LINUX Unplugged - 380: No Sur, No Thank You

Episode Date: November 17, 2020

We review the Dell Precision 5750, a born and bred MacBook killer that runs Linux. Plus a nasty reminder of how closely Apple monitors its users, and their fatal flaw that we think is outrageous.

Are you listening? Introducing sound beaming. You hear the audio, others don't, without headphones. When you are inside of the bubble, you get the sound, the volume, the immersiveness of it. And when you're outside of it, you cannot get it. Sometimes you can hear a little bit of noise. Sometimes you hear there's something going on beside you, but you don't get the volume and don't get the immersiveness of the sound experience. You don't need to tell the device where you are. It's not streaming to like one exact place. It follows you wherever you go. So it's personally for you, follows you, plays what you want inside your head. follows you, plays what you want inside your head.

It's sound beaming, Wes, and it's just as cool as it possibly could be. It's a futuristic audio technologies from Novito Systems. And on Friday, they'll debut a full-fledged desktop device. It sits right there on your desk and beams sound into your head noodle from wherever you are without headphones. Yeah, it uses a 3D sensing module and locates and tracks your ear position, sending audio via ultrasonic waves to create sound pockets right by your ears.

What's interesting is it can be heard in stereo or a spatial 3D mode that creates 360 degree sound around the listener. So it's like headphones with surround sound? I think this is something you're going to have to hear to believe, but it is so Star Trek. It's awesome. You should try listening to Linux Unplugged. Hello, friends, and welcome in to episode 380 of your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.

My name is Wes. Hello, Wes. This episode is brought to you by a cloud guru, the leader in learning for cloud Linux and other modern tech skills. Hundreds of courses, thousands of hands-on labs. Get certified. Get hired. Get learning at acloudguru.com. Episode 380 is up.

It's fresh, and it's another Sunday edition of the show where Wes and I, for the last time, for at least for the foreseeable future, are recording ahead. And we have kind of a special show for you today. This is one of those episodes where we attended some events and took notes so you don't have to. And we'll come back with a fresh report on some Linux events from over the weekend. fresh report on some Linux events from over the weekend. We're going to tell you what's going on with a Mac story and how it impacts Linux users and why it makes Linux the best OS ever, of course. And then right here, I've been working on it. Oh gosh, it's big. It's really, it's a huge machine, but beautiful. I had to wait until the honeymoon period was over so I could give you the full honest review of the Dell Precision 5750 mobile workstation. People say this kind of stuff all the time, but this is legitimately

a MacBook killer. This is Dell going right after the MacBook with chamfered edges and everything. And I'll tell you how it stacks up and what you need to know about it and how much it costs for a configuration like this. And while you're distracted, I'm going to sneak it stacks up and what you need to know about it and how much it costs for a configuration like this. And while you're distracted, I'm going to sneak it into my bag. I don't blame you one bit. But before we get into the community news, the pics that we have and all of that, I want to say time-appropriate greetings to our mumble room. Hello, Virtual Lug.

Hello, CrescentWiz. Hello. Howdy. We got 14 folks in there today because it's a Sunday, and they had a huge LUP Lug going earlier today with some Jellyfin developers in there, and we'll tell you more about that in a little bit. This is the po-show to the Luplug this week. Really it is.

Yeah. So this weekend and late last week, two pretty significant Linux community events were going on, the Linux Application Summit and Siegel. Did you get a chance to go to Siegel much? Yeah, just a little bit. I'll probably check out more talks after the fact. There was just too much going on.

Yeah, and Siegel had like a three-track thing going on too, so I kind of had to pick and choose constantly. Yeah, a lot of good talks. Yeah, it was nice to see it. You know, this has been a, which we'll talk more about in a little bit, but this has been a real thing this year, is how the heck to move all these events virtual. And various degrees of success for different ones.

And the Linux Application Summit has been building and building now for a few years. So this is when we were watching with interest. It took place November 12th through the 14th, 2020. And there's lots of talks. We'll link you to as much as we can. Pharonix also has a rundown. But to give you a kind of a taste, a sense of the flavor, this is Alexi Pol, who we have had on the show before. He's the KDEV president. And he was talking about Wayland. But he's talking about it from not an end user's perspective, but he's talking about it from not an end user's perspective, but he's talking about it from a developer's perspective,

how developers can target their applications and write applications for Linux that use Wayland. Everyone, please give a warm virtual round of applause for Alish, who will be talking to us about Wayland for app developers. There's no applause, so insert applause here. Thanks, everyone, for the virtual round of applause. It was virtually great. All right. So for the talk today, I thought that instead of talking about things that are happening, which is what I generally talk about because I am a developer, I thought,

generally talk about because I am a developer. I thought, well, what will developers care about when they start developing their applications? And he goes through a lot of the different history and things to consider there. But I think I'm going to jump right to my favorite talk, if you'll allow it. Please do. If you'll permit.

My favorite talk, like a lot of these talks did, unfortunately, but it's how these virtual events go right now. My favorite talk does start with a bit of an awkward introduction. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and namaste everyone. My name is Rakshit Vaishnavi Dogra, and now I invite Mr. Greg Kroha Hartman, who goes by at Greg KH on Twitter. I'm definitely sure that there is no need for an introduction. So ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for Mr. Greg Krua Hartman. All the best, sir. Okay, is that working now?

I hope so. Fun thing is, I have construction happening right below me, so we might hear some drilling in the background, but hey, this is the joy of working from home in this situation. These virtual conferences, they're always a bit, you know, like a Zoom meeting. And there's no way around that. In some sense, you feel a little closer, and in other senses, it's a little harder to watch. Yeah, it is.

So Greg gives his own introduction, which is probably a little bit better than my introduction. I like to introduce him as the Commander Riker of Linux. A little bit about me, since they didn't introduce me. I've been a kernel developer for way too long. I used to be an embedded developer before that. I maintain stable kernels. I have done a lot of user space work, but at the low level I also maintain some user space packages. I will make fun of GNOME later, but let me tell you, I have been an advisory board for them for many years and I'm still a foundation member.

And I've worked on lots and lots of different districts. We'll get to that GNOME stuff in a little bit, because I actually thought it was pretty poignant. But he wanted to bring lessons that they've learned as a kernel team to the App Summit audience, which is made up of a lot of developers. What you do and how you act on creating code depends on who you are. And I'll break everything down into about three different groups here. Kernel developers, this audience is not kernel developers, but since I am one, I'll talk about what we've learned and how we've made mistakes and what we've learned from that and how to apply it again to library developers and application developers, which is the primary audience here.

Now, the full talk has some really good insights, but I think you probably agree with me, Wes, because I know you watched this one too. There was one thing he really wanted to drive home with this talk, and that is never, ever break user space whenever possible. It's the kernel's number one rule. You've probably heard it before. He lays it out a little bit here. So first off, kernel developers. Easy, easy thing. We only have really one rule. And Linus gets mad at this whenever you see Ransom depressed or whatnot.

This is when we do not, we break this rule. And the rule is we cannot break user space. And cannot break user space on purpose. Break it accidentally, we'll fix it, whatever.

We break user space if nobody notices, that's fine, because we take advantage of things that when you don't notice different functionalities or stuff. But you just can't break user space. That's such a developer thing to say. We break it when no one notices.

