LINUX Unplugged - 382: A New Endeavour

Episode Date: December 2, 2020

A problem that just kept getting worse and worse. What it was, and why it led us to "check in" on EndeavourOS. Plus some important community news, handy picks, feedback, and more!

and then everybody Hey! Hey there Joe Hey! Anybody want to say hi to Joe? This is your chance Hi Joe! Hi Joe! Huh, I noticed Popey couldn't be bothered That's interesting

Sorry, I was busy talking to Neil on Telegram I was wondering if you could have been to that It's showtime, guys. Well, hello, friends, and welcome in to episode 382 of your Weekly Linux Talk Show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Wes, prepare yourself because this episode is brought to you by the all-new Cloud Guru,

the leader in learning for Cloud Linux and other modern tech skills. Hundreds of courses, thousands of hands-on labs get certified. My name is Wes. laid bare in front of all of you for your own judgments later in this show. And then we thought it'd be a decent time to check in on the plucky little distro Endeavor OS, which you'll probably remember, came up out of the ashes of Intergros, which was a Arch-based distro that really kind of aimed at getting pretty close to upstream Arch. In Endeavor OS, when it launched, we took a first look at it, and we said, this is interesting, but it needs some work. We're going to come back at it. And now here we are towards the end of 2020.

They've had a couple of releases, and it's kind of an opportunity to do a state of the distro. So we'll give you an update and a couple of things that I found really surprising, and then sort of led to a whole series of revelations. But we've also got a bunch of community news to get into, something we're launching that we want to tell you about. So before we do any of that, I got to say hello to the virtual lug, time-appropriate greetings, Bumble Room.

Hello, Chris. Happy Linux Tuesday. Hey. Good evening, Chris. What a crew today. How about that, Wes? How about that, huh? You know, they are mighty and powerful in there, in the virtual lug.

If you want to join our mumble room and get your voice on the show, we have all the info on our website at linuxunplugged.com. What you do is when you're in there, you just tag me in the IRC, mum, Chris Lass, with a little description of what you want to say, and then I'll generally work you into the show, and I'll call on you live, and you can have your thoughts on whatever we're talking about. I don't always call. Sometimes we're like moving on, and I won't call on you, but that's basically how it works. So you can get information about how to set up Mumble, which is an open source VoIP app at our website, LinuxUnplugged.com. Let's start with our announcement first, because

we have kind of some disappointing community news, but I want to start with the good. There's been a lot this year, Wes. There's been a lot, Wes. I've seen it all. And we thought we could do something kind of fun. We were inspired by some friends of ours and other podcasts out there, and we're going to announce right here on the show.

Get ready for this. Ladies and gentlemen, I am proud. I am excited. I am stoked to announce that Linux Unplugged is launching the 2020 Tuxes. That's right. A special segment right here on the show. And you can help nominate your favorite projects. We use that term loosely and other tech for 2020 Tuxes. And we will, at the end of the year, we will announce the winners of the Tuxes. And they will be sent a 3D printed Tuxy award with what they won on there. And it will also serve as a fantastic resource for you to get an idea of what projects and distros are really resonating with the community this year.

It might give you an idea of something you could check out. And I think it's just going to be a great way for us to get an idea of what you all love and what we love, and then to send them a little thank you at the end of the year, saying thanks for making that thing that we love so much, and our audience voted you the best. A nice way to reflect on the year. And I mean, we've covered so many great things on the show, plus a bunch of stuff that didn't make it in. I've already forgotten about half of it. I'm sure you've forgotten even more, so we really need some help making a good list. Yeah, and I want it to be something kind of special,

so the distros, they can receive, or whatever it is, a project, you'll see all the categories, and I want to expand those too. This is just the first year, but I think we could do this every year, and I'd like to expand it and get your input on what other categories we could include. So it's just a form. You go fill it out with some questions about favorite this, best that, worst evens in there, I think, on something, and then we'll collect all the results. We'll submit it to the committee, and then we'll announce the winners on the show. We do get some vote power in that mix, but we're also going to include, we're going to submit it ourselves. So we need to get as much input as we can, because I'd like this to be reflective of the audience.

So we're going to run this for a little while. The link will be in the show notes for the 2020 unplugged Tuxies. And of course, it also gave me an excuse to include a super duper mega retro Jupiter broadcasting beat. If you get this deep cut, then you've been listening for a really long time. And this is the official Tuxes theme music. I'll see how long it takes until somebody can figure out where that's from. Now, let's talk about the community news. We'll do the Tuxes soon, but please do go get your submissions in. But we need to start with what appears to be some super bad news for Zah Reason,

the Linux PC manufacturer that sold desktops and laptops. It appears they've shut down entirely. They say, as many of you have noticed, our product line is getting smaller and our tech support has been slowing down to a crawl. Unfortunately, the pandemic has been the final KO blow or knockout blow. That's what they write. And it's hit our little town hard, and we have not been able to recover from it. As of Tuesday, November 24th, 2020, Zahreason is no longer in business. If you have a computer from us, we hope that it gives you a long and solid lifespan.

If it does not, and you would like warranty work done, we regret there are no employees who can answer those questions or do service repair. Employees usually want to be paid, and without sales, there's no income to pay them. Yeah, that is really unfortunate. And they have in tiny text at the bottom, let me zoom in and enhance here, they say, note that when a business dies, its warranty dies with it.

We know this part is hard to accept. It is sad, disappointing, and unsurprising that Zahreason is shutting down. This is them saying this. There are many, many reasons, but sickness and part shortages are the top two. At this point, there is no other option. We wish you the best, and we hope you and your computers are healthy,

and we hope you and your computers are healthy and thriving. Colonel, you have some experience with Zahrezen? Yeah, so I haven't actually owned any of their machines, but there's a convention that I have met them at personally, and they were really good, just down-to-earth people, even invited me to come by, hang out with them at their shop if I was ever in the area. They were fantastic, wonderful people, and I'm sad to see that they're having to shut down.

I have to say, I hadn't considered that the PC parts makers could be having supply shortages. It has slammed the RV industry surprisingly hard because when you have different areas that are responsible for manufacturing certain parts and there's been various different lockdowns implemented, you've had various kind of ebbs and flows to the production. And so the people downstream from that are kind of left in the lurch. And I hadn't really considered that that could very easily be affecting PC manufacturers. And it honestly makes me wonder about if it's affected our friends at System76, because they're just hitting their 15th birthday. And they've, you know, they've really grown. But at the same time, they could be vulnerable to some of these same supply chain issues.

