LINUX Unplugged - 356: Linux Hardware Love

Episode Date: June 3, 2020

From the low-end to the high-end we try out both ends of the Linux hardware spectrum. Wes reviews the latest XPS 13, and Chris shares his thoughts on the Pinebook Pro. Plus a really cool new feature in Linux 5.7, and we get some answers to the recent GNOME patent settlement from the source. Special Guests: Dan Johansen and Drew DeVore.

Wes, can I interest you in Snakeware? It's a free Linux distribution with a full Python user space inspired by the Commodore 64. Oh boy, you had me at Python and, well, the creepy name Snakeware. This looks pretty cool, though. You're booted directly into a Python interpreter and you can do whatever you want. Now, you should also note that Snakeware, yeah, it doesn't use X11, definitely not Wayland. It just writes directly to the framebuffer. Hello, friends, and welcome into 356 of your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.

My name is Wes. Hello, Wes. I've been looking forward to hearing your take on the XPS 13 for a couple of weeks now. And in my hot little hands, I have the Pinebook Pro. We'll tell you more about our hardware extravaganza. But, of course, we have some community news in 356. I got a little clarification on what's going down with the GNOME patent suit, as well as some great features landing in the latest Linux kernel.

We have some feedback. We may even have some picks. Who knows? But before I can get to any of that, I got to say hi to the guys over there in the red chairs. Hello, Cheese and Drew. Hello. Hello. Thanks for bringing your own chairs, guys.

Yeah, of course. Yeah course yeah i mean after what happened last week i don't blame you right right what was so sticky there i never figured that out it's the honey west i told you we shouldn't use the honey and also of course our virtual lug is here time appropriate greetings mumble room hello stay a while and listen hello mumble room good to have you along uh had a fun virtual lug over the weekend we'll tell you more about that and a little bit but let's start with gnome getting a big open source patent win now you might remember back in 2019 the dome Dome Foundation was sued by Rothschild Patent Imaging for violating its wireless image distribution system and method patent. Of course, Rothschild, a non-practicing entity, which is business speak for a patent troll, has filed 714 lawsuits over the past six years. But now, in a surprising move, Gnome has won not only a release and covenant not to be sued for any Rothschild-specific patent,

but a release and covenant to any software that is released under an existing open-source initiative-approved license. Right, so they're essentially not going after anyone who is covered by an OSI-approved license. So it's not completely a green light, but it's a green light for tons and tons of projects, dozens, many projects. The Shotwell open source image organizer infringed on a 2008 patent because it used an image

capturing device to import and filter photographic images from cameras. And then it would allow users to organize those photos and share them on social media. Yeah, nothing does that, right? Right. That patent would apply to just about every kind of software. Fortunately for GNOME, they had friends, including the Open Invention Network, which we've mentioned before and is a pro-Linux patent non-aggression consortium. Faced with opposition like that and the possibility of losing their patents in the lawsuit, well, Rothschild backed off. Making the best of it, Lai Rothschild, managing member of

Rothschild Trust Holdings, said, I'm pleased that we've managed to settle this issue amicably. I've always supported the innovation of open source software and its developers and encourage its innovation and adoption. Yeah, uh-huh. It sounds genuine. So, Wes, I had a bunch of questions about this because we talked about this aspect on the show. The Gnome Foundation took some funding to fight this, but then at the end of it,

it looked like they didn't have any settlement to pay out. They didn't have any legal fees to necessarily pay, it seemed, because some of that was also going to be covered. So I wasn't really clear on where the money had went. So I emailed Neil McGovern, the executive director of the Nome Foundation, and I asked him, you know, what's happening with the money? What happened with the money that was contributed? And as you would expect, he writes, as with any court case, things get expensive really fast. Although our lawyers were working on pro bono, there's a large number of other expenses we have from court filing fees and prior art searches to even flights and hotels, which I think is the aspect of these court cases we don't talk a lot about. And it was pretty awesome that they had lawyers working pro bono for them. I mean, that's incredible. No kidding. It really doesn't show you unity there. Yeah, definitely. Right. That you've got this, you know, you're all you're all working together and that we can defend the cause of open source software. The important thing

he says, he continues, is I want people to know that we didn't pay RPI. That's the Rothschild patent imaging folks for the settlement agreement. They didn't receive RPI, that's the Rothschild Patent Imaging folks, for the settlement agreement. They didn't receive any money from us. Now, there is more to this settlement that wasn't publicly available, and Neil kind of hinted to that, that there was more details. And if you had a project that is covered by an OSI-compliant license, you can email him to get these details, but they're not otherwise publicly available. So I said, what can you tell me? What about these things can you share with me? And he writes, I'm a little restrained here. Usually a settlement agreement is confidential. In this particular case, I wanted to ensure that those affected by the covenant not to sue was able to inspect the protections

we had gained for them. Also, it shows that we didn't pay them any money. He goes on to say, this means that I can pass on the full and unedited agreement to those who are arguably covered by the CNS. This means that anyone who has authored a non-trivial bit of free software can request a copy, but I can't just put it on a website. However, if you have any extra particular questions about the agreement, I can probably answer those. Neil. Isn't that great? So they didn't pay any money to RPI. They had the lawyers that were there pro bono and the community funding covered all of those extras like prior art searches, flights, hotels, all of the admin stuff for this case.

And the walkaway win here is an agreement that if you have an OSI compliant license, which is a lot of them, you're not going to get sued by this patent troll. It didn't invalidate the patent, which would have been the ultimate win, but it's pretty darn close, Wes. Yeah, it is. Now, the weird amount of secrecy, all the lawyerly goings-on, still a little disappointing. And I'm not quite clear what non-trivial piece of free software really means, but it's definitely a win. Yeah. And it's nice to see this happen for Shotwell, who I'm not positive,

but I don't even believe Shotwell is part of the default GNOME core. I mean, I don't know if it necessarily was the GNOME Foundation's obligation here to help, but I think they did anyway. I'm not positive on that. I say this to the patent trolls. Leave our free software alone. Yeah, I'm flushing them down the studio toilet.

That's where a lot of things go around here. So thank you, Neil, for answering those questions. Because, you know, I asked him, I was like, so what did the money go for? Where did the money go, Neil? And he gave me a very straight answer, and I really appreciate that. Maybe let us know if you've got further questions, and, you know, we can drill down a little bit deeper. Yeah, absolutely. He left that line of communication open, so I'd be willing to do that.