Right? Yeah. It's only a crime if you get caught, Chris. Right. So he's mentioned this before. You've heard probably Linus say this or read it if you've been around for a little while. You know this is a big rule of theirs. But I bet you may not know why they believe it so strongly. And I'll tell you what, it wasn't exactly what I was expecting. And Greg

explains. And we make this rule and other operating systems have this rule as well. It's a very solid rule because we always want you to upgrade. And we want you to upgrade without worrying about it. We don't want you to feel scared if you see a new release and we say, hey, this fixes a bunch of problems. We don't want you to feel worried about taking that. And that's really, really important, especially with security. You want people to take all these fixes. You want people to be able to upgrade, you want them to also take advantage of the new features, and if you have them even hesitate about updating to your latest version because you've broken functionality for them, they won't. And that's not okay.

So that's why. Because they, the kernel developers, want you to feel confident in upgrading. Yeah, I think he really hits on, you know, there's a lot of trust here. You're only going to keep using something and keep getting the latest versions if it has a history of working and you feel like there's respect on the developer side for what you're trying to do and not just what's easy for the developers. It's a hard learned lesson for the kernel team too. I mean, there's only a few Linux users out there. And when you have the rapid pace of development that Linux does, you really do have to be thinking about what makes it safe for the users to upgrade, what prevents them from upgrading. And you see this in some commercial

spaces too, where there is sort of this meme that goes around that iOS users always update and iOS users stay current. But compared to Android. Right. But the reality is, Wes, because I seem to recall that actually took quite a hit when they released, I think it was iOS 7. I can't remember. It was a pretty dramatic UI change. And their upgrade rate

dropped significantly, dropped way off. And then it slowly, slowly, slowly rebuilt over time. Same for me with Fedora, right? I, over time, after about 10 releases of having a successful upgrade, I pretty much just upgrade immediately now. I feel pretty safe about it. Right. You've built that trust with them over the time. Yeah. And so I connected with what he was saying there, but that just wasn't what I expected the reason for that number one

rule of never breaking user space. Now, what can developers do when they need to make change? Because sometimes you're in a situation where users don't want change, but for whatever reason, change has to happen. Well, Greg has advice for that too. But what we can do is we can evolve things over time so that nobody actually notices. We can move to different ways things happen. We can do different things, how stuff works, and we can provide new ways of doing things. And if we provide new ways of doing things, hopefully people will migrate over time. In reality, they don't. They stick to the old stuff, which is fine, but we can provide new ways. And this is how we constantly evolve and how we

constantly move forward. And this is how you survive because you have to change with the world. So you have to provide new functionality. A lot of people, I get this complaint a lot from a number of people who have been in the IT and the computer industry for a long time saying, how is Linux succeeding? It's an old model. The old Unix POSIX model is obsolete. We shouldn't be doing this anymore. And the problem is, in one way, Linux supports that. They support your binaries from 20 years ago, from 25 years ago. You can still run really old BSD applications. You rebuild them, and they work. Or you can run your application that was built 20 years ago, and it still works. So people think Linux is stagnated. But in reality, we've created new functionalities right

next to the old functionalities, and that you can do different things. You can take advantage of stuff. We have eBPF, which is taking over the world. It's a microkernel-like architecture. You can run user space programs on the kernel. You can do all this fancy stuff, proven that you can't lock up the kernel. Wonderful stuff. IOU ring is fast asynchronous IO

in a different way that has ever been done before. And it's, again, sitting right next to the old POSIX model so that your old programs can work just fine, but new programs can take advantage of stuff and take advantage of speed increases. Of course, Linux now is a real-time operating system. It's been a real-time operating system for a while without a tree patch. Those changes are almost all merged. That's something people said could never possibly be done. But yet we did it right next to the existing operating system and nobody noticed. That's how you do it. You evolve and add new functionality without breaking anything.

I think when I heard this, it was sort of triggering a bias in my head, and that is you can't have an old system, an old subsystem, and a new subsystem, and have them coexist. That just adds bloat. And bloat equals slowdown and security issues, and that equals bad. But that's, I think, a bit of a novice understanding. When I gave it a little more consideration, I realized, well, Linux is kind of uniquely suited for this. You have to get the balance right.

But the reality is you can have somebody who maintains the current IO subsystem and you can have somebody else that comes along and maintains the new IO ring subsystem. And there isn't some bean counter saying, well, we can't afford to invest in two subsystems at the same time. This is open source development. So it can absolutely happen in parallel. But additionally, having two subsystems that do similar things doesn't make one of the other slower. That code path just doesn't get activated unless somebody writes for it. So there's really not, as long as it's maintained, there's not really like a performance hit from it. Right. I mean, if you ever call into that code, it's never going to get loaded and run. It just sits there. And so Greg's core point with all of this was, as much as you

can, keep support for existing features and slowly build in new features. If you have to make really, really radical change, maybe it's time to call it something new. And he brought us back to the good old GNOME days to really kind of help sink this in for the developers that were listening. The biggest thing to do is don't take away things that work. If somebody's using this feature and using this functionality,

keep it there. It's that simple. It's being, it was there, you provided for somebody. Don't think by removing it, you're doing them a favor. You might be doing yourself a favor because you think it can be done

a different way, but don't because it's not going to work. And the biggest example of this and the most public example of this happened many, many years ago. 2011, the big day. A number of people here know what that date was. I have heard it talked by as this date, and this was the GNOME 3 introduction. Everybody's system instantly, when the distro switched it over, it looked totally and completely different. That was a major, major break. This was the day the GNOME project realized that they had real users based on the feedback they got. They always thought they had users. They always thought they were doing the right thing. They wanted to make a change. They wanted to do something

different. But this was the day that they really broke all their users' trust because all of a sudden they imposed a totally different model onto them, onto what they were currently used to doing, getting the workflow, and it broke them. It just caused a number of major, major pain. It was horrible. The LWN.net review of GNOME 3 was actually really good. It was very comprehensive, and the comments, of course, were horrible. But read this. If you're an application developer and you are considering rewriting how you do everything

in a totally different way, look at this. You are seeing people mad because you took something that they were using and using to get their real work done. Their real work isn't to create an interface or application environment. Their real work is to do something else. And you made it harder to get them to do their real work.

You broke their trust. And that was a long way. And the known developers clawed back from that. It took them many, many, many years to do that. I think they're there now. I know myself, I switched away and came back many years., many years to do that. I think they're there now. I know myself. I switched away and came back many years. They've gotten better since 2011.

They realized having a clean break doesn't work, and that was not the best idea. Please don't, in your application, do the same thing. I see this happen a lot. People evolve applications to do something totally different, different UI. That's not a good idea. Please don't do that.

And I don't know if I completely agree that their reputation has recovered. I mean, I, like Greg, stopped using it for a while. Same here, yeah. And now I'm back on it, and I'm pretty dang happy with it. But I think that's also, at the same time, Plasma's gotten really, really sharp. He does cite Plasma

Desktop as an example of getting it right. Right. And, you know, it immediately made me think of the systems we have in the studio and that I have at home running KDE Neon. And it's just slow, evolutionary change. And I don't worry, even if I'm getting updates every single week, that my desktop's suddenly going to change out from underneath. Yeah, I remember when I was in IT support and a new version of Windows came along. And it wasn't even a significant change, but it might have been like from XP to 7 or something like that. And I was working with people, getting them set up. And I remember the comment that somebody made to me, and it just really stuck out.

And he said to me, you know, I just don't understand why they keep moving the gas pedal on this thing. And that's how he saw it. He's like, I learned how to drive this Windows XP, and now you gave me Windows 7, and they moved the gas pedal on me. I think that's a common viewpoint, right? You didn't have the problems that the developers seemed to think needed to get fixed or changed or, you know, tried to make more revenue with. And so why change it? Meanwhile, I'm often like, hmm, where can I stick the gas pedal? You know, can I put it over in this corner?