And perhaps Zah Reason is just not nearly as well positioned as System76. But I don't know. I just, I worry. Yeah, it's a wake up call, I think. Yeah, it is. It's something you hadn't really, it would be really kind of, it'd be really sad to see this spread. You know, there's other, there's other manufacturers out there we wouldn't want to see go. I think from a competitive positioning, perhaps Zahreason wasn't necessarily the most competitive of the bunch, though. But we haven't seen this happen for a while. We haven't seen a Linux hardware vendor shut down recently. We've seen a lot launch, but I suppose it was inevitable.

And also just a little bit sad since they've been gone since, I think, 2007. Yeah. Jill, you had some thoughts on Xar Reason. Yeah, I was so sad to hear this. There were actually personal friends of ours at the Linux Chicks of Los Angeles. They were stalwarts at the Southern California Linux Expo. They had a booth every year for a lot of years. And I got to know their family very well. And they even donated equipment to the Linux Chicks of Los Angeles. And I have one of my favorite, they make a wonderful stuffed

penguin, Tex Penguin. It's so cute. Well, that's a great story. Yeah. But I'm just very sad because a lot of the Linux Chicks have their computers. And this is just very disappointing. And their computers are still running great. I have a very old dual core laptop of theirs and it runs beautifully still. Hopefully it will for a while. Yeah. Neil, you have some thoughts on it too. Yeah. I mean, when I found out, I was incredibly sad and disappointed. And the reason I found out, actually, was the saddest of all.

I was trying to buy a Linux laptop. Oh, yeah. And I went onto their site and found out that they shut down. And it was just, it was a blow to me. I haven't directly purchased a Zaris laptop from them in years. Like, I mostly got it through friends who bought one for me or some other circumstances, but they were nice computers and the team was friendly and really, they really cared about making a good Linux experience, um, and making it useful,

like regardless of Linux distribution. I think that was the, that was the thing I valued the most. Um, yeah, but the, the other part of this part of this, just about Linux laptop vendors in general, moving a little bit away from Zahrezen, the Linux laptop vendors in general do not have a whole lot of marketing power. Unless you knew someone who knew someone who had one from one of these vendors, I don't think you would know if they existed. I think System76 is an aberration in this regard, and Tuxedo Computers in Germany is a similar aberration.

But most Linux laptop vendors or Linux desktop vendors, many of them exist, but many of them aren't known. And I think they basically operated on like what you call family business margins and budgets. And something like this pandemic, which induced all kinds of interesting supply shortages, people shortages, all that sort of thing. They don't have the powder on hand, the cash to weather that. And this is what happens. And so if we wanted to have more Linux laptop or desktop vendors, you know, survive, really the way to do that is to help promote them and bring them out, you know, from the shadows of being just, you know, these little

shops that help people to being known to the greater community so that they can be supported in the same way we did with System76 when they came out with the Splash with their brand and their first laptops, you know, all those years ago. Yeah, I myself wasn't a customer, but it does remind me that it is important that we buy locally, essentially, that we buy, It does remind me that it is important that we buy locally, essentially, that we buy – when we can, buy from a place that is selling it as a Linux product. If that's System76 or maybe it's Dell or Lenovo now, you buy it in that ecosystem to keep it strong because when you buy a machine preloaded with Windows – and we all have to do it from time to time, I suppose. I'm not shaming anyone. But it is essentially – it's a vote for the Windows marketplace. It furthers, and that's the tricky thing here,

is it makes me think we've got to remember that. And there's a lot of hype right now about Apple's M1 and how exciting it would be to get Linux on there. But I think ultimately, when you look at what serves us as a community long term, it's buying locally from these vendors. Well, and it's a little more tricky these days, too, with, you know, great Linux support coming from companies like Lenovo and Dell. And I think you just got to make sure it's on your list of, you know, when you're assessing a new laptop, Chris, you've been going through this. There's a lot of different tradeoffs.

And I think that item of, is this a business that needs my business? And would that help the community? Well, it should at least be somewhere on your list, even if it's not the only factor. Yeah, there's a lot of things to consider. I don't think it can be the sole factor. I don't think you should buy just for that reason solely alone. But it definitely has influenced my shopping. I am not going to buy anything that comes preloaded with Windows for this very reason.

But let's talk about these M1 Macs, because there is a lot of interest. Like it or not, I think you can make a really solid argument that the effort that we're about to talk about would be better spent on pursuing open platforms. And I think a lot of us feel that way. But I don't think that takes away from concurrent tasks of making it possible. There's some value in making it possible to run Linux on the M1 Apple machines. And it seems that Hector Martin has launched a Patreon. I invited him on the show,

but it was such short timing, I don't think it was going to work out. But he's launched a Patreon that he's pausing billing on until it reaches $4,000 a month that will, in theory, be a commitment that he can use to essentially pay for his time to convert or, I guess, port or whatever you want to call it, make it possible to boot and run Linux on these M1 Macs, which I guess

he has some experience in this area. What's your read on this, Wes? Long shot? Well, I think it'll just be tough. What will be tricky, I think, is deciding what's the right level. I think there's a lot of interest. Seemingly already they've crossed that threshold in donations where it looks like it will get funded at least of the 4,000, although the goal itself, they're not all complete. But getting it to a really solid experience that you don't have to be so heavily motivated by Linux

to make it worthwhile, especially with so many changes in the M1, things like the new Apple Silicon GPU involved, it's just going to be a long march. You're right. There's some history here. He was hacking on Linux on the PS4, for instance. Clearly a talented individual.

It's just going to be a long time. I think even if it goes as well as possible, you know, even if it gets workable, I guess we check back in in two, three years. And by that time, well, how will Linux be doing on the M5? It seems to me the only shot this thing really has is if Apple supplies some kind of, at least if not code,

documentation of how the disk controller works or how to interface with the necessary components of those disk controllers and whatnot. Because getting Linux to boot on the M1, while valuable, is not nearly as valuable as actually being able to install and run it on the physical disk and use all of those components.

But unlike getting around just a bootloader, which apparently Apple does have provisions to allow users to unlock the bootloader and install whatever OS they want. They've apparently built that into these M1 Macs. But it's not just that, right? It's the drivers for everything in this thing because it's all custom to Apple.