But I'm very pleased to see it. And this is a way that larger software projects and foundations can contribute beyond organizational and financial stability. And it's great to see it. A new kernel landed, Wes, version 5.7 since we all gathered together. And there's many, many, many things in this kernel release, including the new official exFAT file system driver that is the code from Samsung. The good one. The good one, yes. But I wanted to talk about the thermal pressure in the task scheduler support now, because this opened my eye to a problem that I didn't fully appreciate on Linux that kind of

seems obvious on its face. When a CPU is overheating, probably a common scenario for my Raspberry Pis or for your laptop, the thermal governor will usually cap the maximum CPU frequency. We're all familiar with that. However, this decreases the maximum available compute capacity of that CPU. Obviously, if a task scheduler is not immediately aware of those frequency changes, i.e. Linux's task scheduler, it will take the wrong scheduling decisions, assuming that the CPU has greater computing capacity than it actually has.

Never really thought about this, but the scheduler is looking at it going, this is a CPU at this speed. It's not aware that the governor's kicked in and it keeps scheduling stuff as if that CPU is at full capacity. So this release in 5.7 introduces the notion of thermal pressure, which makes the task scheduler more aware of frequency capping and leads to better task placement among available CPUs in the event of overheating, which then, in turn,

leads to better CPU performance numbers. This is just so cool. I mean, we've already worked some on memory pressure getting added to the kernel, you know, just to better understand what that's like. And now that we have thermal pressure added, I think this is going to be a huge win, at least eventually. I mean, you know, no one's running 5.7, at least not very many just yet. But once it makes its way to the distros, this has got to be good for laptop users.

Yeah, I think so. I think, although it could be wrong because I'm not super familiar with the bowels of macOS, but I think this is similar to how the kernel task scheduler process works in macOS, where it is monitoring the temperature sensors, even including the ports where you plug in your power adapters. They have temperature sensors there, and it's monitoring the overall chassis temperature of your laptops. And then this kernel task process will start eating more CPU to make the CPU look busier to the scheduler, but doesn't actually reduce the frequency and keeps the thermal load lower. They don't expose the thermal pressure information, though,

like this Linux API will. This is going to be a kernel-level thing that also exposes that metric as information so you can monitor that thermal pressure. And that is an example of where Linux, once it gets a feature like this, it's always so much cooler. Yeah, you know, there is definitely a little bit of a barrier to get things into the kernel, but

once they're there, you've got this amazing community of folks who can all work to make it better, right? Before we move on from new kernel features, there's a patch that is being discussed right now, so that's the phase this one's in, it's just in the discussion phase, That's the phase this one's in. It's just in the discussion phase that is necessary to land in the Linux kernel for newer Windows games on Wine to work properly. Wait, this is kernel stuff about Windows games? Yes, for Wine stuff, which you can maybe get a feel for why the conversation's a bit awkward. but newer windows games and even applications are making use of system call instructions from the application code without resorting to the win api which is wine's bag of tricks and it's breaking that wine emulation support which is not an emulator a linux kernel patch that is being

worked on would address this issue in the form of a system call isolation based on memory areas while having a smaller performance hit than, say, some alternatives where you do it all in user space. And that's pretty important when you're talking about games. So with newer Windows software, they're basically just executing system call instructions directly without going through the Windows API. So that means Wine isn't able to intercept those with their implementation of the Windows API and then emulate those system calls. And that means those games just don't work under Wine.

Wine can't really rework its handling of every single system call, so that would just trash performance. So that's why you basically need a Linux kernel-based solution for this. Gabriel Chrisman Bertazzi of Colabora, the consulting firm that has helped Valve in all kinds of these Linux gaming efforts, posted an initial patch to the kernel's seccomp mailing list implementing a system call isolation mechanism

based on memory areas. Seccomp, which is short for secure computing, is traditionally used for Linux security matters, and this really isn't for security in this implementation, but SecComp already has all these mechanisms in the kernel for filtering system calls. So basically with this patch, SecComp gains an ability to sort of filter things in this new virtual memory attribute that's used for tracking where in memory these calls are coming from. So since Wine can set this up and basically say like, yes, I know that I've set the program up with this

virtual memory area, it can then use, if accepted, this patch in SecComp to filter all those calls and then do the patching, filtering, and adjustments that Wine needs to do to make sure that those system calls get translated correctly. Wow. Now, they did look into using the existing set comp filtering, but that's like a 10% performance penalty. And if you just do it with isolation based on memory areas, like their proposed plan, that's 1.5%. And that's a lot better.

Isn't it interesting to see Windows and Linux making changes to bring each other slightly closer together in some ways? Yeah, that is fascinating. I mean, it's no longer a, you know, not quite the Cold War of old anymore. And, you know, so many people, especially with Proton, are using Wine for playing games on Linux. So hopefully that, you know, with that sort of momentum, the kernel developers won't object too much. I guess we'll see. But this change is under 100 lines of code.

So it's not like it's muddying up the kernel too much. Yeah, we're not talking like a huge change to Linux kernel here. I like to think about this from like 2002, Chris, where I was really in the prime of my everything must be Linux. This would be heresy to even suggest such a thing. But if you look at this, it's not a major change. It opens the door to bringing even more application compatibility to Linux. It's not something we'll see immediately. It's not going to land in 5.8. That's kind of too late. It may, may end up in 5.9 if they go ahead with it later this year, but we'll see. Only time will tell.

But yeah, you're right. At some point, things just get tricky, especially when you're emulating. I mean, not really emulating, but you're trying to pretend that you're a Windows system, and there's just so much going on there. And of course, that's a target that doesn't stand still. Wes, I am excited to say that I have received my Pinebook Pro. Oh, no way. Awesome. Yep. It's a nice, nice rig.

I love it already. I opened it up. I took it out of the box. I didn't have a strong immediate reaction to it because it just looks nice. It's not striking in any particular way, but it's also not ugly in any particular way. So I took it out of, that's great. Took it out of the box, booted it up. As I started to use it over the next few minutes, I started to realize, oh, this is going to be one of those devices. One of those that's in my bag all the time that I carry with me. I was hoping in the back of my mind that this would be a solid alternative,

something like an iPad Pro with a keyboard. That's a big ask right there. Well, if you look at what I use an iPad for, not really, because I use it for a web browser. I use it for a terminal a lot and Telegram and chat apps. I haven't tried all the different chat apps yet, but man, is it really great. It's light. The keyboard is solid. It has way more travel to the keys than I expected for a keyboard in 2020. It's, so far, performing very well battery-wise. It's probably been off battery for, um, uh, does it tell me? No, it doesn't tell me, but it tells me I have eight hours of runtime left.

