LINUX Unplugged - 385: The 2020 Tuxies

Episode Date: December 23, 2020

We reveal the winners of the 2020 Tuxies. We've tallied the audience votes for the best open source projects, desktops, distros, editors, games, and much much more. Special Guests: Drew DeVore and Nate Graham.

Welcome into Linux Unplugged, episode 385. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And no hiding it, there's a Drew over there too. Hey-o. You guys, you look good. You look real good today. We all dressed up for the tuxes.

We're all wearing our going-to-town clothes because it's a very special episode where we get to say thank you to a lot of open-source projects and see who our audience voted as some of the best in newcomers and distributions and text editors, just about everything you'd think we'd nerd out on. So it's a special episode today. We're also going to do a special

holiday unboxing here in a little bit. And we have a special guest joining us to help us go over all of the new goodies that have landed in plasma, just the state of plasma in 2020. Nate, welcome back to the show, man. Hi there. Thanks. It's great to be here. Man, it's great to have you. So hold on. We're going to get to Plasma here in just a moment. But before we do that, I have to say thank you

to A Cloud Guru for sponsoring this episode. They're the leader in hands-on learning. The only way to learn a new skill is by doing. And that's why ACG provides hands-on labs,

cloud Linux servers, and much more. So get your hands cloudy at acloudguru.com. I psyched your mind, Mumble Room. You thought I was going to call on you.

Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Ho, ho, ho. Hello. Hello. Hello. Ho, ho, ho. Whoa. Hello, everybody.

Good to have you in there. Thank you so much for being here. I'm looking forward to our discussions as we analyze who the winners are this year. Also, I'm glad you're here for the surprise unboxing for Mr. West. this year. Also, I'm glad you're here for the surprise unboxing for Mr. West. And this year on Coda Radio, I've started talking a lot about how I think Plasma is a fantastic workstation for developers and administrators who want a really stable, rock-solid Linux base, but want something that's like a power tool. I've made the equivalence before that, you know, how you might have like a cordless drill in your garage that's pretty capable, but then you go into like a vehicle shop that has like one of these air-powered suckers and it just like can take a thing apart in 10 seconds?

That's what Plasma is in my view when you look at the different desktops out there. But they've managed over 2020 to really polish that thing and make a lot of these things that were rough edges in the past a lot smoother now. And Nate Graham has been tracking all of these developments week by week on his blog. Since we've had you on forever ago, you're still doing it like a soldier of the Plasma desktop. I really appreciate it. I love reading through these. Sure am. It's a lot of fun.

I mean, like, first of all, thanks, man. Like, geez, that's got to be a lot of work to do it every single week like that. I got to admit, it takes quite a while. I typically start writing each new post before I finish the old one. Wow. And I just kind of keep building them up throughout the whole week. I used to do it on like Saturday night right before I hit post, but it would take hours and hours and hours. So now I just keep the draft open all week and add new stuff as I see it get merged, which is a lot more reasonable to do.

But yeah, it takes a while. I know those workflows very well myself. You know, we have a similar kind of approach with the shows is they're kind of in development from the moment we end them to the next one. And because you know what, you must be doing what? I mean, a bunch of VMs in some cases and whatnot. So that way you can get a screenshot or try something because you got to kind of understand it to write about it. Actually, I don't use any virtual machines at all. I run my entire computer on built from

source KDE Plasma stuff. So the first thing I do every morning is build every piece of KDE software from Gitmaster and then use that stuff. So when I need to take a screenshot, I'm literally taking a screenshot of my own desktop. This is all stuff that's in production, in use.

And I feel like, personally, it's pretty amazing how stable our Gitmaster stuff is because so many people are actually running their Pl plasma sessions like this. So we actually have a lot of internal QA. But yeah, no VMs for me. Careful now, you're giving Chris ideas and maybe not good ones.

It's super stable, man. You can do it. And once you use a rolling release distro, I've had people tell me that they read my blog posts and they say, oh man, I switched to Arch, I switched to Manjaro or Tumbleweed because I wanted this stuff really fast, but now I feel like it's not fast enough anymore because I want the new stuff now. I don't want to wait three months. Wow, you make an Arch user look chill. But Nate, it kind of feels like it's a new form of journalism. It's a form of journalism that is unique and only kind of possible with free software. And do you see it as a form of journalism or do you see it as a form of project advocacy? You know, I kind of see it as a bit of both. This is something that I've thought myself about

because I didn't really set out to do something like this. I originally wanted to just categorize and tell people about what had gone on for the usability and productivity initiative that we had a few years ago. And what I realized over time was that it had become a form of marketing as well as just description, because people would be really interested in seeing what stuff was going to happen in the future. Like they would get excited and they would say, oh, I want to use this stuff right now. And that was definitely not my goal to start out with. It was supposed to be descriptive, but it's turned into something that's like a little bit between advocacy and journalism,