It may be from some vendors upstream and once we figure out who that is, we can take large swaths of another driver and make it work. But it's not like getting Linux running on an Intel Mac where the T2 or the bootloader is your biggest challenge, but then it's Intel motherboard components and it's Intel wireless and it's Bluetooth that you know how to work

with and it's an audio interface that you know how to work with. These are all going to be different on an M1 Mac. And so the scale of the problem is massive. And then, of course, Apple won't be sitting still, especially at this stage in the M1's lifespan. So they very quickly are going to be iterating on this platform and will leave these M1s in the dust, surely by within two years. Yeah, I think the question there will be, you know, how much does the platform change and how much does the basic low-level sort of communications channels that are needed stay the same? And how much, you know, is it an iteration or do we see a continued revolution

on their new totally custom platform, which they have a lot more leeway to change. And like Lin Mob says in the IRC room, just imagine how difficult it's going to be to get the GPU working. Well, so there's some good discussion in the Twitter thread. Someone asked, you know,

do you think it's going to be feasible to put an OpenStack on Apple's GPU? And Hector's response is, time will tell, but I don't think it's impossible. NVIDIA GPUs aren't exactly simple, and yet Nuvo exists. And yeah, that's definitely true, but I think that that is the right context to look at this. You might get something that's usable. You might eventually get a Linux desktop that displays you a desktop and you can use to browse the web, but it won't be all the things you're excited about from can use to browse the web, but it won't

be all the things you're excited about from the Apple side of the platform, at least anytime soon. And that's where I get to imagine this amount of effort and this skill level being poured into OpenPowerPC or RISC-V. It just seems like so much more benefit from that, right? It just, it just seems like so much more benefit from that, right? It just ultimately, while yes, it would be great, I feel like what needs to happen is a shift in perception. And maybe Apple will prove me wrong, and I actually would love it if they did,

but I think we need to shift our perception of these. They're not necessarily computers. They're inclusive products. They're a holistic device, like your Nintendo Switch. Yeah, you can get Linux on there, but that's definitely not what it's meant for. It's not a general computing device that's meant for you to load Windows or your own Linux or FreeBSD or whatever the hell you want. And we have to stop thinking of it that way because that's just not what the intention is. It's designed to be the best Mac possible, which is what those customers want.

And I don't think it's ever going to be anything else. If Apple comes out with open source drivers, or, I mean, starts working upstream to make it possible, I will be the first to cover it, probably quite literally, and I will be the first to congratulate them and retract the statement, but I just don't think it's ever going to happen.

I guess time will tell. I mean, you can't stop hardware hackers from hacking on things, trying to make it work, and it is exciting to see what possible gains might be out there. But as ever, it is a question of resources, and I won't be planning to buy M1 hardware for Linux, at least anytime soon. It has happened.

It's gotten up and running on the Switch. They've got it working on the PlayStation before. It absolutely happens, and somebody will find a use for it. So there's that as well. So maybe in a year or so, I'll be sitting here talking about how I'm thinking about buying an ARM-based Mac so that way I can run Arch on it. Maybe it turns into a little, you know,

little headless box you use for your iOS builds there, Chris. Actually, you know what? Thinking about it quite literally how I would use it is I would use it as a way to bring life into older MacBooks. So even if the support lagged behind, if, you know, you could take a MacBook that maybe Apple had abandoned and was no longer shipping macOS for, but you could get Linux confidently running on it, I think that would be a victory. That would be a success. If that's the goalpost,

ultimately, then I'm 100% for it. I might even consider backing it. I want to, you know what, the more, the more we talk about this, the more I think I want to talk to Hector and kind of get his take on it and where he thinks it's going, because that could be something I get behind. I could talk myself into that. That could be something I get behind. I could talk myself into that. Linode.com slash unplugged. Get a $100 60-day credit on your new Linode account.

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And what something is up in their S3 compatible object storage, it's really easy to get a URL and share that file if you want, or maybe even use something like that to power a static website. We use Linode's powerful virtual servers to run our infrastructure, our matrix server, our encoding server, our new NextCloud server. All of it's on Linode. My personal servers are on Linode. Linode started in 2003 as one of the first companies to even get into what is now known as cloud computing, three years before AWS. Go check it out, see what

I've been raving about, and support one of our sponsors who's made our transition to independence possible, linode.com slash unplugged. Thanks to Linode for sponsoring this show, and thanks to everyone who supports our sponsors out there. Linode.com slash unplugged. Okay, prepare yourself because we're going to get geeky about ZFS because some major milestones have just been reached. And I want to try to understand it all. Obviously, we're ZFS users here, but also as things change, and it's nice to stay up to date and keep current.

So it's now called OpenZFS 2.0, and I wanted to play a little bit of Matt Aaron's, giving us a brief state of the union on ZFS. And then what I'm going to basically do is try to talk Wes into explaining all the good new stuff to us. Now I'd like to talk a little bit about the overview of the state of the project.

So last year, I talked quite a bit about what's going to be coming in OpenZFS 2.0. And the big thing is that we've now combined the source code for OpenZFS on both Linux and FreeBSD. And last year, I talked about how this is going along really well. It's going to come out in 2020. It is still going to come out in 2020. So this project is very far along.

We've released three release candidates so far. It's on 2.0 RC3 right now. It just came out last week. 2.0 RC3 right now, just came out last week. And the final release is still on track to come out before the end of the year, possibly even before the end of the month. Please don't quote me on that, but that's what we're aiming for. And here are some of the new features that you'll see in the next release of OpenZFS.

So this basically is superseding the ZOL releases. So this is stuff that's new since ZOL 0.8. And this is a continuation of that codebase, but now with support for FreeBSD as well. And most of these, a lot of these we've given talks at previous conferences about. So things like, you know, all this performance work, redacted send and receive. In fact, we will link you to some of those talks. But in addition to the unified code base for now Linux and FreeBSD, it's no longer ZFS on Linux. It's just open ZFS now, right, Wes? Yeah, isn't that neat? I mean, from something that felt like a weird stepchild of the whole ZFS family to now be in the place that, you know, a lot of the development effort is actually happening.

And it's also just a great example of a wonderful open source project that manages to work with, like, pretty much full parity across two very different operating system kernels, but both of them being open source software. That's amazing. Yeah, it is. And now they say they're targeting macOS as well.

So they may have macOS support in OpenZFS 3.0. They've kind of talked up some of the features. The one that kind of stands out to me, and I don't fully grasp why you would need it, but it's L2 ARC support. So the level two ARC in ZFS is like this cache, right, that is sort of the most frequently used stuff that ZFS keeps in there? Well, it's the second layer. You've got the ARC, the Adaptive Replacement Cache, and that's for the first, you know, the nice smart cache to handle stuff that you don't really need to go fetch off disk again. Just keep that hot and fresh in RAM, and ZFS does a great job of managing that.