So that's pretty good. I would guesstimate that it's been off for about an hour, maybe even slightly more than an hour, maybe an hour and a half. Boy, am I impressed. Now, I know, Cheese, you traveled with yours to System76. So this is sort of a unit that you have extended hands on with at this point. Are you still using it on a semi-daily basis? Yeah, I mean, I use it mainly for all of my 3D printing needs, so slicing and, you know, checking out models, adjusting models and stuff like that. And then, of course, you know, telegram and browsing and just general kind of couch surfing computing, you know. So it seems to fit that niche really well. And, you know, whenever I ran it at the System76 event for a week, I was using it primarily as a device just for that, writing up some reviews. You should have held it up and said, guys, you could just build one of these. You could just...

Well, you know, I did put it in Carl's hands. Good. I showed him, you know, the machine and he was actually really, really surprised by the machine. And, you know, big up to Dan and all the guys over at Manjaro that have put a bunch of work into this machine as well. Yeah, Manjaro really, really sings on this thing, and it makes it feel like a powerful workstation. It doesn't just seem like a toy. I think it seems like I've got nearly the entire Linux universe of software available to me. So Dan is joining us today.

Dan, welcome to the Unplugged program. Thank you. And Dan, explain your role with the project before we go too far, because sometimes I'm horrible at that. Well, I'm the, you can call it, lead developer of the Montyar Arm branch. So you are the perfect gentleman to have on the show as we are talking about this. I'd love to know a little bit of the background of the work it went into, if you have anything you do know

about the work it went into getting this thing singing like it does on the Pinebook Pro. The main thing is probably the mainline of the kernel. Oh, I bet. That went into 5.7 now, but we've been running our own kernel repo branch for a while since 5.4, 5.5 on the Pinebook Pro. And so what aspects of Pinebook Pro hardware have been mainlined?

Almost everything except the battery. That's going into 5.8. And the DisplayPort alternate mode is also missing, and suspend is missing. This is why I think Manjaro is such a great candidate for these ARM platform devices devices because it's not all there yet and you need something that's going to be really fresh because the stuff is inbound right now. We are living in the era where these fixes and the support is landing. But if you use a

distribution that doesn't update very often its hardware support, you basically end up with a machine that isn't fully functional. Yeah, well, the previous OS was Debian, and that was using a very specific kernel built on 4.4, which was specific for the Pinebook Pro, so that had most of the things working. So do you have a bunch of ARM SBCs around your playstand? I do. I have a lot. Of course. How many do you roughly would you

guesstimate i guess about 15 wow oh okay are they mostly all one type or all different kinds like i'm curious what you're finding to be your favorite all that like for me mine are obviously i love the pi 4 and i love the rock pro 64. Yeah, those are my favorites as well. I have a lot of the Pis. I have all the way back to the Raspberry Pi 2, then 3, then 4. And I have lots of the Pi 64 devices because of our partnership. They shipped them out to me, which is nice. Yeah, no kidding.

I see you invited Dan on just to normalize your Raspberry Pi collection, Chris. Right. Absolutely. I just got to clip this out and send it to normalize your Raspberry Pi collection, Chris. Right. Absolutely. I just got to clip this out and send it to Alex now because he's giving me a hard time. Yeah, the Rock Pro 64 for me was sort of the next level of these SBCs because of that PCI Express slot. And then when I threw the NVMe drive in there and I'm sitting there getting performance that seems, well, it seems absolutely comparable to an x86 system. Yeah, it's really great device. And the Pinebook Pro is really close, if I understand, to the Rock Pro 64. Is there any

major deviations that you're aware of, other than different ports? The different ports and, of course, the displays and stuff, but otherwise, it's basically the same stock and board that's in it. So it also has the PCI slot inside. It kind of feels like the Plasma desktop is sort of at the edge of what the device is comfortable performing. It works for sure, but I get kind of the chunkiness when I'm resizing Windows. So why Plasma as the version to ship? I love it. I'm going to keep it, but I'm just curious what the thinking was.

Well, I'm a Plasma guy myself, so I was pretty hooked on getting that to work pretty good. And the GPU drivers are also pretty far ahead now, so they can actually run Plasma. So the Plasma you're running on the device is actually hardware accelerated. It's awesome. And the login screen and lock screen looks super sharp and clean. And when I'm logging into the desktop, the progress bar sort of fades up from the bottom very nice and smooth. It's a pretty tight experience. And I wouldn't have thought it'd be possible a couple of years ago. So it's great. I'm glad it feels like that addition of Plasma and, of course, the repositories available to Manjaro

and the work that you've put into it to make it all really sing, it made it feel like a full-fledged product, not a hobby toy that came with a cool Arch install on it, but it made it feel like a full-fledged product that is actually competitive for what I would use a $1,000 tablet for. Yeah, we were aiming for giving it pretty much a desktop feel.

It's remarkable for the price and for the board. So as we get into the XPS 13 here in just a few moments, it's got, I think, a higher bar it has to hit now because this, for what you get for around $300, the Pinebook Pro gives you a great terminal experience, gives you a great browser experience. I watched some live stream videos in Firefox on it, worked just fine. I brought the whole thing up to date, installed a ton of packages on it. Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to say it felt like it was some super performing i7 32 gigs of RAM system. But when I look at the relative price points and the fact that you could save $1,000 and you're still getting your terminal web browser email chat work done. Still feels like a real laptop. With a good keyboard too, Wes. That was the other thing that

surprised me. I don't love the trackpad. That's my main criticism of the overall hardware. How have you felt, Cheese, using that trackpad for an extended period of time? Did you get used to it? I'm not a huge fan of it. I would imagine that the version that you have has been flashed to have the new firmware for the trackpad. The early first shipment of those devices, it was pretty horrible. The palm rejection was really bad. I usually just hook up a little USB mouse to it and I'm fine. I'll rock and roll that way. You know, and it should be said too, I think Dan, and you can correct me if I'm wrong here, you guys have already got the latest Pi 8 gig working with Manjaro as well, right? Yeah, we have.