I want like three of them, and I want them all shiny. But he underscores this point by saying, you know, look at the Mate and Cinnamon projects. They're still here. They're still going. This really underscores the size of this change, of this event that GNOME was. As a result, everybody here knows Mate and Cinnamon sprung up. They fill a real need. These are real desktops

that are with lots and lots of users because they were used to it before or they're used to that common paradigm. That's fine. But this is an example that kind of shows that what the GNOME developers did was major and was really big because there's two separate projects

to fill that void. That's fine if the GN known developers want to do that. They did. That was their decision to do. Again, we're writing software for free. You're throwing it over the wall. I would say that maybe that wasn't the best decision to do. But hey, maybe you should have called it a different project,

gone off a different way. But like software development, sometimes there is a reason to introduce real change. You have to provide enough reason and enough goodness to force somebody to take the time to learn to do something else. That's very rare. It happens very, very rarely in an application space. Sometimes in library spaces it does. I'll call out SystemD as a good example of how they did it right. They provide all the functionality.

They solved a real problem that was there. They unified all these existing tools and problems in such a way that it was just so much better to use. And it provided enough impetus that everybody was willing to do the work to modify their own stuff and move to the new model. It worked. People still complain about it, but it worked.

Everybody switched. Everybody updated the new stuff that KDE is doing with Systemd on how it launches better. It's very nice. GNOME was integrated with it from the beginning, from very early. It works well. It solves a real problem. Again, that was an example of how you can provide a compelling reason to move on and make the change. You know, it reminds me that we have some really intelligent people. of how you can provide a compelling reason to move on and make the change.

You know, it reminds me that we have some really intelligent people that are running the kernel. And that's one, I think, Linux's best strength is the people closest to the core of it, they know what the hell they're talking about and what they're doing. Well, and you can see that this is really, you know, Greg's got an understanding of being in the open source space

where, you know, no one's required to use Linux necessarily. Like, you have to work and have a value proposition to your audience to make sure that they use it and don't just fork you and do whatever else they want to do, or use one of your many competitors, right? In a corporate environment, if I'm writing some software, you might just be told that you have to use it. Or if I need to make a change, I can force you into a Zoom meeting,

tell you you've got to fix your software by X date. But in the larger world of open source software, you can't do that. And that is when he cited systemd there. You know, you absolutely could have your qualms with systemd, and many people do, and they still love to talk about it. But at the end of the day, it was immensely successful in getting adoption. And in a way that we don't normally see with a disruptor in open source, and so it was kind of a rare case, because usually it has to be slow, progressive change.

And maybe it is a good example, too, in that I think a lot of the folks who, you know, didn't like systemd, for them, that change wasn't as well justified, right? There were reasons that they didn't have the same problems or that systemd didn't feel like it was necessarily solving for them. So there was less incentive to move on. So the whole talk is worth listening to. It's about 30 minutes long, and we got you a few minutes worth of clips here. So it's worth checking it out. But at the end in the Q&A, he was asked a question about what new technology coming to Linux at the kernel level and around it that he's the most excited about. And so I'm going to play that for you, and then we'll quiz Wes Payne to see if he knows what it is.

Any kernel technology, user space devs? Yes, IOU ring. User space developers who care about IOU should pay attention to that. I know the Postgres developers are looking at it now. Other database developers, it is asynchronous IOU with no system call overhead. Very, very fast IOU. You can throw things into a ring,

and you get notified in user space when your data is there. Very, very good if you care about I.O. I recommend looking at that. All right, Wes Payne. For the last chicken little in the kitchen with cheese, what is I.O. Ring? Well, it's I.O. underscore U Ring, Chris, and it's a mechanism for performing asynchronous IO. Oh. Oh.

Well, that's it? That's all you got? Hmm, judges? What more did you want? Well, what makes it so special? It's new and faster and better. You heard him talk about, you know, less system call overhead.

Yeah. No one's really been happy with the existing asynchronous IO subsystem options in Linux, and classic Unix IO.O. is inherently synchronous, so this is a new faster method that's becoming very popular. Alright, I'm going to give it to you, Wes Payne. You are correct, yeah.

There's actually one other technologies. He cited two technologies that he's very excited about. I.O. Ring was one of them. I.O. U-Ring. The second one, though, I'm going to say you have to go listen to Linux Action News episode 163 to hear that one. Oh, you know, there's also some interesting talk about a breaking change coming to systemd, which I think is right on point for today's discussion. Yes, very much so, as a matter of fact. So go check out linuxactionnews.com slash 163. Linode.com slash unplugged. Go there to get a $100 60-day

credit towards your new account. Linode is the largest independent cloud for developers. They are our server provider. Not only do they offer servers, they offer node balancers, they have object storage if you want some static storage, up in the cloud. And they've been around three years before AWS. That's when they got their start. They're in this for the long haul, Wes. That's for sure. And that gave them some very early opportunities in infrastructure and in private networking.

They have 11 data centers around the world. They have a crazy fast network that they just recently made a blog post about that I encourage you to go read. They're my cloud hosting provider, and they host all of our new infrastructure here. They have native SSD storage, 40 gigabit connections at the hypervisors, a really nice, easy to use cloud manager to do all of this. Plus they also plug in with your orchestration management tools. So that's just like a slam dunk. Plus Linode costs 30 to 50% less than the major cloud providers like AWS. They're's just like a slam dunk. Plus Linode costs 30 to 50% less than the major cloud providers like AWS. They're independently owned like your humble podcast network right here. And so that I really like. But additionally, Linode was one of the first sponsors to step up and make us, make Jupyter Broadcasting going independent actually happen and possible. They were one of

the OG sponsors that came in when things were brand new, and I was just a few days out from going on air, and I didn't have anything lined up, and Linode stepped up. So they have been part of the community for a long time. They're also backers of LinuxFest Northwest. They've sponsored projects like Kubuntu, and they do lots of hackathons and meetups, although I don't know how much these days but i've been going to events for years and seeing linode there so i always wanted to try them out so a couple of years ago i had my opportunity and i've never gone back so check them out see what they can do for you see what you can build linode.com slash unplugged go there get that 100 60 day credit towards your new account, and support the show. See why they're our hosting

provider and why we love them so dang much. A couple of weeks ago, I did a custom rig that I swear you could only do at Linode because they get it. Unlike entry-level service providers that lock you down and prevent you from being able to do some of the back-end stuff, Linode lets you have at it. Check it out. Linode.com slash unplugged.

A big thank you, Linode, for sponsoring the Unplugged program. And thanks to everybody who listens and goes to Linode.com slash unplugged. Big thank you, Linode, for sponsoring the Unplugged program. And thanks to everybody who listens and goes to Linode.com slash unplugged to check them out, to support the show, and let them know you heard about it here and get that $100 60-day credit towards your new account. All right, Wes, this week there was a story that kind of reminds us why a lot of us choose to use Linux on our workstation. Set the scene. It's a rainy Pacific Northwest morning. I've lazily gotten out of bed, wandered downstairs, got the laptop rebooted, set up, ready to get to work,

or at least drink some coffee and start going that way. Think about getting ready for work. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's a multi-step process. Got to get in the headset, yeah. And I notice I'm using my work Mac, okay? Mm-hmm. Apps are taking a while to load. And I notice, you know, I'm using my work Mac, okay? Apps are taking a while to load.

I thought at first that just this must be, you know, macOS doing something. Maybe it's rebuilding some caches in the background or had perhaps done some updates after I'd rebooted it. But it just kept persisting. Really? And was it just during application load time? Just load time. The apps would launch eventually and then run just fine.

