LINUX Unplugged - 384: Born To Run Fedora

Episode Date: December 16, 2020

It's light as a feather, fast as hell, and everything is upstream. The ThinkPad X1 Carbon ships with Fedora, and this week we put it to the test. Plus community news, feedback, and a great pick.

Let's do an informal poll. Wes, when's the last time you updated your daily driver? My daily driver? Actually, this weekend. Okay. Pretty recent. Pretty recently. What about you, MiniMac?

When's the last time you updated your daily driver? Two days ago, I think. Okay. What about you, Carl? Yeah, probably about two days ago because Fedora tells me every time I go to shut it down that I have updates, so I just check the box and then do it. Right. What about you, Neil?

I did it this morning because, like Carl said, I was running out the computer. Wow. Okay. Is there anybody in the mumble room that's been like a month or longer? Anybody who's gone a while? Nobody? That can't be normal. Hey, if you want a sample size of one of somebody who's gone a month or longer,

when I had my office computer before it, you know, gave up the ghost after a series of rolling power outages that burned out my SSD, it would usually be about three to four weeks before I would get a chance to do updates. There you go. But at home, I do it enough times and the computer freezes up enough times that I wind up getting updates basically daily. Is that your Seuss workstation? But there's little time. ACG's Learning Paths help you take the right course to prepare for architect, developer security, and many more high-paying cloud jobs. Get hired, get certified, get learning at acloudguru.com. My name is Chris.

And my name is Wes. Hello, Wes. We got a great show today. Today I'm going to describe what I think is the perfect laptop for me, for Linux. I ordered a ThinkPad X1 Carbon with Fedora preloaded on it, and I am going to give you my experience with receiving my first ever Fedora preloaded machine, why I chose this laptop, what the results have been, how Fedora fared on there, what I would do differently, and a little bit about the performance and the experience and all of that.

But, you know, I've been looking at it, Wes. I've been thinking about it, as you know, since summer. I've been thinking in December, right before the end of the tax year. A little holiday present for yourself, maybe. Merry Christmas to me, right? So I thought, you know, I'd get myself something. And ultimately, it was a tough choice. Wes was above and beyond, had to listen to me just

go on and on about all my different laptop ideas and possibilities. There really were. I mean, there's a lot of good options right now, which is both a good thing, but doesn't make the choice easy. Yeah, especially when it's your own hard-earned money that, you know, you don't want to spend that on the wrong thing. So we'll tell you about that in a little bit. But before we get to that, we have some community news and all of that to get into. So let's say hello to that virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hola.

Hello, Chris. Hello. Howdy. Good evening. Hello. Hello. Somebody slipped the virtual lug a little caffeine before we got started, I think. Or somebody on the pre-show just got them all riled up.

I'm not sure which one. Before we get into the community news, I want to remind everyone you have just a little bit of time to cast your nomination for the 2020 Tuxes. Coming to an Unplugged podcast very soon. It is our best of 2020, voted by you and selected by our panel. And then we will be sending out little care packages to the projects that win your nominations. There is just a little bit of time left. Also would be then curious about feedback on what we could do to expand it next year. Because this is a minimum viable Tuxes.

Yeah, we're just trying this out, you know, getting started with it. I'm already excited by the submissions that we're seeing, though. Yeah, there's some good ones. I think we've had a couple hundred submissions so far last time I looked in there, which now means it's officially entered the territory where, like, we're going to have to come up with a way to programmatically sort and go through this data. Yeah, we've got some work ahead of us now. Look what we signed up for.

Yeah, yeah, right. But before we get to that, Wes, you know what time it is. Uh-oh, yeah, I know that sound. It has been a long time since we have done an Arch update, probably just about 40 days or so. Yeah, I think so. So we have committed,

when we deployed this Arch server in production, which you should never do, but we did it, and we committed to doing the updates live on air and owning, if it bites us in the butt, live. And we won't cut it out. We'll just do it. So are you ready to kick this off, Wes? I'm standing by at the keyboard now.

All right. What kind of update load are we looking at? Because it has been a while. Looks like we've got 192 packages, total download size of 715 megs. That's total install size of nearly 3 gigs, but a net upgrade of just 44 megs. Okay. Now, this server is even more important than ever because we have a much more hybrid cloud approach. We have a lot of stuff locally now.

I'm trying to think if this is going to take anything out. Is there a kernel update in there? Oh, yeah. Although we are on the LTS kernel still, so if there is... Here, let me give Pac-Man SYU a go here and see what we got. That's what my concern would be.

Especially if there is a kernel update, we should make sure there's a ZFS module in there. Oh, yes. Linux LTS 5.4.83-1 is what we're going to be running soon. Oh, not 5.10. Hmm, okay. Well, because we have that. Because, you know,'re going to be running soon. Oh, not 5.10. Hmm, okay. Well, because we have that. Because, you know, I mean, it's the brand new one.

Yeah, I know. I know. All right. Wes, you know what? Go ahead. Kick it off. We'll get the updates going, and we'll check back in. Ah, nothing like a live production server upgrade on air while you're recording a show

that helps support your back-end production infrastructure. But I think CentOS developers, or I should say admins and developers, kind of know how I feel right now. Here we are one week in after Red Hat announced that CentOS was shifting its focus to CentOS Stream, is shifting its focus to CentOS Stream, that the traditional CentOS releases would be wrapping up with CentOS 8 and that support would be ending at the end of December 2021. There has been a gamut of reaction to this.

I'm really proud of the analysis that Wes and I did in Linux Action News this week. So if you want a lot of the details of functionally what's changed, you can either catch last week's episode or get just the straight shot version in Linux Action News from this week. That's 167.

Thank you, sir. But now a week in, we've had a couple of, we have had a couple of contenders step up. Rocky Linux enjoyed being one of the number one projects on GitHub over the weekend. Rocky Linux is proclaimed to be going to be a CentOS alternative for the traditional release model. And Cloud Linux, while it seemed like they were initially talking with Rocky Linux, has now kind of stand out on its own with news that they were going to invest more than a million dollars a year into their CentOS clone. Whoa.

That's a big commitment. And they proclaimed that it would, I guess they have a name, it would be called Project Linux? Not like Linux the way we would spell it, but L-E-N-I-X. Yeah, that's an interesting name, but I guess Cloud Linux has been doing this for a while. They've made a business of taking RHEL and CentOS code and fine-tuning it into Cloud Linux OS. This is a customized, high-performance, lightweight Linux server for multi-tenancy web and server hosting companies, something they do themselves.

Project Linux will be a free, open-source, community-driven, one-to-one, binary-compatible fork of RHEL 8 and future versions. So I guess they'll be just sort of continuing what they do internally and opening that up. Yeah. They even claim you'll get the ability to port what they say is an entire fleet of CentOS servers with a single command.

