LINUX Unplugged - 376: From The Factory Floor

Episode Date: October 21, 2020

We put the new Ubuntu 20.10 to the test, and chat with System76's Mechanical Engineer to get the secrets of the new Thelio Mega. Plus some important community news, feedback, picks, and more. Chapters: 0:00 Pre-show 1:37 Intro 2:55 Edge for Linux 7:29 Thelio Mega 16:00 NVIDIA's 5.9 Problem 21:02 PinePhone Manjaro Community Edition 25:44 Housekeeping 30:17 Ubuntu 20.10: Groovy Gorilla 49:33 Feedback 54:11 Picks 57:37 Post-show Special Guests: Lindsey Cross and Philip Muller.

It's a big day. Microsoft has officially launched Microsoft Edge for Linux. This changes everything. I've just installed it, the dev version, on this machine, and I'm going to launch it for the first time. I'm going to capture my reactions live. I'm firing it up on a Neon system, which is a 2004 base. Ooh, Wes, did you get this? I'm getting like a first-time welcome to Edge wizard, a full screen job.

Let's set up your new tab page. Do you want inspirational, informational, or focused? And I'm going to, you know what, I'm going to go ahead and send helpful information back to Microsoft. And I'm going to go for a focused design, whatever that means. Oh, I'm going inspirational, come on. Oh yeah? Okay, that probably means you get a pretty background. It is a lot like Chrome. It's a really clean Chrome, isn't it?

But almost as if you're running Chrome on Windows. You know, everything's like a little like Chrome. It's a really clean Chrome, isn't it? But almost as if you're running Chrome on Windows. You know, everything's like a little flatter there. Yeah, interesting. So it's not an Electron app, is it? Maybe that's hard to say. What is Electron but a whole bunch of Chromium? And isn't that what Edge is underneath, too? That's true.

That's why it feels a lot like Chrome. But it does seem to be running pretty snappily. Maybe I'll make this my default for a while, you know, live on the edge. I'm going to check in. Let's see. We'll check the RAM total for Microsoft Edge. It is currently the brand-new, fresh installation of Microsoft Edge. It is taking, drumroll please, 63 megabytes of RAM. 76 of your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Wes.

You can just move the chips and dip out of the way. This episode is brought to you by the all-new Cloud Guru. Cloud Guru now includes Cloud Playgrounds, Azure AWS, and Google Cloud. Sandboxes on ACG's credit card, not yours. Just one click for fast, fresh, and disposable cloud instances at your fingertips. Check out cloudguru.com. We have a really fun episode today because nominally we're reviewing Ubuntu 2010,

which we've been looking forward to the groovy gorilla for quite a while, and we'll tell you why here in a little bit. But there's also a lot of big news today, so there's a ton of stuff for us to break down, including Edge and a bunch of other stuff. So, Wes, what do you say we start by welcoming in the virtual lug? Time-appropriate greetings, MumbleRoom. Hello. Hello.

Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Well, hello. That is an excellent sounding turnout. I think we'll need their help today. Yeah, definitely. We also have Philip in there from Manjaro returning to share some good news about the Manjaro Pine phone. Hello, Philip. Good to have you.

Hello. Happy to be here again. Hello. Hello. And we have Lindsay joining you. Hello. Happy to be here again. Hello, hello. And we have Lindsay joining us from System76 who will be joining us in a little bit to talk about the new Thalia Omega. Hello, Lindsay. Hi, everyone. Hi, thanks for joining us.

So we're going to get to Thalia here in just a moment, but Wes, let's start with the news that, yes, indeed, Microsoft today, just as we went on air, has released Microsoft Edge for Linux. And this is a bigger story than I thought, Wes, because after I kind of brushed it off a little bit and said, oh, who's really going to use this? We got a lot of feedback of people saying, me, I'm using this.

Well, at this point, you've got to think, all right, some of us are in the Google camp, but at least especially perhaps in the workplace, there's a ton of people whose online lives or at least a section of them, are off in the Microsoft ecosystem. So if you've got a browser that just sort of plays ball in that sphere, maybe that makes

sense. And honestly, at this point, you're going to have to trust Google or Microsoft and now you can have your pick. Let's do the acid test here. We'll do a search for Linux unplugged. Oh, surprise, surprise, it's using Bing. Of course. It's also telling me I can easily Oh, Wes, surprise, surprise, it's using Bing. Of course. It's also telling me I can easily collect, organize, and share content I find across the web with collections.

That's interesting. But it seems to have nailed the search result right there, coming up. Page render's just fine. I mean, it's very much a Chromium experience, only, if I dare say, maybe a slightly leaner feeling one. I don't know, Wes, you know, we've been running 2010, Ubuntu 2010, and it comes with Firefox. And it's a really, you know, feels like Firefox has gotten really, really good. And so this was one of the first times I just chose not to install Chrome.

You know, actually, I was in the same boat. It was sort of like Firefox looked nice. It's got a really shiny icon in 2010. And it just, I didn't need to go beyond it. Now, sometimes there are the random sites, unfortunately, that just sort of assume that you have Chrome, but at least in my, you know, the testing I've been doing for the past week or so, I didn't run into that. I might just, you know, for the show, I think what I might do is if I end up needing a Chromium slash Blink browser on these machines, maybe I'll put Edge on there, and I'll give it a test drive for a little bit. Maybe I'll see if I can get it on Fedora 33.

Oh, yeah. You know, it is kind of interesting that on one hand, I have worries about this sort of blink monoculture that we seem to be inevitably heading towards. But on the other side, it's also maybe an open source success story that Microsoft can do this at all

and that we're here running Edge on Linux because of all the hard open source work done in the Chromium project. Yeah, exactly. And I'd also be interested if anyone throws Wireshark at this thing just to kind of get an idea of how many connections an hour or a day

it's making back to Microsoft headquarters. And maybe now it might be not fully a fair test because in beta, it's especially in early beta, it's collecting certain crash metrics and whatnot that it might not in production. Yeah, you already agreed to give them those metrics, Chris. I did. Well, I feel like in a way it's sort of it's registering a vote for Linux support. I often will say go ahead and collect information, even though I don't feel great about it. But it serves my broader goal of telling corporations that there's Linux users out here. Hey, I'm over here. Support me.

