open source work. And it really is on the users to make that thing possible. Exactly. So that's pretty great. All right, Wes, what do you say we do a little housekeeping? Housekeeping. All right, bring it in, bring it in. Oh, yes.

You heard us mention that we're live. You heard us mention the LUP lug. Let's just kind of explain what those are because we're just tossing them around like maniacs. We are live on Tuesdays. I mentioned that earlier. Noon Pacific, but you can get it converted at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. You go to jblive.tv to watch it. And that's the gist of it. Although, more and more people are really figuring it out.

We have a quiet listening section in our mumble room, which is pretty good audio quality and the lowest latency you're going to get anywhere. It's like you're sitting right here in the studio with us. It's true. So that's another way you can tune in live, and it's low bandwidth as well, so that's nice. There's so many ways, but we'd just love to have you here. We have a great chat room going too, a bunch of people in there. irc.geekshed.net, pound Jupiter Broadcasting.

Okay, that's the live stream. Now let's talk about that love, love, love, love. That's happening on Sundays. Now let's talk about that. That's happening on Sundays, same bat time we do this show on Tuesday. So noon Pacific in the same mumble room, just up in the lobby. We get together, we hang out for a few hours. We get Chris to try enlightenment and it's a rather good time and we really enjoy it. So we'd love to have you join us. It's just a way for people to hang out and actually chat with other Linux users. It can be refreshing if you don't get an opportunity to do that very much. So that's the LUP plug, and you just got to get in that mumble room to join us.

And there is an IRC room as well, where you can get details, irc.geekshed.net, and that is pound LUP plug. It's just nice to have a casual chat, you know, no pressure. It's not live or anything, but you'll be surrounded by people who also want to talk about Linux. That's right. That's right. And then Drew's here with the news on the infinite escape room for Linux. What's this? What is this?

What is this? This is a podcast that reached out to us on Twitter, and they asked for some help getting up and running with Reaper on Linux for their editing. some help getting up and running with Reaper on Linux for their editing. So I talked with them a little bit over Twitter DMs and got them up and running with some LinVST and some Wine and really just getting them where they needed to be to do their audio editing on Linux. And it sounds like they're there. They've got it running and everything is good.

So I just wanted to give them a shout out and say, hey, congrats, guys, for moving to Linux. That's awesome. That's amazing. Super cool. I did see that Twitter thread go by and that's super cool that you helped them. And I presume since it's you they were speaking to, they're now using Reaper. That is correct. Yes. That is our recording tool of choice for the Linux platform. I mean, big props, though. It's not easy to go, you know, especially when you're focused on the content, to go change up all the tooling that you're using. And I know from experience that getting to working on Linux while it works great can be a bit of an adventure. Especially if a few of your favorite plugins are Windows-based plugins. Right.

Now, we have a bit of, it's a change, but not really one that will really affect the show very much. But I'm excited to announce that Mr. Wes Payne, ladies and gentlemen, has a new day gig. Wes, congratulations. But not much is changing for the show, really, is it? No, not at all. I'm going back to the world of software development full time. So I'll be leaving a cloud guru as an employee, but I'm certainly not leaving the Jupyter Broadcasting community and definitely not the show. Now, I'm really glad that you were able to continue staying here for the show, because

since episode 100, it's kind of become a thing, Wes. I know. I can't quit it. No, you can't. I noticed you got these shackles installed here. I was going to ask about that. I was going to say, yeah, if you just sit right there forever, just so I can make sure you won't go anywhere.

No, no. No, we've chatted about it, and I think it's going to work out pretty good. I'm very happy for you. I'm glad you're able to get a new gig that's back in the software development field, and I think you're going to enjoy it quite a bit. But it does bring up a rather particular challenge, and that is you've got to give back that laptop. So let's talk about that.

But that right there, we'll leave that for the housekeeping. That's officially the housekeeping this week. But let's talk about what we're going to do about this ThinkPad, because that is a work machine. And that's got to go back. I miss it already. But wouldn't you know it, we got something new that just came into the studio this week. So sent in by Dell.

Go ahead and take it out of the box there, Wes, and tell me what we got there. There you go. Nice. Yeah, open it up here. Oh, it's very silver. It is very silver. This looks like the latest new model of the XPS. Oh, it is indeed, Wes.