No reinstallation or reboots required. Which, by the way, it's also straightforward to switch to stream. Just sort of the same thing. Yeah, sure is, right? Which command will you choose? Yeah. And I think that choice will say a lot. It seems like Cloud Linux is really stepping into play a little more than I kind of expected here,

but I don't know. I mean, is the difference, you know, if stream's not that big of a difference, is that enough of a motivation? I think that's yet to be determined. Listener Mike wrote into the show over the week. He said, I listened to the last episode discussing the end of CentOS as well. I know it and the upgrade path that's available to CentOS stream based on what those from Red Hat said on the show and what I read online. I decided I'd go ahead and try to upgrade my personal WireGuard Bastion VPS that I host on Lidnode, thanks guys, from CentOS 8.3 to CentOS Stream.

I thought, of course, a supported upgrade path on a mainstream distro couldn't possibly update the kernel without bringing along all of the appropriate KMOD packages for the packages that I have installed. Well, imagine my surprise then, when I realized that CentOS Stream didn't have the appropriate WireGuard KMOD package for the new CentOS Stream kernel after I upgraded. This is behavior I might expect from Archer Gen 2.

I haven't used Red Hat-derived distros in quite a while, and I'm just disappointed that a purportedly mainstream distro that just made such a huge change doesn't control for this. Maybe I'm missing something here on how YUM and DNF work, but I feel like if a user had functionality installed, like the WireGuard packages, then a simple DNF upgrade should block from completing if the transaction would result in those packages

no longer loading against the new kernel. I realize I could have forced the kernel back to the old version, and I did confirm that it worked when I loaded that kernel, but I was just so frustrated and annoyed that I blew the whole server away and I just decided to replace it with Arch. What? No way. That's actually what he says.

That is. Which, you know, we're going to see. We're about to do an upgrade. We'll see. We'll see if it pulls down the right modules. I mean, we're building the ZFS DKMS module right now. I mean, this is a tricky one. See, when Mike hit here is, you know,

it's like why you always want something baked into the kernel whenever possible and not have it be a module that gets built with like DKMS or something at install time. The thing I would wonder is if maybe that just hasn't been packaged for Stream yet. Carl, something like that possible where like a WireGuard module for the kernel just isn't packaged in Stream because Stream doesn't have a huge base right now of users? So to be clear, WireGuard isn't shipped by CentOS Linux or CentOS Stream. So these are all something third party that I honestly don't know exactly what the issue is.

If it is a DKMS thing, it could be a number of problems. In reality, we know that anyone building against the kernel headers, they're going to have some challenges ahead of them. And what's going to probably have to happen in a lot of cases is they're going to have to build packages that are for RHEL and clones and then packages for CentOS Stream separately. Right. And I bet WireGuard by December, by this time next year, I bet there will be WireGuard Stream packages that are pretty easy to get your hands on.

Yeah, they seem to be pretty good about that. Yeah, the WireGuard developer has actually already been in contact with CentOS Stream, working on ways to get all of his builds working correctly. So it is a known issue and we're working through it. Is there an opinion at Red Hat that if you're dependent on kernel ABI stability, that you should just, that is a use case for RHEL? I mean, if you ask the Red Hat business,

you know, something like that, of course, they're going to say buy RHEL. That's what they'd say. Yeah, there's this thing called the kernel ABI. The KB is what some people will say it as. And there's a lot of documentation out there about what that exactly is. But if you ever noticed that some kernel module that whenever you upgrade point releases on CentOS or RHEL, that a kernel module requires an update at the same time, that's what that is. That KABIs is usually stable within that point release, and then the

next point release will get a new KABI. So that's some of those things that you have to work through, some of those details that are getting exposed to people now. Right. Very good. Thank you for setting us straight on that. Sorry to hear that Mike had trouble. I mean, there will be, that's going to be what happens. It is still a change, even if it's mostly a small change, but especially for, I think, as we mentioned a little bit last week, you know, long-lived systems, systems that have some third-party modifications, customizations.

It might not be trivial. Hopefully, though, it's all very doable. One of the biggest third-party KMOD providers out there for Enterprise Linux is LREPO, and anyone that is frustrated by this, I would encourage you to get involved in that community. They are working with us right now, trying to make heads and tails of this and figure out what they need to do to provide a good

workable solution that's easy to consume for people. And this is a great time to get involved with them. Good to know. I thought I'd do a little follow-up on my Matrix usage because we talked a lot about Matrix on the show a couple of months ago. I have been slowly using it more and more. I think I kind of slowed my role when we got a lot of reports that people are having onboarding issues, just figuring out how to get onto our Matrix server and sign up through Element. That killed a little of your enthusiasm, eh? Yeah, and then Element itself,

while ultimately I think it's the most feature-rich matrix client, it has a bit of a wackadoo UI. It really does. I didn't really appreciate that until I started looking at other matrix clients besides Element because, like, you know, a web browser, right, you can have Firefox and Chrome and browse the web.

You can have multiple matrix clients. So I tried out Fractal, which is a GTK, simpler matrix client, and I think it supports lib handy too, so I think it'll rescale down to like mobile devices as well. Oh, here, see, it's written in Rust. That's why you ran it. I got it. I'm sorry, Wes.

It was written in what was that, Wes? What was that? Rust. That's right. You got to introduce it properly. We have a system. You're right. You're right.

This looks nice, though. Minimal, maybe, but clean. Very minimal. But it's much more like an IRC client, and it just is way easier for my brain to navigate. And it works great. It doesn't have all the features, but it works really well. And it's really easy to get up and going. There's a flat pack available and there's others, packages and whatnot.

And then the other one I think I looked at that I didn't like quite as much, Neko, N-H-E-K-O, Neheko. It tries to kind of have a Discord-like interface. They say the motivation behind the project is to provide a native desktop app for Matrix, which, yeah, I like that, that feels more like a mainstream chat app. So I think they're kind of going for a cross between, well, to me, it looks like Discord. Discord and Element. And I had trouble getting this one running, so I just stuck with Fractal.

But that has made it a little bit simpler. And then the other thing that has been kind of spurring more adoption on my part is the audience still seems to be finding our colony.jupyterbroadcasting.com matrix server. So we still have people that are joining it at a good trickle. But additionally, I am seeing more and more open source projects that are setting up matrix rooms. And I am really

delighted to see that because there was a time where we were trending towards Slack for a lot of this stuff. Oh, boy. Right? And so it's really, really great to see kind of like how people started just spinning up rooms on Freenode back in the day.

You're starting to see projects just spin up rooms on Matrix.org. And I went in and, you know, I've actually had more conversations with upstream developers in the last couple of weeks on Matrix than I've probably had in the last year. I think because I had gotten so used to talking to these people in person that I hadn't really invested time in tracking all of them down virtually. And then as they've now moved over to Matrix, and I've been moving over to Matrix, I've found them again. And it's like reconnecting with long friends and meeting new people. And it's been a nice experience on Matrix. So I just, I haven't fully switched over.