All right, so let's be real. Could you see yourself actually use – I mean, if you're using Chrome day-to-day, is it really that different to use Edge? Well, I think Joe probably put it best. I think it was Joe who said that Google's already got him, right? So at least he's – that's like already a deal he's made. Why invite another corporation into that circle of trust and give them all of your activity information? So even if it is maybe better in some regards, you've already kind of – you've already gotten yourself comfortable, at least in my case, with Google. Interesting.

You know, I was almost thinking the opposite. Like it might be nice to disconnect things. I've already got so much in Google. Interesting. You know, I was almost thinking the opposite. Like, it might be nice to disconnect things. I've already got so much in Google. Maybe I want to better isolate and deal with, you know, not having my browser sign me in automatically to any Google accounts that I'm signed in. That might be nice. Yeah, I think that's a very, very, very valid use case. And, you know, real actual genuine Linux support could mean that you have a viable Blink alternative that is supported by a large-scale vendor with industry support. So it's nothing to blink at. And I could see it because there's a story that was out today, I think, as we record at least, that when you clear your history and browsing history inside Chrome, a couple of sites are actually excluded from that clearing.

And surprise, surprise, they're Google properties. Who would have thought? Yeah. So, you know, that kind of thing, I think it's more and more people looking at them sideways and thinking, gosh, the browser is pretty essential to my day-to-day use in life. So maybe.

And in the meantime, people that are in Linux, but in a Microsoft-centric environment, have a pretty good option. And also people who are buying GPU-powered workstations have a pretty good solution. Today, System76 announced the Thaleo Mega, the world's smallest quad GPU workstation, primarily made for deep learning and scientific computing. Of course, I'm sure you could probably play video games on this thing. Carl says it's kind of their hype car of sports cars. They put all of their most advanced engineering and technology into the Mega, and he says they got stunning results.

And it goes way beyond industry standard quad GPU systems in a compact, quiet little box. And we have a special guest joining us from System76 today to help us tell us some of the secrets that went into this. Lindsay Cross, System76's mechanical engineer, is joining us today. Congratulations on the release. You must have been working towards this for quite a while. Thank you. Yeah, we have, even though things move pretty quickly here, we'll say. So this is the thing I noticed immediately about this, because you have one picture on the website where you get a real good sense of the size, and it's shorter than a monitor in terms of height. The monitor is taller. A widescreen monitor is taller than this case is.

And I'm wondering how the heck you managed to pack four GPUs into a smaller version of the Thalia. Yeah, it was hard. There were times where I was like, Carl, can we just make this a little bigger? And he's like, no, we got to make this the smallest. So it took a lot of thermal coordination, a lot of messing with different manufacturing methods, but I think we got there. You must have had to build an exceptional cooling system.

Yes, yeah, we did. We almost had to treat everything kind of independently. So the CPU has its own kind of cooling system. The GPUs have their own cooling system. And then we, you know, added some intake fans here and there to kind of round everything out. Now, when you're building something like this, you must have situations where you have to generate a lot of heat to get an idea if things are working. So you must have had to throw some workloads at this thing to test this stuff out. Yeah, we tested it with four 2080s all the time.

I don't think we ever tested it without four GPUs. And Carl had some crazy workloads where he was taxing each GPU to use at least 250 watts to make sure it actually worked. GPU to use at least 250 watts to make sure it actually worked. Before the show started, I asked you how big the power supply must be in something like this to support four GPUs. Will you share that? Yeah, we have a 1600 watt power supply in there. It's pretty big. Some people are like, you know, maybe we should put a thousand in there just in case someone

wants something smaller. And we're like, nope, 1600 it is. Why so much effort into making a quad GPU system small? Because it seems like the easy route would be to take the largest Thaleo and just pack a full of GPUs. Right. I mean, it makes it a little more accessible, especially now that, you know, more people are working from home. You don't necessarily have the option to go work on a server farm or on this huge computer. You just need something that's a desktop that can sit under your desk or on top of your desk and be able to work in the situations you need it to work in.

And it really seems like it's targeted right at professionals, because I think it's all essentially professional grade GPUs in this thing with insane amounts of RAM. Yeah. But, you know, if someone, an individual who has, you know, a little bit of money lying around, they want to do some crazy machine learning on their own, they're more than welcome to pick one up. Right. I mean, this is, this would be quite the get. It's sort of like Carl said, it's like a super sports car that if you can afford it, it would be, it'd be quite the treat. The size I think would make them perfect for the studio. So I could almost talk myself into it. Yeah, I think you should. I think you really should. It makes me think the whole line here is getting more mature, you know, that Thalio has come far enough now that you can pack all this into such a small thing that you're comfortable with the thermals, with managing, with changing up the manufacturing process.

That's interesting. Yeah. And, you know, there's more to come. We're trying to fill all the gaps in the line, if you will. So stay tuned. More Thalios to come. We're trying to fill all the gaps in the line, if you will. So stay tuned. More Thalios to come. So I know you're on the factory floor right now as we chat, and I'd love to get some insights into what it's like to build something like this. How many iterations of the chassis and the kind of details that consumers never really know because what we end up seeing is just the finished product.

Yeah, exactly. One of the joys of just being able to build all these desktops right here in Denver is we can move real quickly. For example, I'll make a design in CAD, and then I'll be building it later that day, which is unheard of if you kind of outsource it. So, you know, me and my coworker, John, we come up with these crazy designs. We go over to the laser punch and cut it out and then take it to the bender and powder it up if we want to make it look cool. And it all takes, you know, a day or two just to build something up and test it out. That is some fast feedback.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that is really great for building. Do you get to keep one or do you end up getting a final one or do you have one of the uh it does like one of the iterations become your machine well uh this machine's a little too expensive to just have one of my own right i wish though um but yeah i definitely you know i have uh i work on a paleo major right now um and it's kind of hobnob together of pieces we found so it's kind of fun to be able to do Right. It's very much how it goes when you're actually on the factory floor and building these things. I figured something like that. Well, you got a Thalia, so you're not doing too bad then. No, I'm not. I'll say my CAD renders very quickly. I really wish I had a good reason to grab

one of these things because they just look so great. And the size, I feel like, is one of those things that would really strike you in person. So not only is it something that has four GPUs in it, but getting the right size components that support that much GPU capacity must have been tricky. Like motherboard. Yeah, the motherboard, we definitely had to hone in on.