But if you just, you know, RAM's too expensive, you only have a certain amount, you want more cache for stuff that's not quite as well used, but in the next layer of used, you can have a faster amount, you want more cache for stuff that's not quite as well used, but in the next layer of used, you can have a faster disk, say, right? You've got like a big pool of old-fashioned spinning rust, then you've got like a nice shiny NVMe that you can use as a cache for after RAM. That's the L2 arc. Well, this new feature is known as the persistent L2 arc, and this just basically saves you time. Let's say, you know, you had to reboot your system, you did some updates, or you just something happened, there's a fault, there's kernel panic, whatever. Most of the time, with the existing implementation of the L2 arc, well, you have to go rebuild that cache. So you won't get the advantages of having

a good cache until you've actually done gone through, you've had your service up and running stuff actually looking at stuff from the disk, trying to pull it. But if your workload doesn't change, that's just wasted time rebuilding basically the same or a similar version of the cache. With persistent L2 arc, that's just going to get loaded back up and you can skip that time. Ah, that's handy. There's a couple of things in here that make it seem like just using ZFS overall is going to be quicker

amongst just general performance fixes. There's also a new compression standard, Z-Standard. Z-Standard. It's a modern high performance general compression algorithm, which should give better compression levels, really similar to the GZIP, but with much better performance. And it's also got a big selection of different compression levels. So depending on what your data is, what your trade-offs that you want to make, you can choose and configure that. I think it's also neat

because it's just a cool open source project that was invented at Facebook back in like 2016. Then the Linux kernel got it and it's been an available compression option over in Butterfest for a while now. And then FreeBSD got it originally to compress core dumps, thanks to our friend Alan Jude, who also made a proof of concept over there for using it for ZFS, that's finally now been integrated. How neat is that?

Welcome to BSD Unplugged, your weekly BSD talk show that's too busy getting actual work done to care about your silly display server. My name is Alan. Love you, Alan. Yeah, that's great. That is really cool to see that get in there. Tons of stuff. Like, we could do a show that'd be way too long about all of the stuff that's in 2.0. So we will link to some of the details. And of course, as always,

Michael Arbol over there crushing it with the deets. He's got an article that summarizes some of it as well. And it's cool to see this stuff landing. I do wonder if we're really going to see any movement on what distros adopted or not. I doubt it. But if you have means of accessing it, it's going to be a nice little upgrade. Get yourself prepared for another round of DKMS Rebuild. Exactly.

Something we should probably do kind of soon, too. Maybe next episode we should do an Arch Server update. Uh-oh. But we need to look into the future with GNOME. And there's a major feature announcement for GNOME 40. Remember, that's what they're going to next is version 40. And Mutter is moving, that's the back-end display compositor, is moving input work to its own dedicated thread,

a separate, get ready for this, Wes, a separate CPU thread for the input. This long in-development effort led by Red Hat aimed at restructuring Mutter. I mean, it's just good, right? You don't want the input work handled on the same thread if you don't have to. And now the input work will be able to be moved over to a separate CPU thread. And it's finally at a state where it was merged into Git. I think it's been

developed, it's been played with, but I mean, this is a fairly big architectural change, right? The merge request had been open for the past three months, but was merged on Friday. This is massive. This input should, the input thread should allow for avoiding possible cursor jumpiness and situations where your pointer kind of lurches across the screen.

It should deal with high frequency input devices a lot better. It should make sure that no lib input events are missed. Not to mention, it's just a superior way to architect a workstation desktop. And recently on the show, I've talked about how much I've really been enjoying GNOME desktop. You really have a little GNOME renaissance over there. It was like I came back home for the holidays and my room was still there and it was like, oh, I love this. I love this. And it was great. And I got the green bean casserole just the way I like it when I came down for breakfast. It was just like being home again. The thing is, like being at home, it eventually

all comes crashing back down. And you remember why you moved out as early as possible and why you only go back for the holidays. Wes, you saw a little bit of it because, was it Sunday? You showed up, and I was stuck upstairs in my office for like an extra 15 minutes before I could come down and say hi to you at the studio because I was just dealing with my computer being slow and input lagging because I was editing, God forbid, a two and a half hour video file. And I was cutting audio from it for the shows. And I was extracting audio segments. And having a large file and working with an application that is trying to display a very large waveform and move about. And then to have some other applications in the

background that are transcoding maybe wave files to flack i mean this is you know it's a this is a system that i've built that has 12 overall addressable threads and i have a dedicated rate zero 14 terabyte scratch array that i use for any files that I'm working on editing. My OS is on a dedicated MVME disk. That's where my root is. And then my home partition is on a dedicated fancy fast Intel two and a half SATA disk. And I have every, I have it all split out like that. Plus I have 32 gigs of RAM.

So, I mean, it's not like I'm doing, and I'm just cutting audio from a video file. It's opened up in an audio editor, but the whole interface, just when I'm doing a task that for me is a really standard occurrence, the UI becomes unresponsive. Like right clicking on say like an icon has a delay. And when you're moving windows around they get kind of leggy and they kind of stutter around a little bit. And when you're trying to move really quick

and it's something that maybe you do every day and so you're really fast at this task and when you're really fast at something and you're waiting for your computer, like even if you have like this experience at work, if you have something you do for work kind of repeatedly and you really can just blast through it faster than anybody you know. And then you're waiting for your computer at each stage for every time you alt tab and every time you click on a menu and every time you try to bring up files and when you drag and drop and

it just becomes so aggravating. And you think to yourself, what more can I do? I've got a modern high-end AMD GPU. I've split up my disk workloads as much as possible. I've got tons of RAM. I'm only using six gigs of it. I've got 12 addressable CPU cores. It's a desktop plugged into Ethernet.

cores. It's a desktop plugged into Ethernet. Like, what more can I do to let my computer work, so I can work, so my computer lets me work as fast and as effective as possible? Why are you so slow? And so, you know, I came downstairs, and I'm like, I just don't know what I'm going to do,

Wes. It's just like, it's really aggravating because I do this kind of all the time, and I was having to talk about it because I've really been enjoying GNOME Shell, but I find this very annoying. And I was having to talk about it because I've really been enjoying Gnome Shell, but I find this very annoying. So I was asking you, what would you do? What should I do? What distro should I do?

And that's kind of how we got to Endeavor OS, but we'll save that for the analysis. But I ultimately, I decided to go back to the Plasma desktop because I just don't experience this particular kind of frustration. There are other paper cuts, but not that paper cut. Right, you know, you win some, you lose some, but especially for you who are on a high-end machine

with real workflow needs, it's sort of like the existing state of GNOME. Not all of it was necessarily built for the way that you're trying to operate. And I kind of enjoy, with my monitor setup, I enjoy the window rules where things always open up in the same spot when I launch them. I like that consistency for my kind of setup. Yes.

So that was nice. It was like, honestly, to complete the metaphor, it was like after you're done visiting family and you get back to your own place. And you're like, oh yeah, I way more prefer this. It doesn't look as good, I didn't decorate as nicely, but all my things are here and I know what food is in the fridge. Yeah, exactly. That's so much what the experience was like.