Awesome. My 8 gig's supposed to arrive tomorrow, my 8GB Pi. So I'm looking forward to that. Yeah, there's that caveat, Cheese, that if you got the Pinebook Pro in 2019, you need to reflash your trackpad. But they have instructions on their wiki. And then the other caveat is that if you got one of the more recent batches of Pinebooks, like mine, it came with the Wi-Fi and microphone turned off. This is actually one

of the cool features of the Pinebook is you can turn these off and then there is a LED indicator to let you know if they're off or on. And they ship with all of those things off and they tested them in the factory and then they left them in the off configuration. So your Wi-Fi won't work out of the box. It's just you hold down the pine key and I think it's F11. And then if you get the two flashes of the LED, your Wi-Fi is on. If you get three flashes, your Wi-Fi is off. Did I get that right, Dan? Yeah. You just need to reboot in between them. Yes. And that too. Yes. Thank you. You also have to reboot because I hit it and I'm like, well, where are they? I thought it'd be like airplane mode. No, no. It's hardware physically reconnecting to your OS. You know, I actually mentioned to Lucas as well that maybe that's something they should

ship turned off and include, you know, kind of an instructional pamphlet so that people actually know that those features are baked in. I mean, the majority of us do, right? Secure by default. Yeah, exactly. And then opt to turn them on. I actually, I didn't turn on the others. Just turned the Wi-Fi back on. Yeah, leave the camera off. I don't need the camera right now. Although I should probably try it. So I'll keep using it. I'm going to take it on the trip with me. It'll be kind of like my go-to, you know, just checking up, checking in on stuff machine. And I'll give you my thoughts after an extended review.

Today, really, we're going to talk more about the XPS 13, which is the most recent 10th-gen Intel developer workstation from Dell, and it's gorgeous. I've been watching Wes use it as we've recorded the shows with a lot of envy. Usually, I get to review the machines, but we thought, let's change it up. It's fair that Wes not only get a shake at it, but he's got a new gig where he's setting up new machines and he had to give back his ThinkPad. So he's kind of, in a sense, he's in the market. So before we get there,

how about a little housekeeping? We'd love to have you join us live. Just as a disclaimer, though, we will not be live next Tuesday. We have a special episode already recorded and waiting to release. We will each get assigned a lightweight distribution. We're going to review it, and then we'll have to meet a certain set of requirements. We'll score it based on those requirements, and then we're going to try to convince each other, all of the co-hosts, that our distribution is the best.

It's a really fun episode. Yeah, that's for June 9th. So we won't be here June 9th, but pay attention to your feed because there'll still be a new show. Exactly. LinuxUnplugged.com slash subscribe. Also, check it out. Go pay it forward. Cloud learners can now empower others to gain the knowledge needed for a career in the cloud

just by getting your own certs. For every cloud certification a Cloud Guru and Linux Academy users earn between May and June 2020, they are awarding an annual subscription to a person applying to receive a free Cloud Guru subscription. So you get a cert, somebody else gets a subscription. That's a nice thing to do right now, so I wanted to pass that along. The LUP blog goes on every single Sunday, even when I'm on the road. By the way, guys, I am going to try to connect from the phone. I suppose the only variable will be if I have signal or not, or if I have children climbing all over me. But the LUP plug happens every Sunday,

noon Pacific, so that's when we do this show on Tuesdays, the same bat time, different bat day in the same mumble room. We just do it up in the lobby to help figure out when all this is going. We will soon be adding it to the calendar. And also you can join the chat room on irc.geekshed.net where the hashtag Jupiter broadcasting chat room is. There's now a new room, hashtag LUP plug. You join that, you can chat in there. That's also the room everyone uses during the LUP. So LUP plug happens every single Sunday. Sometimes we may even commandeer it into a surprise show recording, which may or may not have happened recently, but I can't say because that's in the future and that is also all of the housekeeping. The XPS 13, Dell's 2020 developer edition with 10th generation Intel CPUs, super edge-to-edge screening keyboard, this nice new fingerprint reader. I mean, it's definitely one of the

fanciest machines we've ever had in studio. We're drooling all over it. And those drool marks are easy to clean off, though, so don't worry. I just kind of want to mention this because we often will just pass right over it, but the aesthetics of this thing are, I think, worth noting because, to me, it's striking. I mean, you're sitting there with this thing, and I look at it with these chamfered edges, and I look at it with this gorgeous keyboard, and I think to myself, that is a very high-end machine. I legitimately one time glanced at it and I thought, Wes is using a Mac? Oh, no, no. It's in several ways they've exceeded what the MacBooks do with the edge-to-edge screen and keyboard and

the chamfered edges. I mean, aesthetically, it's very nice. I don't know if you had, did you have a chance to show it to anybody else and get any reaction? Yeah, you know, everyone I sent pictures to and the few folks that saw it in person from afar, they were all impressed. Like it's in the Linux community, especially we're used to sort of settling a little bit, you know, trying to find the right hardware that we know will work well with our, you know, out there operating system at times, there's no settling with this new XPS 13. Like it's just, it feels great in the hand. It's definitely a lot more dense than some laptops, like especially the LiMu Pro,

but it feels so solid. You know, you can just really tell that it was, they've been refining, building these things over the years now, they've been refining, building these things over the years now that they've been working on them. Yeah, I agree with that assessment. And it kind of shows in a lot of ways. Yeah, boy. So it's a 10th generation, 10 nanometer chipset here, Ice Lake. It can be hard to get your hands on Ice Lake, get the 10 nanometer processor from Intel, because a lot of their stuff these days is still Comet Lake and 14 nanometer. It's a nice CPU. I was especially pleased with the Iris graphics installed. One of the first things I did was just get Steam going. So no, that wasn't job work, but it was a lot of fun. And I was pretty impressed with the wide range of games

I was able to play. Now, not all of them are on the settings that I was used to from using a desktop, but they worked. Like, there weren't problems, and they were definitely playable, which is nice because I think one thing that this XPS excels at is sort of being a jack of all trades. It's small enough to fit in your bag very comfortably. You hardly notice it's there, even though it's not the lightest of all laptops. But at the same time, if you've got the right dock setup, which we'll get more into, it can be almost a desktop replacement. All right, let's talk about that, because I know this sounds kind of silly, but if I'm going to spend, I don't know, maybe it's not silly, maybe not, but if I'm going to spend a good chunk of change, nearly two grand or something,

on a laptop, or maybe even $2,200 after it's all configured and shipped, I want to be able to play a little bit of games,. I want to be able to play a little bit of games and I want to be able to do a little bit of work. I've heard good things about the 10th generation graphics. If my expectations are moderately low, but not too low, I'm going to, you think I'll be happy with the results? So this is the Intel Iris Plus G7 with three gigs of dedicated memory there. Now, one caveat here is by default, you know, it's a 4K screen on this laptop and it is beautiful, but the higher resolution has some costs. So it will depend a lot on how far you push things in terms of the in-game resolution.

And honestly, that was one of the factors I think that showed up a lot in several of the benchmarks from performance to battery life is just it's a big, beautiful display that takes a lot of power. That's just how it works, you know, and it's worth it. It's not going to be the laptop that has the longest battery life on the field or is the fastest, but it's in a very special middle ground between those, where it's fast enough and it lasts long enough. So we have the benchmark data for the Lemur, and we have the benchmark data for the previous XPS generation, the one just before this. Did it stack up decently in those results?