It's not my primary communications platform. If you message me there, I'm probably going to take a couple of days to respond to you if I do. But I like it more and more. And I have a lot of long-term hope for it as an open chat platform that really offers so much more than what any of the closed Slack and Teams could even begin to touch on. That's just it, right? There's a lot more potential. And I don't know, have you been checking in at all with This Week in Matrix? No.

Is that a podcast they have? Yeah. I mean, it's like a weekly thing that they do, update to the project. This last one was a demos week. Oh, it's like a blog? Yeah, a blog and then a video, like a meeting that they do, update to the project. This last one was a demos week. Oh, it's like a blog? Yeah, a blog and then a video, like a meeting that they do. So you can hang out, watch that, and then, or, you know, just follow up after the fact, like I end up usually doing and checking out all the cool stuff that they're working on. Like, hey, you know, I see you on Instagram

sometimes. Did you know there's a new bridge for that? Are you telling me you've been geeking out on Matrix and didn't tell me about it? Well, it's just trying to follow along, you know. I love the bridges stuff. I love that it's just trying to follow along, you know? I love the Bridges stuff. I love that it's all open. I love that they're developing a whole bunch of clients and a whole bunch of servers. Like, it just seems like there's a lot of investment, and even if it is still not the king of all chat clients,

at least in UX at the moment, it seems like the bones are really good. Huh, yeah. Boy, I'm digging this Weekend Matrix thing here. They have this most recent one has a little bit on here about home server deployments. Uno Host

is an operating system aimed for the simplest administration of a server that's been democratized for self-hosting. That's cool. There's some neat stuff in here.

Oh, yeah, look, they even integrate with the Element web bit, which we've been thinking about exploring, I think. Oh, yes, for an embedded chat. Hey, put a link to this in the old the Element web bit, which we've been thinking about exploring, I think. Oh, yes, for an embedded chat. Hey, put a link to this in the old show notes keys there,

would you, because... Already done. Aha, that's great. Oh, and they got Docker ARM images. Watch out. Watch out, Raspberry Pi. I figured you'd find that one. I'm going to have a matrix-powered Raspberry Pi server soon.

All right, Wes, crack your knuckles because you know what time it is. It is time for us to get back into the Arch update. How are we looking over there? We've finished our DKMS. The next question is should we move on to our AUR updates or would you like me to reboot first? I say let's skip the AUR updates. We can do those electively later.

Nothing too important in there. I want to know if these core updates are going to cause the system to A, not boot, and B, not get the file system mounted again. This is the thing that I worry about. This is where I start to worry. I've got to pull up a ping here. Yeah, you tell me when you're ready. I've got fingers over the button

now. Alright, do it. We'll do it. Here we go. This is going to take a while because it's not the fastest booter out there. I can't go on with the show. Oh my gosh, okay. Alright. What we'll do is we'll

I'll keep it up in a U8 tab and I'll just drop it down from time to time. Oh gosh, Wes. Really, this is ideal because now you don't have to ask me for an update. You've got it right there. What have I gotten myself into? What have I gotten myself into? I need to distract myself.

All right, we'll be back. We'll come back and look at it in a moment. You keep an eye on it, right? Yeah, of course. All right. Linode.com slash unplug. This will make me feel a little bit better. I love talking about Linode. They're unplugged. This will make me feel a little bit better. I love talking about Linode.

They're our cloud hosting provider. That's where we run things like our matrix server. We run it up on Linode. And the other thing that's really nice about Linode is if you go to Linode.com slash unplugged, you get a $100 60-day credit, and you support the show. But that $100 60-day credit is going to get you really far because the prices are great. I wanted to just go through the experience of setting up CentOS 8 and then converting it to stream.

And I suppose I could go through the hassles of installing software on my machine or, you know, virtualizing it, but it takes me 10 seconds to get it up and going on Linode. I tried it, and then I destroyed the machine. And I love using it for just quick little checks like that because you get great performance. You get an IP address, you can connect to it. And it's also just kind of rad to like have a system running up there that you then SSH into and you're like on the super powerful box from your remote machine and you're

trying out something. And then as soon as you're done, you just destroy it. It's just, it's a really cool sensation. But maybe you want to build a personal portfolio or a blog or host some holiday photos. Linode has like a $5 a month rig that would be great for that. Maybe you want to deploy infrastructure for your business or your community. They have systems that are more than capable of that. Dedicated CPU systems is what we use for our encoding. They have systems with GPUs that you can load up like crazy. They support all the different distributions you could possibly want to run in production. And they even give you access.

They don't prevent you from getting in there and just re-imaging the disk yourself. They got a guide on how to do that. They know how all of this works. They've been around since 2003, way before AWS. And I love saying that because I'm so damn proud of them.

Because I was, you know, that's how I got started in IT is I saw where Linux was going. I saw the problems it was solving. And I kind of just hitched my way into that. And I started replacing Windows NT boxes that were crushing with Linux boxes that would just come in and do way more work and could support way more users. And it was so great to watch that technology develop. That's where Linode was at back in 2003. Their founders came together and built something around Linux,

and now they're the largest independent cloud provider. And you can get a $100 60-day credit when you go to linode.com slash unplugged. Go there, support the show, and check it out. I keep seeing people who try it out, and they're like, okay, I gave it a go. I've been thinking about it, Chris. I finally did it. I see what you're talking about. You know, we got an email into the show. I'll have to share it with you in the future about their awesome support. That's

not something I touch on very often, but we got a really great email into the show about how fantastic their support is. Go try them out. Linode.com slash unplugged. See what I've been talking about. All right. Before we get to the X1 Carbon review, which I have sitting right here. I have the keyboards turned on. I can't really think about anything else, Wes. I can't really. So we got to check back in. It looks like it's just back online.

I'm SSHing in right now. Okay, I'm gonna check my pings. Oh yeah, it was down basically for... And all of our containers are back online. No, really? That easy? Yeah. They said it couldn't be done, Wes. I mean, they've just started, so maybe some of them will have problems,

but once we get to this point, it's usually fine. There you go, Wes. Now, I suppose for completion's sake, I should probably do some AUR updates, right? Yeah, sure. Go ahead and do the AUR updates. I was mostly just wanting to make sure that when we're doing the kernel upgrade, I want to make sure that ZFS file system mounts. Well, oh, so here's where it gets fun, actually. Because we have the LTS kernel, it meant that we could just continue, you know,

we didn't need a new build from ZFS to work with that new kernel, right? So that keeps it simple, and I think that was, honestly, I'm glad we made that choice. I think it just makes this simpler every time, and it's not like we really need the latest kernel for this box anyway. I see. So it wasn't a major version change of the kernel. I got you. Exactly.