And Carl definitely did a bunch of work to kind of dial it in and figure out what would work best for this 4GPU system. Colonel in our mumble room noticed on the System76 site that you know that you're using closed loop phase cooling. What is that? Yeah. So, for example, for the CPU, it has an intake and a duct, its own duct. So, basically, we're trying to move air over the CPU specifically, and then on the other end,

kind of out the back, has its own exhaust. So it's kind of like its own loop for the CPU there. I see. That's called a closed loop. Very cool. Well, Lindsay, this has been a really interesting release to go over this and just see what a monster this thing is. And really, I kind of can't think of another machine that's pre-built to run Linux, pre-installed with Linux that's this powerful and shipping today. This, I think you guys have nailed it. All right. That's what I like to hear. Well, thank you for coming on and telling us about it. Of course.

Linode.com slash unplugged. Go there to get a $100 60-day credit towards a new account and go there to support the show. Linode is our cloud provider. And because their price is so great, it makes it possible for a small team to have killer infrastructure. And personally, one of the things I think is great about Linode is all of the distributions they support.

All the Alpines, Arch, the recent CentOSes and Debian releases, same with Fedora and OpenSUSE, and of course, several versions of Ubuntu. But what I really get about them is their love for Linux and their support for open source. They've been the backer of initiatives that we love, like LinuxFest Northwest, or a supporter of All Things Open going on right now, I think. And also a sponsor of the Kubuntu project. It goes on and on and on.

They started in 2003 as one of the very first companies in cloud computing. That was three years before AWS. And they've got their game together. They're independently owned, which I also get that. And they started with a love of Linux. They got into this business because they saw the features and capabilities coming to Linux. And as Linux users recognized what they could do with them before anybody else pulled the trigger. And Linode is dedicated to offering the best virtualized cloud computing.

If it runs on Linux, well, it runs on Linode. And they don't have just machines either. Let me tell you, they've got node balancers, central logging tools, Kubernetes support, Terraform support, as well as object storage, which I love and use all the time. And unlike entry-level hosting services that lock you into their platform, Linode gives you full back-end access to customize and control your server to fit your needs. So go to linode.com slash unplugged.

You go there to get a $100 60-day credit towards a new account, and you go there to support the show. That's linode.com slash unplugged. Big thank you to Linode for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Linode.com slash unplugged. Big thank you to Linode for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Linode.com slash unplugged. Well, NVIDIA made some news this week. It appears that they won't have support for Linux 5.9 at least for another month. And it's all about a GPL condom.

They sent out an advisory to their customers on Friday that they don't expect to have 5.9 kernel support in their proprietary graphics driver until mid-November, or about one month until after the stable version of that is released. The advisory notes, Linux kernel 5.9+, in case, you know, they're really slow, is incompatible with current and previous NVIDIA Linux GPU drivers. We advise customers to defer updating to Linux kernel 5.9 plus until mid-November,

when an NVIDIA Linux GPU driver update with support is expected to be available. NVIDIA is aware of the impact this will have on customers, and we are working diligently to provide the driver update with kernel 5.9 plus support as soon as possible. Oh man, how aggravating. So we're about to talk about Ubuntu 2010 today. That release is using Linux 5.8, so it won't have that issue.

But it means if you want like the latest and greatest hardware support in 5.9, you're kind of left out until at least mid-November timeframe. Now, as you mentioned, Chris, NVIDIA didn't publicly spell out why it's taking them much longer than normal to deliver support for this new kernel, but it may very well have to do with the change around tainting that module with GPL shims that circumvent GPL symbol exports

used by proprietary drivers. We talked about this a little bit. It all came out of some work from Facebook around NetGPU, but it sort of reminded kernel developers that, well, the NVIDIA proprietary module has been playing fast and loose with that old GPL shim requirement anyway. Maybe they're catching up.

Yeah, it is kind of a shame because Linus and other kernel developers try not to disrupt user land, but obviously this is one of those that absolutely will. And the NVIDIA driver won't be the only one that is impacted by this, but they may be the one that's perhaps best capable of responding to it. And this is really from a discussion that has been, shall we say, colorful at best, which has been hostile to certain vendors. And this is what it has come to. And the thing that I find tricky about this is if you aren't on a distribution that's watching for this,

you could get bit. For example, if you're on Gen 2 or Arch, you're going to get the new kernel eventually, and your NVIDIA card just won't be able to use the driver. Yeah, that is unfortunate, kind of the pains of rolling. And, you know, it's sort of the pains of using and relying on this proprietary driver from NVIDIA. It's two separate projects being developed, and, you know, sometimes NVIDIA just has to

play catch up. Yeah. Until then, some good advice from GamingOnLinux.com that if you're on an Arch-based distribution, well, you might try out the NVIDIA installer from TK Glitch. We'll have a link in the show notes, and it sounds like it works well enough for the moment. Hmm, yeah, okay. Well, that's just sort of a public service announcement, everybody. And if there's anything that develops, we'll let you know.

I know Mangero has been watching out for this particular one. They've been talking about it for a while. Philip joins us on the show, really here to talk about the new PinePhone Manjaro edition. But Philip, do you have any follow-up thoughts to this NVIDIA issue? Well, I did also post and had the famous Linus picture on it. And then I got a tweet about it. What is that for silly? And we should be mature more and so on so i had to change it and apologize and in the end the tweet was deleted but anyway um the topic is still there and new users found out about it and talk about it so it's it's a big thing and from our standpoint as a distribution we cannot change the kernel stuff. So when Linus is adding the scheme

so that the kernel doesn't accept the NVIDIA driver, then it is like it is. The distro has to follow. Right. And we cannot simply reword it as that might be against the law. And so we have to wait about NVIDIA to fix it on their own. So it works. But the good thing is on Manjaro, we have all the kernels,

so you can choose between the latest is 5.9, as of course that doesn't work there, but the earliest we have is 4.4, so we have plenty to choose between 4.4 and 5.9. And if you don't want to lose that, then still use one kernel, which still works. You know, I just thought of a show segment idea, Wes, where we go back and try like the oldest possible supported Linux kernel and see if we can tell any difference in our day-to-day usage. It would obviously depend on the hardware, but it might be a fun segment.