Yeah, I think a lot of people ran into this on November 12th when Big Sur was released. Uh-huh. Big Sur came out and hours after the initial release, somewhere in Apple's infrastructure, their online certificate status protocol servers just started crawling. And part of the problem actually was that they didn't go completely offline.

They just got really, really slow. And what could be happening in your case and in some of these other individual cases is that macOS in the background has this gatekeeper technology, and it checks to see if the developer certificate is valid of the application before it runs. So say you have, do you remember one of the apps, like Slack perhaps? So Slack, when they submit to the Apple app stores, all of them, part of that process, they actually become an Apple developer, they pay for that, they get an account for that,

they submit to these different app stores, and their build has to be signed with their certificate. Apple signs the application, and then they sign it with the developer's certificate, too. And this all happens on the back end. The application, when it runs, it generally just runs. But every now and then, like, if you haven't run it for a while, or maybe it's like a fresh boot, it will check to see if that developer's certificate is active, if it's like a fresh boot. It will check to see if that developer's certificate is active, if it's still valid. And here's where the drama came in.

Because yes, that means, you know, I'm launching an application, I'm doing stuff on my computer, and suddenly we're sending a response to some servers over-controlled in Apple's cloud, checking to make sure that I can, in fact, launch this program I've asked it to run. This is something Apple rolled out quite a while ago in macOS, and they've evolved it over time. And ultimately, the idea being that they could revoke Slack certificate or anybody, is something Apple rolled out quite a while ago in macOS, and they've evolved it over time. And ultimately, the idea being that they could revoke Slack certificate or anybody, and that application would then fail to launch on Macs or iDevices. Right. Let's say, you know, I've been publishing stuff. I just put out a new version of my application. People are running it. And I noticed that, oh, I've been compromised, and someone put some, you know, malicious crypto

miner in my software, and now it's out there. Well, I might not be able to do anything, except in this case, I can. I can tell Apple about it, and they can make sure that any new launches from there on won't work. So this is why it's built in there, but it also has the flip side. There's an evil side to this. If you wanted to implement your own app store in your app,

and Apple decided they didn't want you to do that, they could turn your account off. Additionally, it means that these Macs have to check in semi-frequently with Apple servers before they'll run an application. Think about that. Network activity has to occur before the application runs. So if you have a bad route,

if you've got some weird latency, if you're on a MiFi, and it's just going a little slow that day, you could have a $10,000 Mac Pro tower and it will still wait to launch the application. Now, there is provisions in there for if it's offline, but when it's totally offline, it won't, you know, it'll just launch. But when it's actually responding, guess what? It slows the entire thing down. And I really think Apple, as this company that positions themselves as a privacy-first company, needs to be really super clear when they're doing something like this

because you kind of get a sense of a person's basic metadata about the use of their machine, application launch times, IP address. I believe it's also sent in HTTP. Is that true? Yeah, that's a common thing in these scenarios. And yeah, looking at some Wireshark logs that folks have been investigating this from, it does seem like there's some information transmitted over plain text. Now, that seems to be just information about the particular developer's certificate, and usually that certificate could sign multiple apps,

say in the case of Mozilla for both Firefox and Thunderbird. But that's kind of a personal choice of how do you feel about that? And as you say, right, there's, you know, these are associated with time, with your activity, with perhaps your location. Yeah. Yeah, so there's a couple of issues here. The first issue I'd say, is this a system that people are comfortable with? Because it gives Apple a lot of metadata and it gives them a lot of control. I would argue if you buy a Mac, you're kind of already conceding to trusting Apple. And so that probably doesn't

bother you as much. But then you have the implementation here. Even though this touches Akmai, which is, by the way, a third party now getting in the mix, part of this will touch Akmai's CDN network. Part of it goes directly to Apple. I'd like some real clarity on what information is being collected and sent along. Because what has been deduced by the community is kind of damning. It seems like a lot of information I wouldn't want out there. Well, and I think a lot of, you know, but for being proprietary, I think there's still a lot of folks even in our community and Linux users that, you know, Apple isn't Google. They're not just trying to sell you ads and necessarily mine all your personal data. And they've tried to build a brand on that.

But not being clear here, I think, is hurting that at least among, say, the developer crowd. And there's that whole privacy aspect of it. But I think this conversation, so far as we've heard it, because we're recording this on a Sunday, hasn't really included the fact that iOS behaves exactly the same way. Right. This is the Apple ecosystem. That's exactly how it works, right? Or at least the same fundamentals. And in This is the Apple ecosystem. That's exactly how it works, right? Or at least the same fundamentals.

And in their ecosystem, they're king. Yes. And that may be part of the value proposition, right? Like, how often do you really worry about a bunch of iOS malware? Yeah, I suppose not really ever. And most users aren't really capable of, you know, evaluating that. Do you maintain a list of trusted and untrusted software? I mean, you know, Apple does, and they can get security reports.

They have whole teams of people that can monitor and keep these things up to date. True. I give you that. And if you're just downloading some random software and running it, who knows what could happen? It also feels like it's potentially surveillance. Like it could be utilized for surveillance if you had somebody on your network who was, I don't know, wanted to surveil you. I think I'm just going to slow down requests to that specific domain

all the time on all my notes. So this is the third issue. No, really. I think this is – so you literally have a system designed and such that it could slow down the operation of a Mac. And if I was using a Mac that day and I was trying to get work done and I was in a rush, maybe I was trying to get down to the studio really quick or I had to take off, I would be very incensed. I think I would be enraged that they designed a network system in such a way that it could slow down my local computer on my LAN. Right. And of course, you know, like we talk a lot about the various trade-offs in security,

and I think it just underscores that they've made the choice of where to fall in those trade-offs. You don't really have a lot of input. So Minimac, the way I put this in our show notes is it's really about who owns your computer. And Linux users, I think, are the only ones who can really confidently say, I own my system. Do you see this? Is that overstating it? No, I don't think it is.

I mean, it comes down to these questions. Do I own my computer, or does the company that owns the computer, so does Apple own my computer? Can I do whatever I want with my computer or does Apple decide what I do with my computer? And in the end, we Linux users say or ask themselves, do I want that or not? And we don't want that. So we choose another system. Right. And I think the other problem is it's going to encourage people who are concerned about this just to disable all

code signing checks. And that's not a good user behavior either. Right. Especially for folks who maybe don't know that much about security like most users and can't really weigh the pros and cons. So then there is yet another wrinkle to this story. It's really something. In macOS Big Sur, they have designed it such that a certain set of the core system bypasses VPNs and other types of things.

Like maybe you have a popular Mac app as a little snitch, an outbound firewall. Right. And that relies on some hooks that the kernel, Apple's kernel, provides them to be able to make these choices. And they've just said, no, our programs, they do what they want. So that means that Macs are essentially leaky on VPNs now out of the box. And now this is all provisional.

As you said, it's a Sunday right now, but at least from looking at Twitter, it seems like maybe some other third-party apps can start taking advantage of that too, at least right now, and it is still in beta. Yeah, but from what we do see on Twitter, it seems like someone else was able to essentially create a malicious app that took advantage of this new system. And it's ludicrous because, again, there, I would expect as an end user, if I'm establishing

a VPN, I would never think that my kernel and other parts of my OS are sneaky sending data to other servers outside my network level VPN. That's why I created a VPN. Something tells me there'll be some network IT administrators who are none too happy about this. I hope that's a bug. Could be a bug. We will see.