And I thought it would feel like a big compromise, but I was like, oh no, this is actually home. And so I have so much respect for what both desktop teams are doing, because there's things I just love about all of them. But to see this kind of move for GNOME 40, where they're going to start to break this stuff off, that's huge, because that may end up ultimately being the best of both worlds for me, and no one had to get assimilated. So big things look like they're in the works for GNOME 40. They've also officially announced GNOME Circle, which is kind

of a way to include, I guess, more people in the GNOME Clubhouse. You don't necessarily, say in the past, if you wanted to be part of the GNOME project, your projects needed to be hosted on GNOME infrastructure, and you had to follow their rules. But GNOME Circle aims to sort of change that. Yeah, now, to become members, projects must simply be open source software and use the GNOME platform. Both applications and development libraries can apply, and projects don't need to be hosted on GNOME infrastructure, nor do they need to follow GNOME's release schedule. Now, what do you get? Well, you'll be eligible for a range of benefits,

including promotion, GNOME Foundation membership, and that gives access to things like travel and marketing funding, services including an at-gnome.org email address, blog hosting, video conferencing, and, hey, a GNOME Next Cloud account. So you actually get to be part of the family, but you don't have to play by all of the rules. Yeah, that might mean we get to see a bunch of cool desktop applications and whatnot start showing up that are maybe a little more independent,

but sort of follow that desktop ethos, so they'll look really good as a part of your desktop. I think that could be a really lovely development. Just a little bit of cleaning. Just a little bit here and there, every now and then. It's always worth mentioning you should join the Luplug. Our virtual lug has a whole other event outside the show on Sundays. And they do that at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern in the lobby.

We have our mumble info on our website. And it's kind of it's perfect because if we ever have a backup time where we need to record the show, that's when we do it because we know there's people in there. And so there's other reasons. It's kind of fun. You know, it's a great place to hang out and chat with people, but can also maybe every now and then catch a live show. And I'll also give a mention to the All Shows feed. If you're subscribed to that, you'll know that Linux Action News has recently been revamped with Mr. Wes Payne joining the team, and I'm really loving where we're going with it. And if you're only listening to this show,

you're only getting half the story. There is a whole other set of stories that we cover in Linux Action News, and that's the stuff that kind of dents the open source universe every week. Particularly great if you want to be or are in the industry and you want to stay current on stuff that has wider ramifications too, Linux Action News has got you covered. So check that out if you're not already, linuxactionnews.com. And that, my friends, is all the tidying we need to do today. So it's time for an Endeavor OS check, and it's something I promised when they first announced and we took a look at it, and I sort of judged it as

need some time to cook, but we should come back to it. And that was a little bit ago, and here we are. They have a new release in the works right now. They just put one out in September. And then, of course, because it's based on Arch, you can get up to date in between pretty quickly. So Endeavor OS has found itself a comfortable niche in the distro world because God knows there's plenty of Linux distros out there.

And you really kind of have to wonder what makes different distros stand out from each other, especially when you have Manjaro, which is clearly filling a big need for people who want a productized Arch. Right, there's already Arch with an installer in several different forms. So what do we get in here?

Yeah, and a big community too, right? So I think, and it was evident when they launched, but I think as time has gone on, they have refined their position in the market with a maybe more clever pitch. They very much are not focusing or even pushing a desktop or even branding. They say on their website,

Endeavor OS is mainly a terminal-centric distro with some GUI tools out of the box, like our Welcome app, Reflector Auto, and a kernel tool to make jump-starting easier. And with these tools and the power of the terminal, we offer you the opportunity to give you full control from the start in creating a system that suits your idea in computing.

They even kind of list no branding as a feature. So wrap your head around that, because that's got to be, as a distro, that's got to be a hard choice. You're going to remove your wallpaper, you're going to remove your branding if the user chooses. Well, then how are they going to remember? How are they going to know?

But they offer that. And if you use their online installer, you get a choice of desktop environment. But they really seem to be refining their pitch as close to Arch as possible. They say on their website, and I love this, with the exception of our in-house developed Reflector Auto, the welcome screen and a kernel manager, and the update notifier, all of the packages are installed directly from the Arch repos or from the AUR. They are not customized or modified. They're not coming from our own repo. We want to stay as close to Arch as possible.

And so that's, I think, where they're trying to position themselves is a Kickstarter to get into just a long-term Arch setup for the desktop. Does that appeal to you? You know, it kind of does. At least, you know, I don't know if it's necessarily what I would choose to use to set up my next Arch system, which, by the way, I do think my next system

will be an Arch system again. But I'm glad this exists, because if I'm going to be working on a system, but I'm glad this exists because if I'm going to be working on a system, if I'm going to advise other folks to do this, I just don't know that many folks who've been down the road of setting up an Arch system, who've gone through all the install, who've done that, and who really just like doing it all the time. I kind of do. For me, that's like a rite of passage. It's a way you sort of get familiar. It's almost like you're paying the upfront cost to really understand and feel connected to your system

that I really like about running Arch. But I also get that for many, you just want the, you know, the easy maintenance, the simplicity, and the great access to packages. And for that use case, this seems perfect. And they never have to install it again if you don't screw it up. You know, that's super appealing to me.

Some of my longest installs have turned out to be Arch boxes. And I know this, people listening, they're, oh, Arch, they're talking about Arch. You can roll your eyes. I kind of, I think you should try to put that aside, if I could be so direct. And consider that there's obviously something that's appealing to a certain market. Because on top of everything that Wes just touched on, I have to be honest with you, I think just because I've been around for a long time,

I don't think this would impact new users to the desktop. But I find it a big relief to not think about if I'm installing a Flatpak, a Snap, a Deb, or an RPM. It's such a relief just to say, yay, that's the helper I use, yay-s slack or telegram. And I'm not doing the overhead of, well, do I want a flat pack of this?

If it's a snap and it's confined, am I going to have some issues because I do attachments with this app? It's just a binary. It's going to be as fast as possible because there's no structure around it. It's just a binary on my computer, and it's going to be as fast as possible because there is there's no there's no like structure around it it's just a binary on my computer and it's going to get updated

really quickly sometimes as soon as the git repo has been updated and I'll only have to run one command to ever do that ever like what I was doing on pop which I got down pretty well I was I would have to do

apt updates and then I would have to do flat pack updates and then I would you know and I'd have to do both of them and then I would have to do flat pack updates, and then I would, you know, and I'd have to do both of them. And I just got down, and Snap just takes care of itself. But I just, as a longtime user, I guess I haven't really liked that overhead that I take when I, even on Fedora, it's like I'm always kind of wondering, what's the downside of having my video player as a flat pack? Is there a downside to that? Does that mean there's going to be any difference in where it can

get to on the file system or access to what video decoding it can do? Like I just have to do that math and it's exhausting. And I don't have that with an Arch-based distro. And so what Endeavor OS has done here is they've said, hey, we get that you want Arch, but you also don't have a lot of time. You don't want to be worried about who's maintaining these packages, what the delay is. You just want, if it's in Arch, you want it. But you don't want to bother

with the whole setup process. It's an interesting kind of middle of the road too, because it's not, it's clearly not aimed necessarily at, you know, like brand new users, folks who aren't prepared for Arch. It's terminal centric distro, right? But at the same time,

they have a lot of nice little utilities in their welcome utility that sort of get you going, explain some stuff, helps you out with helpful tools, helps some guides to like, well, here's how you start installing stuff from the AUR.