Oh, I love it. 2.6, anyone? 2.6, anyone? Yeah. So, Phil, when we talked before, I recalled that there was going to be two Manjaro PinePhone Community Editions, a 2GB of RAM, 16GB of eMMC edition, and then a slightly more expensive version that had 3GB of RAM and 32GB of eMMC.

It also included a dock with that one. I'm curious if you've got any early results on how the reception has been and any update on when things are going to be shipping out. Well, we ship out early November, mid-November, as we could manage to get production one week earlier. That was done because we had the backup image ready. We had planned to ship it with Lumiri, but things happened and we could not do that. So we go for Fosh now. And the good thing about Fosh is it's already established by Purism and all the other projects and we patched everything together. So we have the torch working, the camera is working with

autofocus and so on. So it's the best experience what you can get now with Fosh. And we also have the 5.9 kernel with better audio stack. Oh, it's great to hear about autofocus in the camera. That seems like a big deal. Somebody must have really worked hard on that. It was done by Martin from PostmarketOS. And it's really good to have all the people around all the distributions to push and help you out to get this community editions

out and if they have a patch or some cool package then we speak internally with all the developers and see how we can get it done on each base and we also help each other to get it out because in the end it's about the phone experience and so everybody works closely together across the distros yeah man that is a really nice aspect of free software development, isn't it? And giving us a real edge because we don't have teams 200 people deep, like some of the carriers or manufacturers do to design certain aspects of their OS. Well, it sounds like people that ordered one of these will be getting them soon. Any numbers?

Like you have a rough idea of how many phones are going to be out there? Well, we got half. So 3,000 are out. So we still have some. So you can still buy them. And the numbers are obviously the 3-gigabyte version is the most wanted. So they mostly got sold there. Still, some people cannot afford the big price of $1,200,

so they go for the cheaper one for $150. And, yeah, we have so 7 to 3 ratio here. And, yeah, it's still there, and you can still grab them. Very good. Any other Manjaro news you want to share with us before we move along? Well, we are working on the new version called nibia we will might go with the 59 kernel and the latest plasma and the latest gnome but if you want to keep the stable version we got released yesterday the mika 20.1.2 which fix the bluetooth bleeding tooth issues so you can go there and have that.

How was that process? Did that get fixed upstream fairly quickly for you guys and then it was a matter of integration? The problem was the news about the vulnerability was too early. So nobody was informed. The kernel developers had it, so you could not do it properly. Like there's the patch and then we released the vulnerability and everybody can be prepared and have it in every branch.

So we had to play the catch-up as usual. We did it first in the unstable branch and then fast-forwarded to testing and did a snap only for the kernels in the stable. And then I had to spin all the ISAs, which are six by now for the main releases. And then I had to announce it and so on. So it took me one day to get the ISAs out. So today we have the homepage also updated.

And since yesterday, you can already download it. Very good. Yeah, we covered the news in Linux Action News and did a little analysis. And one of my takeaways on that Blue Z story is, you know, once again, Intel blew the messaging. They didn't inform the kernel developers or the distribution projects fast enough. early Eastern time, and then by lunch Eastern time, it was on ZDNet and other sites. It had been released to the press as well. And so then people knew about an act of vulnerability before the developers even had a chance to start getting the patches shipped.

So thanks for jumping on that really quick. And it sounds like good news is ahead for a Manjaro Pine Foam Community Edition. So thanks for joining us, Philip. No problem. I'm always happy to be here. Well then, let's do a little housekeeping. I got to tidy it up around here. I want to mention the Leplug is rocking.

They had a great one this Sunday where they talked about browsers and had some extension developers stop by. Talk about an awesome hangout. It's every single Sunday, noon Pacific time. It's on the calendar though, jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. Hang out at the Luplug. The other nice thing about it is you get your mumble set up to do that. You do that in the lobby and then you can join us for the main show. Hang out in the show. You're set up for Tuesday. Pro tip. Also another pro tip,

consider grabbing the Jupiter Broadcasting all shows feed. We've relaunched Linux Action News and Coder Radio. And, you know, the network as itself has a nice focus now. It's a great feed. And you get anything new we might be launching. Also, it is political season in the States. So there will be a debate this week. And I will be live streaming that over at twitch.tv slash unfilter. You just go to unfilter.show slash live.

Unfilter is no longer part of JB, but it is up and cranking to cover the people's history in real time. So go check that out and join me and hang out. I think it's, is it Thursday night? It is. Yeah. So welcome to join me over there. Also, I am very excited to announce that Wes Payne is joining the internet's favorite Linux news show very soon. Mr. Joe Resington will be taking over editing duties from Drew on this podcast. It's a good news, bad news situation. Drew got a job. We're very, very happy

for that. But Drew also now has to make that his first priority. So he is transitioning editing to Joe, which takes a considerable amount of time. And one of the things we want to do is keep people sustainable. Don't want to burn them out. I mean, we make a mess over here and someone's got to clean it up. Learned that lesson the hard way last time we were independent. And taking that forward, you know, Joe and I had a real talk. And to keep him healthy and not overwork him, he's going to focus on editing because if it's not Drew, there's really

nobody else in the world qualified. And I mean it. Thank you for offering to edit. But this is a one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, sometimes eight or 12 track production live audio podcast. And we have a very high standard. And so when it came down to it, we wanted Joe to have that job. And it gives him his Sunday back too. So he'll be editing and Wes will be taking his place on Linux Action News. And I'm really excited about that because not only has Wes always been involved behind the scenes on Linux Action News, he's been there when Joe or I needed a day off, but Wes follows tons of stories that never make it into LUP.