The other thing that I wanted to kind of just note in all of this is it may not all be bad news. There could actually be a little potentially good news here. It seems that there will be a way for users to bless their own kernels on these new ARM Macs. Say what? Yes. So while yes, there is a secure boot-like environment on these ARM Macs and you have to have a signed kernel before it will boot. We've now found out that there will be a process where you can manually sign a kernel, and the developer of Pongo OS, one of the developers,

was getting pretty far on actually getting this to boot, and it may actually be possible, using the same approach, to bless a Linux kernel, and then potentially boot a second stage bootloader like this Pongo OS and then load Linux from that. Right, the Pongo OS bits there because you're in kind of a weird environment

that like say the Linux kernel wouldn't expect to be booted from so you need a little shim to get it going. This is interesting, right? This is kind of on the side of okay, maybe you do still own it. Yes, we are going to enforce that you do it in a secure way, but if you can add your own blessed signed systems and boot it, that's a step in the right direction.

So maybe it's not totally locked out there. Apple giveth and Apple taketh away. But this story, when I looked at this, I thought all of this combined together, I thought this is why I think there will be a portion of Apple users that are in the professional end that expect to be able to control their computer. The people who noticed these things, they're good candidates for Linux. They seriously are for the Linux workstation, like this laptop we're going to review today. They are the exact target demo for this Dell Precision.

Set them up on, you know, Fedora 33 with a nice shiny GNOME setup. All right, all right. That may be too much. I don't know. They may have to go Ubuntu. You know, they need a soft landing. But really, like seriously, it is, when you're talking about the differences between a Linux workstation and a Mac workstation, how do you quantify something like this? Because we'll often talk about telemetry or we'll talk about spying and privacy, but this is a multiple layer cake here where you've got the privacy implications of metadata tracking of

when and what developers you're using. You've got then the other aspect of this, of course, that Apple is able to turn applications off, which you may or may not be comfortable with. That's a decision you have to make. But then lastly, you have the network effect where because Apple is not particularly good so far at developing online services, they've designed this thing in a way

where when they release the new OS that day, it can cause all of the Macs, all of the Macs, not just the big Sur Macs, all of the Macs, not just the big Sur Macs, all of the Macs to slow down. That to me is a line that should not ever be crossed. And, you know, these things are never going to impact your Linux distro. Right. It's just not going to happen. There was a time maybe where an Amazon referral search would be conducted when you'd searched in the launcher, but this kind of stuff is just not going to happen on Linux box. The funny part that struck me, too, was all the very interesting and good investigative work

going on to figure out just what was sent and what was happening. That's all, you know, in the Linux world, that's open source. Just go point me at the GitHub. And you have to wonder, with this move to ARM... Apple Silicon, really, even, right? Yeah, right. Thank you. It's true. The M1 chip. The reality is that they really are closer and closer

to a world where nothing runs unless it's signed. Today, they allow you to bypass Gatekeeper. But why really go to the effort of having a ecosystem and a hardware and a software stack that you own top to bottom, and you are the sole kingmaker if you're not going to make that move? And if you look where Apple is going, where they're seeking revenue now is services. And these app stores, they count them as services for the reports to Wall Street. And it just seems very likely that now that you've got Macs that can run iOS apps and they're on their own custom silicon and they have this all the pieces in place like Gatekeeper,, the App Store, is probably only a few years from now where they flip that switch

and everything has to run through Gatekeeper. And there will be absolutely nothing you can do. Like, you can't run anything but Big Sur or Later on these M1 Macs. Just can't. So there's just, you have no option. And I think that also is going to make Linux more and more of a compelling platform

for high-end professionals, tech-savvy professionals. I'm not saying, you know, for everybody, but... It's just making it fall more and more of a compelling platform for high-end professionals, tech-savvy professionals. I'm not saying for everybody, but... It's just making it fall more and more, I think, into less and less, I should say, in the general purpose computing category, and more and more as a niche thing. Maybe you have it as your video editing utility. It's just a box in the corner that you need because it

has the best applications for that purpose, but it's not a general purpose computer. Yeah, I could see that. Sure, I mean, that's a pretty expensive non-general-purpose computer. When you're spending that kind of money, you'd like to be able to do everything. But, yeah, I mean, maybe what happens is if Apple goes crazy, maybe you can load Linux on those ARM Macs one day. Maybe it'll happen. Something tells me you're going to try.

Well, let's talk about this MacBook killer that I've had in house for a few weeks now. I really had to put it through its paces, but first I do have a little housekeeping. You should definitely join the Leplug. We have a virtual Linux users group that gets together every Sunday in our mumble room in the lobby. It's really easy to get started. You can go to linuxunplugged.com. We have the mumble info in there. Now, next Sunday is the Jellyfin Bugathon. The developers will be joining our lug. They were actually there earlier today, too, doing a presentation. And we're going to help them try to just stamp out any of the bugs we can find in the 10.7 release.

Jellyfin is an open-source Plex alternative. And we want to do anything we can here at the show to push that forward. And so the virtual lug has extended an invitation to the Jellyfin developers to join them next Sunday at noon Pacific, and you can get that converted at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar

and help them out. Hey, I'm excited, and I'm a big Jellyfin user myself, so the more bugs we find, the better for me. That's right, man. Also, I want to recommend you grab the Jupyter Broadcasting all-shows feed. You never know what could be coming up. And these days, all the shows are really great. Coder Radio's back.

Wes has joined me on Linux Action News. It's a nice, tight production. Self-hosted will be coming out later this week. And if you have the all-shows feed, you just get it all. So you can search in your podcast app or get it from the website. I think it's a good way. It's like the pro user move. Or the lazy user move, where you don't

want to bother checking and making sure you got all the ones in the right spots and in your feeds. That's a really good point. There's just one feed. It's the lazy and easy way, but also the pro way. See? Sometimes the easy way is the pro way. That's right. You want sustainable podcasting, Wes. All right, that's all the housekeeping for this week.

So let's talk about this Linux MacBook killer. It's a bold claim, Mr. Fisher. It really is. This is the Precision 5750. And this is a really pretty new beast from Dell. They've really stepped it up. They managed to get this thing 10% thinner. So if you've seen the old edition,

it's kind of got like some big fan gaps on the sides and whatnot. All that's gone with this one. And now, this is really something. I had to double check this, but now Dell can claim the world's smallest 17-inch mobile workstation. It is quite a thing to look at. Yeah. Really handsome, shiny, professional.

Yeah, it's that same metal and sort of carbon fiber-like mix that Dell uses on the XPS, but brought up to the professional precision line. And they've also done another pass at the edge-to-edge infinity display with just blow-in. This thing is, it's really something. The screen on this is, well, I mean, it's always tops, but it's a 16 by 10 aspect ratio. It has HDR 400 support. It's 3840 by 2400 resolution with touch support.

And it's edge-to-edge glass. I didn't even try the touch support. And the webcam's back up at the top now, which is pretty nice. So this Precision, as it's configured, is really meant for a workstation replacement. It's meant to stomp a MacBook. It has the Xeon mobile processors in it that run at a base clock of 2.4 gigahertz, but can actually go all the way up to 5.3 gigahertz. Wow. Eight cores, 16 threads. Isn't that something? I'm not used to typing

N-proc and seeing 16 on my laptop. 32 gigs of RAM in this particular one, although I think you can go even further. This one has a Quadro RTX 3000 with six gigs of video RAM. I'll tell you more about that in a little bit. It has an M.2 1 terabyte PCIe NVMe. Wow, it doesn't have a spinning rust down drive? Come on.