So it's an interesting sweet spot of, yeah, you want to use this computer, but we're still going to cut you some slack. We've got some docs. We've got a wiki. We've got a forum. We've got all the usual structure. So if you do need some help, well, there's folks around and there's some docs for that too.

They have applied their customization at just the right points. So a live session starts with their welcome app. starts with their welcome app. It's an XFCE-based desktop, which in general, any GTK desktop is just a mess about where it puts the windows across my three screens. But this one was particularly hilarious.

Like it would just be random what screens different dialog boxes would pop on and what orientation they would be in. But once I got everything centralized on one screen, I noticed that they have a tool right there, the Reflector Auto tool.

Reflector is a tool in Arch that goes out and helps you find the fastest mirrors and update your mirror list. Well, they just have like a one button click to do that. They ask you a couple of questions and then it gives you a super fresh, fast set of mirrors. And that's really nice because that's something I do when I'm setting up an Archbox already. Then they have an update this app button so that way you know you have the latest version of the welcome app and presumably the installer. And then I like that they have an offline mode and an online mode to install.

Offline mode just gives you like their XFCE desktop environment with the packages that are released on that ISO. And it's a good looking. It is, you know, actually, that's what that's what I went. I figured that's what I'd try. And I stuck with it because it's a it's a sharp XFCE. It is. Enough that it took me a few minutes of having to go poke around to figure out,

oh, yeah, this is XFCE the first time I booted it up. That is legitimately the benchmark when you know they've got XFCE right is when you can't tell at first because it just looks like a modern desktop. And that's slick. And you can really see the appeal to that. Or, so that's the offline mode. Or if you use, and that's nice to have, I should say, I'm all over the place because I'm very excited about this. But offline mode, super nice to have, really appreciate that that's an option. And they kind of have a little bit more experimental online method, which lets you select a desktop environment at the time of install and pulls down the latest versions of everything from the Arch

repo. And again, that's where having that reflector tool comes in handy, because that means as you install, it's going to be the fastest package installation transfers as possible. And I think these features and even the process are just clearly more appealing to experienced Linux users who've probably been through this rigmarole before. They understand that like using a fastest mirror,

for example, means your system will install faster. Like that could be as an example of the type of user that understands that difference is kind of the type of user

this is targeted at. And I think Endeavor OS is nailing that. It's for people who like to mess with computers. It's for people who like to mess with computers. And you know who you are. And it's not better. It's not like the superior distro. It's just another option. It's a set of features that are appealing to my uses of Linux, like I mentioned with everything Wes and I talked about, plus these options right at install, the ones you're done are just kind of

out of your way. But having these choices of a custom partitioner that is actually surprisingly customizable, it recognized my LVM RAID, and even recognized the disk that is the output of that and all of it and let me manage all of it in a way that is possible in most distros, but some distros don't even

make it, don't even make that approachable. And it's not like because Endeavor OS has all of these things, Ubuntu or Fedora are bad. It's, they're just different. It's a matter of personal preference. But I think I'm the kind of user that prefers to have access to these kind of more power user style features at the beginning of install. And I went through there on my main workstation, which I originally wasn't going to install this on, but then I mentioned earlier and be able to visually see it and lock it in and reboot my box, and it just, it was all there.

It's a very basic, plain install, but it's all there. I mean, I think if you were going to set this up by hand in the regular Archway, I'm not sure you would have been done by the showtime. No, no, I did it this morning, not planned. I was just going to just keep on keeping, but I thought, you know, I was really enjoying it. So I was like, let's see if I can get this done this morning. And I chose Plasma as my desktop environment again, and it's going pretty smooth so far.

I really like it. There's something else I find kind of appealing about it, and I don't know if this is going to be a factor but I'm trying to be open-minded when I get my new laptop whenever that happens I want to put an OS on there that I'm really going to stick with for a while I want to put a distro on there and I know myself, I know that sometimes when I get kind of stressed out I can kind of start to distro hop as a way to

quote-unquote problem solve with immediate results, where maybe I'm struggling with something that takes a long time to resolve and it's frustrating. So I want something I can make a change to immediately and see some immediate benefit. And sometimes that's why I think I distro hop. So I have to be aware of all of these aspects. It's a complicated psychological thing for me, Wes. You know, it's hard to pick a distro these days. Well, it is. And you know, you're going to leave it running for a while, maybe not forever, at least with you, but it's going to stick around. You want to make the right choice,

and you don't want to regret that later when everything's broken and on fire. I got in my head too. I started thinking, if I say it was on air, and I ran Ubuntu all the time, and I talk about how I always run Ubuntu, or what I notice when I talk about how I use Pop! OS people think like oh he's so in the bag for Ubuntu or he's running Pop! OS because System76 paid him to do it or if I run Fedora

it's like oh he must be a big fan of Red Hat and I worry that like the distro I choose to run like sends a signal in a way just because of being on the show. And while Arch sort of sends a, like, oh, by the way, I use Arch, it doesn't signal any kind of corporate allegiance. It's sort of like neutral territory, much like Debian is. And so in a way, it kind of feels like that in the back of my mind is playing a role in the distro I may choose going forward

is just simply, I know Arch, I can make it work for me, I'm very happy with it, and it essentially means I'm neutral. You know, I don't have some sort of perceived bias because I use Pop! OS or because I'm running Fedora. We all know you're in the pocket of the Linux Foundation anyway. Yeah, I'm getting that big foundation money for sure. I don't know, maybe that's just, maybe I'm just up in my head about it, but it's been on my mind too as I go through this,

and I kind of like that I don't really, I know that over the years there's been drama with Arch here and there, but I can't really articulate anything at the moment. But mostly not, right? I mean, you don't, you just don't expect the next big thing, the next big tumult that we'll end up talking about here on the show. If you're running Arch, it probably won't be about your distro. It might be about some software you're running, but then you'll just be running the upstream stuff anyway. I do like them fresh packages. That's the, like, if I was going to go, if I was going to go Gnome desktop, Ubuntu and Fedora are much more appealing because you get that fresh