But, you know, we talked about last week, two weeks ago, whenever that was, recently that there's been the 2.0 release of OpenZFS with all those new goodies. That is now available in the AOR. So we can do this whole cycle again and get brand new ZFS if you want. Oh, my God. Why? What? What?

Oh, my God. Okay. what what what oh my god okay so you're telling me even though i just dodged a bullet there's another firing squad we could stand in front of and do it all over again if you'd like to or do it later and that's up to you let's do it you know what because i'm going to get on my soapbox here for a moment because everybody told us we couldn't use arch in production and this server has only gotten more production. It's only gotten more critical. Has it been two years, Wes? How long is this install? Do you have any idea?

No, that might not be the Arch install, though, right? Because we were running it on Fedora. Yeah, Fedora for a bit. So a year, maybe? I think at least. We'll have to do some spelunking in the logs after the show. And we went over 40 days in between updates on that one by mistake. And, okay.

I'm just saying. People talk a lot of shit about Arch. A lot. But, I don't know. I mean, there it is working. And we're not doing it properly. We're not doing it as well as we possibly could. And we're doing it like jackasses live on a, on a podcast and it's still working just fine. I'm just saying. I will say I do like, even when we've occasionally had some

troubleshooting or things just going slowly that we were worried about, it's nice that we set the system up. It's really simple. I feel like we have a good understanding of it. So when we do have to do a little troubleshooting or reconfiguration, it's usually not a big deal. And when it does die on us, we'll switch over to CentOS stream. Exactly. We got a plan. I don't know what we're going to switch over to. But I am running Fedora on this ThinkPad. And you know what? Maybe there's something there. So if you have listened to my work over a decade, you know that just about any time a vendor has come out with a big splash with a new Linux product,

I inevitably have bought that thing. It goes back to when System76 became a company. I bought one of their laptops. When Dell announced their very first developer workstation, it was a tower. I bought one of their laptops. When Dell announced their very first developer workstation, it was a tower. I bought one of those. You're not going to miss out on something like that. Right?

One of my favorite computers ever, actually. I still have it here in the studio. It's just out in the living room, not hooked up to anything. But it was a great little machine. I even used it as a Hackintosh for a little while. When Lenovo announced consumer ThinkPads running Fedora, which are now also available with Ubuntu, I knew there was a good chance I eventually would end up getting one of them. Because in this entire time, whenever I've been buying a machine

preloaded with Linux, God bless them, they've been with Ubuntu, which is great. But this was my first chance ever to get a computer preloaded with Fedora. And I didn't just buy it because of that. I did try to think about what I wanted in a laptop, and I wonder if this maybe connects with some of you out there. I wanted my money, the limited amount that I have if I'm going to spend it, I want that to vote for Linux. So I was going to, regardless, I was going to buy something preloaded with Linux. If I'm spending that kind of money, that's just, it's got to further that cause. I also, maybe even more so than the average bear, I want a laptop that I can load any distro on quickly and often with very

minimal fuss. That means everything needs to be upstream as much as possible. Fan control, screen brightness, keyboard brightness, everything. It needs to have Thunderbolt 3 and eGPU compatibility because my work from home setup is all based around a Thunderbolt 3 eGPU dock. And my experience, my number one complaint with the ThinkPad T480 that I used to have was the screen. We got them with 1080p screens, and Lenovo just didn't put a lot of effort into that particular model screen. It's always been a source of complaints. So I wanted something with a 1440p screen, or 2k as you call it. And I highly preferred though did not require something with LVFS support. Highly preferred though read

just about required. And I preferred something I could pop the bottom off and put a bigger disc in or put more RAM in. Perks if it was thin and light. I want something thin and light. That's why I have an eGPU because when I want something powerful, I've got that. And I'd like something that has solid construction, high-end materials. Right, if you're spending your own money here, it shouldn't look clunky. And a high-resolution, 1440p screen, backlit keyboard, and Thunderbolt 3 with eGPU support, that is actually a very small overlap of devices. That pretty much, that's what brought me back to the X1 Carbon.

Is it has an optional 1440p screen. It has Thunderbolt 3, works exactly like it did on my T480. It's thin and light. It has LVFS support. And it ships with vanilla fedora not like an oem version of fedora that's been patched for the sound card and the webcam to work but a vanilla version of fedora 32 actually with um high dpi mode turned on so on a on a 2k screen with high DPI mode turned on. So on a 2K screen with high DPI mode, that's like really zoomed in. 200% is way too much on 1440p.

But it does ship with that. And it's the GNOME version of Fedora 32, totally vanilla. And it uses the Fedora OEM, like GNOME welcome experience to get you going. And then you're in and you're off to the races and i thought that that was fine but i actually quickly replaced that after a bit i want to keep it fedora for as long as possible because that's what this was meant to run in a way so i put fedora

33 on their plasma spin and um everything just works you know i just formatted the entire disc didn't didn't care to like keep any special partitions or anything. I just blew away everything and put my own distribution on there, and absolutely everything works. I have a hardware probe in the show notes if you want to see what this machine has in it. It's a nice little box. I like it quite a bit. And the nice thing about this Linux hardware probe site is it just tells you everything that the Linux kernel can see.

Yeah, bury your secrets for us here, buddy. Everything, right? It does an LSPCI and it organizes it nice in an HTML table for you. It calls out that my fingerprint reader isn't currently working because I haven't bothered setting it up. Everything that Linux sees, it's in here. And Linux sees everything

that's in this device. I can even control the keyboard backlight level using the Plasma desktop lighting applet where you set your monitor brightness. I can control everything on this laptop. It sounds silly to be excited about that in one sense, but I think as someone who's been trying Linux laptops for years now, you didn't have to fuss with that. There was no special Arch wiki page about how to find this driver on GitHub and get it built and installed to make that work. Awesome. It's tricky buying a ThinkPad if you're not already convinced. You know, there's some people I talk to, it's like that's all they would ever

buy. That's all they get is ThinkPads. That's not me. I'm not that guy. I like to look at everything. I considered the Galago Pro very seriously. I considered the XPS 13 very seriously. But ultimately, what won me over for the X1 Carbon, besides the fact that it was preloaded with Fedora, which I wanted that experience, is it remains to be a very practical laptop. remains to be a very practical laptop. It is so thin and so light that you can't tell it's in your backpack. So that's the kind of heaviness it is. You don't know it's in there. It's so light. But yet, somehow, somehow they've managed to still have room for two USB-C ports and two USB-A ports and HDMI out.

Two USB-C ports and two USB-A ports and HDMI out. And one of those like dock connector, think pad dock connector things that I'm not familiar with that goes over Thunderbolt as well. Wow, yeah, those are some ports. And you know what it was? Keyboard is great. The sound is adequate. It's better than the T480. And my overall experience with the X1 Carbon is it's in the hands. Everything kind of comes together.