It is the new XPS 13. It's got one finger open kind of, sort of. And look at that screen. So that's got the new edge-to-edge screen and the edge-to-edge keyboard. So it's just nothing but laptop. And the new fingerprint reader up in the top corner, which looks really nice. Same carbon fiber feel to it, but even more metal now. I mean, they've got these fancy chamfered edges. Yeah. Isn't that

looking super nice? Yeah. It looks like a really high end product now with those shiny edges. So Wes Payne, what good timing for you to review a new laptop and tell us what it's like to set it up for a software development job and maybe a little casual gaming. What do you say? I think that sounds like a challenge I'm ready to take on. There you have it. So, we'll either have it next week or shortly thereafter, the Wes Payne take on the new XPS

13. So, that should be really cool. Coming with me, buddy. Getting used and abused. Wow, look how much... Put that next to the ThinkPad there. Look how much thinner that is. Holy smokes. Wow. That XPS is almost just the size of the top of the ThinkPad. That's wild.

And it's like 75% just in the area of the thing. So the ThinkPad is a 14-inch? 14-inch, yeah. So it's a slightly, slightly bigger screen, but no question about it, just even from across the table here, I can tell you that XPS 13 screen is way better than the ThinkPad screen. It's way better. Yeah. We'll find out about onboard sound and things like that.

You know, that'll be in the testing. Yeah, I'll be curious on the whole Westpain take, because that's got the 10th gen Intel processor, which people are claiming has a decent, as far as decent integrated graphics goes, has decent performance. You've been playing on the ThinkPad with the 7th generation, right? Is that what it is? Yeah. So this should be a big GPU upgrade. I'm excited to give it a try. Curious to know how all the setup goes for the new

gig and all that. Of course, eventually we'll have to send it back, but we'll wipe it. We'll wipe it before we do that. Just a great opportunity to really give that. Yeah, I mean, I keep watching these things evolve, and of course I had XPS way back when. Yep. So I know it's been a good line.

See, would it work as my day-to-day? Was it the first model XPS you had? I think it was, yeah, the first model. This is going to be really interesting to just get your take on this one. So cool. So we'll have that in a future show. But now, what do you say we talk a little Pop OS 2004?

Oh, it's beyond time for that. Now, I was a little spoiled because I got to play with it on the new Lemur Pro, so I really got to see it in its prime when it's on System76 hardware. But I think that's worth talking about for a moment. So there's a couple of standout features that I think you guys will probably also echo, but I'd like to just give a little attention to here off the top, and that is the new PopShell tiling tool. You heard us talk about it. We were the first to interview System76 and get information out there about it, and turns out it's totally rad.

It's rad in how it's been created, too. They're using TypeScript to write this thing, which means in theory, I think a lot tighter, safer JavaScript on the end. Yeah, right. I mean, a nice first-class development experience. Absolutely. And that feature alone is implemented in a really slick way that just makes it worth trying out. Even if you just get the latest version of Gnome Shell and install this extension, it's really neat because it's integrated in the top menu. You click that little sucker, and then there's just one button toggle on, one button toggle off. Yeah, it just says Tile Windows, and there you go. toggle on, one button, toggle off.

Yeah, it just says tile windows and there you go. That one simple, obvious, fantastic feature is what makes this a totally actual usable feature for me that I will really use. Because there's certain workflows where I want free floating windows and I want control over everything and where it's positioned. And there's other times where it's just a keyboard day,

my hand's not coming off the keyboard, go ahead and tile it for me. So I've got it right here. I've been using it while we're doing the show. And I was using a note-taking application that had a little submenu that just was not playing nicely with tiling. Super simple to go pop that off, get my work done. When I'm done with that app, pop tiling back on and I'm set up in show mode. That feature alone is worth trying. Even if you're familiar with tiling window managers and whatnot, it's just fun to see how they implemented that. And I think they're going to just add more to it.

Absolutely. Plus, you can configure the spacing around the windows, and especially with some of the, just as a contrast to some of the more, you know, low-level tiling window managers where you're customizing it in Lua or, you know, something that takes a lot more learning. This is just an easy mouse click away to configure it how you like. Yeah, and you're still in Gnome Shell, too,

so that's a lot more appealing to a lot of people. Other things in there are really nice to have. I feel like 2004 Ubuntu, 2004 is just a really great release, but there's still some differentiation there with Pop. Pop shop, I think, stands out as what seems to be maybe another round of thought and pass that went into the default selection of apps. When I open up PopShop, literally probably three out of the five top apps I have to install immediately to make this a work machine are right there. And then after I have those installed, what it replaces them with completes the picture. It's pretty rare, and it includes proprietary stuff and open source stuff.

