LINUX Unplugged - 377: Buttered-Up Fedora
Episode Date: October 28, 2020Fedora 33 is a bold release, and we’ve put it through the wringer. We tell you what’s great, and what you should know before diving in. Plus our thoughts on the bigger problem exposed by the youtu...be-dl takedown. Chapters: 00:00:00 Pre-show 00:03:12 Intro 00:04:40 New LTS Kernel 00:07:16 Pop!_OS 20.10 00:08:47 The youtube-dl Problem 00:29:00 Why 1Password Matters 00:34:52 Housekeeping 00:37:09 Fedora 33 Review 00:56:44 Feedback 01:05:04 Picks 01:08:21 Post-show Special Guests: Brent Gervais and Neal Gompa.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Well, Chris, I almost lost my wallet this weekend.
Oh, no, like out and about in town, downtown Seattle?
No, thankfully not.
Actually, this was out in the woods of Issaquah.
Are you kidding me?
I've been out in the woods this weekend, so we're both out in the woods.
What happened?
Yeah, right, it's a lovely Pacific Northwest day,
although actually it was kind of soggy but misty in the woods in the rain.
And, all right, the dogs had suckered me into taking them out for an adventure in the woods.
Here I am having a great time getting very damp, taking some pictures, too, and that's
where things went awry.
I get back to the car, you know, I was going to go to the store, pick up a few things,
do some errands on the way back home after the walk, and I notice I don't have my wallet.
So, of course, I check the car, maybe I left it in there, although I tried to take it with
me on hikes, and I think to myself, well, I wasn't planning to do this. You know, really, I looked
at the small dog and she killed to me with those cute eyes. And I thought, all right, all right,
I better take him to the woods today. So it was plausible that maybe, maybe I just left the wallet
at home. I'd never brought it at all. Right. So you realize before you make it home that you've
lost the wallet, but you're, you've left the woods at this point. Oh yeah. No, I mean, totally. I'm
like, well, what do I do? I don't have my wallet.
I don't know that I lost it.
So I drive home.
I search the car again.
Then I search the apartment.
Not there.
Oh, no.
By this time, you know, it's like Sunday getting to be evening.
We're at, you know, quite the latitude up here.
So it's getting dark early.
I basically have just enough time, I think to myself, is this really worth it?
Is this what I'm going to do?
But I get back in the car. I think to myself, is this really worth it? Is this what I'm going to do? But I get back in the car.
I drive back to the trailhead.
And then I jog the entire route that I went on with the dogs looking for this wallet.
And I find it.
So actually, I go right past it.
I go right past it.
I'm getting kind of depressed.
I'm like, what am I going to do when I get back to the car?
Like, I need to buy stuff.
I don't have that much gas left in my car since I just drove back to the trail.
Oh, man.
And I remember that I took a picture at this spot, and I think to myself,
I have my wallet and my cell phone in the same pocket. And I back up to where I think I snapped
the picture, look to the right, and just there, under some ferns and some leaves,
is my slightly soggier wallet.
Oh, wow. And it must have been just as it was getting,
I mean, you must have been close to running out of daylight.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, this was probably like 10 minutes to sunset.
My story is not as awesome,
but I got this new mobile router,
this new fancy schmancy mobile router.
And I brought it down to the studio
and I got it set up and I got it all updated
and I packed it all up and I took it back to the RV,
which I had strategically stashed out in the woods on the edge of signal.
And I'm so proud of myself because I've got this whole thing and I'm going to plug it in and I'm going to have, you know, totally usable cell signal out in the woods.
And look at me.
I'm such a fancy boy.
And I get it out.
I run the Ethernet cable to it.
I get ready to shut down my Raspberry Pi that had been doing the job of this thing.
And I realized I had left the power cord at the studio.
And so I seriously, and it's more than an hour drive away,
and I seriously sat there for a solid 45 minutes debating
if I was going to drive my butt back to the studio just for that power cord.
But ultimately, I decided just to call it a night and have a chill skill is by doing. That's why ACG provides hands-on labs
for cloud Linux servers and much more. Get your hands cloudy at acloudguru.com.
Welcome into 377. We have a great show. Fedora 33 is out this week, and Wes and I have been
really putting it through its paces, so we'll tell you our thoughts on that. But we also have
some really good community news. Just some stuff, Well, maybe not all of it's so good,
but stuff we're definitely
going to chew on.
So there's a whole batch of stuff.
I apologize if it smells
like pine trees and skunk.
Wes and I have been out in the woods.
Also, Wes, I apologize.
I set up the SodaStream in your spot,
but it was I was on sale for Prime Day.
I had to get a SodaStream.
And I just can't compete
with that carbonation.
No, no, I like I like seven squirts, Wes. I like it really bubbly. So that's why it's right there. So if I,
if I have any burps, I apologize. But before we get into that community news and those burps,
I want to say time appropriate greetings to that mumble room. Hello, virtual lug.
Hello. Hello, everybody. It's really great to have you in there. Rocking 22. We've been,
we've been averaging a little higher some weeks, around 22 some weeks.
And it ebbs and flows. You know, people have stuff going on in their life.
It's been getting cold out in the woods, way below freezing.
So, yeah, let me tell you, it's nice to be down here in the studio where it's warm and cozy.
And let's start by talking about Linux 5.10.
No, it's not out yet, but it's shaping up to be a pretty impressive release.
There's a couple of things that are worth noting, and why we're talking about it today
is it's been confirmed by Greg KH that this will be the next LTS kernel, which speculation
had been that it would be Linux 5.9.
But no, my friends, it is going to be 5.10, which may be a nice thing.
Yeah, right.
Greg Cage announced this at Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit Europe.
And I guess really we're talking about it because once it's released stably,
perhaps around mid-December,
it's going to be a kernel that hangs around for a long time with that LTS support.
So you, I, all of us will probably be running it for years to come.
Yeah, and Android devices in particular. And be running it for years to come. Yeah, and Android devices
in particular, and sometimes
when it is a kernel adopted by Android,
it wouldn't be uncommon to see that
support extended out further
than just a few years.
I think the other notable thing about 5.10
has to be the
Bluetooth bug that we've recently heard about.
It sounds like the complete fix for that
vulnerability is going to be when you have both the BlueZ update and a kernel update that corresponds with that.
And that particular fix is in 5.10. So it's good to have that, but there's also just a plethora of
new hardware features and improvement support that's in 5.10 as well. The current LTS release,
just if you're curious, is Linux 5.4, and that is expected to be maintained
through the end of 2025.
So when you have 5.10 out there,
you're probably going to at least see it maintained
until the end of 2026.
So go build your servers, your LTS distros
and your enterprise distros and your Android phones.
Hey, that means we can look forward to 5.10
on our little GarageArch server sometime soon.
Yeah, that's right.
Hopefully that takes a little while.
That'll be a dicey upgrade.
Stay tuned, audience.
Also in 5.10, just a side note,
XFS is making the long play with, in 5.10,
XFS has been updated with what they call big timestamps,
which means it will now support timestamps out until 2486.
So they're going to be around for a long time.
Oh, yeah.
Okay, so previously we were counting things in seconds since 1970,
as maybe you well know.
That runs out in 2038.
Seems like a long time, but 18 years, maybe not really.
But now we got huge 64-bit nanosecond counters.