The build, the weight, the quality that you can feel. It's a very well-built product. How does it do on the old like one-handed carry test? You know, that was always one thing kind of upset me about the T480 is just you could feel it, the whole system kind of bending if you carried it just by the corner. So it's a much better chassis. So this is their carbon fiber magnesium

composite. I mean, there's no flex in the body at all. And it's light enough that you could just pinch hold it in the corner. So what I'm doing right now, even with it open, is I'm just holding it with my pointer finger and my thumb in the corner and I'm bouncing it up and down at sole light. And there's zero flex in the machine.

That's great. It's really, really solid. It really has kind of checked all the boxes. It's, from a performance standpoint, I benchmarked it. It's a little bit faster than the T480. It's a notable improvement, but not a huge improvement. The multi-core story is a bit of a dog's breakfast, to tell you the truth. It does okay in some benchmarks in multi-core, but it doesn't quite

do as well in other benchmarks. But the single-core performance turns out to be really fantastic, actually. It benchmarks faster in single-core performance than that giant Dell Xeon that I had in not too long ago, about a month ago. Wait, really? Yeah, the single-core performance than that giant Dell Xeon that I had in not too long ago, about a month ago. Wait, really? Yeah, the single-core is ridiculous. Wow. So, I mean, that's kind of nice. And I hooked it up to my eGPU,

and I'm running Plasma with Wayland, hooked up to an eGPU, playing Red Dead Redemption 2 under Proton, and it works great. I actually haven't played for more than about 15 minutes because I didn't have time this morning, but it all worked. You had a show to do, but wow, yeah, that's a really good day-to-day, can you have a little

fun before you have to do some work test? So my build as I have it here is the i7 4.9 gigahertz burst. as I have it here, is the i7 4.9 gigahertz burst. It has 16 gigs of RAM, and I got it with a 256 gigabyte NVMe, and I'm already kind of regretting that. So my plan is to kind of just tell you guys what this is like, having had this for about a week and change, took forever.

UPS is a bunch of dummies. But then I'm planning to see if I can open it up and put a little more RAM in it or put a little bit more disk in and see what it's like long-term to use it. So I'll plan to follow up and do a long-term review. This, I have to say, is probably one of the finest machines, though, that I've owned. And I am extremely happy with the purchase. And it's small and light enough that I'm using it in places where I was using an iPad before, like the couch.

Now I'm just cracking out the laptop. And I can then just wedge it in the cushion seat when I'm not using it. It works great for that. The 14-inch screen with a 1440p resolution is a little small. 1440p resolution is a little small. But under Plasma, you can really have fine-grained control over the UI elements. And so I notched the fonts up a little bit, and I have the scaling at 125%. Because, you know, you can refine it. So instead of being 200%, I just have it at 125%.

And it's really at a spot where I like it. I can fit a ton on the screen, especially in a web browser or in a text document or in a terminal, but I have everything just turned up just a little bit larger. And it really complements the 1440p resolution. And I think in a way

where I probably would not have been quite as happy under GNOME Shell because I do not have some of the same knobs I can turn that I do under Plasma. Oh, just like the extra configurability of more precision on what your scaling looks like? Yeah, there's just so many options. Not only is there more precision with the scaling, at least in Fedora here with the stock, but I have so many more options for UI element control from the buttons in the title bar

to all the various different fonts that can be set throughout the entire UI for all the different little types of dialogues and title bars and consoles and all that kind of stuff. So you can just notch it all up a little bit and it's really easy to do so. This is as close as I've ever felt to the metal with an OS because the performance is great and it turns out multi-core is wonderful,

but a lot of stuff really benefits when you have really good single core performance being able to burst to 4.9 gigahertz means that things just fly like opening up applications and whatnot just absolutely scream and all meanwhile i just have access to everything through all of the built-in things like in the plasma desktop or it's all there's there's no sensors that can't be detected. It has no problem controlling screen brightness or no problem controlling volume and audio. Everything just works absolutely perfectly.

And I'm expecting that updates will come down via LVFS when they're available. And if you're not looking for a system with a GPU or a 4K screen, I haven't tried the 4K screen variant, I think the X1 Carbon is really, really nice. The only knock, and it's not really a problem for me because it's still a pretty nice upgrade from the T480 I was using, is that it's 10th-gen Intel processors.

I'd love to see 11th-gen, and I think that might be where the Galago Pro has a leg over this. But for me, it wasn't a deal breaker. I absolutely would love it. But when I need GPU power, I have an eGPU, and that would be the primary thing you would get, I think, in my opinion, by going with 11th Gen is you'd get nicer graphics, a pretty notable upgrade in the Intel graphics.

It would be nice to have that. But when I need nice graphics, that's just when I go to the eGPU, and I'm fine with that process. So 10th gen processors work for me. Battery life has been pretty impressive. It's not blow-away battery life. It's not all-day battery life, but I actually haven't drained it down yet, and I use it pretty consistently. But I usually, around 30%, 40%, I plug it in, and I'm probably getting at least four or five hours out of the battery, which is plenty for me. It's reached the threshold of it hasn't been an issue yet.

And even when I've left it in my bag overnight and I open it up in the morning and I need to get some work done, I've still got, like, plenty of battery life left. Yeah, that's the real test is do I notice that I have to constantly keep plugging this thing in? Yeah, and I haven't yet. And, you know, it's USB real test is do I notice that I have to constantly keep plugging this thing in? Yeah, and I haven't yet. And, you know, it's USB-C as well. So any USB-C power source I have, I can plug it into, which I love that versatility of it. So very, very happy with the purchase. I was nervous as hell when it arrived because, like I said, I'm not necessarily sold on all ThinkPads. I don't think Lenovo has been a great steward of the brand, but some ThinkPads have really held up over time. And

I think the X1 Carbon is one of them. And now I kind of see what everybody's talking about. Really like it. And I'm very happy with my purchase. This will probably be my daily Linux driver for a long time. And it checks the number one box I needed from a laptop from a functionality standpoint and that is just this sort of universal works with Linux everything I load on it works because we talk about distros so much we try out different things so often that I just want that variability removed I don't want to have to fight to get anything working in the laptop I want to be able to focus on the distro. And that's totally what this gives me.

Even if it's not blow-away performance, it's good enough performance that I'm happy. And I give it a big recommend if you're in the market. Boy, isn't that tempting. I mean, it's nice that we've got a solid set of options in this higher- end set of Linux laptops that just work. Yeah, I think my overall config was pretty well under two grand, but I'm not positive. I can't remember now because I ordered it a long time ago.