And they've really gone all in on Flatpaks, but the way it's implemented, the user never really has to be concerned with it. You know, honestly, so far, we've just been doing just Stock 20.04 and Fedora. The Pump Shop, it's been the best experience by far. It doesn't feel slow. There's no random sluggishness. Things queue up in a very natural way. And all the software you want is right there. Normally, I give up and just use Flatpak on the command line.

But I didn't have to. And just Flathub being installed by default is a nice touch. It makes it a little bit quicker to get running. The other thing I really appreciate that I implement on every desktop environment today, except for Plasma and GNOME now, is they included a pretty great launcher. Super key plus forward slash, and it launches a quick responsive launcher that is definitely faster than stuff built into GNOME. I think I'm probably just going to stick with GNOME at this point. I've built that muscle memory, but that's the kind of little stuff they're adding that I think really

shows you System76 is thinking a little bit deeper about a particular niche. Jack Wallen has a take that we'll link in the show notes, and in there, he writes, System76 understands that their target audience wants to keep their fingers and hands at the keyboard. Why? It's more efficient. Instead of shifting from the keyboard to the mouse and back again, things go much more smoothly when you can keep those digits pounding.

And he's right. You're seeing features like the tiling, like the launcher. Not everyone likes that, but they're kind of being bold here in a way. They're going particularly at a certain demo of users in an aggressive way that I like to see. And I think adds genuine differentiation between stock Ubuntu and long-term, I think could potentially be great for main Ubuntu, mainline Ubuntu, because they could Sherlock the crap out of this stuff.

They can sit here and watch System76 essentially market test this stuff in a particular niche that's tolerant to these types of tests and watch what does well and then just nab that feature and roll it into mainline Ubuntu. That's called Sherlocking, which is a term that's been coined because Apple does that with macOS and iOS. They watch what independent developers create. They take the most successful ideas and then they just incorporate it into their own OS

and they make it part of the platform. Canonical has that opportunity here with the innovations that are happening in Pop, in PopShell, et cetera. They can watch that and say, you know what, things like game remote, maybe we should ship that by default. Yeah, very true.

I've also just been impressed with how accessible it is for tiling in general. It doesn't feel like some obscure super user type thing. It's just another way to interface with your desktop. That's a really good way to put it. It doesn't feel like you're all of a sudden becoming an elite hacker. Exactly. Cheesy, I know you've spent a lot of time with Pop. I'd like to hear your thoughts on the 2004 release. I spent a considerable amount of time with it. I've been living with it on the ThinkPad now for a couple of weeks to two and a half weeks, something like that. Also living with it on the Thaleo that I was gifted from System76. So that upgrade process was painless. Tiling extension, the pop shell is great. And I think it's a great

entry level for someone who doesn't know if they want a tiling window manager, doesn't want to necessarily go full i3, maybe just wants to experience it first. All the keyboard shortcuts are sane. There's nothing just super crazy in the keyboard shortcuts. The terminal is added to your favorites by default. Thank you. Nice. The dot matrix wallpaper is super cool. I love it. One of the cool things that I really like about Pop, and it makes sense to me because of the market that they're delivering these machines to, is that it's an opt-in kind of disk encryption on the installer. You can opt out of it by hitting a checkbox, but by default, disk encryption is turned on. This is where you need to be, people. You need to be encrypting your drives.

is turned on. This is where you need to be people. You need to be encrypting your, your drives. And obviously if they're selling to people that are developing equipment for space or whatever that, you know, you would want to have that disc encrypted in case that machine was ever lost for some reason, a couple of things that didn't really care about. And, you know, it's, it's just personal preference sort of thing. It doesn't default to detailed view. It's still icon view in GNOME files. Uh-oh. I hate that. That's where it always goes first, right?