You know, we'll have to dive more into the graphs to really tell, but it's a four-core, eight-thread laptop. Now, you do have to do a little bit of tweaking to make sure that it's in the performance mode in terms of the CPU performance, as well as you might want to do some battery tweaking to get it there. But I've been pretty impressed with the general overall performance in terms of, you know, running a workload, spinning up a bunch of virtual machines. I also did just some various benchmarks out of the Pharonix test suite to, you know, see how the system would perform under load. I did notice a couple times the desktop freezing. That was a little concerning, but it didn't take the whole computer down. I was able

to just pop over to, you know, another term, restart GDM and get back into my desktop. And it wasn't that big of a deal. But I've heard from some other folks who've been testing out these that they've had similar experiences. And that was a little concerning. Would it do that only in a load scenario? Or would it do that even under like idle conditions? No, you know, during normal use, I didn't run into that at all. Yeah, that's a tricky one. because even on my fairly powerful workstation upstairs, I would get desktop freezing until I switched to ProfileSync Daemon for my browser. Overall impressions on the way the work applications, all that kind of stuff, pretty good. It sounds like the battery life, not quite what you'd want, but acceptable. Charging all USB-C, I assume, all of that kind of standard stuff.

In fact, it's only USB-C, isn't it? It is only USB-C, and that is something we should definitely talk into, is just what ports do you got? And you've got a microSD, two USB-C that are, you know, Thunderbolt as well. Full-featured, both able to charge from. So that's really nice. That's nice to see.

So you've got Thunderbolt 3 on those ports and microSD, which feels like is just an obvious, easy addition for any laptop at this point. And it's got one of those legacy 3.5 millimeter headphone ports on there. Wow. Legacy ports indeed. I know, right? So if you pick up one of these, you're just going to need some docks and some dongles, basically. There's no getting around it.

I think for folks that have a newer laptop before this already, or maybe some setups from various work configurations, not that big of a deal. But if you've been lucky enough to hang around and just using manual USB-A style ports, or you like physical Ethernet, maybe not the configuration for you. One big thing, though, in this line is you can get it with up to 32 gigs of RAM, and that is a huge change for the XPS line. It's great to see that, especially for those of us that have a few VMs kicking around. Let's talk about what it feels like to actually use it.

Seems like it has a pretty sizable trackpad. That keyboard layout I'm wondering about. Like, I noticed that the arrow keys look like the bad version of the MacBook keyboard. How's the overall, like, experience using that? Are you triggering the mouse more than you mean to with a trackpad that big? Is that an issue? You know, no, honestly. I've been decently impressed with, you know, some of the rejection from the trackpad. No complaints, and I like it a lot better than I liked the ThinkPad trackpad, that's for sure.

Oh, really? Okay. Oh, yeah, definitely. And it's not quite MacBook level, but in terms of like the actual material, the build quality of the trackpad, a lot of laptops use the trackpad, especially if you're using it a lot. It just starts to wear out really quick. You know, it loses whatever surface that they put on there to make it smooth and nice for

your fingers. I took the XPS on a little tour around Seattle and we'll have a photo gallery in the show notes. So I, you know, I set it up. I couldn't go to coffee shops, unfortunately, but I went to several different parks and locations around and set it up to just use it, try to get some work done, tethered to my phone, using the trackpad the whole time. Really, one of the better trackpads I've used on Linux. It wasn't, again, it's not like Mac level with tons of fancy gestures and all that, but really just solid basic trackpad. And I've got to say the same for the keyboard. It's not quite ThinkPad level in that term, but

for just regular day-to-day use, a little light programming, catching up on emails, sending Slack messages, it was good enough that I just didn't think about it. Do you think that keyboard would bother you a year out from now? No, I don't think so. There are times it feels like maybe a little bit flimsy and the travel's not super deep, but it's good enough that when you're using it, you just forget about it. It's totally fine. And once you've got it docked for a real workstation setup, I'm just going to use a regular keyboard anyway. But that's true for basically all laptops that I use.

So you went the dock route. I assume, you know, limited ports. It's kind of easier if you just shunt it all off into a dock. Yeah, I think you have to in the USB-C lifestyle, right? You're going to need a nice dock setup so that you can actually have all the peripherals you want, especially if you've got, like, a desktop microphone and maybe you've still got a non-Bluetooth mouse in play like I do at my current work from home setup. So it just seemed like the easiest route.

Go plug everything in that way. So there were some times, especially when I was trying to do some testing as maybe, you know, like a recording workstation, the lack of parts was kind of annoying because I've run Ethernet up into my recording location where I am now, and I've got it all set up. And of course, my audio interface is a USB-A. So if you're not prepared for the USB-C lifestyle, there are times that you sort of forget that your computer can't connect to things and can't talk to most of your gadgets. But if you're used to it, it's just not that big of a deal.

I love your pictures. I'm looking at some of these pictures. I was showing them on the live stream. They're really cool. And it really does show you what a nice looking machine is. You get a good idea of that keyboard. But the thing that I'm not, I'm not blown away by the results in the Pharonix benchmarks. They're good, but I'm not, I'm not blown away by them. They didn't super surprise me. It doesn't seem like it's a substantial performance increase, but other than the RAM area, where if you need more memory, it's an obvious choice. Yeah. And this isn't some, you know, it's not like the real desktop replacement lines, the Precision series. It's not to that level.

Right. Yeah. But, you know, I was testing it out with a ton of containers running and some virtual machines, tons of Electron apps and Chrome tabs. And let me tell you, plenty of tabs open. And compared to any of the other sort of day-to-day laptops I've used for the past couple of years, it wasn't breaking a sweat. What about fan noise? I was going to get to that. When you're playing a game or spinning up a whole bunch of stuff, you will hear the fans.

But it's not a bad fan. It's not shrill. It's not too you know, wooshy. It will be there in the background, especially if you are playing a game, it's basically there all the time. But, if you're listening to any of the game audio, or you're chatting with friends on Discord,

they didn't hear it, and I couldn't hear it once I put headphones in. That's how it works on a laptop. I did notice it right away, but I couldn't hear it once I put headphones in. Yeah, okay. I mean, that's how it works on a laptop. I did notice it right away, but I wasn't really put off by it, and it wasn't anything like those laptops that, you know, have the world's tiniest fans spin up and are just screaming in your ear. I want to take a moment to talk about Thunderbolt 3 here, because this is something that really has gotten a bad rap.