Well, what feels like a long time ago. I ordered it two, three weeks. I can't remember. It's been a few weeks. And then UPS actually got here pretty quick, but then UPS took a week and a half to actually deliver it to me. They just kept missing me and screwing it up and taking it to the wrong place. And so that whole thing, it just sort of made it feel like it took forever. And it was really disappointing because I was sitting there waiting and waiting for it. Because, you know, you get that new rig anticipation,

and then they kept blowing it and claiming they showed up when they hadn't actually showed up. All that was pretty frustrating. But in the end, it was worth the wait, and I've been really quite happy with it. And I'm really impressed with how sturdy it feels for how thin it is and all of that.

So it's going to take a lot of machine now to replace that. It would really take quite the argument to switch to something else now. Yeah, no kidding. I'll be excited to see how it performs in some upcoming distro reviews. Guess we'll find out. And Plasma, you know what? I really think I'm happy with it.

Coming back to Plasma after spending the summer and change, the summer and fall on Gnome Shell, coming back to Plasma, I feel like I've really kind of got down tweaking it. And so when you've got a desktop environment set up the way you really like it, you've got it with hardware the way you really like it, and I'm really satisfied with Fedora on that machine so far, and I think I'm going to try to keep it Fedora as long as possible, it's really checking all the boxes.

So it worked out well. Right? You've got a comfortable, well-provisioned home. Well, let's do a little cleanup. Gotta get the boxes out of here. And let's talk about the LUP plug. Happens on Sundays. We do them at noon

Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern in our mumble room. You can get information about that at linuxunplugged.com. And rumor has it that there'll be some released recordings soon of their talks. And rumor has it that there will be some released recordings soon of their talks. And what Wes and I

will probably do is set up an RSS feed for them soon that we'll be able to tell you here in housekeeping that you can subscribe to and then when they

have people come in and do a talk about something, you'll be able to get access to that. Stay tuned. Stay tuned for that coming very soon. In the meantime,

we talk about feeds all the time. We should talk about the all-shows feed. Just get everything we make. Coda Radio is back. Linux Action News is fresh and new, covering stuff as it happens. And then this show here. And of course, of course, self-hosted every other week. So it's not so much that it's going to blow out your podcast player,

but you get all the shows we're producing right now and anything new that comes along. So go get the all-shows feed if you haven't yet. We have that linked at the Jupiter Broadcasting website. And a note about Coder Radio, it has a new live time. Coder Happy Hour now starts at 5 p.m. Pacific, 8 p.m. Eastern, and the show usually starts about a half hour after that. I was playing a little cyberpunk on the live stream and cracking jokes with the chat room.

It actually turned out to be a really great event. And we're doing that now Monday evening as a chance for people to hang out. 5 p.m. Pacific, 8 p.m. Eastern at jblive.tv. Join us for that, won't you? Mr. Payne, why don't we do a little bit of feedback? Do you want to take Rob's? Oh, sure. All right.

Well, Rob wrote in about the tuxes, actually, and Rob's been doing his own version. Hi, I just wanted to share my picks for the tuxes, but with a particular angle of an academic perspective. And he links us to his blog post, and he's got a whole bunch of pics for the academic tuxes. I love this. That's a great idea. He forked it, and he made it his own. If this is your area of interest, we'll have a link to this in the show notes. I like it.

He got to it before we did. He took the ID and he ran with it. That also serves as a nice little reminder that the tuxes are closing soon, so you have a little bit of time left. But Marcus writes in with the best top tool, and he says, I've been following your discussion on tips and tops. Nice. Different utilities with great interest, but I have to say, even though the various tops, you've never really got to one that's the great, the best, nothing that beats Glances in usefulness. Glances not only shows more information on the screen than any other utility I've come across, it also color codes values, indicating problems.

It also provides you with a human-readable warning log when it detects anomalies in your system. I just thought I'd share this invaluable gem. And he's right. Marcus is totally right. You know, it's been a long time since I looked at Glances, so I went ahead and gave it a good old install. And it does fit a lot on the screen, and I do like the information and how it displays it. Right, and it comes with a web UI. That's awesome.

Plus, you can export to stuff like Influx or OpenTSDB if you have other metrics you want and also want a handy little feature like this. And I feel like, I don't know about when you run the web server part of it, but when you just run the command line version, it seems like it takes less resources than bash top, go top,

bpy top, all the other tops we've been talking about. You don't always see it at the top of the top. Exactly. It just seems to sit there. At least glances on the command line, and it does fit a lot of information on there. And I felt kind of foolish because I knew about it, but, you know, you get these new and shinies on there. I mean, PBY top is still, I don't know, it might look better, but Glances might be the overall more practical tool.

Let's do another practical tool. This is our pick this week. This is something that Wes found. It's called PBG Oppy This is our pick this week. This is something that Wes found. It's called PBGOPI. God damn it, Wes. Hey, I just find the picks. I don't make sure they're easy to pronounce, okay?

Yeah, PBGOPI. And if you've used a Mac, maybe you've – now I can't speak. If you've used a Mac, maybe you've used PBCBCopy, their little handy-dandy pasteboard helper, much like Excel or Xclip on the Linux side of things. Well, this is like that, except it's cross-system. So if you want to copy between machines, maybe you don't want to have a full setup of something like a barrier or synergy or other solutions for this. Well, maybe PBCopy is the tool for you. You just get started by running PBGoppy serve

on one machine that acts as the server, and then you just define an environmental variable on other machines that you want to talk to that server so they know what server to point to, and then you can pipe to and from PBGoppy and share between systems. It's pretty easy. And they have packages for just about anything,

or you can just go get and grab it. It looks like it's really easy. And they got packages for just about anything, or you can just go get and grab it. It looks like it's really easy to get up and running. And don't worry, it looks like there are some options. I hadn't played with that yet, but you can add authentication and end-to-end encryption if those are concerns of yours. Oh, so, hmm. So I bet we could set up a WireGuard tunnel, right? And then we could do it over the internet too. Yeah, we can just copy and paste to each other. I mean, who needs a messaging platform anymore, Wes? I like the idea of me constantly replacing

your clipboard with little surprises. Okay. Maybe I don't like that. It's like a clipboard stocking stuffer. Let's talk about something else. Let's talk about our core contributors. Thank you to the Unplugged Core. UnpluggedCcore.com these folks uh help keep the show independent help us run with a reduced ad load uh they also get two feed choices a limited ad feed with only the ads we're contractually obligated to include or a full firehose feed. All our screw-ups,

all the stuff that never makes it into the show, just a raw live feed. Those are two feed options and they're available to our unplugged core contributors. Thank you, everybody. We really, really do appreciate your support over there. Also, go find our sponsor, Cloud Guru, on social media. They are at slash the Cloud Guru at YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook.

You can find them anywhere over there. Mr. West, what else? Is there anything else we should mention before we get out of here besides the tuxes? Well, just that unfortunately we're still compiling the ZFS module. So this one might have to wait, but we can provide an update later. I thought maybe we'd see if we make it to the post show and see how it goes. But yeah, that's a big build. That might be like we follow up next episode.