Oh, yeah.
Finally, finally.
So there's your long-term storage or ZFS or Butterfest.
Just not NTFS.
Do me a favor.
System 76 in the news this week also with Pop!OS 2010.
It came out at the end of last week.
There seems to be a lot of improvements that take
advantage of like Gnome Shell 3.38 and the underlying updates in Ubuntu 2010. But there's
also something landing in Pop Shell that caught my eye and it's called stacking. Similar to tabs
in a web browser, you can stack tiled windows on top of one another. So you can imagine maybe a
multi, they have actually a really good video that demonstrates this, but you can imagine maybe a multi, they have actually a really good video that demonstrates this, but you can imagine a multi-tiled window
and maybe you have a long vertical pane
on the left-hand side.
You could have your web browser there,
your notes,
you could have multiple applications there
and then you can toggle through them
with Vim shortcuts or whatnot.
It sure just keeps getting better and better.
Another one that caught my eye
are floating window exceptions
because sometimes you just have
those little weird dialog boxes that are just too
small to really tile efficiently.
And now you can just add that to the exceptions
list, and they're totally exempt from
tiling. You don't have to fuss with turning it off and on.
My use case for that, so it'll be interesting to see if I
can do this, is bookmarklets
for tagging things for various
shows. Those windows
always get tiled, and it scrunches everything up
for just this tiny little pop-up where I tag something and give it a title and hit enter.
But it's spawned by the web browser.
So I wonder if I'll be able to do that.
I wonder if I'll be able to accept that.
We'll see.
Oh, if I didn't mention to the chat room, as we're going along, do bang suggest and title our show because that's how we're going to title this thing if you don't do it.
We can't be trusted.
No.
No, so please do help us title it.
But I want to talk about a story that is really unfortunate.
And we covered it in LAN, a lot of the details about this.
And it is the DMCA takedown of YouTube DL, which has been removed from GitHub after a
DMCA notice.
There's been some developments since Linux Action News, including some alternative repos and an interview with one of the original creators.
So I wanted to stop for a moment. issued a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown on YouTube DL
under the grounds that it could be used to pirate music videos off of YouTube.
And it is kind of – it's a bit of a spacious argument,
but I'll tell you where they're coming from on their point
because we want to give you the both sides of it here.
So in most cases, the DMCA notices are regarding
unauthorized distribution of a piece of media.
That's typically how a DMCA takedown is done.
You're distributing copyrighted music or copyrighted video.
And then they will use the DMCA takedown request
that these platforms support.
It's like a tool often that YouTube or Build or GitHub builds.
They'll use that mechanism to use the DMCA as the grounds to take down that copyright.
But this notice for YouTube DL is different because it's targeting a tool that can be used
to reproduce copyrighted media. YouTube DL is licensed under the unlicensed license,
which is an anti-copyright license that
promises ownership of the software to the public domain. And it is usually considered lawful to
freely distribute the software itself because of that license. There are notice claims that
YouTube DL software was being used to copy a couple of songs that they cited, particularly
songs that were like a Taylor Swift song and whatnot that were in the documentation.
Yeah, some of the examples are Taylor Swift, Icona Pop, and of course, Justin Timberlake.
Maybe those aren't the best examples to have.
But at the same time, you're right, like, are we now policing if you violate some other
services, you know, terms of service?
If you violate the JB website terms of Service, not that we have those,
I don't think we could get GitHub to take your code down.
Right. Take the entire project down.
And, of course, it's still widely available.
It's still widely used.
Last year, the RIAA was able to get five YouTube Ripper sites,
you know, sites you could put the little URL in there,
got them removed from the Google search engine.
So one of the new developments with this story since Linux Action News came out is Perchant News interviewed Philip, I'm going to say, Hajmeister.
Hajester.
He's the previous maintainer, Philip is.
And this is an interesting bit in the interview that I want to call our attention to, is I think there's a broader action that's happening here, and the RIA takedown may only be a function of that broader action
because Philip says he received a seize and assist letter from German lawyers
just a couple of weeks ago,
but notes that there's a ton of technical inaccuracies in the letter.
They don't seem to understand that, for one, he's no longer the maintainer, but he can't say a lot about it because it's an ongoing issue.
Perth Chat News also asked, you know, despite not being the maintainer anymore,
would he change those examples? I would remove the test cases, he writes. These videos were
never fully downloaded anyways. They're just automated test cases where the test downloaded
the first 10 kilobytes, which amounts
to a couple of seconds at most.
And this is certainly fair use,
but the project is fully functional without
those test cases. How about that?
It was only downloading the first 10 kilobytes.
I think that's a bit that's been overlooked.
And these are just test case examples.
They're not, like,
advocating it, but it would have been so
much better to point to some Creative Commons content on YouTube instead of a music video.
That just in retrospect seems ridiculous.
But I want to say this because I think this issue has been a little misunderstood, particularly in some of the Linux journalism slash media space.
But YouTube DL is a tool that maybe is not properly named.
YouTube is one of many sites that this tool supports downloading from,
hundreds of hundreds of sites.
And it is a tool that this podcast uses to give voice to open source developers
to tens of thousands of listeners.
All these events that get posted online that we clip up,
that process starts with YouTube DL.
And that is absolutely 100% fair use under the DMCA.
I use YouTube DL to back up news clips for fair use in my Unfilter podcast
every single day, every day.
And I pay YouTube a monthly subscription for premium
to just have the privilege of not seeing ads,
so ads aren't really a factor for me. But I don't think this conversation should be about the
tool's ability to copy a Taylor Swift song or the tool's ability to download YouTube videos
without seeing ads. Because that conversation about ad blockers is a much larger discussion,
and YouTube DL is really not alone in this space. And that's a broader conversation.
And the ability to download videos from YouTube, functionality-wise, I think it's an important tool to back up a very relevant medium
right now that is culturally more relevant than I think we've seen any cable platform or television
platform because it is a publishing platform for the people. And the ability to back that up,
especially in an era when more and more is being controlled and what you're allowed to
watch and not allowed to watch, or the fact that things can be taken down by the creators themselves
after the fact, having a tool that allows you to archive that is pretty important. And we have to
remember, this is free software. So you can't just squash this one group of people and claim victory
because a dozen more will fork and sprout. So we have to think about it in a broader way too.
You know, it also makes me think it's an important sort of statement about because a dozen more will fork and sprout. So we have to think about it in a broader way, too.
You know, it also makes me think it's an important sort of statement about browser lock-in.
If you're acknowledging that you can go to YouTube
and watch this video freely,
well, why can't I use the very same sort of API calls
to interact in the same way, right?
I don't want to get to this future where YouTube is totally locked in DRM
and you can only access it on your iPhone app.
This is a tricky thing here because I don't know if this is a fair analogy to make, but I can see
a future where there is U.S. federally mandated encryption backdoors that are built into products
that are capable of encryption. And I could see a similar process where application Y,
messenger application Y, doesn't support backdoor. And so
therefore, it's a security risk. And it's, you know, there's some process where they issue a
takedown on GitHub because it doesn't comply with US law. It becomes a real gray area real quick,
because what we have here is a recording industry association that is using music copyright law to take down open source code on a platform
owned by Microsoft, right?
That's the real big picture here.
And I think this is a horrible precedent that we're seeing.