Whenever I open up GNOME files. There are still a few issues with PopShell, and I expected it to be that way. If you're resizing windows, splitting windows, and those sorts of things, you'll run into issues where certain applications don't tile properly. So you'll kind of have to, you know, mess around with it a little bit to find that happy medium for you. Obviously, if you've got a large 4k screen, it does help out with the screen real estate. So you're not crunching down gnome files to a, you know, super small tile and the, you know, making it basically impossible to navigate through files. But overall, it's really a solid distribution. It makes sense that they would do what they've done with PopShell

for the audience that they're targeting with their hardware. So I think they've done a great job. And it's built on top of 2004, which, as you mentioned, has been a rock solid release. So I've been thrilled with it and it's going to remain on my Thaleo and it's going to remain on my laptop for quite a while. That's the ultimate testament is if you stick with it. And I don't I don't know for me because where Pop sort of seems to be landing in my spectrum of distros is right where I have Manjaro right now. That makes sense. I think Pop has a better out-of-box experience, but in three months, I know I'll be happier

on Manjaro just because all the little things... Hooked on rolling. And, you know, with an AUR wrapper, you can really just install anything under the sun. I was spending 10 minutes like a dope over the weekend Googling for a CUPS PPD file for my brother laser printer when it dawned on me that of course it's in the AUR. Everything's in the AUR. And I just installed it and I was ready to go. And I got right to printing, which was like the first time I'd printed in two years, I think. You animal. Well, it should be said too, that on the other drive in the ThinkPad, there is Manjaro.

You know, it's like Wes always says. It's not the distro. It's how you use it. I do think you're right about the pop out of box experience. I was especially impressed with the installation. It just felt super friendly, streamlined. Honestly, I think it's like my favorite install experience on any OS so far. Fair point.

It has the best installer, the best art, it looks the best, it has the most consistent look and feel. You can really tell that they have talented people on their team and they're pointing some of them at this thing and saying, or them, and saying, make it consistent, make it a product. And it feels like it, much like Fedora does, just in a different kind of branded way right and i think we were a little skeptical at first when pop was announced like what where's the value add white but it's exactly that sort of focusing on it as a product combined with some of their hardware yeah it's there and then lastly i'll just add with the the lemur pro the most

direct experience i had being benefit that it was a Pop!OS install on System76 hardware with the Lemur was the firmware update they needed to issue early into the review cycle of the machine that changed the fan curve. That was a very cohesive experience. It felt top grade. I mean, it felt just as good as anything you would experience from any vendor that has been doing this for 15 years already. During the flashing process, it came up with a graphical System76 screen with a console output. It wasn't just like some UEFI output on the command line. We had Jeremy on last week talking about the Lemur, and we kind of briefly touched on the keyboard and a lot of these keyboard shortcuts for pop shell kind of play into this new keyboard that they're manufacturing as well so i'll be

interested to see you know how that all turns out and i'm sure i'll be the proud owner of one of those keyboards whenever they do start to ship too so i think if you you know if it works for you it's a great one i think for me i'll probably on Manjaro, but keep a close eye on what Pop's doing. Now I really have all the choices, so I'm doing good. We got a feedback in. You want to switch to feedback, Wes? It's apropos, as they say. Indeed.

It says, hello, guys. I was just listening to episode 343, what Linux is best at. The PopOS Tiling Window Manager Extension chapter made me wonder if you'd come across PaperWM. It's a GNOME extension that provides a decent tiling window manager experience. I've been using it daily for a few weeks. It works well on pretty much stock Ubuntu 19.10 installation in my case, and looks like it's under heavy development. Richard also wrote in on GNnome and Tiling, says,

I just wanted to say that I was listening to the one-click trap episode, and you mentioned a Tiling window manager for a GNOME shell. I think we've been talking about this. I'm getting the sense that this is a topic. System 76 isn't the only one out there, and some of them are really polished, such as Paper WM and Mosaic. A new contender enters the ring, Wes. Mosaic.

You should check them out and review the GNOME Shell extensions. You know, when we got this feedback, I actually did go and install Paper WM. Because why not? You know, you just go clone their repository, run the install script, and it'll install for you. And yeah, it looks pretty nice. Maybe a little less user-friendly than the PopShell is. But if you want perhaps a little more full-featured tiling, definitely worth a try. So if you are even hardcore on the tiling side of things.