We've got the utils done. We're just doing the actual kernel module itself right now. Oh, really? We'll see. Yeah. Almost there. Do a reboot. Test it out.

I bet it works great. And hey, I'm excited for some of that new stuff in CFS. Yeah, we'll see. If you'd like to join us live, we'd love to have you. We do the show Tuesdays. We do it at noon Pacific at 3 p.m. Eastern over at jblive.tv. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station.

There you go. The show is at Linux Unplugged on the Twitter. Your contact, your feedback, that stuff, I don't know. I don't know what you do. I don't even know what I'm saying right now. But we want your feedback. That's what I'm trying to say. LinuxUnplugged.com slash contact.

You go stuff our box over there. We got a form. You fill it out. It goes into a box. We read it. Makes for show content. Do I need to explain it? Really? Why are you making me explain it? This is awkward. It's the end of the show. And now this is what the end of the show is about. I don't know why you did this. Linuxunplugged.com slash contact. Just go there so Chris can shut up. Damn it. You know, just ruin the end of the show. I hope you're happy and we'll see you right back here next Tuesday. All right, JBtitles.com. I, you know, I've been doing this for a long time. So in my experience, you really kind of want to shame

and give the audience a hard time on your way out. That's what I've, that's my pro tip. To any podcasters out there looking to copy my style, really give your audience a what for right at the end. Chris, I feel like intuitively that's the opposite looking to copy my style. Really give your audience a what for right at the end. Chris? I feel like intuitively that's the opposite of a good pro tip. Oh, oops. All right, well, let's go pick our title.

How's that build going there, Wes? Good, just finished. I'm going to install these new packages now. All right, you let me know when we're going to do the reboot. It's fun that this ZFS release includes ZStandard and then also the package that it built while building it. Wait, do we have to reboot for a

file system upgrade? Depends on how DKMS is configured in your distribution. Oh, it's a new module too. Right, right, right. Most distributions do require that. I mean, the main exceptions would be Fedora and Debian, where DKMS will build against all the kernels automatically and then reload the modules automatically. But

the rest, most distributions don't do that because it's a pain in the butt to make that kind of automation work. You know, I didn't want to put this in the official review, so it feels like it's okay to say it now, but I didn't think a Linux laptop could be this good. And that's someone who regularly reviews the latest XPS, right? I feel slightly insulted and hurt that you think I couldn't produce a good Linux laptop experience. No, it's the just, the absolutely nothing needs to be installed to get it working. There's no, there is zero vendor software on it. And that's not something that appeals to everybody, but it appeals to me. There is zero penalty

for wiping it and putting anything I want on it. That was a prerequisite for us working with Lenovo on this. We worked very hard to establish this process of we want the default base image that you download from Fedora to be able to do all the same things as your OEM preload. And what's great is it comes

with Fedora 32, which means by now, everything, anything that would have just made it upstream for that release or anything, it's just everybody has it now. 33 just runs fantastically on there. Yeah. I mean, we're not doing this in a way, we're not trying to do this in such a way

where we have the, you know, quote unquote, upper hand, you know, as some other platforms tend to do when they're doing hardware enablement. We're doing this mostly because people keep asking for it and they want it. And so that's why we're even doing this at all. Otherwise, I think really it wouldn't have happened. And the funny thing is it wasn't even our side that asked for it.

It was the other side, Lenovo, because their customers asked for it. So what I see is that a lot of big brands go with Linux and partner up and create one of their brand laptops. But what you also see is that KDE, for example, brought out their KDE laptop. And there are some others that, for example, use the Clevo. But what of those laptops have you tested and think were nice? Well, I mean, if you've tried anything from System76, Tuxedo, Slimbook, or others, they're all using the same Clevo shells.

I mean, obviously, there's a slightly different mix of hardware components from time to time, but they're generally the same base thing. Yeah, I see a lot of Clevos. But what I also found, and I think that's also the one that KDE uses, is the base of Tongfang. Yeah, but that's also the one that KDE uses is the base of a Tong Feng. Yeah. But that's coming from Tuxedo. And so their,

their design is, is the one that's based on that basis. That where the X one carbon kind of, I think has the edge is it has this really sturdy magnesium body, right. And carbon fiber, whatever the hell they put in there, space material. But just regardless, it has a very rigid build,

but it's extremely light, and yet the performance is, like in single core especially, competitive. And so that's where it's like, wow. So I've got this laptop that is 100% pure upstream. Every distro under the sun is supported. It gets updated via LVFS, so I just have to support anything I install just has to support that. But additionally, it's not really compromised in any way.

It's extremely light. It has quite good battery life. The performance is good, so it gets that Venn diagram just in the right spot of all of those features that I like. Like, for example, the new KDE laptop or some of the other higher performance laptops,

they're just too big. They're too big. And this is just the right size. It's not too small. It's almost too small. And it's not too big. And it's just in that, for me, that perfect size where I could take it on an airplane, but I can also work on it all

day. You can easily drag and forth back to the studio or the RV, wherever you are. You know, it's not just sitting on a desk all the time. You're actually taking it with you. Yeah, and it really, there's no penalty for taking it with me because it's so light. It doesn't feel like there's a big penalty in my bag for carrying around this big heavy I really like that high performance Dell laptop I reviewed recently but man could you feel that big metal chassis you could feel the chugging you really could feel it in the bag

the bag could be empty and the bag was still heavy get a little sweaty carrying it if there's nothing but that laptop in the bag it was still heavy it was still heavy is what I mean. It was notable. And this, I literally, for the first couple of days, was having to double check my bag that it was in there until I, you know, just started accepting that, yes, I did in fact put it in there. When you look at Lenovo laptops and the design for them and how they're approaching this, they have the wherewithal to customize every layer of the hardware. And that's just something to appreciate because it's one of the reasons we like Apple computers, right?

Like they have that flexibility and they take advantage of it. Yeah. And you could see some of that same thing like in the XPS 13. It's got a very competitive design and chassis and screen because Dell has a little more leverage there when they're putting all the components together. Just a question. Yeah. What's the noise level of that thing? Could you use it in the studio just working with daily work? So a week into it, you know, setting up my software, loading a bunch of stuff on there,

even installing the OS, I didn't hear the fans until today when I was starting Red Dead Redemption and Steam does that thing where it pre-processes the Vulcan shaders. That was the first time I've ever heard the fans kick in, and it was not bad at all. It was very tolerable. And it was pushing it. It was really pushing it.

Yeah, yeah, that's good, because if I want to buy another laptop, I want to use it at quiet places, too, like a library or something. And if you have that van noise kicking in all the time, that's bad. But if the noise level is good... Oh yeah, I would describe the vast majority of my usage with it as absolutely silent. The only downside that I have with the X1 Carbon is the price point.