So we're going to have a lot we can talk about there, and we'll do a good job of separating out what goes into LUP, you know, more of the community-focused stuff versus the stuff that really dented the open-source universe. That'll be in Linux Action News every Sunday. that really dented the open source universe, that'll be in Linux Action News every Sunday. And so if you want a little more Wes and myself, go over to linuxactionnews.com slash subscribe and start getting it, because it's going to be us rocking it. I'm really excited to do it with Wes,

because you guys, you know I love doing a show with him, right? So it's great. Plus it gives us another day of the week we can barbecue, which is a victory. Oh, I'm excited for that as well. And I mean, Linux Action News, it's a network staple. I was so excited when it started being relaunched

and I've always been honored to be a part of it. And you're right, I think, you know, Linux Unplugged, it's our community space. It's time to hang out with the mumble room, it's time to talk to folks doing all this great work. But Linux Action News stands alone as this sort of, you know, bastion of keeping up with what's actually happening,

tight, critical analysis. The only thing I'm sad about is I no longer have my favorite Monday morning podcast. Yeah, and that is one of the things when you start doing the shows. You can listen, but it's just not quite the same experience. So that'll be coming up at the beginning of November is when we're going to make that transition. So Joe's got one more week.

And it's kind of nice for us because it means he can still be involved. We still get to hang out with our friend. He's now integrated into Linux Unplugged, which means that we'll be talking to him on a daily basis. So for us, it means Drew gets a job, Joe gets a little better work-life balance, and Wes gets to join me on Sundays to crank out a Linux Action News and do some barbecue. So I think it's going to be pretty good all around. It just means a little adjustments, but we wanted to give you a heads up right here that it's happening so that way you're not caught off guard. And that is all the tidying. Let's get it all out of here, and let's talk about Groovy Gorilla, Ubuntu 2010, which is released this week. The release candidates are like everything done and frozen has been out for a few days.

That's what Wes and I have been kicking around. I may do a little follow-up next week on a couple of other items once it's officially released. But by the time you're listening to this, it probably already is. Ubuntu 2010 ships with a lot of new stuff that we've been waiting for, like a new version of GNOME Shell and what was once considered or called the largest kernel update ever, Linux 5.8. So there's a lot of really good stuff that makes 2010 a compelling release and something I wanted to give a go. Some quality of life things that have improved, like better fingerprint support and Active Directory integration. More on that later. But also, like, you know, actual decent hardware support. Getting 5.8 in there, which was released in May of 2020, no small feat. It has new features like the option to specify an initial RAM disk image. It has mitigations for the special

register buffer data sampling flaw, aka the crosstalk hardware vulnerability in Intel processors. It has inline encryption support for the block layer. It now supports the Rockchip video decoders, which is awesome.

Yeah. It has a new event notification mechanism in 5.8. Also, 5.8 has support for LZO RLE compression in the F2FS file system. And that's just scratching the surface.

There's improvements in there for AMD graphics. There is CPU frequency scaler improvements in there. There's a ton of stuff in 5.8 that you just get by installing Ubuntu 2010. And also, your video card still works. Well, and, you know, 5.8 was a great kernel. But if you've been sticking with Ubuntu since 2004, you get all those interim updates as well, right? I mean, like

5.7 had some good stuff, everything in there. It's just a fancy, shiny new kernel. And I think in order to really appreciate everything that's nice about the official flavor of Ubuntu, we can talk about the other ones later, is you also get Gnome Shell 3.38, which will also be landing in the other ones later, is you also get Gnome Shell 3.38, which

also be landing in Fedora 33 soon. But you have an improved settings panel where you also can now manage parental controls for standard user accounts, which I have two kids that are using Linux as their desktop. That's actually kind of an interesting feature for me. There's other improvements to settings to include the fingerprint enrollment stuff that I mentioned. And better multi-monitor support is in 338, as well as

the new revamped screenshot and sound recorder tools, which have been redesigned. And there's the new tracker search stuff. Tracker 3 is in GNOME Shell 3.8 and 338. And a lot of the core GNOME apps have been updated to take advantage of the new search tool. And then

under the hoods, they've switched from IP tables to NF tables for the networking stuff. So in a way, it's a really significant release that on the surface doesn't feel ultimately all that different from 2004, the LTS. Did you get that experience? You know, things are definitely a little bit shinier. Did you get that experience? You know, things are definitely a little bit shinier. I can tell there's been polishing going on in the back end, especially with GNOME 3.38,

which is just, I've been spending a lot of time on Plasma lately, and it's nice to be back home in GNOME. But you're right. I mean, new background, you know, some smoothifications, some new updates, some new features. But honestly, I can't tell that much of a difference because it just feels like being back on a modern Ubuntu desktop. I don't think that's bad, though. It definitely is the, and it's become cliche to say this now,

but it is the best performing version of GNOME Shell. And that translates to a very, very good desktop experience. And it is good enough that after what has been a very long, stable process, it has pulled me off of Plasma again. I can't help but feel like Gnome Shell just feels like a super refined, cohesive desktop experience that is barely in my way when I'm using an application and gives me just the right amount of tools to do some window management in a way that I like without it feeling sort of like it's been put together

like by multiple pieces, like the taskbar is one piece, the system tray is one piece, the launcher is another piece, the icons are another piece, the desktop is another piece. It all feels like on some desktops, like individual components that are all working together, which it all really is. But in GNOME Shell, especially with 338, and I really like just the minor improvements to like check a box now to show battery percentage or Wi-Fi share with a QR code. Or now it's just a small thing, right? But they've added the – they've just kind of redone the way that the user menu settings work.

So you click that down and you have an option right in there now to restart. It's just a lot of little small things that maybe should have always been there, but they're there now. That's it. I think it's this whole series of, you know, modern GNOME. It started off with a very strong sort of design language, design intent. But there's been holes. There's been gaps. there's been gaps, there's been changes, figuring things out.

But I think we're now finally at, not the end of that road, but a really healthy middle spot of that road where it all just works together. And as each of the small pieces gets updated, brought into line, it just gets smoother and smoother. Although the one thing that I have hated about Plasma is on your default login screen, when you're testing out a new distro, smoother and smoother. Although the one thing that I have hated about Plasma is, you know, on your default login screen,

when you're testing out a new distro, it looks terrible if you haven't set yourself up a nice little home user icon, you know, a user icon for yourself at the login screen. You got that on Gnome now, too. Yeah, boy, that, you know, I still, I know it's been out for a couple of releases or at least one release, but the new login and lock screen is so good.