You know, everybody probably is aware that recently there was yet another security story that mentions that, oh, by the way, it's dangerous to have external access to the PCI bus. Wow. Shocker. Shocker. But yeah, it also is external access to the PCI bus, and that makes it amazing. And I have some docs in the studio and in my RV that I can move between Linux. I can move between MacBooks. I can move between anything that supports Thunderbolt. And it's so great because they're not gimped devices that require a bunch of CPU usage to sort out messages on the USB bus. It is really PCI wired in. And that means multiple monitors and GPUs and sound cards. And it really gives you a lot of power

that you can hook up into a laptop with one single cord. And if you're willing to invest in that, it, I think, tremendously expands what these laptops are capable of like i just really think it's it's gotten a bad rap and i know as part of a review it's hard to go out and buy a whole bunch of thunderbolt accessories because they're not cheap unfortunately they're not but i think did you get a sense of like it's nice you can hook up the monitor you can hook up your mouse and keyboard to one thing the power if you have power pass through and then it's just that single cord that goes into the laptop. Yeah, you know, actually, that was really nice. And I got myself a little Bluetooth mouse to play with too. And that

combination really made for a seamless sort of docking and undocking experience where I could throw it in my bag, go run around and do stuff, show back up at the house. You know, when I was using the ThinkPad, for better or worse, there were like three or four things because I actually had ports. So I was using the ports that I had to unplug and replug in even with USB-C on there. And with the XPS 13, yeah, it's just one cable and you're done. And then you're instantly back at your legitimate setup and you don't have to feel like it's some really flaky setup. Like I know I've had in the past some docs that, especially with like DisplayPort pass-through for multiple monitors and like they just would never wake up correctly after, you know, after

sleeping. None of those problems. Yeah. And you could even, if you were going all in, you could eventually decide, I really actually want to game on this thing fairly seriously. And then you could go spend the ridiculous amount of money it is on an eGPU and have a real powerful GPU you hook up. Maybe it's not 16x PCI, but it's still plenty fast to play your video game. I do it all the time. And it means that you can have this tiny machine that has almost no bag debt. And you know what I mean? Like it just doesn't really affect your bag in terms of size it takes or weight. And because it's USB-C, you're charging it with the same charger, you're charging all of your other devices on your trip, and it matters a lot. So if that's a situation that comes up for you from time to time, or you want to have a grab and go

situation where you just take the bag and get out and work somewhere, I think it really makes a big difference. And I think we're now in a world where the Linux version is a superior product to the Windows version. Friend of the show, Jim Salter, had a review of the XPS 13. And on the Windows side, there's software it comes with to manage the killer wireless card and all of this that has some tradeoffs that make it maybe an experience that I don't think the developer market would be interested in. And it shows you how when you buy the developer edition of this laptop, not only do you get a great operating system, but you also don't have these silly, like gimmicky killer wireless management features that take a bunch of CPU overhead and whatnot. And I think that's also worth considering now, is like these products are in some ways better on the Linux side. They are.

I mean, you also get that 4K screen, which, you know, I could go back and forth on. It is so beautiful. It's a little bit much in a 13-inch laptop, I think. And it definitely has some, as we talked about, complications for the battery life and some other issues. But it's just, it's so nice to see the Sputnik program have gotten this far,

that we have this developer-focused machine that really does feel like it, with 32 gigs of RAM and a first-class experience all around and Ubuntu shipping on it right out of the box. Was it 1804 that it shipped with? Do you recall? I know we kind of, we nuked and paved fairly quick. We very quickly got rid of that.

It did ship with 1804, and that worked fine. But I wanted to try 2004 on it because that's the new hotness. And it works great. Now, one thing people have been asking about with this machine is the fingerprint reader. That doesn't work quite yet. I haven't found any official updates about when that will be available. If you look at the Dell website and Barton George's original post on his blog, they mentioned that that will come out sometime mid-2020.

So I think we're in that range anytime. It should be an over-the-air update, just some firmware that gets added support and a new driver available for Linux. Not there yet, though. Maybe a combination of an FW-UPDI and a point release of 2004. Yeah, I think so, because you can see it there, you know, if you do LSUSB, it shows right up and you get all the driver information. And they have promised that, you know, they've been working with the hardware vendor. This should be coming down the pipe, but so far not there yet, which is a little

disappointing because I was excited because in 2004, they've got the GNOME changes in that you can add fingerprint support just right there in the GNOME settings, which is pretty cool. It's a nice fingerprint reader. It's like a big padded button. It's not your old swipey fingerprint reader. No, it is not. And it actually doubles as the power button, which feels a little modern, maybe too modern. Takes a little bit to get used to, but it's pretty cool. Don't change Wes Payne's power button. It spooks him. Now, this thing, doesn't it technically have support for the Windows Hello style Face ID style login? Yes, it does. So it has the infrared sensors needed to do that right

next to the webcam. And we should note, unlike the old days of staring up your nose on a webcam call, Unlike the old days of staring up your nose on a webcam call, this XPS has the camera in the usual spot on the top of the display. It is only 720p, but honestly, it's fine. You know, I did some work calls, did some gaming with friends, some Zoom calls. No one complained. No one said anything. The webcam is good enough.

I can't believe they managed to fit a webcam up there. Oh, I know. It's shockingly small. You hardly believe it. I tried to take a picture of it, but that was hard, too, because it's just a tiny little bezel. You can kind of see it in your picture. So you got to check this out. Go check out the photo gallery because it's remarkable they fit it in there, along with the IR sensor. Also, it gives you a better concept of what we're saying when it's edge-to-edge screen and edge-to-edge keyboard.

It really feels like every scrap of space in that machine is used. Nothing has gone to waste on the design and space of that machine. So you were mentioning the Windows-style Hello. So this gave me a good opportunity to try some open-source software called Howdy. Oh, really? And Howdy provides Windows Hello-style authentication for Linux. And it's actually pretty cool because it ties into PAM. So if you want to do sudo, you can use your face to do it.

Now, I'm not saying you should do this. It's probably not a good security posture. But it was really neat to see this actually work on Linux. There's a PPA out there if you want to go install it. They've got packages available for Ubuntu. Add that, install it, and then it's got a handy little guide that will guide you through registering your face, getting that enrolled, and then it downloads all the necessary machine

learning models, sets things up for you, and you're done. Say you were going to buy this thing. You get, there's two base models they start with, a $1,000 model and a $1,400 model. They both come with the 10th gen processors. One's an i5 and an i7. I want to price this out and see if you'd actually buy it now that you've used it. Would you get the i5 model for Westpain or would you get the i7 model? You know, that's a tough one. I might be tempted to just stick with the i5. I could see it's reasonable. And in a laptop, you're probably not going to see a huge difference. That's just it. I mean, if you're using this

thing, you're going to throw it in the closet, never be around it. It's going to have its fan going and it'll be cooled and you're busy on the CPU all the time, then okay, maybe you want the i7. But I don't think you'll notice just with the i5. For whatever reason, I think when you get the i5, you cannot do 32 gigs of RAM with a Dell configurator at this time. So are you okay with 16 gigs or would you stick with 8?