The takedown functionality, it seems like it's useful.
Like we looked into it and there's legitimate known open source projects on GitHub that
issue takedowns under DMCA
against projects that are maybe copying brand or something like that.
So the takedown process itself seems like it has some legitimacy.
But how the RIAA is using it here really reminds me of how they've abused YouTube as well.
But now it's source code and it matters a hell of a lot more than cat videos.
Well, yeah, I need to download and archive those cat videos, Chris.
Yeah, you know, I and I see as, as someone who's just out in the woods, man, everything
I watched recently was offline.
And for me, it's kind of a nice thing because I can kind of download and curate several
videos from the creators that I really enjoy.
And I kind of set them aside and, you know, we make dinner and I have them all loaded
locally and it's, it's locally and it's a thing.
And it deeply connects me to those content creators.
And the fact that I could use YouTube DL to facilitate that
is critical in my relationship and my continued consumption
of that content creator's media.
Or maybe you're using a low-power device that just doesn't play well,
this full-screen video in your browser,
and you want to just play it on the command line
with something that has hardware acceleration.
I'm curious if the Mumble Room has any thoughts on this particular
takedown. I think probably nobody would disagree that they
should probably consider a name change. It just seems, and you can see it in the project's
social media communications. They initially assumed it was
Google that knocked them offline, because they just live in fear of Google constantly.
And then they realized after they read it
that it was the RIAA.
You wouldn't expect it.
Co-what? You guys are still around?
Yeah, right?
Like, what is this, Napster you're enforcing here?
And Microsoft, I think, should try to own this.
You know, they can distance themselves
by saying this is GitHub,
but the reality is that when you bought GitHub,
like, you get both ends of that relationship.
Yes, right. And that's kind of the funny part here, too, is it's, you know, there's been sort of a lot of jokes
or mocking or sarcasm around the, well, it's on GitHub, but it's also Git.
So in one sense, you can't kill it because, well, it's Git, it's distributed inherently.
But the other side is that there's still this problem of the defaults.
And right now, GitHub is king.
That's the place where development takes place.
That's the place where issues, discussions, documentation, the place people go.
And it's a little tricky when it's a giant, layered-up industry association
versus a little humble open-source project.
Really? Yeah, ByteBit, and you have thoughts about this.
So I had to laugh about DMCA,
about someone made a pull request towards it and an
empty one and he did it at such a way where he made it an empty one that via that pull request
you can eventually still pull the entire youtube downloader project because it's available through
kit that's great yeah i mean they have their own local copies too.
The developers are saying, you know, we have recent local copies.
We can obviously host it in other places.
And I can't tell if there is a similar thing we're seeing happening here
where you have, I feel like we have this issue
where it's almost going to become a matter of survival
that you're on your own self-hosted infrastructure
if you're a project that is skirting the legalities here, if you're in the gray area,
and maybe you're not going to enforce an encryption backdoor, or if you are a project like YouTube
DL, you have to maybe consider that you're better off from day one on your own infrastructure
and just training your user base, that's where you go to find us.
And I know you suffer a little bit
from the social network effect of GitHub.
And you also have to be comfortable enough
with Git, the admin side of things,
have the time and the resources
to be able to stand that infrastructure up
and maintain it.
Yeah, and maybe that's an area as a community
we can keep improving.
I mean, it is getting easier and easier than ever to stand up infrastructure.
So there is that aspect of it.
It is getting, it's been, it's so much simpler today than it was a long time ago that maybe that's changing.
But I wonder, I wonder, I've, you know, I've never really taken Mastodon seriously until recently.
And I kind of go, okay, I kind of get it.
Long term, maybe it is better to invest in owning the infrastructure like that.
And for an open source project, something like GitHub is just an absolute vital part
of the infrastructure for the project.
And when you think of it holistically, you think maybe we should really be in charge of that.
Even if that means asking for some funding or something to make it possible.
And I know there's people out in the community.
I know it, that there's people out in the community.
I know it, that there's people out in the community that would volunteer to help them build that infrastructure.
I know that's true because anytime we have an ask about infrastructure,
the community steps up immediately.
And I know YouTube DL's probably got a lot of very passionate fans out there
that would be willing to help it.
So we'll see.
I think this is something, I feel like there's a bigger
trend happening
here. I'm curious, Bitmux, on what your thoughts are
on the network effect versus self-hosting
and having the freedom of
being in control of your own platform.
That's exactly that.
You have to make a choice. If you're going
to take advantage of the network effect, which is probably
one of the strongest forces
in today's world in development and creation of anything, you're going to gravitate towards
one of the major corporate supported platforms. And right now, it's interesting, you have like
a lot of binary systems. You have Microsoft or Apple. You have Amazon or Google. When it comes to GitHub, you have GitHub or what?
You end up choosing.
Do you want the freedom of self-hosting it and all of the responsibility that comes along with that?
Or do you want the advantages and the network effect and not having the responsibility of self-hosting?
Just throw it on GitHub and invite all your developer friends to have a go at it.
Yeah, and you maybe even get more contributors potentially,
which also has a lot of net benefits for the project.
So that has to be a calculus too.
Neil, you and I have done an extra on GitHub alternatives.
I'm sure you must have thoughts on this.
There are avenues around this, and I think some of the things going on with the Fediverse,
with ForgeFed, which is a protocol in development
to support, you know, cross-server interactions and subscriptions and things like that to
essentially build a decentralized federated network across Git servers. You know, that sort
of thing I think will help. And, you know, Pagger, as I talked about with you in an extra show
several months ago, you know, there's a contributor who's actually got funded effort to build an extension for Pagger specifically to support that model.
And Pagger itself has features built in to support things like, you know, people are forking the project or maintaining their own clones in their own Git servers.
They can still make branches and send pull requests to the master repo on another Pagger server. And Pagger itself doesn't even require the other
server to be using Pagger. It could just be a plain Git repo on HTTPS or, you know, C Git or
whatever. And as long as the Git URL works and you can clone with it and the branch is accessible,
it can pull it and then you can make a remote pull request with that. And so what I think we need to move towards for projects is to consider that we shouldn't
repeat the mistake that we, well, we did repeat the mistake we made with SourceForge with
GitHub.
We should try to learn from that and start diversifying.
I kind of feel like it's not just source code hosting.
It's communications with the options of Matrix and Discord and Slack and Mattermost and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
It's social media platforms with Mastodon versus Twitter.
It's PeerTube versus YouTube.
And I don't – maybe versus isn't the right way to put it.
But there is a common theme here amongst all of it.
theme here amongst all of it. And it is, and I, I find myself as time goes on again and again,
like with, as I have perspective on things, I look back and go, yeah, it's clear. You know, that platform was, it was like a limited ride. And eventually, you knew that ride was going to
come to an end. And I see YouTube is very much that and social media is very much that. And
long term, to be serious about it, you should
probably own that infrastructure yourself. And that's, that was really what inspired me to go
hard into matrix. But the onboarding has been an issue where the commercial apps like discord
have really nailed that. And it's just a challenge. It's again, the network effect.