It's so good. I have decided, though, that I am not a fan of bringing the OEM logo forward during the boot process, which is now supposed to be that, you know, that so much lauded after seamless boot process. I don't like it. Because it makes it feel like my machine's taking way too long to post, which back in the day,

if your machine was taking a while to post, which back in the day, if your machine was taking a while to post, that meant something was wrong. And so it makes me uncomfortable. Is this one of those divides between new school Linux users and old school Linux users where you have that built-in suspicion? But if you were just, you know, you were migrating from modern day Mac OS, wouldn't that be what you expect? Well, I got a little special Ubuntu-flavored conspiracy bacon. Actually, it's not just Ubuntu, but I think the reason, my conspiracy, get your tinfoil hat ready. My idea, the reason why everybody, all the distributions went for the seamless boot is because it essentially puts the boot-up process on the OEM. So what I see when I boot up, say, like a ThinkPad is I get a Lenovo logo the entire time.

So if I was just an average user who didn't really know how this stuff worked, I would think it was something with my Lenovo that was taking a while, and then boom, all of a sudden I get my desktop. Right? They're punting the blame. That's it.

All the hard work of enabling the nice UEFI pass-through, keeping that vendor logo displayed seamlessly with no flashing. It's just to blame the OEM. Right. I figured it out. You're welcome, everybody. So I also know that one of the other major things about this release is straight-up desktop support for the Raspberry Pi 4. Now, I didn't get a chance to give this a go like I want, so I think this will be one of the items I follow up on in the

future. I downloaded it. It's an ISO, not a traditional, like, image that you would get for an SD card. It's an ISO that I tried flashing to my SD card, but I also tried flashing to a standard USB thumb drive. I was going to say, yeah, well, did you need a special tool to burn it, or it just

worked? You know, it's possible that that Pi hasn't been updated enough to support USB boot, but I think you're supposed to flash it to a thumb drive because it's an ISO image, not like a file system SD card image. So what do I know? But I wanted to give that another pass and give that more time and see maybe if I could even pull out my 8 gig Pi and try it on that. I thought that'd be kind of cool.

So I'll follow up on that. But seeing Canonical just go after the Pi 4 like it on that. I thought that'd be kind of cool. So I'll follow up on that, but seeing Canonical just go after the Pi 4 like a serious platform, I just give high marks to. Really like it. Well, and I think we kind of complained it took a little while. It wasn't always where we wanted it, but once they've added it, just

having that there as a continual burden of support and seeing that followed through, that's awesome. Yeah, and it seems like the situation on the Pi just keeps going from good to better. Like last week, we talked about ESXi, which will have some follow-up in the feedback coming out for the Raspberry Pi. And then today, as we sat down to record the show, I saw that there was a pretty big update on the Raspberry Pi blog about Vulkan getting merged into Mesa, and then that being upstream. And so you're getting about Vulkan getting merged into Mesa and then that being upstream. And so you're getting official Vulkan Mesa drivers that are compatible with the Raspberry

Pi 4 being upstream now. And that is just awesome. Big news. Yeah, it's big news. And it's passing 100,000 different Vulkan standard tests now that come from the Kronos group. And it's just more and more. It's basically becoming one of a small handful of fully Vulkan-compliant little small board

computers. And the Raspberry Pi, I think, should be taken more seriously by all the distributions. I know they're all trying. But the reality is that the Pi 4 is fantastic. The Pi 5 is going to be even better. The Pi 6, the Pi 7, the Pi 8. is fantastic. The Pi 5 is going to be even better than the Pi 6, the Pi 7, the Pi 8. And if you start now, when it's just on the cusp, if you start now, then by the time the Pi 6 or the Pi 8 is rolling around, your distribution is going to have this nailed. Now, thankfully,

all that will be upstream and other distributions will be able to jump on board. But I think Canonical is showing leadership here. So I really do want to give it a go on the Pi 4 because I think that has serious long-term potential. But we will see. Maybe the performance will be horrible. I don't know. And I don't even know what desktop I'm on, but I might be Gnome Shell. I don't know.

I guess we'll find out. I also had some strange issues that I didn't run into that I kind of chalk up to being early days. But I didn't run into these issues before I put 2010 on the system. My Wi-Fi reception just seemed to be a lot worse, dropping off a lot when I'm upstairs in the studio. I've never, ever had this problem on this machine. I had Manjaro on it before I put 2010 on there. No issues at all.

I don't really know if that's a 2010 problem, a driver problem, or maybe just some weird Wi-Fi interference going on. It did strike me as funny that over on Discourse, you know, better Wi-Fi performance was one of the highlights for kernel 5.8. But, you know, to my end, I've not had that problem. And I think we're on pretty similar hardware. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it really could just be the Wi-Fi in the studio on that one.

The other one that bit me at one point was I did the minimal install because I love that they have that as an option. Also, all of my test systems were CFS because I'm going to push all the buttons. And when I did the minimal install, the Ubuntu software center was not installed, but the icon was in the sidebar. And, you know, as I try these in their earlier versions, I try to figure out if that's a bug or not. I didn't see that one listed as a bug. It might also just be my box because I tried it at 2010 on another box, and it didn't have that problem.

So my intention here is to kind of take Ubuntu 2010 and try to give the audience an idea if it's worth upgrading if they're running on 2004 every day. And I saw some people in the chat room were saying they're actually going to put 2010 on their servers. I think that's a pretty clear line there is 2004 LTS is going to be your best option for a server. But as far as a desktop or a workstation goes, I'm not absolutely convinced that 2010 is a must upgrade unless you need something in 5.8 or you need something in GNOME Shell 3.3.8 like performance. But 2004 will get a lot of this backported. Hardware enablements will be backported.