Sorry. I think you can actually put up to 2 terabytes of PCIe storage in it, but this is 1 terabyte. 6L, 97 watt-hour lithium-ion battery,

so the maximum you could take this thing on a plane with. And then Dell does this, and I really like it, is they've done a really beefy USB-C charger. 130 watts? What? Yeah. So you can really dump power into this thing. Or just use any standard USB-C charger in any of the ports on the thing. It's really nice. So that I really appreciated because when you needed to throw power into it, they had such

130 watt, but when I wasn't doing much with it, I could just use like the 65 one. Just plug in whatever you have around. Yeah, like I have a 65 watt that was pretty easy to use. This one also features a much larger trackpad. I mean, look at the trackpad compared to our ThinkPad trackpads. I mean, it's... Puny.

Yeah, this trackpad is MacBook style. It's massive. And it's got a very nice... It's the best touchpad I've ever used on a Linux laptop. Easily. Which might not still be saying much, but... It's pretty good. I really have zero complaints. The other thing that's nice

about this laptop is you can load it up with ECC memory, if you like. Wow. If your workload calls for that. Oh, and I was wrong. You can get up to four terabytes of PCIe storage, and you can get it in RAID 1 or 0 options, too. I did not do that. This also, they've worked on this to reduce the amount of blue light

that the panel blasts in your face to reduce eye strain. This has an updated keyboard with a slightly longer travel distance. I'll be curious for your take on that particular detail. Yeah, I actually don't really find the keyboard much different. It's not offensive. I find myself not to be a very good keyboard critic. I definitely appreciate a nice keyboard, and the better the keyboard, the more I appreciate it.

But I can go on anything between the butterfly keyboard, like that, I can't use that. Right, that's the upper limit there. Right, and then like a really nice custom mechanical keyboard. But I liked it. I found that when I did start to use it, it took my brain about a minute to really adjust to the layout, and then I had it. It was really no big deal. And then there's something that is really special about this laptop.

This laptop has what has got to be maybe the future of where Dell is going on thermal management. Get ready for this. So Dell wanted a solution where you could really run this thing, GPU and CPU going. Right, and otherwise,

why are you filling it with so much beefy hardware? Totally doable in a desktop tower. Yes. Not very doable in a laptop. In a thin laptop. Yeah, in a really thin laptop. So they've done some secret sauce work. It's patented, so it's not that secret, but they've done some secret sauce work on the fans. So they have these really kind of big, special, fatty fans in there. But then they also have something called dual opposite outlet,

where they have a pressurized air chamber and fans to really move the air in this thing so this thing manages with a combo of fan upgrades the dual airflow and the pressurization they do in there to move a ton of air without a lot of noise um in fact i'll say without really any audible noise even under some really significant loads. Wow. They also have done, in the little controller, a machine learning dynamic tuning technology that actually comes from Intel, but Dell's the first to actually ship with this. And it's a code-based solution

that automatically adjusts the performance based on application load, what parts of the system the applications are hitting. And it also can anticipate based on your previous performance when you start a CPU load and it might in the past, maybe it's going to attempt to avoid ramping up cooling because it's going to see, it's going to try to wait as long as possible before it ramps cooling.

But now with this adaptive workload system, if it knows when you run this particular workload that the CPU runs for a long time. Always training another model. Yeah, it just ramps right up the cooling and it just gets right on it. But here's where they bring it all together and this is ridiculous.

Dell has built in a series of vapor chambers which are thinner than heat pipes and they can spread the heat out better and more efficiently. And they allow for larger heat rejection paths, which is great for like your skin temperature stuff. And it really moves the heat. And so they have the, they have this thing, the vapor chamber stuff bolted onto both the CPU and the GPU. And so you can crank this. I mean, I'm throwing benchmark after benchmark at this thing for like a solid day.

crank this i mean i'm throwing benchmark after benchmark at this thing for like a solid day and it's just sitting there quietly chugging right along um and then i i hope this i hope this makes it into other models in the future they have a graphite layer between the hot components and the outside of the laptop so that way your hands and your wrist and stuff like burning my legs no wow yeah and so they disperse the heat strategically throughout the system to prevent So that way your hands and your wrists and stuff. I'm not like burning my legs? No. Wow. Yeah. And so they disperse the heat strategically throughout the system to prevent hotspots from affecting the user's comfort level. Yeah, I'm sold. Isn't that something?

So let's be real here. As configured. Yeah, what is this going to send me back? This is a $4,800 review unit. 4,800 review unit. 4,800 U.S. greenbacks. Okay. But, I mean, you got to think about really who is this laptop for, right?

That's the question here. Is this is for a professional? This is not my watching YouTube on the couch laptop. This is I've been using Macs for years. I don't like where they're going, and I want something that replaces my MacBook. This is somebody who has a very GPU-intensive workload. Perhaps they're messing with TensorFlow. Like, this is a particular type. There are several types, but these are particular types of users. I'd also say also people who like to treat themselves to the very best, because the reason why I waited so long to do this review

is I really wanted to see if there was downsides to this laptop because I just immediately fell in love with it. And I knew I needed to, like, catch my breath, balance it out, figure it out, you know, use it for a while. And so I took an extended review with this one, to the grace of Dell, thank you very much. And I walked away realizing that even if you're not in like this particular

professional category, if you like a quiet laptop, a fast laptop, a beautiful laptop, a laptop preloaded with Linux, and you just kind of like the very best. Right. You've got money to spare, not an object, and you just want the best. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because, you know, it's got Thunderbolt, so you can hook it up to a dock. You can have a bunch of monitors. This graphics card had no problem powering external screens and internal screens. There is something to be aware of, though,

and I think this is maybe the biggest caveat. I knew it couldn't all be perfect. The but in this sentence, yeah. It currently requires and only fully works with Ubuntu 18.04. We haven't seen this for a while. So I called up Dell, and I was like, what's going on? Why can I only use 18.04? I tried Fedora, I tried Pop! OS, I tried 2010, I tried 20.04.

Right, that's kind of the standard thing, right? Anytime there's an XPS in here, really any laptop running Linux, it's throw all the distros at it. See what it does. Because, you know, I figure a lot of people in our audience, they're going to run whatever they want to run. They're going to reload it. So the thing is, is the thing has some super fancy sound and that SoundMax card required a lot of custom work and they are targeting support for 2004 in

January, but don't yet have it. And the way this process works is Dell is working with Canonical. And then when there's an update for hardware support, those updates ship to the Dell laptop through a Canonical repository. So it's part of just the system update process. There is an OEM repo at Canonical that contains the software. And this is how this partnership works, is Dell engages with Canonical to do this custom work for them. So it's not like Dell's doing this weird hacky work

and then just dropping a big blob file on the file system and saying have go at it. They are contracting with Canonical, who are experts on the operating system, and building this out. So they presently are targeting January for Ubuntu 20.04 support. But you're not going to be able to put Manjaro or Fedora or whatever else you might want on here. At least if you want to have sound. And have sound. Yeah. You can use it.

It'll work great. Performance is excellent. I have, you know, that wireless RF headset that I have that has a USB dongle. That's what I used for the majority of my usage time anyways, and that works just fine. So I ended up, for the most part, not running 18.04 until towards the end of the review where I put it back on there. When you first set up the machine, Dell asks you if you want to create recovery media.

And so I said yes, flashed that. And so I knew at some point I might want to go back. And I did, and it was simple, and it was straightforward. One of the things that is pretty well known about Dell but worth reminding you is they have that service tag system. is pretty well known about Dell, but worth reminding you, is they have that service tag system. And the nice thing about that is you just go into the website, you put the service tag in, and you can re-download the recovery media as well. Right, they've got all the stuff for your specific model and documentation. But this thing's about the performance. So let's talk about benchmarks a little bit.