But I also think about this, the reason why the onboarding is so poor is because there isn't,
there isn't the drive and interest, the network effect
to push people into improving this. The only reason that these solutions tend to have weaker
user experiences is that they have weaker levels of investment. And that's because there's a weaker
network effect because there are people preferring solutions that already are there and things like that. And again, it's not necessarily,
you know, always a bad thing to do that. Like I am on Twitter and Mastodon. I prefer Twitter for
the discoverability. But on the flip side, if it's something that I essentially care for and have to
really depend on, I really strongly consider the self-hosting avenue simply so that I have confidence that I don't lose my data.
Like I lost all of the stuff I did for Google Plus years ago.
And, you know, I recently spun up a personal Pegger instance for my own usage.
It's, you know, I locked it down so nobody else can log in or do anything.
But like it's useful for me for doing issue tracking, workflow management and storing mirrors
of repos and things like that. And so I'm doing that for my own personal usage. And, you know,
things like Pagger or even like, you know, GITTY or whatever, like they're easy to set up. They
have easy documentation. The requirements are low. I'm running my Packer instance on one vCPU and with one gigabyte of RAM and open SUSE
Leap 15.2 on Linode for basically nothing.
And it's fine.
It performs very well.
And that's the sort of thing that you should consider.
Because I think people think that the administrative efforts are not worth it or oversized compared
to what they
actually might be relative to all the other work that they have to do. And it's true that there's
like the security stuff, but you know, at some point you've got to, you've got to pull the
trigger and start really thinking about your project in that, in a, in a manner where it's
long-term accessible. Yeah, I agree. So we'll be keeping an eye on what happens with YouTube DL
and I'll be thinking, I think we all will think about this more.
And if the audience has additional thoughts on this overall trend that we seem to be seeing across a lot of different mediums, I'd love to hear it.
LinuxUnplugged.com slash contact.
This seems like a great moment to thank Linode for sponsoring the program.
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I've been using them for just over two years,
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when I'm checking them out. So that's something to consider as well. So go to linode.com slash
unplugged. Sign up with a $100 60-day credit towards a new account. That's a really great
deal. If it's meant to run on Linux, you can run it on Linode, and you can run it really good.
And every single plan comes with their amazing human-powered customer support.
It's really legit.
So check them out.
Linode.com slash unplugged.
Thank you to everybody who goes there just to support the show, to let them know you
heard about it here, or takes advantage of that offer.
A $100 60-day credit on a new account.
Linode.com slash unplugged.
A couple of more items for us to address.
I thought this was really fascinating that 1Password is now out in beta for Linux.
And there's a lot of options in this space already for Linux users.
Bitwarden's a popular one.
Of course, we've covered it plenty on the show.
LastPass is a longtime contender on the Linux desktop.
And 1Password kind of comes along at a time where there's already a lot of options,
but they seem to be really going in with full steam.
They've built an app that's written with a back end in Rust, which, you know, we love.
know we love they're proud to use also the as they say incredible ring crypto library to power end-to-end encryption to keep your data safe it looks pretty legit now before you get too excited
it's important to remember that this is still a beta so expect some sharp turns and sudden drops
as you test this out.
Really, this should be used for testing and validation,
and if you want a quote-unquote stable experience on Linux,
for now, you should use the browser version,
which I'll tell you, Chris, that's what I've been doing.
My new day job, well, turns out they're using 1Password.
I'd only experienced the web stuff.
I had no idea this was being planned.
So I'm pretty happy about this, and I've already got the beta
installed this morning.
I think 1Password should be a sponsor on this podcast.
I'm going to say it right up front, because I really like 1Password.
I think they have the best UI,
and this is what the company makes.
They're not part of a larger
conglomerate. This is what they do.
And they
have a bunch of corporate users
because over the last year or two,
they've done a ton of deals with businesses
where businesses just roll out 1Password
for all their users.
I've been there, I've done that.
And the other thing they're doing
is kind of an introduction,
which I think shows maybe some insight
into the community.
They say, if you work on an open source team
that needs a password manager,
open a pull request in our 1 password open source project repo and we'll give you
and everyone on your team a free account. I think they get it.
Well, maybe another sign of that is they're maintaining signed apt and RPM package repositories
for Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as well as the Snap Store.
Plus, if that's not enough for you, there's an app image.
Although, so far, nothing on Flathub.
Now, for yourself at home, you know, listener at home,
I think you could really consider looking at something like Bitwarden,
especially the Bitwarden Rust server that you can run yourself.
I think that's something you should definitely consider.
There's KeePass as well that people like for local password management.
But the reason why I think this is noteworthy
and why we elected to
include it in the show is this
kind of is reminiscent
of Active Directory getting added
to Ubuntu and having it in Fedora.
It's a way for Linux
to plug in with Enterprise.
Or the teams come into Linux, right? Kind of the same
thing. You don't get to pick these tools.
They're chosen for you and
that's kind of what decides if you can use your favorite desktop or not.
Yeah, oh, and don't worry, Wes.
Yes, it is in the AUR.
I was worried.
Yeah, I know.
You were concerned about that.
I haven't given it a go myself, but I guess so.
You've tried it, Wes?
Yeah.
Is it like an Electron app sitting on top of a Rust backend,
or is it actually a true native desktop Linux app?
Oh, you know, I didn't get that far. I just actually
tried it out for its features and, you know,
was trying to sync up with my existing vaults. That's a
good question. It's hard to tell from
the screenshot. I can't really, and I suppose
it's fine as long as it's not too resource intensive.
You didn't seem to have any performance
concerns, it sounds like. No,
started up real fast, and away
we went. They say it's this new look they're working on.
It has automatic dark mode selection based on your GTK theme.
It also supports opening network locations like SSH and SMB and FTP locations.
And it will unlock your Linux user account, including biometrics.
No way.
That's amazing.
What?
No, I got to look into that.
All right, I got to try this.
I got to try this.
That is one thing I think that's exciting is, you know,
just looking at various password managers over the years,
it seems like people really like 1Password
just for their sort of response.
Very actively developed features, bug fixes,
all go out in a timely manner.
And here, yeah, right?
It seems like they're not trying to half-ass this Linux support.
It's not just throwing us a bone.
It seems like they really want to make it a platform that they're willing to support.
X11 clipboard integration and clearing, also a feature in there for autofilling passwords.
I got to try this.
If you try this and you like it and you buy something,
you tell them Linux Unplugged sent you and that they should sponsor this show.
Because I think this is great.
I really do like seeing like big,
well, not big,
but independent commercial apps like this
that have really found a niche and gone after it.
That's, I really do like that about them.
So there you go.
I guess I was on the fence,
but then reading that they claim
you can unlock with your Linux user account,
including biometrics,
I got to see that integration.
And then the X11 clipboard integration, I'm on Wayland presentlyrics, I got to see that integration. And then the X11 clipboard integration,
I'm on Wayland presently, but I got to try that too.
That sounds like some sort of Mac fancy magic right there.
And I'm just not believing it until I see it.
Does look like there's some Electron happening here.
So surely some of this is written in Rust
and then they're leveraging, you know,
all the handy UI elements that Electron provides.
But, you know, easy install.
I just added the app repo to give that a shot.
But I like that they have an app image.
That seems nice, especially for a machine
that maybe I'm just using for work.
I wonder what the memory usage is on that there app.
You got any data on how much that sucker's taken down?
I mean, I kind of like that the important bits
are written in Rust
and then the UI bits are written in Electron.
I can understand why they're doing that
with multi-platform support.