Sometimes even significant GNOME Shell performance fixes will get backported to the LTS, to the version that's in the LTS. So I actually think, I don't know if I could make the recommendation if 2004 is working for you today to actually upgrade to 2010. You know, I think you're right about that. You know, it's just that the deltas get smaller and smaller, you know, as you have more features, as more things are made, snaps, as just the Linux ecosystem gets better and better with more application support, modern GNOMEs. You know, a small point release might get you a lot of nice features, but it's already pretty darn good. It feels like right now, 2010 is more of a back-end polish release

than it is as something maybe more user-facing. Now, if you really love the Linux desktop, yeah, there's a lot of great stuff in here to like, and I'm really happy to see the work. It just doesn't have a noticeable field difference. And it's clearly building towards the next LTS, which is going to accumulate all of this stuff and going to be really great.

For myself personally, when I load a new Ubuntu system though, I'll be going 2010. It's got enough for me that it pushes the buttons. I do think you're right there that the next LTS is going to be super solid. Yeah. And then I think there's one other category of user that should very seriously consider going to 2010. And that is anyone who needs to integrate with an Active Directory environment because they've built an Active Directory support into the installer like Fedora

has now. And with Fedora 33 coming out soon and 2010 coming out soon and both of them rocking Active Directory support, and then today Microsoft announcing Microsoft Edge for Linux, there's a version of me from about 15 years ago that was using Zandros and Crossover Office to barely integrate with a Microsoft infrastructure that looks back at that and goes, wow, what an era we're in now. And so if you are an Active Directory user that you need Active Directory support on your Linux desktop, this kind of seems like a slam dunk for you. Something Wes and I want to try in the future, it's all a matter of timing, is maybe set up something like free IPA or maybe even Azure Active Directory, I don't know. And see if we can point our Fedora and Ubuntu boxes at it to start authenticating.

Let's go crazy. Let's enterprise the studio. I mean, I would actually, even just for my LAN, would very much like to have a single sign-on across all my machines and across all the studio machines. You could have a Wes account here at the studio and you could log into every system as Wes and we wouldn't have to set it up manually for each one of them, which we legitimately have enough now where

that would be kind of nice. It would be nice. I think I'd also kind of like it to be everywhere I am, though. I'd kind of like to be able to use the same logins at home and get access to some of the same resources, which is maybe where hosted Azure. I don't know if that's even worth it,

but if anybody out there has any experience with the free IPA or hosted Azure or something like that, I don't really fancy actually installing Windows and running drag-and-drop. Yeah, we'd like this to be Windows-free, but also we want encrypted VPN everywhere roaming accounts. Yes, exactly. So if you've got any tips, linuxunplugged.com slash contact.

That'll be on our to-do list to test as well as following up on Raspberry Pi 4 efforts. And just a big congratulations to the Canonical team and to Wimpy and the desktop team in particular. This is, in my opinion,

it's one of the best looking. I think it's now a toss up between 2010 and Pop, and they are two really great experiences that are very opinionated. I think Ubuntu remains now one of the most opinionated Linux experiences, and I mean that in a good way, than many distros out there. There's some out there. I'm not taking away from all, but they have a real branded look going. You can

tell you're on an Ubuntu system right away. I can tell because I know enough Linux desktops. I can recognize usually a SUSE system and a Manjaro system, but the Ubuntu colors with the Ubuntu theme and all of it just really pop, and they're really iconic at this point. And it's

great because we will often talk about how the distribution doesn't matter. And that is so true in so many ways now. But there's still some differentiation out there. Next week, when we try Fedora 33, it's going to be a very upstream experience, which is also a good thing. It's just a different experience. And I am very grateful that we have some standout differentiators in the desktop. Some may look at it as fragmentation, but I look at it as everybody

taking a crack at something. And sometimes, like in the case of Ubuntu, I think they get it right and they get some things nailed that maybe upstream should consider. I really like their dock implementation. It is super slick.

As an eGPU user, I very much appreciate that I can right click on an icon and right there from my launcher in Gnome Shell, I can say execute this application on the external GPU. That's on a Linux desktop, a mainstream Linux desktop. Yeah. So I'm hitting that all the time for Steam. You know, what I used to do, and I kind of, they're all still in there actually, I think about it, so I'm hitting that all the time for Steam. You know, what I used to do, and they're all still in there, actually, when I think about it, but I used to have to do it in the Steam launch options for every single game. Yes.

You know, this is way better. It's just right there, integrated in. Notifications for Telegram look great on the dock. It's all really, really well done, and the experience of getting things up and going is simple. I'm not always clear on when I install something if I'm getting a Snap or Deb still, but I'm starting to get a better sense the more I use the system when that's going to happen. So it'll be my driver.

You know, any Ubuntu system I set up, it'll be a 2010. Now, the real question will be if I end up sticking with 2010, Fedora 33, or Pop 2010. But that's all yet to be seen. We will be trying Fedora 33 next week. So if you want to install that when it's released and join us in the mumble or join us in the chat room and share your thoughts, or in the love blog, you are absolutely welcome. And congratulations to all the teams involved and all of the hard work. It's a killer release.

Woo-hoo! It's pretty great. It's pretty great. It's pretty great. Also, thank you to the Unplugged Core contributors. We really appreciate you helping us keep this show independent at unpluggedcore.com. You keep this show going. You help reduce the ad load needed to make the show profitable, but you also get some perks.

As a core contributor, you get access to two different feeds of your choice. Well, or both, I suppose. Feed 1 is an ad, limited ad version. I have to be careful because there are some we are contractually obligated to include, but it is a limited ad version of the show. It's the same full production. It's got now Joe's special touch and sauce that has been

sprinkled onto it and then packaged up and released for your consumption. And that's Feed 1. Then there's feed two, which is the full live stream. All our screw-ups, all the stuff that never makes it into the show, our test audio when we take a break, if somebody gets disconnected, the extended pre- and post-show, which is almost an entirely additional show,

that's all in that feed. And you can get that as well if you like something that's long and maybe doesn't sound quite as good. Full disclosure, but it is absolutely out there and it's another way we can be fully transparent with our community.

That's a special sauce on the side. Unpluggedcore.com. You become a member. You support the show. Now let's do a little feedback. We got some messages in about ESXi ARM and Fling. So since this first one is in my namesake, will you take it?