What would your choice be? I don't think I could buy a new laptop that only had 8 gigs in 2020. It's $100 to go up to 16. So the display has two options. Now the one we got in-house to review is the UHD Plus 4K Infinity Edge Touch Anti-Reflective 500-nit display. I mean, it's like gorgeous on a laptop. reflective 500 nit display i mean it's like gorgeous on a laptop however you can get that same chassis with the infinity edge display at 1920 by 1200 and it's actually 400 cheaper that i would be tempted for i mean the 4k is beautiful but honestly just for like simple linux desktop stuff and since i'm, and since I wasn't using it for doing any sort of content creation in terms of photo or video work,

the smaller resolution would be fine for just when I'm in the terminal. 1920 by 1200 is a great resolution. It's a great resolution, and it'll save you some battery life. I'd love to see a 2K option, but they have an anti-reflective version of that 1920 by 1200 for an additional $100. I don't know. That's 2K option, but they have an anti-reflective version of that 1920x1200

for an additional $100. I don't know. That's a tough call. But at the storage level, by base, it's 256. I'd kind of advise you bump it to a terabyte for 250 bucks. I don't know what your thoughts are, though. Maybe 512 or 256 is enough for Wes? 256, I don't, not anymore. I think that fits in the eight. 512, I can live with, especially if it's, you know, you build your workflow around it. You just know that you're going to need a scratch disk attached to your dock somewhere, or you're doing everything in the cloud anyway. Those are all workable. You've got Thunderbolt, you've got cloud storage, you can always build the NAS. So, okay, 512, M.2 for a hundred bucks more all right wes are you ready for your final price this by the way is with

the uh base warranty one year pro support um and no additional damage and any kind of like office software no office software no antivirus please your grand total comes to 121,249.99. So let's just say maybe $1,300, $1,400 after sales tax or whatnot. Shipping's free. Let's round up just to make it a little easier. Would you pay $1,400 all in for the laptop you have right now? Yeah, you know, I really think that I would. It's just, it has fallen into my lifestyle so well.

You know, it doesn't do really any one thing better than anything else necessarily, but it is remarkably well-rounded. It feels comfortable just throwing it on the couch and using it while you're watching TV. And it feels comfortable as like a primary development workstation. That's a hard thing to

get right and make it a laptop that I'm proud to show off as I'm walking around. And I got to say, you and I both having been XPS owners, I think we both have some very old XPSs that still boot up and run when they have no right to be doing so at this point. Yes. Now, unfortunately, you do kind of have to make the Mac style calculus of how much more am I going to spend to try to future-proof this thing. But you're right. I have no doubt that this will still be, especially given the build quality of the thing, a great laptop in four years' time. So before TACS, this thing came out to essentially $1,250. And for that, it was a 10th- gen i5 up to 3.6 gigahertz

boost. It came with Ubuntu pre-installed, 16 gigabytes of DDR4 low power RAM, a 1920 by 1200 FHD plus edge to edge 500 nit display, a 512 giggigabyte PCIe NVMe solid-state disk, the killer Wi-Fi ATX 1650, which is legitimately, supposedly, a very good Wi-Fi chip. I poked fun earlier. And also those Intel UHD graphics that come with that 10th-gen Intel i5. And on the mid-range area, a 4-cell 52-watt-hour battery in the fully nice shiny platinum silver with black carbon fiber design you get all that for 1250 plus tax that does seem like a pretty strong value i don't know if it's the end all machine for everybody because they have made some very serious decisions and how you can use the machine.

And that, I think, is where the compromise lies. But outside of that, I think it's very compelling. Now, it would be another $400 to go with the 4K display. But I like your build a little bit better, Wes. Yeah, I do too. Honestly, that's very tempting because it's just, it fits, it does what you need. And I love that Dell is making these with Linux just pre-installed.

I think that it's great to be able to support that if you can and send that signal like, yes, keep doing that. Yeah, the team's got to be super proud of this machine. Looking backwards, Cum. You know, it's funny too, you mentioned the Wi-Fi there and all of Jim's problems with the Wi-Fi was on Windows.

And it turns out it's a totally fine Wi-Fi chip with Wi-Fi 6 support. And when you just use the in-Kernel driver for it, in Kernel 5.1 or later, you won't notice a thing. I think that's another way in which it is a superior product using Linux for people that just want to get their work done. Well, that means we have to box it back up and send it back to Dell now. But it was neat to see it. And this is really, I mean, we say it every time, but they really just keep iterating

on this product. And so if you buy in at a certain generation, there is a really good indication that when you're ready to rebuy in, how many years has it been for you, Wes? Seven years since you bought your XPS? Yes. You know, though, that you can now go back to that same product line and there's continuity there. And there's very likely at this point that if, say, you bought another laptop in four to seven years, there could be another one in that product line. And there's something to that.

That's just it. I think they've shown excellent stewardship of the line. You know, it hasn't really betrayed us yet. It hasn't just really sacrificed quality. If anything, they've continued to invest in the quality of the hardware, of the setup, of thinking thoughtfully about how to configure these machines with things like adding 32 gig support, with finally working on drivers for fingerprint readers for Linux. Those are all good things, and I expect we'll see them to continue. Those are all good things, and I expect we'll see them to continue.

Yeah, and you really can't argue with that price, $1,300, or if you want to round up, $1,400 all in for decent hardware. But what is not in that price but is included is the design of the chassis, that edge-to-edge screen, that huge trackpad. I think I agree with Wes. I think it's likely the best trackpad shipping on a Linux pre-installed laptop right now. We've talked about the beauty and niceness of sort of the machining and the build of the chassis, but it also just feels very sturdy and reliable. As I was walking around with it, using it around, like I wasn't worried about damaging it. It had a great feel in the hand and the hinges were really solid, which is one thing that I really bugs me on a lot of laptops. Even if it's a good laptop, supports Linux well, you can just tell that those hinges are really going to wear out. And after a year or two, you're just going to have a floppy screen

that you have to prop up. Yep, absolutely. Well, thank you, Wes. Now, before we run out of time, I wanted to do a little follow up on my data loss crisis and answer a question that I'm sure was common in a lot of listeners' minds. Jameson wrote in and he said, why not build all of what you just tried to do with ButterFS on LVM and XFS? I know it requires a bit of stacking of technology and different tools to manage, but there isn't much you can do on LVM that you can do on ButterFS and ZFS these days. And I think that was probably, everyone was probably wondering why I didn't go with XFS.