But, yeah, not too surprising.
No, nothing much.
Not really showing up on my radar here.
All right, very good.
Well, then, Wes, we have a few items.
I know people have been skipping the housekeeping
because I just saw someone in the chat room
who didn't know Unfilter was back.
So don't be skipping the housekeeping.
You know, it's politicals here in the States.
It's politicals right now. And I'm going to be live streaming the election, which is like
coming at us like a freight train off the rails like next week at unfilter.show slash live.
If you want to watch that train wreck. I mean, you'll just be you'll just be streaming nonstop,
right? That's what I assumed. Yeah, probably for weeks. No, I'm just going to be there for the
night. I'll make a few predictions on the stream. You know, we'll do's what I assumed. Yeah, probably for weeks. No, I'm just going to be there for the night. I'll make
a few predictions on the stream. We'll do that
kind of stuff. We'll do live commentary.
It's really about having
a social outlet to commiserate this together.
I'll be there with you. But
maybe you'd rather do the Linux thing. I want to
remind you that we do have the Luplug
every Sunday at noon Pacific,
3 p.m. Eastern. You can
see it on our calendar.
Just get the Mumble client installed.
We have info for that on our website.
And then you connect to the lobby.
And I think we have kind of a special plan again,
another theme for the Leplug.
Indeed we do. So you might remember that we had,
two weeks ago we had a talk about browsers,
and that was a pretty interesting discussion.
So the idea is now to continue with some kind of topic
every two or three weeks and next sunday will be a topic about keyboard shortcuts mouse gestures
mouse button configuration and stuff like that i will prepare a little talk about how i configure
my input devices and maybe some of you want to tell us how they configure their keyboard and mouse.
So if you are interested in that topic,
we would love to see you in the lobby in Mumble for our LobLock next Sunday.
And there is something really special.
We might try to record that session too.
Look at you guys getting fancy.
Very good.
Also a reminder, if you want to be a pro JB listener,
we do have the all shows feed.
You can upgrade to the all Jupyter Broadcasting shows feed
by searching in your podcatcher of choice
or there's a link at jupyterbroadcasting.com.
And be sure to stay to the post show
because we will get a weather update with Brent in the post show.
So you want to stick
around for that. But moving right along. Extremely excited to say that Fedora 33 is officially here.
It's Linux distro release week like like last week we had Ubuntu 2010. This week we get Fedora 33.
It's like release week parties like all around. It's the release season.
I'm almost just real hungover at this point,
but there's enough in 33 here that it kind of makes me excited to talk about it.
Wes and I went clean slate after last week's episode.
We went hard into 33, and I kind of just went all deep.
I think we'll start with what's new,
because there's some major standout things
in this release that we've been looking forward to and talking
about for weeks.
Obviously, number one
headline here is
this is the Fedora that ships to
ButterFS as default when you
install it. The default file system now
is ButterFS
and perhaps
a reason to consider reinstalling this time,
if you're so interested.
But seeing ButterFS finally ship in a major Linux distribution,
I think is extremely exciting.
I think it's gotten to the point where it's a really solid workstation
and VPS and laptop file system,
and that's exactly what they've done here.
In the workstation versions of Fedora, it's ButterFS.
Yeah, I mean, we've kind of had our own little ButterFS journey of late.
And okay, maybe things get more complicated if you're building out your giant next NAS
solution, but I think you hit it right on the head there.
Do you want a modern file system that's maintained, that works well and has a lot of nice features?
Well, ButterFS is it, and having it used by Fedora, used by the folks,
the great people using Fedora,
all of the folks that that means,
that's just more people testing it
in all kinds of configurations and settings and environments.
That's just going to make everything better.
Yeah, and the reality is more and more people are on SSDs.
Well, ButterFS is the file system that has optimizations for that.
Data compression with modern disks and modern CPUs can provide lots of not just storage benefits but performance benefits.
Data integrity, copy on write, snapshots, being able to send a file system over the network.
It really is a competitive file system, and I think it's great to see it land in Fedora as the default.
I think it's a very bold move.
I think it's equally as bold in many ways as Canonical deciding to ship ZFS.
But while that is fantastic, what is really exciting about this is not only is it the default on your root,
but this is a free file system.
I mean, this is clear and free,
totally integrated into the Linux kernel,
so it is truly just a baked-in file system
that feels like it's part of Linux.
Yes, right.
No weirdness with module loading
or strange situations you have to debug
because it just doesn't feel like it's part of the system.
No DKMS concerns, right?
It's just in there, and you get all those features.
And I've just really, really found it to be a great file system
for my home file servers.
But I'll tell you a little quick story.
I recently went over to Angela's house to help her with her file server,
which is a Synology, I think.
A Synology disk station, if I'm getting my...
I'm not sure.
But it's the one that uses ButterFS on the file system.
And she's having some problems connecting to it.
And I figured, well, this thing is six, seven years old.
It's a really old NAS that's ran out in a garage, right?
It's not kept inside in like a perfectly air-conditioned room either.
It's kept out in a garage.
And it's been out in that garage for seven years with spinning disks.
And I thought, oh, boy.
I thought I was coming over to deliver
her the bad news that this thing has finally eaten
itself because it's a version of ButterFS
that is from the,
maybe it's before the 5 Series kernels.
I mean, it's from a very long time ago. It's
really old. I've done like one or two
updates to the OS in its lifetime.
So it's got a couple of
updates on there, but it's a pretty old version
of ButterFS. A couple of updates.
And so I thought I was going to have to prepare her for the bad news that she had lost her data.
And she's not really big on cloud storage.
She likes it all local.
And I was prepared to like, I was bracing and nothing of the sort.
It was just simply an interface issue.
There was a rogue DHCP server on the network and the NAS for some reason had grabbed an IP from that and didn't get its reserved address from the proper DHCP server.
And it was really, it was, when I got back on that NAS and I logged into it, I looked at the
file system and every disk was online and everything read as healthy. I had a little bit
more appreciation for ButterFS right there because that's seven years of kind of neglect, but just reliable use and keeping that data safe.
And you combine that with GNOME 3.38, and I think what we have here is a magic version of Fedora.
It's pretty impressive with just these two things alone.
Nothing else really combined in the mix.
It is a close to upstream version
with a couple of small Fedora takes on it.
Maybe my favorite is they've done a clever thing
with the background where I'll kind of transition
several times during the day
to a different lightning and color.
I actually don't particularly like
any of the default Fedora experience,
the theming, the background, any of that.
So I can't really sit here and tell you that it is,
it's going to be the slickest, best
GNOME shell implementation you're going to find,
but it is one of the purest,
which you can very quickly build on top of.
And if you are the type of Linux user
who is okay doing a little bit of that work,
a little legwork, not a lot, probably two hours of legwork
if you're familiar with the processes, maybe not even.
You can really hone it in because I kind of like starting
with a close to blank slate and just tweaking the things
in GNOME Shell that I want, minimal extension experience, you know?
Well, it gives you a nice sort of idea of what it is like fresh. You know, if you install a distro
that has a lot of customization, that might be great, but you're never getting to try what that
stock experience might be. I mean, you're just lower down the tree. There's less branching off
places to try radically different things. Well, and when you are installing extensions,
it's not a bad idea to kind of do them one at a time and kind of get a sense for it.
it's not a bad idea to kind of do them one at a time and kind of get a sense for it.