I'll put some links in the show notes, but I decided to take this Dell Precision laptop, and I decided to put it up against a Ryzen workstation. I decided to put it up against my own workstation, and I decided to put it up against the MacBook Pro 16. I like this competition. Yeah, it was a really interesting fight because these are all nice computers in their own right. I mean, my workstation's from like 2017, 2018, so, you know, a little old,

but the Dell is a modern Precision 5750, so I expected it to stack up pretty well, but I wasn't sure about going up against desktops like a Ryzen. The Dell came out on top in almost all the tests, as you would expect, right, because it can ramp up to 5 gigahertz, 32 gigs of very fast RAM. Brand new machine. Yeah, yeah. The Ryzen workstation pulled ahead a few times, but I decided let's put it up against

the MacBook Pro 16 because I felt like that was an interesting comparison. And this is pretty telling. I ran a Geekbench benchmark on the Mac and then I ran Geekbench benchmark on the Dell because this is a very common Mac benchmark. And the MacBook Pro comes in with a multi-core score of 7,392. The Dell laptop comes in with a multi-core score of 7,738. So several, so a few hundred at least, a few hundred higher on the score for multi-core and also faster on single core counts and faster on GPU benchmarks. Not too surprising there, but when I expect out the MacBook Pro, that MacBook Pro was almost $6,000. Ouch.

Yeah, and of course it doesn't run Linux, so there's that too. So I felt like when you look at it from in that range, the Dell stacks up pretty well price and... And we've seen other laptops that are, you know, should be quite fast but don't have the best thermal management or other issues where, you know, a MacBook just has those things solved. Yeah, there's that.

The Dell thermals, they're in a class of their own. I decided to also throw the old ThinkPad. ThinkPad comes in with a 3500 score. Ouch. Yeah. Yeah. It really, so the other thing that, going through all these benchmarks that this test really underscored for me ThinkPad comes in with a 3500 score. Ouch. Yeah, yeah. So the other thing that going through all these benchmarks that this test really underscored for me is there is still a pretty clear advantage that a desktop workstation has in some areas over a laptop, even a totally decked out laptop like this Precision. But you can't take the desktop tower with you. What am I carrying the whole tower?

That's awkward. So when you look at those compromises and you look at what Dell tried to do here, they tried to come up with a mobile workstation where you can max out the GPU and CPU and still get reasonable battery life and get reasonable cooling and you don't have the thermal throttling effect

where you run the machine for a bit and then it just starts really eating on the throttling. That's what they set out to solve with this and they realized that the machine for a bit, and then it just starts really eating on the throttling. That's what they set out to solve with this, and they realized that the audience for that were Linux users. So while I dislike that it's limited to 18.04, it's not really a deal-breaker, I think, for most people in this class. Right, especially if you're a professional and want to use a supported long-term release anyway. Yeah, and you've got to remember that this also is, because it's a Dell, it's an option that's

available to a lot of people from a corporate standpoint. And they're not going to be choosing their operating system anyway. Right. The other thing I didn't, they only had really two dislikes with this. And my second dislike was that it seemed like sometimes the screen auto-dimming logic was hunting for just the right light settings. And this seemed to persist across all the distributions I tried. And it was really only when I was in a situation where there was a bright light source behind me

and my body was blocking the photo sensor, then the system would sit there and try to hunt for the right brightness to kind of a distracting degree. But if you don't sit like I was in front of a light. Don't do what Chris does. It wasn't so bad. But, you know, in conclusion, this is a work tool. And it is probably one of the nicest tools you could own if this is the type of system that you need for work.

I mean, there's no doubt about it in my mind. If I was rolling with it these days, I'd probably pick that up for myself. This would probably be my machine because it played the games I wanted to play at high resolution. It did the workloads I wanted to throw at it. It never complained from a temperature standpoint. And I'm okay with the sound workaround for something that's this high of quality. Plays nice with your eGPU? Yeah.

Yes, it does. Would I like the sound to work? Obviously. But if I was really rolling in it and money was no object for myself, I would get this personally. Clearly, if I was in this work field, this seems like an obvious choice, too. And I think that is a bigger and bigger market. The people that need a laptop like this that run Linux for TensorFlow and other types of work, we decided also just do a little machine learning testing, not just because, you know, that's clearly one of the things that's... One of the target areas, yeah. And it's killer. It's just absolutely killer. And you've got to think about it from this standpoint. It's preloaded with Linux and ready to go.

I think this is a bigger and bigger market, and it seems like Dell thinks this is a bigger and bigger market. And so they've built this Linux MacBook killer. And it's a moniker that has become cliche. It's one I've used myself in the past. But I really, truly think this thing is a game changer for corporate Linux or for professional developers or high-end game developers who want to move over to the Linux platform and they want something they can buy from a name brand that they know or maybe their corporation

already has an account with. And this thing is just, it's such a winner for those people. You can really see how the platform they started building with the XPS has evolved and just, it's such a winner for those people. You can really see how the platform they started building with the XPS has evolved and just, it's shiny now. It's really impressive and it makes me happy that someone other than Apple is playing in this space and making computers that

can be this good. That's it. We now have something that is just top, top tier. And I hope to see a lot of the awesome tech with the cooling system come down to the XPS line. That would be super nice

because that's a little more approachable for me. I also, I don't need a Quadro. Right? So I'd like to have something that's

You do some gaming but nothing crazy. Right. So I'd like to have something maybe a little more in a different tier but I could absolutely

understand the people that do want it. And my time with the Dell was, it was tricky because I didn't really know what the approach was for a review for a computer this powerful. Like I have out in the other room,

I have $150 laptop. I know how to review $150 laptop. I can tell you if the value proposition is there really easily. I just don't know how it works with Linux yet. But with this, when you're talking something that's $47, $4800, how do I come on the air and tell you it's worth your money? I can't tell you that, right? Because everybody has a different sense of value. But what I can tell you is this is one of the nicer computers I've ever used, and it runs Linux out of the box. And when I walk away from it, I'd say, they it runs Linux out of the box. And when I walk away from it, I say,

they've hit it out of the park. And that's why I wanted to come, and that's why I wanted to relate to you, is what they've done that's kind of unique and kind of interesting, and just the success that we're now seeing with these laptops. I'm really impressed, and I wish I could keep it.

You know? But I will now box it up and send it back to Dell, and then the review will begin on the $150 laptop. So long, you beautiful beast. It was fun while it lasted, and it was a great excuse to load up Steam and try a few video games. Now I'm back to my old system. All right, Mr. Payne, moving on from the review,

what do we have in the feedback section? Anything this week? No? No feedback this week. Well, there is some. We just haven't selected it and put it in the show. That's probably what it is. Well, then let's plug the feedback so we can get some. So we'll do a little more feedback the next episode.

Go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact and fill that form out and send us in your thoughts. Yeah, we love your feedback. You know, not all of it can make it to the air. There just isn't time. But we still love hearing from you and all the stories, the adventures, the projects in Linux, that stuff's great. I might have a special request.

Wouldn't it be great just to get somebody's crazy setup? Do you have a crazy setup that's as crazy as this laptop or crazier? What weird stuff are you doing? Yeah. First of all, tell us what you're running. Give us an idea of your specs. And then tell us why you need that. Because I'd like to get an idea of all, tell us, yeah. So first of all, tell us what you're running. Like, give us an idea of your specs and then tell us why you need that. Because I'd like to get an idea of what some of those workloads are.