Because yeah, the money you pour in at the beginning you get back in the years but not everyone has that kind of money for a start uh of the laptop i hope i can upgrade the disk because i i wish i went cheap really it's soldered in what yeah what i did find all lenovo platforms have soldered storage and ram is there any any openings on it? I hope there's something I can do. I'm trying to tell you during the review, Chris. With one specific model of the Tongfang that has a Ryzen 4000 in it, and they advertise the battery for up to 14 hours, and the whole unit is 1.5 kilograms. It is a 15-inch unit, but with 14

hours battery time and with an AMD 4000 in it, with an M.2 PCIe or SATA SSD, it's an amazing thing. And the starting price is from 835 euros that's a great price it is it's fantastic i did hear from one from one manufacturer building on top of that platform that it basically is super buggy with anything older than linux uh 51010, 5.9, which is not a great place to be when basically no hardware manufacturer, no PC manufacturer is shipping Fedora 33 out of the box, for example. Like, nobody's doing that. And I know of one that has basically, they disabled their Linux offering until they work with all the distros that they were working with

to be able to get that working because it was it was doing things like random CPU lockups bad battery life things random fan speed ups and shutdowns geez not what you want on your like dedicated Linux laptop right yeah and this and they were a dedicated Linux laptop vendor and this was bad for them and and the problem was that they were trying to work with the Linux distro vendors, and with the exception of a couple, which, you know, you can guess Fedora being one of them. But with the exception of a couple, basically all of them said, well, you're just going to have to wait until next year. So they pulled it.

Fedora being pre-installed on this thing was definitely, for me, like, it's a perk. Because not only does it mark the first computer in my lifetime i've ever bought with fedora loaded on it so that's like for me it's just it's a nice milestone as a long-time desktop linux user but additionally it was a signal to me that that means i'm going to put it i could put anything i want on it because i recently had an experience with a laptop where when i installed anything but the stock image, I didn't have a sound card. And I just didn't like that restriction at all. And so by just having Fedora on there,

sort of a vanilla Fedora at that, it just sent a signal to me that this was a machine that was safe enough to run any Linux I wanted on it. And I liked that too. And then there was just that kind of personal milestone of, wow, now I've bought a computer with Fedora on it. Man, I remember when Fedora was announced, right? So like, it's cool. It's really cool. It's a connection back to it. Yeah. It's very meaningful to me at this point. It's

been 18 years since the Fedora project was announced. It's been 17 years since the first release of Fedora. And we're finally, we're on computers. Yeah. Well, what I noticed is when I went to buy one, it said that the Linux version was like five weeks. And it said like the Windows version would take way less time to come. So I just ended up buying one and grabbing a USB stick. Oh, no.

Yeah. I mean, I've done that before too. That's how I got my. Yeah, but it's because the Windows and Linux versions are actually different hardware. Oh, no. Yeah. I mean, I've done that before, too. That's how I got my... Yeah, but it's because the Windows and Linux versions are actually different hardware. Oh, really? They make some changes to facilitate all the upstreaming and stuff like that?

Yep. Oh! Because I'm like, I'm running my X1 here, and it's getting up to smell VHS just fine. It'll work on Fedora because Fedora's awesome. But there were specific hardware changes made to the device so that it would be more optimal for running on Linux. So certain hardware features were stripped out or replaced with different components, like the choice of Wi-Fi modules is more restricted, things like that.

is more restricted, things like that. There were specific changes made to the Linux version so that it would actually, you would have the experience that you had, Chris. Huh, because I'm on Arco Linux and Arch derivative and it works just fine. Did you just get an Arch by the way in? Is that what just happened? Come on, kid.

Anyway, anyway, it doesn't, so in all fairness and in practice, regardless of the Windows or Linux platform for the ThinkPad that you are buying, it both will work perfectly fine with Fedora. The reason why the Linux version of the ThinkPad hardware is different is not for Fedora, but for the other Linux distributions. All the hardware enablement has already been done for even the main platform as far as i'm aware with the exception of the nvidia card but that's because nobody could do anything about that but uh but the only thing where i'm always annoyed by is the horrible io placement of some laptops like you don't place one of the most prominent USB connections on the right, almost on the front of the laptop.

That's where my mouse goes. Explain to me why there are two USB-C ports on one side and none on the other for the X1 Carbon. It's brain dead, is basically what it is. I have an X1 Carbon Extreme and it's even worse. I want to charge my computer on both

sides of the thing. I have an X1 Carbon Extreme and it's even worse. I want to charge my computer on both sides of the thing. I have an X1 Carbon Extreme and it's worse because all the ports are still on the left and there's more ports. You'll have to allow me to interrupt because, as you probably recall, we have just done a ZFS update and Wes has rebooted the server. And it is still down at this time. Looks like it. Yeah, you should get a Pingo. We have just done a ZFS update, and Wes has rebooted the server. And it is still down at this time.

Looks like it. Yeah, you should get a ping going. Do you have one up already? Yeah, I got one going, and it's not coming back. Oh, jeez. It does take a while. I don't remember how long it took because we were distracted doing the show. ZFS takes a while to build and get started the first go around, especially since you need an upgrade,

which means it's going to update the pool automatically. It's going to reset its settings. it's going to reset its settings it's going to reload the configuration like there's a bunch of stuff that it does the first time after you do a zfs upgrade and see this is how you know i work with zfs that's right these super micro boxes take forever to reboot anyways they really do they're just slow too yeah and super micro is a pain like it's last time i had to reboot a super micro box which admittedly wasn't that long ago it it was like a week or so ago, it took like a minute and a half to get through all of the firmwares before it got to the operating system boot.

It's stupid. Wes, the host is back up. It's responding to pings. Okay, so now we'll see how the actual boot goes. Do you want me to jump in or do you want to do it? No, you can do it. It'll take a little bit. My VPN's got to get reestablished.

I am logging in right now. Hitting mount. Huh. Oh, here we go. I think the Docker containers are just starting up. Yeah, it looks like it because I just saw a whole bunch of that start up. Yes, I see the ZFS mount points. Wes Payne.

Boom! Wes Payne! Ah! You know what else I love about this? West Payne? Boom! West Payne? Oh! You know what else I love about this is, in what is not a good idea, my VPN connection to the studio is through this box. Yes. So I'm cut off if it, I mean, Chris is there as a backup, of course,

but I love that WireGuard just comes back up. Like, I don't have to fiddle with anything. I don't have to change anything. I can keep my ping going. It just, and once it's back up, I can SSH. Wes, I don't have to fiddle with anything. I don't have to change anything. I can keep my ping going. It just, and once it's back up, I can SSH. Wes, this seems like

a bad plan. We've got SSH tunnels and other things set up. Well, there you go. This soapbox is getting a lot of use today because look what our Arch server just did.

Look what that Arch server just did.