Here's what Fedora does that I think is tops.
So I go to the GNOME extension site,
and of course I'm getting this crap about needing the OS connector
installed for the extensions to work,
and I started thinking to myself, well, for God's sakes,
Fedora doesn't have that installed, so I go DNF install it,
and it says it's already installed.
And I sit here and I scratch my chin for a second and I go hang on I seem to recall that they put these in the repo in some
sense whatever that is and many of the GNOME shell extensions that I use are in the repo so I don't
actually have to go to the extension site and they get updated via DNF with my other packages
which is brilliant and it's totally the way to manage Gnome Shell extensions
in a way that I think works really well and reliably.
And again, makes Gnome Shell a little bit more workstation grade
because the two are generally getting updated together, if you're lucky.
And I think that's way better than going to a website
and having to remember to go update your extensions from time to time.
Because it turns out I never do that.
No. So I'm curious to know what your kind of early impressions were of Fedora 33 and where you
ended up with it.
Oh, I've actually been having a lot of fun.
You know, I'd been enjoying GNOME 3.38 already, just having played with it the past couple
of weeks since it's been out.
But you're right, there's something really fresh about Fedora.
It was nice to spend a little time before I really got the system invested with all of my default applications and just sort of using Firefox, using default GNOME,
exploring the system. And I'm still enjoying, I installed it rather a few times, which I'll get
into later, but it was really nice to just go through the GNOME welcome experience.
And I'm just kind of impressed with how, for a distribution that tests and integrates
all this great upstream open source software, I'm getting to be really impressed with how integrated
and its own Fedora feels. It doesn't feel like just a grab bag of good open source projects.
It feels like a thoughtful, crafted distribution. Yeah, I really agree with that. It really does.
From the way the software updates are handled and the firmware updates to installing the extensions
to all of that. But additionally,
it's not so
buttoned down that you can't make it your own pretty quickly
if that's your thing.
I admittedly just went
and got the pop theme. I got the pop icons.
I got the pop GTK theme. I got the
auto-tiling
extension. Oh, did you?
I was thinking about that.
What was the experience like? Because I didn't get down that road
all the way. I mean, it's great. System76
just puts it all up on GitHub.
And now
Carl has made it even
easier to install in Fedora 33.
Yes, sir. I packaged up
the PopShell extension. It's available as
GnomeShell extension PopShell
with hyphens in between, and you can just DNF install it and start using it. Yeah. So I pulled it off GitHub and built it because they
put the instructions and it's really easy to do that. But there was some TypeScript updates that
had to be done. I mean, there was some shenanigans. So Carl just packaged it all up, makes it even
easier. And I'm a big fan of the look. I think it makes a really great theme on Fedora 33.
Not to mention with that extension,
there's quite a few of their shortcuts
that conflict with default GNOME shortcuts.
And I have that all handled with G Schema overrides
in the package that you'd have to figure out
those conflicts yourself if you were manually installing it.
That's great.
That's so great.
So I did, you know, I had to do it the hard way,
but now you could do it the easy way.
And that sort of started to complete my experience.
I was impressed, too, that the Flatpaks I installed,
they seemed to launch fast and adopt the theme that I'm using,
which I'm really grateful for.
So all that just worked really well.
And I was on a pure Wayland session,
because I'm doing this all on Intel hardware,
and I found performance to be exceptional.
And it's noticeable now that I can do things
that I couldn't do in Wayland.
My monitor management is sticking, which is a huge win for me. If you guys have listened to
this show for a while, you know I've really struggled with my two verticals and a center
monitor setup. It has been a non-issue using a Thunderbolt dock hooked up to a laptop running
Fedora 33 on Wayland. It has worked. Hallelujah.
And additionally, I have found that performance has been even better than I got on X.
Like videos don't tear.
Games are playing just fine, even though they're X Wayland.
It's really good, even with multi-monitors, which I was concerned about.
I was concerned about a performance hit with Wayland and multiple monitors,
but it is not so far bared out.
And I'll say lastly,
I can tell the functionality has really gotten there.
I can take screenshots
of various applications
and then I can copy and paste them
into other applications.
And all of that is working.
There's a couple like Shutter.
There's a couple apps
that I used to use
that don't work with Wayland.
But for the most part,
if you use the built-in tools,
it's brilliant now, Wes.
And they all look really good.
It's almost to the point.
I mean, OK, yes,
there's all kinds of weird little niche cases if you're
pushing things, but it feels like it's
to the point where I kind of forgot that
I was using Wayland and not
X. At least, you know, for my, especially
for like my use case of
just using it for work as an actual workstation
not as a streaming or a test machine.
Yeah, I'll add this
into the mix, too. Fedora
33 is the first distro to pioneer Nano as one of the default text editors, as far as I'm aware.
And I think that's a groundbreaking feature right there.
Oh, you would.
And so Nano, by doing so, makes Fedora accessible to humans and now clearly is an easy distribution to recommend to beginners because Nano.
to recommend to beginners because Nano.
Also, those of you on the Plasma side of Fedora will be getting early out-of-memory manager
that was shipped last version
but was on the GNOME side of the thing,
of the distro, I guess,
and now it's on the Plasma side of the distro
if you get the Plasma spin.
So that's kind of nice.
And you also get swap on ZRAM by default now,
which should help with performance as well.
Yeah, I noticed that.
Isn't that fancy?
Yeah.
There's one notable other addition to the Fedora family now in 33, right?
And that's Fedora IoT is now an official addition.
So that's kind of fun if you're out there potentially building something
that could be in this ecosystem.
It's now an actual official addition, which I think is fantastic.
But here's my final sell on Fedora 33.
And this is where I think it is
really nailing it right now.
If you are using
Arch, by the way, if you're an Arch user
and maybe it hasn't
been just quite perfect.
If you're a happy Arch user and you're
loving it and you have no concerns
at all, I'm not talking to you.
But if you're an Arch user
and maybe you got bit once or twice or you're concerned about it. A little more rocky than
rolly. Yeah. Perhaps you should give Fedora a serious thought because it sits in this real
nice nexus of close to upstream like Arches, really fresh packages like you're going to get
new kernel versions during the lifespan of Fedora. It's really easy to jump over to even the rawhide version if you like
but just with the current version you're going to stay pretty fresh but major user land changes
like changing your version of plasma or or gnome shell those are done at official versions, like 33. And you can plan for that.
And you can essentially rely,
in a world where your extensions come from your repo
and a lot of your applications are coming from Flathub and Flatpaks,
you would be surprised at the success rate you'll have
at doing upgrades, even relatively soon around release.
It really is rock solid.
And so what you have here is a distribution
maintained by a major player in the space. You have a fairly frequently updated base with a
stable user land that gets updated to the latest and greatest at every major release with a package
management system that makes it really practical to actually do all of this. It's not hard to
maintain. You don't have to be on this rocky
roller coaster of a ride,
but you still get that really sweet
nexus of fresh software, well-supported
upstream, and a wide
variety of packages to choose
from, industry support,
and also a growing community. I mean, there's
a lot of positives here. I'm not trying
to convince anybody to switch off of their beloved
distro, but if this sounds like
this appeals to you,
I think Fedora 33
could be a serious
contender for you.