Gnome shell sauce right when it's pretty much as soon as possible. Like, Arch, it takes even longer to get in Arch than it does in Fedora or Ubuntu. You know, but, yeah, I looked at it and I thought, you know, it's very, it's a utilitarian move for me, much like Plasma is a very utilitarian

desktop for me, And I think the two things might work well together. And I think Endeavor OS could be the way I got there. And I kind of love it because Antigros was my solution in the past for some machines, but it felt like too much, where I do not get that sense with Endeavor OS. It really feels like it's pretty much there to help me get it rolling. And then they're out. And it's, peace out, have a good time, enjoy your Archbox. Yeah, it's not too much, and it felt like, with the little reflector helper,

it was kind of just enough of a GUI for me. Like, I can do it, I know how to edit this in the command file, but scrolling through to find just the countries I want, or, you know, whatever else, it's just really nice to have a quick GUI. I could click, it had already figured out that I just wanted, you know, servers in the United States had HTTPS already selected. Boom. I also, when I was in the forum and Frank was just reminding me, Frank, it sounds like one of

the founders of Endeavor OS has been having some medical problems recently. Yeah, Brian is really a very nice guy and he's been having a few medical issues, but I really think you should get him on. He is a wonderful person to talk to and is really focused on his community. And that forum that you were talking about, they are really helpful. That's a really nice thing to hear. I don't think I've had enough exposure yet to really make a call, but it's good to get that feedback. Yeah, we will try to track him down or Ryan, if you're listening, reach out to me on Telegram or Twitter. I'm Chris Lass or Chris at jupiterbroadcasting.com. I would love to chat.

And I hope he gets better. I saw that news, and it's really sad because it's such a great, solid distro. So my best goes out to him. So I really like it, Wes. Would it be stupid, nuts, ridiculous to put this on the new Studio hardware? Would it be crazy? I mean, Ubuntu has served us so well that the only reason I would want to replace it would just simply be for consistency. Ooh, now you're getting exciting.

I thought you were going to say reinstall it on our server in the garage. But okay, okay, we'll start with the Studio hardware. Well, no, the server is already Arch. It sure is. Okay, okay, we'll start with the studio hardware. Well, no, the server's already Arch. It sure is. You know, if we get Jack, maybe Pipewire going, I think it could work.

I think it could work well. Test box. Yeah, but we need a test box. We should probably run the test box for a little while, go through a couple update cycles and figure out, is this going to work for what we need? Yeah, I think we're going to stick with it. It's just we are getting to a point where we really have to, we were very generously sent some hardware,

so we have to run that through some validation testing, and we have some machines we have to replace. It's maintenance season in the studio. Very much so. Funny how that always seems to happen around the holidays. And I don't think we're going to put 1804 on there, which is what some of them have now. So where do we go next?

This is a serious perpetual problem I have, but I enjoy it, I think, at the same time. We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out. Maybe folks should write in and let us know, you know, if we should go down this dark road. Yeah, I'd actually be curious to know what their studio production experiences are. What are you doing

audio on out there? Listeners in the world, linuxunplugged.com slash contact. Oh, it's Black Friday season and a cloud guru has a Black Friday deal for you. We have a link in the show note. You know that the cloud is growing like crazy and so is the demand for skilled cloud professionals. 82% of hiring managers,

they say that cloud certifications make a candidate more attractive. Well, a cloud guru's annual Black Friday sale is your last chance for low prices this year. Get access to the most effective hands-on cloud learning. You can keep up with change and develop the skills you need with ACG. Developing cloud fluency can be hard,

but you can use ACG's platform to keep up to date. They make it easy by providing an engaging way to learn, retain, and stay competitive. The Black Friday sale only comes around once a year. It's the last chance to get the best prices. We'll have a link in the show notes for a Cloud Gurus Black Friday sale. Now, you went out and did some email spelunking, and we have a couple in the mail bag.

And I'll take the first one, Wes. Why don't you take the second one? Zach writes in. He says, while visiting the Linode site, I typed in linode.com slash Linux and I found a pleasant little Easter egg. Oh, that's why I couldn't get Linux. I see. I wanted to get linode.com slash Linux.

I was wondering. We have slash unplugged. He said, if you visit the site of this address, you'll get a smile for sure. Warmly, Zach. Oh, that's great. Well, thanks for letting me know, Zach. When they said of this address, you'll get a smile for sure. Warmly, Zach. Oh, that's great. Well, thanks for letting me know, Zach. When they said it was taken, I was like, oh, okay.

I just assumed some other podcast had gotten it, but I guess that's what it was. All right, Wes, fire. Well, we were just talking about Black Friday, and Mark wrote in with a little bit of confusion. No Black Friday deal for core contributor? I'm altruistic, but cheap as well. So I thought maybe you could just clarify

that for us, Chris. I thought I did do one. I thought, yeah. Well, there is a coupon code. It's Black Friday and it takes $2 off. Crazy Chris, it is blowing the prices out.

And if you want to be a core contributor and you haven't done it yet, it helps the show stay independent. It helps us be picky about advertisers. You get a limited ad feed. It helps us be picky about advertisers. You get a limited ad feed.

There is some ads in the feed, but limited. And you also get access to the totally live version that starts well before we hit record. Some of our best stuff, actually, is well before we hit record and well after we stop recording. You get the whole live stream as a possible RSS feed just packaged up and delivered as a podcast. If you would like to do that, use the coupon code BLACKFRIDAY just as one word when you become a Core contributor. And you can find that at unpluggedcore.com. Thank you for thinking of us. All right.

Well, moving on, I've got another question for you, Chris. This one from Harry. What are those RF earbuds that you're using? I've heard you make reference to the fact that you use RF earbuds instead of Bluetooth. What are you using?

And what are you using in conjunction for your microphone? Oh, man. Well, so I have some bad news is they're not earbuds. So that's the bad news. Maybe those are out there. If anybody has

any recommendations, do send those in. But what I have been using is more like over-the-ear headphones. And I was just searching my orders to try to get the exact model number of them. And I know I have them somewhere in the show notes. You may be able to find them on the website. But when I search my order on Amazon, they don't show up. They're like Corsair RF headphones that have a microphone built in that auto-mutes when you put the mic up and then it unmutes when you put it down, which is what I prefer. But the brilliant thing about it, and I've had some good success with Bluetooth, but the brilliant thing about the RF headphones is not only is it super reliable and rock solid, wireless, obviously, but there's a USB dongle

that is an always-on existing sound card, even if you have the headphones turned off. So you're not having this problem where the headphones come and go and so your sound device comes and goes because that's sometimes like, for example, maybe Chrome doesn't switch over when you first turn on your Bluetooth headphones

because you have to close and reopen Chrome before it'll start sending audio to the new audio device. Those kind of annoying little problems. I hate that so much. They don't come up because the USB dongle is always there. It's always acting as your sound card, so it's always your default output device. And then you just turn the headphones on or off when you want system audio, which is just how I prefer to work.