And then on the opposite end of the spectrum, if you're running on something ridiculously low end and you're making it work, I'd like to hear that too. That's always, like, I like both ends of the spectrum. So give us that at linuxunplugged.com contact. And we may just cover it in a future episode. Also, thank you to our Unplugged Core contributors. You can go to unpluggedcore.com to sign up.

You keep the Unplugged program independent, and you help reduce the ad load needed to make the show profitable, let us be a little more picky with who we work with. But you also get some perks. First perk is the limited ad feed, which cuts down as many of the ads as possible and just gives you the same great show, same production. And the second feed is the full show,

live stream, all our screw-ups, like one that just happened a moment ago. All the stuff that we don't make it and we don't put in the show, that's in the live feed version. And you get either one when you become a Core contributor at unpluggedcore.com. Yes, Wes.

Yes, it's time for the picks. Finally. I decided since we didn't have feedback this week, we should have two picks. Look at you. First one comes in from a listener of the show, and it's called Yacht. Yacht is a graphical interface for managing your containers with a focus on templates and one-click deployments and also a dark mode. I like that. It is early. It is a community member who is making this,

but it's pretty neat and you could try it out right now. I mean, so far you got your basic container management, you got a template framework, you have an easy approach to updating those templates and centralized settings for volume management similar to QOL functionality. Which is neat. You know, I like it. I got it running right here on the laptop, and it's already giving me a splendid little dashboard of all the containers I'm running. Now, I don't have any templates or anything, but I can see why you'd want that.

Yeah, that's pretty nice. And, I mean, can you beat a name like Yacht? Just the nautical theme. It fits all right in. Mm-hmm. So the other pick we have is the reason why, another reason why we did two is because you heard of this one, but they have a nice new update we wanted to make you aware of.

A brand new version of Lutris is out. Zero five dot eight. Now this, the Lutris gaming platform has been working on importing your steam library and your GOG library and third party libraries into one store, one UI, one place to manage them all. One-stop shop. And they've made some nice strides recently.

And now Steam games are loaded directly from the Steam API. You don't have to go manually sync, do all that weird stuff you had to do on the website. It just brings it all in. Game banners and icons are downloaded from the services themselves. It's getting really slick. Even bonus content for GOG games like manuals and soundtracks can now

be downloaded and stored inside Lutris. So if you haven't checked out Lutris in a while, go do it. It's a pretty great little app. And if you've been doing some gamings... Gaming on Linux just gets better and better. It sure does, Wes. It sure does. Let's give it a honorable mention. There we go. Let's give it an honorable mention.

There we go. Get the valve bong in there. Now, we'll be back at our regular live time next Tuesday over at jblive.tv, which is nice because doing it on Sunday thing is getting a little old. Right? Yeah. What happened to Tuesdays? What a day that is.

Linux Tuesday. I know. And doing it on Sundays is a lot because we're also working on Linux Action News. It's a lot. So back to Tuesdays for us it is. You can join us, though. Yeah, we'd love to have you join us over at jblive.tv. We do the show at noon Pacific. We actually tend to kind of go in about a half hour before that.

All of that's converted in your local time zone at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. Links to everything we talked about today at linuxunplugged.com slash 380. The show is at linuxunplugged on the Twitter. He's at Wes Payne. I'm at Chris Lass. I don't know. Anything else we should mention? Lots of good shows over at Jupiter Broadcasting.

Check them out. Go check them out. jupiterbroadcasting.com. Thanks for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program. And we'll be right back here, not on a Sunday, but we'll be back here next Tuesday! All right, well, you were comparing that laptop against other laptops, but would you rather have that or, for a very similar price, a 2006 Pontiac Vibe? Probably the Vibe, to be honest with you. Yeah, when you start getting to those prices, you really are getting to used car prices.

Yeah. Over the weekend, Carl and I were kind of commiserating about a sense of a bit of virtual conference burnout. I kind of implied it there with how they all feel like Zoom meetings. Where are you at on it, Carl? Yeah, I definitely appreciate it. I mean, it's better than nothing. Right. Right. If Corona has shown us anything, we got to take what we can get. But at the same time, I mean, it just cannot emulate the feel of a real conference and, you know, getting to hang out with friends that live far away, you know, go out for drinks, go out for good food. It's just, it's not the same, you know, at times it just feels like you're sitting there just watching YouTube and some of them are even live streaming on YouTube.

Yeah. That's just it. It's a lot of good information. I'm valuable, you know, valuable time from the speakers and I really appreciate that, that's just it. It's a lot of good information. I'm valuable, you know, valuable time from the speakers. And I really appreciate that. But you're right, it doesn't doesn't hit that human connection. I know a lot of cons are trying to mix things up and have, you know, separate rooms for hallway tracks or other methods and chatting in a live stream can be fun. But yeah, and some of these are very well attended. Some of them are very poorly attended. And then it kind of looks like a big waste of everyone's time and then additionally on top of that and I just I'm not ungrateful I am very grateful that all of these are happening even and that the information is being relayed but as a culture we just haven't gotten really good yet about knowing how to have good audio quality and where to position our

cameras and there's still a lot culturally we're learning and so you really kind of get the worst of it when you're watching these virtual events they tend to have a lot of audio issues they tend to have a lot of camera problems there's a lot of dead air right there's not necessarily someone you know being an mc keeping everything flowing right that's some yeah it can make a big difference there's sometimes people are accidentally muted all the stuff you get in like your worst work conferences happen at these events too. And so it's almost like someone needs to develop a platform that allows somebody to MC it and mute and unmute people and kind of be the person keeping the stream going and then making sure that when like it's Wes Payne's time to talk, I can mute and unmute Wes. Like that's how we do it here, right?

I don't rely on the individual host to unmute themselves. I mean, they can, but you know, the host can do it. And then you don't have this weird thing. Like I played that clip of Greg's introduction, which was slightly awkward, but his was actually like one of the best case scenarios. This went smooth compared to almost everybody else. And his audio quality was better than almost everybody else. One of the big benefits is that it's really opened up the availability for a lot of people that either can't afford to travel themselves or their work won't pay for it. It allows going to conferences all over the world. You know, I missed, I tried to attend some of the Linux app summit, I think.

But a lot of it was on European time. So I missed all the morning ones. I got to go back and watch those on YouTube. But it's just really opened up the availability, which is a plus. So it's a mixed bag. Yeah, the timing was tricky on that one. That's why I wanted to grab some of the clips from it. But I also feel like there has been a gain. And so you got to wonder if there isn't some sort of maybe middle ground here, Carl. I don't know really what it would be because the in-person track and the going out and eating and the seeing people stuff matters. So you don't want to have something that's

only virtual, but could there be some kind of virtual hybrid conference where part of it's online, part of it's physical? Would that be worth doing? I don't know. I mean, that's an interesting idea. I think it'd be really hard to pull off. I mean, everyone that's having to do remote stuff more than they used to now can probably appreciate that there's a golden rule for virtual meetings is that if one person's remote, everyone's remote. Because whenever you have some people in person, you have sidebar conversations going on and it's really just not as a lot worse communication. So I fear the same thing happening with a mixed conference. It'd be interesting to try and see, see if there's ways we can mitigate that because I mean, even if all it is is just that you have the live in-person conference

eventually, and then, you know, it's just standard that you have to provide a live stream of it. Maybe that'll be the compromise. Maybe. I can certainly recall going to conferences and staying in my hotel room and watching the live stream.

Sometimes it's the better way to go. And then still go out for drinks or whatever afterwards. Right, you still get that. You're still there. You know, you just went at the conference.