I can still have my
kernel hipster dreams.
Fedora 33 gets the stamp
of approval from Linux Unplugged.
I'm really loving it.
I had to make it my own
to get it there,
but I have no problem
doing that. But it's worth that little bit there, but I have no problem doing that.
But it's worth that little bit of investment, I think.
Yeah, okay, maybe it comes a little raw,
unconfigured perhaps,
but it's just built on such a solid foundation.
And you're right, you're no longer waiting
for software to become available.
Pretty much everything just works.
You can go grab whatever you need.
It feels like you can get, finally,
and this has been true for the past few releases really, but it's this happy marriage of, okay, well, there's probably an RPM that works if you need feels like you can get finally. And this has been true for the past few releases, really.
But it's this happy marriage of, okay, well, there's probably an RPM that works if you need that.
And, of course, a million other ways to get your software.
And you get all the great systems and architecture work that the Fedora team, you know,
brings in and makes the new future of Linux.
I think one of the things that's really changed for Fedora,
from Chris' reviews of the past where I really struggled with Fedora,
like in the teens, in their early 20s of Fedora from crisp reviews of the past where I really struggled with Fedora like in the
in the teens in the in their early 20s of Fedora releases is you didn't have mechanisms like copper
and flat hub and so when you add in the rather expansive now repositories of Fedora to begin with
then you add in flat hub and you add in copper you can pretty much get anything you want an app
image of course and snaps available as well you could could just install Snap on Fedora, there's nothing stopping
you. So there's really the software availability has kind of gone by the wayside. And the kernel
maturity and the desktop environment maturity is just always a default win for Fedora. So,
you know, while we get here, when Ubuntu comes out first, we'll often go through the list of
features in 5.8, and we'll go through the list of features in GNOME Shell.
Of course, Fedora has all those as well.
So it's a very compelling release.
And I think it's, for now, an easy recommend.
And you also get a chance to play with ButterFS,
which, Wes, you put in the doc, and I missed it earlier.
You have a crazy way to run ButterFS from RAM?
Yeah, well, so this is nice.
You know, I like to test out distros sometimes,
run them straight from RAM,
and kexec in there,
just as I get to play with, you know,
it's like the benefits of a virtual machine
where it has a whole disk.
I can try out the default automatic partitioning
and see what happens there.
But I can also just blow it away
and try again if I want to do things differently.
What's nice about having ButterFS installed there
is I can kind of make it work a little nicer in a hybrid approach because I've got everything on ButterFS and I actually just sort of changed my setup to put boot on ButterFS too because I'm a madman like that.
But what that meant is here's my OS running in RAM.
ButterFS has these awesome copy and write snapshots though.
So I take a snapshot, send that snapshot back to disk as a backup, right? So in case my
computer breaks or, you know, of course these things that I run on RAM, they're on a UPS,
all those normal things. But in the event of a power failure or kernel panic or whatever,
think that off. And then anytime I do updates or system changes on the system partition,
all I have to do is take advantage of that snapshot diff and only send the diff and I can
keep a nice on-disk backup that I don't ever actually run.
But if I need to, I can take that, restore it back into memory, and have a full, fast RAMDIS system ready to go.
You know, you are just a few short tricks away from like a bulletproof segment here of, I'm already seeing it now, Wes Payne's run your whole system from RAM safely segment.
And then for just extra fun, we'll say do it as root the entire time as well.
Because why not?
Coming up on a future episode of Linux Unplugged, Wes loses all his files.
I want to say thank you to our Unplugged Core contributors, unpluggedcore.com.
You're helping keep Linux Unplugged independent.
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When you become a core contributor, you get access
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But there is feed two.
Oh, boy.
Now, this is nothing like feed one.
Feed two is a mess.
It's horrible.
I wouldn't listen to it.
I encourage you, never download feed two.
I kid. horrible. I wouldn't listen to it. I encourage you never download feed to a kid, but it's the
full live stream, which means anytime we have a screw up or, you know, a pause in the show or
anything that's a blemish, it's still in there. If we, you know, caught something that we would
technically have pulled because maybe we said something that's inaccurate, we would cut it.
But that it's all in there, all the scripts, full transparency, but you also get with that a lot
more show. You get all the stuff
that maybe gets cut because we didn't have time,
but you get the pre-show, which
is generally quite a bit of show, and you get the post-show
that is a lot more
than whatever gets released in the public version.
So there's some perks to feed to,
and if you've got a long commute, it's pretty great
for you. And it's just a way of saying thank you
for supporting the show.
UnpluggedCore.com.
You can become a core contributor of this here podcast.
Keep us going, keep us independent, and you get a few perks.
Emails coming into the show.
Francis writes, Hi, in the last episode of Linux Unplugged 376,
you had someone on from System76 to talk about the Thaleomega.
As much as I'm a fan of both System76 and Linux Unplugged,
I have issues with not disclosing the fact that System76 sponsors
one of your other shows, which is Linux Action News.
He says, I know that you have interviewed people from System76 previously,
and I don't think those interviews were appropriate,
but I feel that there's at least a perceived conflict of interest.
It just made me uncomfortable listening to the interview with you not first putting a disclaimer about your business relationship with System76.
Thanks for your understanding.
Love the shows.
Francis.
Yeah, I knew when I talked about Pop 2, it's like it's awkward because they do sponsor LAN.
They don't sponsor this show.
And I haven't offered this show to System76 because, well, I am not really concerned about it impacting what I would comment on.
I am concerned about the perception of it.
And so if we talk about something in this show, it's because we want to talk about it.
Nobody asks us to talk about it.
It's our choice and our decision.
And I have had a – you guys, if you listen to the show, I mean, I've had no problem holding back.
Like I went all in on criticism for Pop when it came out.
And the thing about System76 and I,
and really NetJB as a whole,
is our relationship spans like 13 years now almost.
I was literally one of their first public customers.
So it's kind of beyond, it's beyond like one ad deal.
So one ad deal doesn't really influence what I say or don't say.
It doesn't hold back my criticism.
That's just how I roll.
That's one of the benefits of me being independent.
But I totally get the perception and the concern of conflict there.
And so what I always do is if they're an active sponsor in that show,
I disclose it.
If it's something like that would be like,
say there was some sort of paid promotion,
a paid thing like that, I would 100% always disclose it.
If you don't hear me disclose it,
my general default is just because we chose to do it.
I asked to have her on.
I wanted to know about it.
I think System76 is extremely interesting from a
Linux ecosystem perspective because they have been around for so long. They've been through
the Unity years, the transition to Gnome. Now they're making their own products more and more.
And I think it's a really interesting just bellwether in general for the Linux desktop,
for Linux in business, Linux in education. So to me, they're a fascinating subject to follow on that level.
But because they are so relevant, I also feel like they do make for a great sponsor because
they fit in that nexus of interest with our audience, a company I know well and believe in,
which means I've vetted them extremely thoroughly. And they have a legitimate message to get out
that I think is, you know, it's a good product. So they're really, they sit in that kind of sweet spot there.
But we will, as we begin picking on sponsors and stuff like that,
because, you know, this is kind of new again for us,
we will try to be really receptive to this kind of feedback
because it's, you know, I want to get it right for you guys,
and I've got no reason not to be fully up front with you.
So this is something we will try to learn from and try to make sure we get right.