Yeah, all right. Chris writes in. Actually, I think this feedback was over on Telegram. Just caught the recent episode of Linux Unplugged. That'd be last week. And your comments regarding ESXi on the Pi. VMware seems to be targeting this as a platform for edge computing and network services. At the end of the day, I think for you and I, a Pi 4 is really only going to give you a very limited ESXi host without much in the way of features, you know, at least without vCenter

running on a much beefier hardware somewhere else on the network. But I'm looking to play with this as well, and it might just be a catalyst for me to purchase a couple more Pis. Now, I don't believe VMware sees the Pi as anything other than a test and development platform, but it's exciting nonetheless. I think so. Yeah, Debrass in the IRC is asking, is there any take on performance of VXI on the Pi versus KVM? So we don't have our own internal numbers yet.

But I did do early testing on KVM, and it was unusable. It was just, it took 10 minutes for an ARM version of Debian to boot. It's not going to happen, guys. So if ESXi is doing better than that, and what I seem to observe so far, it is doing much better than that. Also, there's a, as I understand it at the moment, a limitation where you're not able to use local storage on the Raspberry Pi for ESXi. So you need to use something like NFS or iSCSI. It does make me think that Chris, other Chris, might be right in that this is still probably set up for larger or lab environments where you've got those

resources already there. That's not a big deal. Might be a little more work if you're trying to set it up just to play with at home. Yeah, I think that's well put. Obviously, and I talked a little bit about this on I think Coda Radio too, but it's hugely compelling for developers

who are targeting large ARM servers in the cloud, but they need something local that doesn't cost them $3,000 to $6,000 just so they can do their dev test on. And so, you know, if you can get a Raspberry Pi 4 with eight gigs of RAM and you can run maybe two test VMs just to try executing your code in an ARM environment

that isn't necessarily very hardware specific because the virtualization abstracts away the individual hardware components, it may mean that developers now have a really easily and approachable way to develop ARM cloud software and then build it locally on a Raspberry Pi with VMware and then deploy it on a big, beefy VMware server in the cloud. That could be it.

Let's see, Drew, actually. Drew came in with some feedback, voicemail style. Hey, Chris. Hey, Wes. First time, long time. I was just listening to LUP 375, and I think you guys might have missed the mark a little bit about ESXi on ARM.

Yes, I know it's on Fling, but this doesn't feel like just some random experiment to me. It feels more like they're trying to move towards being able to support ARM data centers. And the Raspberry Pi is a really great way to build a minimum viable project. You have known hardware, and you can start building on ARM before you start looking at some of the bigger processors that have been coming out. I don't know, I could be wrong, but this feels more to me like they are planning for the next five years

of trying to make sure that they are up to standards of what data centers are going to look like. And that could be ARM. Anyways, love the show. Keep it up. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Drew. And yeah, that's kind of where I'm thinking. What do you think about that, Wes? It's really a move for developers. Yeah, right. I mean, it's a big change. In some ways, maybe not.

But you got to make sure everything actually works throughout your entire stack. And this is the first step down that road, get you comfortable using ARM. And yeah, OK, maybe the pies aren't the hardware that ends up being deployed. But local development needs something in dev. You need something in staging before before you actually ship it on whatever hardware gets allocated down the line once the contracts are all signed. Raspberry Pis are ubiquitous already.

Probably a lot of developers in this space have one or two, or however many you have, Chris, already. So if you're going to start somewhere, make it cheap and easy. I plead the fifth on that one. All right, let's do some picks before we get out of here.

Self-hosted 30 comes out later this week. And in there, we'll talk about this cool rig for like under $100 that Alex built to stress test a bunch of USB drives that he shucked with Prime Day and Black Friday coming up. He wanted to go through and figure out, like, if you're going to buy a drive on Black Friday, get this one because it's got XYZ drive in there. And he actually found a real gem, but I won't spoil it. However, and we'll take out a little bit that he used on the stress test system. If you would like to test your own disk, get a sense of their smart status, but also put them through their

paces, I recommend you check out Bad Blocks. You may have heard of it before. It's been around for a very long time, but if you never have, it's worth a go. Give it a try. Punish one of your discs and see what happens. So, you know, for example, if you get a, if you get a disc that has a smart error, that gives you an idea that something's wrong. But what if there's something further down on the disk that you don't really access that very often that wouldn't trigger a smart error?

It's only going to passively watch for errors. So what you can do with bad blocks is actively write simple patterns to every block of the device and then check them. Search for damaged areas. Kind of like you would do with a RAM check, actually, only it's on a disk. And it takes a long time. And this is just a great way to say you get a used disk before you put it in production. Run this at it. We have very graciously, a listener, Mike, has sent us like a whole batch

of disks. This would be a great tool because they're refurbished disks. I'll run this on it first before we put them into production. It's bad blocks. It's just that kind of forgotten Linux infrastructure and tooling that we all have at our fingertips because many sysadmins before us have come and gone and these tools are out there. If you're going to invest in a whole bunch of stuff,

why not test it first? Also, shaking the disks to try to find the bad blocks does not work. Chatroom is suggesting that. They are incorrect. It is a good workout, though. If you'd like to be in our chat room or our mumble room, we'd love to have you join us live. We do it every Tuesday at noon Pacific.

See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. We do it over at jblive.tv. We also stream at twitch.tv slash jupiter broadcasting if you just want to follow us over there if you're already a twitch user and you get notifications when we're live or get the download version

honestly it sounds the best you can subscribe at linuxunplugged.com slash subscribe the show is at linuxunplugged on the twitter I'm at chrislas he's at westpain and the whole network is at Jupiter Signal. Thanks to our guests for joining us this week.

Thanks to our listeners. And thanks to all our core contributors. We'll see you right back here. Not Monday. No, not Sunday. Wednesday? Nope, nope, nope. Not Wednesday.

Next Tuesday! Who's there? do not hammer your discs either that will that will also damage them i do uh i do know somebody we all know somebody we've. He's been on the shows before that does like to take a big drill to hard drives before he throws them out and just goes to town. Just drilling holes into them. Well, you can't trust that encryption, Chris. I go for D-band

myself. Before I give away a disk, I run old D-band on there. That's my preferred way to clear a drive before I turn it over. You don't just fill it with a bunch of good JB content, why not, right? Here's the back catalog, stranger. That's a great idea.