Oh, you found it. Thank you. Yeah, they are premium gaming headphones. I don't know about that, but they do work just fine with Linux, and they are great for gaming. I don't know about premium gaming headphones, I guess. They do have an RGB logo on the side that I don't think you can control from Linux. So a disclaimer. Ugh, of course.

Yeah. Well, that's good. I'm glad. I knew you had been using those, and I'm glad to hear that they're still working well. Yeah, I pretty much use them every weekend at least. I don't like to use them as much for video conferencing because they are so big. But, yeah. All right, so Bennett writes in about the Pro 1X smartphone. Hi, Chris and Wes.

I was wondering what your thoughts are for the Pro 1X smartphone from FX Technology and the XDA developers. I hadn't heard of the original Pro 1, and my jaw hit the floor when I saw a physical keyboard. And it ships with Ubuntu Touch and Lineage OS. And the specs, well, they're pretty good. I'm fairly active on XDA. I was fairly active. And the phone would be perfect mix between an old Android and my current love for Linux. They demolished their Indiegogo campaign, and it looks like it's going to ship in March.

I hope to hear your thoughts. Bennett, how did I not hear about this? Wes? This one was new to me, too. I know. Thank you for writing in, Bennett. Yeah, I'm really happy to check it out. I actually would be kind of down.

I have a very small phone now, which I'm really happy with, and I could see room in my heart for a bigger phone with a keyboard. It's that style where you slide it back and up, so the screen kind of pivots up, so it kind of is tilted right at you. And they say it's a purposely designed function for Android lineage or Ubuntu Touch. So that looks really good. And, of course, it has USB-C out, and they talk about connecting it to a larger screen. And they have some shots of it with the Ubuntu desktop,

a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard, and then it's connected over USB-C. Kind of a well one. Yeah, you know, this would be pretty nice even if it was just like a handy little remote terminal machine. Even if I didn't use it as a full-on replacement for my regular smartphone, just having this in my bag, in my back pocket, in the car, I'm interested.

Get this, Wes, that has a removable battery. I didn't think they still made those. They have three left at their Black Friday sale price, which is down from $829 to $599. Too rich for my blood, but I think it's a fair price for what this thing is. So they'll probably be sold out of that particular one by the time you're hearing this, unless you're listening live. I'm going to drop it in the IRC right now. So if you want to, oh, you already did. Look at you, Wes. We're hooking them up. But I'll put it in the, I'll put the direct link to the Indiegogo in the show notes if you want to, oh, you already did. Look at you, Wes. We're hooking them up. But I'll put it in the, I'll put the direct link

to the Indiegogo in the show notes if you do want to check it out because even, I mean, if you have the money to burn, even at full price, it looks like really nice.

And the fact that they're aiming for multi-OS compatibility out of the box and they have what looks like an actually pretty decent QWERTY keyboard, I'm down with that. I think that's a pretty solid recommendation.

So thanks for sending that in. Those are solid. All right, Wes, have yourself a taco because it is time for the picks. And I mentioned earlier I wasn't sure about having a video player as a flat pack. Well, I'm going to recommend a flat pack that's a video player. It's a really great MPV front end for the Plasma desktop. Yeah, yeah, of course, right? I'm always looking, Wes, for the best video player.

This is going to replace Dragon Player for me. And it's got to look native so that when you full screen it, you can easily forget about all those mismatched window borders, of course. You savage. Yeah, it is a cute QML video player built on top of libmpv. And it's available as a package, of course, but I have a link to the flat pack. And I think it's great. It reminds me a lot of Dragon Player, but it's current, it's maintained.

And I think mpv is the best video player for desktop Linux. I love me mpv. Soloid or whatever it was, was great on GTK. So this is great for Plasma. Now we do have a second pick. You want to cover that one? Yeah, this one's interesting. We've talked a lot about YouTube DL lately, but maybe you're not interested in moving pictures. You just want regular pictures. Well, enter Gallery DL, a command line program to download image galleries and collections from several, well, they say several, but turns out many image hosting sites. I like this. So it's like YouTube DL, but for galleries. The chat room says I didn't mention

the video player name. It's because I don't really know how it's pronounced. Haruna? Haruna, yeah. So Haruna is the video player, and then GalleryDL is the command line app that downloads image galleries and collections. It doesn't say exactly what right here in the release notes, but they do have a page on their GitHub, and it's just about every damn picture site I've ever seen. I could see this being really handy for backgrounds, getting wallpapers.

Yes, or maybe you don't want to be on a platform anymore. You just want to back up a bunch of your old work, for like backgrounds, getting wallpapers. Yes, or, you know, maybe you don't want to be on a platform anymore. You just want to back up a bunch of your old work, something like that. Because, you know, they've got things for Instagram. They've got things for all these popular sites like Flickr or various places you might post art on here. A lot of other sites as well. But, hey, that's the sign of a good tool. That's right. That's right.

That's right. If you'd like to give us a suggestion for an app that we should try out, maybe talk about in the show, Contact Page is a great place for that, too. You can just let us know over there, linuxunplugged.com slash contact, or hit me up on Twitter. I'm at ChrisLAS. He's at Wes Payne over there. Wes Payne, the host of Linux Action News. Yes, that Wes Payne. Yes. Yes. How did you know? Oh, you've heard of him Payne, the host of Linux Action News. Yes, that Wes Payne. Yes.

Yes. How did you know? Oh, you've heard of him. Yes, he's on Linux Action News. Hey, I think that's me. We'll be doing the next episode live on Tuesday at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. See you next week. Same bat time, same bat station.

And we'd love to have you hang out with us. Hang out in the chat room or just watch it live, or maybe go all the way and join us in the mumble room. We'd love to have you also. Thank you to everyone who just shares the show or supports our sponsors. We appreciate you. And of course, a big thank you to our core contributors for really helping keep the wheels on

this thing. We, we really have a great audience and as the holidays get closer and closer, and as we have now crossed the threshold of three solid months of being independent, I just really couldn't be more thankful. So thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of The Unplugged Program. And while it's a long haul until next Tuesday, we will indeed see you right back here next Tuesday. All right, let's name this thing jbtitles.com. Got to come up with a real good name, right?

That's the secret to podcast success. It's got to be it. I think with the new laptop, I'm going to kind of refresh the home setup. I'm going to try getting monitor mounts and a laptop mount that goes on the monitor mount so I can have screens and my laptop mounted. Yeah, I'm going to put some effort into kind of like a 2021 setup. So I want to try to get it all kind of going, and then I think I'm going to talk about it here on the show.

Talk about what I did and what didn't work for me. I think it's going to be a solid kind of at least start for the year. I don't know if I'll stick with the whole setup, but I'm kind of aiming for that. Sounds like we'll need to play some bets for how long it lasts. Oh, I don't know if I'd want to take any of that action, Wes.