But don't want to step away from GNU. That's a weird use case. Who is that user? These people are. Richard and Chris are. So then we have Gamma's dot file tool, which I thought would be a cool one to kind of cap us off today. You ready for this one? Yeah.

If you're like me and use Git for version control and sharing your dots, you probably have a few things you want to keep private. Nearly everyone has an SSH config, and a lot of people here need their mumble.conf. Great point. Oh, boy. See, I just always delete it, but that's not the right answer. No, me too. It's not. See, I just always delete it, but that's not the right answer. Me too.

It's not, which is one of the reasons it has your private cert in there, which is what all of the permissions for Mumble, once you've been verified and like voice or, you know, a mic check and all of that, your certificate says you're good. And then when you delete that config, you lose that. He uses Git Crypt. It uses Git's filter attribute to encrypt transparently. So you can host all of your.files in one public repo without worrying about people stealing your sensitive data. If someone checks out the repo,

the encrypted files are simply checked out and encrypted unless they have the key and the Git Crypt unlock and then Git Crypt unlock the repo. Have you looked at this? No, you know, I've seen it floating around there, but I've never actually used it in any of my workflows. And it does seem like a nice way to do it. You know, if you don't have ways to separate that stuff fully out there

or you have to compose them together when you, you know, reinstall stuff, just leave it right there and let Git handle it. I wonder if I was going to use Git, say, to backup my configs and my.files. I think that might be where I drew the line and just did a little self-hosted GitLab. And I suppose I'd still care about security, but I just don't know if I'd want to put that stuff on a public. Yeah, I suppose it depends on the line, too,

of which configs do you need secrets in and which do you really feel value in sharing. You know, if you've got a lot of customizations or nice hacks to your VimRC that you want to share with folks out there versus something maybe like MumbleComp where it really is just sort of your personal details. I think if I was doing a general dot file backup like that, I would be concerned that eventually something would end up in there.

Sort of like we started the show with that installer error that wrote, by mistake, the encryption password in plain text. Like you just sometimes... It's easy to have happen to even experienced users. You don't know what's going in there. Sometimes applications just put something dumb in there. I think I'd want it encrypted too. So I think this is a great tip by Gamma.

So Gamma, thank you for sending that along. And again, it's GitCrypt. This seems like another opportunity for folks to give some feedback to us too. You know, this is a common problem. If you're not using GitCrypt, what are you using? Yeah. How are you doing this? And is it necessary to use Git for this?

Or would rsync just do the job and to, like, say, a sync thing directory? Is that crazy? That just seems like maybe a simpler approach. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a, for Git users, folks who already work with Git every day, there is sort of a, you know, when you have this hammer, then. Probably what you just said is it, because I probably use rsync more than I use Git. Right, and Git has, you know, versioning baked into it. Right. Yeah, that seems like the big advantage. Yeah, for sure. Interesting. Linuxunplugged.com slash contact for how you do it or anything else we've talked about recently that you'd like to chime in on, including any questions

you have for that XPS 13 that Wes will... Oh, please do let me know. I'll be putting it through the ringer. Probably another way to let you know is on Twitter. Yeah, that's right. At Wes Payne. And I'm at Chris LAS. You can go check me out over there and let me know what's up. Check out my website, chrislast.com. That's happening too. I don't know. Maybe there's something going on over there you didn't know about. I don't know. There's only one way to find out. I'm not the boss of you. Not yet.

That's right. That's right. Well, congratulations again to you, sir. Thank you. I am looking forward to hearing your takes on that XPS 13 As well as more feedback, I love doing that So please get all that sent in We have links to just about every dang thing we talked about today At linuxunplugged.com

Slash 353 That's this episode And of course I encourage you to subscribe At linuxunplugged.com Slash subscribe Where we have a feed for every type of variety and player out there, as well as just a straight up RSS feed. It's new. I think you're really going to like it. Check it out. linuxunplugged.com slash subscribe. There's only a little bit of XML. We're sorry about that.

Just a little. Thank you. I thought it was going to be an Oprah moment there whenever you let Wes unbox the XPS. I thought you were going to be like, you know. You get a laptop. You get a laptop. You know, if I could afford it, I'd get him a laptop. But now that Wes is, you know, I think the rule goes, Jesus, whoever has the new gig buys the laptops. Right.

I think that is how it works. Right. I think he owes us all lunch and a round of laptops. So I'll be taking orders.