And if somebody has some sort of business relationship with us
that could be perceived as influence,
we'll try to disclose it.
I kind of started playing with that when we talked about Pop
because I knew there was something there about it,
but I don't really have the words for it yet.
It's like, yeah, they sponsor Linux Action News,
but my thoughts about Pop are still my own.
So I don't know how to cover it.
But it's something we're thinking about.
And Francis, I appreciate that kind of feedback.
Wes, do you have like thoughts on, I don't know,
lessons learned, what we could do differently?
No, I mean, I think you're right.
It is a little bit of a strange bundle
in that they are a little closer
than maybe some other sponsors or relationships
in that you've been a customer.
You know, we've gone to events with them.
We see them a lot and know a lot of the folks personally.
But you are right that I think we try to keep things separate.
And Francis has a great point that even if we feel these ways internally, it can only help to make that more transparent or as transparent as we can be.
That, yes, you know, we know these folks.
as we can be that, yes, you know, we know these folks.
It kind of goes with a lot of the projects where,
especially over the years, you know, you reporting on them,
following them, sending emails asking for,
hey, can you clarify these things?
You just develop these relationships.
And it's important to, you know, make sure the audience knows that,
yes, you have those, but you're still going to say whatever you want.
Yeah, and I think I really, I gained more respect for them too when I really shit on Pop OS.
And they didn't like – I'm sure they didn't like it.
Constructive criticism?
Yeah.
And I admit that I was wrong.
I think it's actually pretty great.
And here I am running the pop theme now on Fedora.
Kat writes in, hi, Chris and Wes.
Why don't we as a community acknowledge the freaking amazing level of technical support we get with our software for free?
This week I had a great displeasure to contact a certain commercial vendor about a technical issue in their product, which we paid a lot of money to use.
I couldn't get in touch with any qualified personnel who could actually understand the problem we were having, let alone fix it, and had to give up and debug the issue myself. Oh, I guess we're not
spending enough millions to be able to have direct lifeline to whoever is actually writing the
product. This got me thinking about the level of support we've seen on the Linux kernel mailing
list and so many other places so many times. It's very easy to get in touch directly with the
developers and who are generally relatively eager to help.
And he has an example. He says, some guy posted about a hard drive which crapped itself and
totally broke his ButterFS file system. Okay. And he says that the ButterFS developer and
Asusa employee actually responded in a few hours by writing a custom recovery tool
specifically for this individual's problem.
Isn't that just great, he says?
If this were a commercial project, you'd have to shell out millions each year
to be able to have that kind of support.
And it's more of the norm than it is the exception.
He says, by the way, you have listeners even in remote places like Central Asia.
Love the show. Keep it up.
That is such a great point,
and one that I think can also contribute to developer burnout,
but it is such a level of transparency.
It's one of the reasons I think Wes and I like covering this space
is because you can actually go to the mailing list,
and a lot of times, for a lot of the things we talk about,
especially with Linux Action News, we just email them.
Yeah, right, there's no secrets.
The development's happening out in the open. The discussion is often out in the open.
And once you're pushing these commits out there,
it's not that big of a leap to actually just start conversing with folks.
Oh man, Marty writes in with some feedback that I was just thinking about on the drive in from the woods today
about how I want to set up a local AD Active Directory
server and I want to try getting an Ubuntu box and a Fedora 33 box
to both log into it.
I think that'd be pretty cool.
So Marty writes, I was listening to episode 376,
and you mentioned Active Directory support in Ubuntu 2010
and the forthcoming Fedora 33.
I'm a small-time Fedora developer,
but I run several different Linux distros,
have for a long time, and I run free IPA in my home lab.
And it's remarkably easy to set up.
The best thing about it is that it's available for my clients,
and there's clients in all the major Linux distros as well.
Single sign-on reality is here.
FreeIPA uses the underlying bits of 389 for LDAP,
MITKRB5 for Kerberos, and DogTag for certs.
It's ridiculously simple to get up and running
and get clients joined to it.
It's very convenient.
It also bundles in an LDAP-enabled bind,
which allows clients and servers
to both get their own Kerberos-secured DNS updates
and do dynamic addressing.
That's pretty great.
He says, I even do domain replication
pretty easily in free IPA.
I run a multi-master on my home lab.
I think it'd be really worthwhile for you to check it out.
Well, I think that seals the deal.
I think that puts it on the project list right there.
Thank you everybody for writing in.
Love the feedback.
Linuxunplugged.com slash contact.
Anything we've talked about or anything you think we should talk about.
If you want to get something in front of us, that's where you go.
And last but not least this week, we have a pick for you that's rather topical,
and it's called Annie, the fast and simple and clean video downloader.
You gave it a go this morning, Wes.
I sure did.
You know, it's written in Go, pluses and minuses, depending on what you think there,
but it did mean that there was a simple little static binary I could go download and run. Hey, that's pretty convenient if you
don't want to go install things somehow else, although there are downsides. But it was super
easy to get started, and honestly, it had some really nice output. You know, it just, it used
the terminal display really well, great integrated progress bars, and as much as I love me some
YouTube DL, there's kind of a lot going on when it's printing all this information
and Annie felt a little bit cleaner.
I think that the flip side here is
Annie's definitely younger
and not nearly as full featured as YouTube DL.
I mean, if you've ever looked at the YouTube DL man page
or just the long help options,
can do just about everything.
Annie, it's a little more bare bones.
Yeah, I agree with you, though.
I gave it a spin.
I do like the output.
It's going to require you have FFmpeg installed,
but I'm guessing you already have that.
And it's quick.
I think it launches and downloads faster.
Yeah, you know, also it integrates with a tool
I tend to use sometimes for downloading things, ARIA 2.
Now, if you go that route,
you do have to merge the resulting multi-part files yourself, but hey,
FFmpeg's there anyway.
That's right. Yep, it's a thing of beauty.
So if you're jonesing for a YouTube
DL alternative, and
YouTube is the primary use case,
which actually isn't for me,
check out Annie. We'll have a link
in the show notes. It's hosted up on
GitHub for now.
Jeez.
Also, I encourage you to join us live
next week. Join our Mumble room,
join our chat room, or just stream along
over at jblive.tv. We do this
noon
Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern.
See you next week. Same bat time,
same bat station.
And of course, there is that virtual lug happening
on Sunday. You get your Mumble client set up for that, and then you might as well come by Tuesday.
Don't miss it.
And go try out Fedora 33. Let us know how it went.
Don't forget, you can also join our Telegram group if you want to join the conversation after the show.
That's at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash telegram.
People are chatting in there 24-7, and it gets pretty geeky.
So go get that.
The show is at Linux Unplugged
at Linux Unplugged on Twitter. The network's
at Jupyter Signal. I'm at Chris
LAS and check out Wes Payne
now on Linux Action News.
Woo! Woohoo! Yeah!
Coming up in your feeds.
See you back here next Tuesday! Bye. This is CNN Breaking News.
All right, Brent is here with the report.
Brent, is it snowing in Canada?
Yes, today in the weather it might be cold for some of us outside,
but it's always warm here in the Jupiter Broadcasting Mumble Room.
There you go. There you go.
If you do get cold, you can snuggle up close to Brent. Works great.
Thank you for the update.
You're welcome. Back to you.
Ha ha ha!