I was specifically trying to use Butterfest. That was a choice I made. There was a couple of things that played into it. Number one is I do like to do it as low level to the system as possible. So that's bias number one is I don't like a lot of tools stacked on top of it. I love the concept of an all-inclusive file system that's built into my operating system kernel that has the tools to do these things for me.

All about that monolith. Yeah, man. And these things being I want Drobo-like capacity to just add disks. So I have production disks that we may retire out of production. This is not an actual scenario that exists right now. But in the future, we will have disks that we'll want to retire out of production. This is not an actual scenario that exists right now, but in the future we will have disks that we'll want to retire out of production. And I could take some of those and just add them to an existing group storage pool with ButterFS very simply for just scratch projects. I have no concern if the data loss

occurs. There's a very simple ButterFS add volume command that just grows a mount point. And that's a very appealing technology. So I wanted to learn and experiment with that as well. If I was building something that I wanted absolute stability and predictability and that I never touched again, I probably would have gone with LVM and XFS. That's generally my go-to strategy for like a server setup. Or if it was a more powerful x86 system, probably would have gone with a isolated OS and then ZFS pool approach like we do here in the studio. You know, but it is a good point by Jameson here writing in, which thank you. LVM, especially with thin provisioning and the snapshot capabilities, has a lot of these features and XFS2 is growing copy-on-write abilities as well.

So they have not stood still, and I think we've seen, too, with things like Project Stratus, that there are a lot of those capabilities. But you're right, to my mind, a lot of the big wins with things like ButterFS and CFS is you just have the one interface for it. You don't have to manage multiple different projects and how they interact and really understand it.

You just got to rely on using the one tool correctly, even if sometimes with ButterFS, that's tricky. Yeah, that's it. And on a Raspberry Pi, there is less overhead available. So I really want to do something as low level as possible. The other thing that I find appealing about ButterFS is, besides its SSD trim support and things like that, is I can individually turn off copy on write for a directory of things. There's some compelling reasons, perhaps, on a Docker container to turn off copy on write, although there's advantages, too, for snapshots. There's advantages of having ButterFS for snapshotting there, too. But anyways, actually, where I don't really intend to use Copy-on-Write is these 5-plus-gigabyte media files that can be up to 25-gigabyte MKV files. I don't really want Copy-on-Write on USB media for those. And I can turn that off just with a directory attribute with ButterFS.

Yeah, that's pretty nice. But you can still get some of the other nice features of ButterFS at the same time. Yeah, exactly. And I can do this Drobo-style mismatch disk sizes over time, which is probably a recipe for horrible disaster unless I bring some kind of RAID into the mix, which I'm not super inclined to do with ButterFS. But I'm also doing it with files that assuming my backups are working correctly are all restorable the applications are all in containers the data is all backed up here at the studio so it's all recoverable and I am happy to say it is all back up and running and like what happens anytime one of these catastrophes happen and you rebuild you rebuild with lessons learned and so now I like the new setup even more than I liked the old setup. So I'm feeling

pretty good at this point about it all. I am using the crazy ButterFS setup. After I rebuilt everything, I went back to ButterFS from the start this time, no file system conversion shenanigans. And I did the volume add. So I have now combined two one terabyte MVME SSDs as a two terabyte storage pool that is available for my media. And I love solid state media in the RV because I'm going down the road. They say it's like a four on the Richter scale for an earthquake for everything in the RV as you're going down the road. So obviously spinning rust is out. Mind those platters. Yeah. And so my kids are watching TV while I'm going down the road and I'm serving up media and doing the encoding.

I'm streaming it and I don't want to be running off of platters. So that's where this kind of technology where I'm adding fairly reliable disks and the use case scenario is our media server goes out or I can't get to my notes, makes the stakes low enough that I'm comfortable experimenting with Raspberry Pis and with ButterFS because it's a great learning opportunity and nothing truly teaches you like actually using something in a scenario where you kind of depend on it. That's why I was glad to see you pick ButterFS. Honestly, it's just nice to use some of these times because we've deployed it a little bit at the studio. I've still got a storage pool at my

house that's using it, and I haven't seen a need to replace. And it's good to remember that it's in the kernel. It's being updated and maintained. It hasn't stood still, so it's good for us to keep abreast of the changes. And for me, it's like, okay, if I was going to rebuild, say, the file server here in the studio again, something, God forbid, happened, I'd go ZFS again.

I wouldn't be experimenting with ButterFS there. But at the same time, I don't want to be ignorant to what it's capable of. And because I have been critical of it in the past, I think it's important that I check in on it from time to time and update my understanding of what it's capable of, because otherwise I just become one of those jackasses on the internet that criticizes things for 15 years and never updates their opinions and never tries things out. And that's just annoying. We wouldn't want that. All right, Mr. Payne.

Well, I think that wraps us up this week. LinuxUnplugged.com slash 356. You can go to LinuxUnplugged.com slash contact to send us your feedback. JupyterBroadcasting.com slash calendar if you want to find out when we'll be here live. Could mention the Twitter handle at LinuxUnplugged. The network is at Jupyter Signal. I'm at Chris Lass. He's at Wes Payne. The network is at Jupiter Signal. I'm at Chris Glass. He's at Wes Payne.

And thank you for being here. That's what really matters. And we'll see you back here next Tuesday. So You know, I was looking at the specs for that XPS, and I was pretty surprised. 2.6 pounds. Yeah. It's definitely dense because it's, you know, so just small in a 13-inch platform. But it just feels very sturdy.

And yeah, I threw it through my bag. Didn't feel different than having an empty bag. It kind of feels like it's all one solid device. It does feel like that. Could you open it with just one finger or did you have to hold the base down as well? So that I found depends a little bit on what surface. They've got some pretty good little grippies on the bottom there. So on most normal surfaces, yes. Holding it in my hand, also yes.

But the hardest part is just like the angle on the screen. And so like at the ends of the screen is thicker than like the taper on the bottom part of the laptop. So the hardest part is just getting that first crack going. They don't have the little cutout like the older MacBooks did. But once it's open a little bit, then it works really nice. Yeah, that's the tricky thing. I tried that probably too much. I was just playing with it because the hinge is so smooth, it was fun to mess with.