I would say. And it also gives the users a sense of continued forward progress. People seem to have this impression that it's like it's dead. Its developers are mean and rude. There's all this stuff that doesn't work properly. It's really buggy. And that wasn't really my experience. And I felt like if I could be a voice for the opposite, showing just what I saw of the project, it would help to counter that narrative that to me seemed like it was very dated. Like maybe this was true 10 or 15 years ago, but it didn't seem true in that moment. And I really feel like that was successful, because I don't think that those old stereotypes are true anymore. Like people used to say,

oh, it's so bloated, it takes up a gigabyte of RAM, I can't use it. But now, Plasma is known as one of the most lightweight desktop environments out there. And we still see people who believe that old stuff. But now there's always a cohort of people who understand the truth that all of this performance work that we've done over the last couple of years or even a decade or more have paid off and everybody can benefit from it. can benefit from it. So I think it's really important to have a direct line to your users so that you can be pushing a narrative that's true to counter misinformation out there. And sometimes the misinformation, it isn't malicious, right? Like somebody who used KDE 15 years ago, their impression back then was probably true, even though it doesn't match the state of reality today. So sometimes countering that misinformation doesn't mean like putting somebody in their place, but just giving out the correct information that's true today. seeing how the community discusses Plasma now, it's really in a much more positive tone. I think it's had a significant noticeable impact. And so I thought, why don't we bring people up to date on

kind of some of the stuff you've really thought was the most interesting in Plasma in 2020? And maybe if there's other KDE apps too that you think we should include in there. But it's a big question. But, you know, I kind of took most of 2020 off from Plasma and then just came back to it a month ago. And I'm like, oh, man, I can see. Even in that time, there's been noticeable improvements with, like, the brightness controls and just all the widgets down by the clock that I use all the time. Oh, awesome. I was going to talk about that quite a bit, so I'm glad you noticed. Well, do you want to start there? Because I've noticed there's nice little improvements that have landed, and maybe that's one of them we should start with. So this was a specific improvement that we really set out to do. It's been in the planning stages

for over a year, but the system tray, as I believe what you're referring to, and this was one of the oldest parts of Plasma 5. It was, you know, most of this code was years and years old. And it was like good for the time, but it could really stand a lot of modernization. And so KDE's VDG group, this is the visual design group. We also do interaction design stuff. We set out to improve and modernize the system tray applets. And over the course of 2020, we've done a ton of that.

If you look at the current state in Plasma 5.20, I think it's pretty good. And in 5.21, it just gets even better. But we've made a bunch of improvements, such as using a unified theming for all of the applets, so they don't seem so unique anymore. They all kind of have a common theme. We have like a defined header area on top. And in Plasma 521, we're even going to have an almost like header bar style, where we have the title bar and the controls merged into the same row. We have common controls used for everything. So the amount of code and the bugginess is hugely decreased. so the amount of code and the bugginess has hugely decreased. We've worked on the visual presentation for system tray applets that have a visual component like the media player.

Oh, the media player looks so nice now. It's really, really, really pretty looking. And so on and so forth. We kind of went down the line with every individual system tray applet and reviewed the usability, reviewed the aesthetics, and just said, how can we polish this

and make that individual applet the best version of itself? And then we went back to the whole system tray itself, which is like the containment for these applets. And we tried to make them integrate well into the system tray so that it seems like a really cohesive unit and just make it better, basically. And I feel like we've succeeded. So I'm really glad you noticed that and brought it up because that tells me that our work was impactful. Yeah, no, noticeable. It seems like, and maybe this has been landing in bits over time too,

but system settings has seen a bunch of rework. It feels much more streamlined and easier to navigate. Awesome. I used to have this sensation that I just had to go hunt for everything, and now it seems much more discoverable. That's great. Yeah, system settings is another example where we've done a lot of iterative design. Most people don't realize that system settings is actually one of the most complicated pieces of code we have, because each individual page is actually a tiny app. So system settings is basically a shell around like 120 apps, which is kind of mind

boggling to think about. And that's why a lot of this work gets done in a very incremental fashion instead of, you know, all at once and then it's done. But I'm glad you noticed that too, because we have definitely done that. One thing that we're doing over time is rewriting the old system settings pages in QML, which makes them a lot easier to improve in the future. It gives us a chance to revisit the user interface for that particular page. And it also makes those pages usable on Plasma Mobile too, because Plasma Mobile does not have the ability

to use QWidgets-based system settings pages, only QML ones. So we have the convergence aspect there too. And over the course of 2020, we have rewritten eight pages in QML. And there are a couple more that are in review, and hopefully will be merged within maybe a week or two or something like that. So yeah, that's a bunch of stuff. But we also have a bunch of new features in system settings too. We also have one thing that's been really popular among our users is an automatic syncing system for your KDE app settings to GTK apps. So like when you

change the font size in your KDE apps, it changes the font size in GTK apps as well. When you change the color scheme in your KDE apps, it changes the color scheme in GTK apps, stuff like that. This used to be a manual process, and you'd have to do it yourself. Now it's automatic. It just happens on its own. That's been very well received. We also have a feature in system settings that lets you highlight settings that you've changed from their default values. We did this because people would often say, oh man, system settings is really complicated. I tweaked a bunch of stuff, and now I don't know what I did. So we did that so that people could visualize what changes they actually made so that they

could see whether they wanted to keep them or not once they found themselves in that situation. And there's tons of polish throughout the stack too. This is really neat. I had not noticed this before. So essentially it marks them almost like with an unread indicator. And you want to know what's really cool. You're looking at the orange dot on the sidebar now, right? Yeah, yeah. So if you click on one of those items that has an orange dot, it will actually highlight the individual settings on the page that have been changed. This was a ton of work, by the way.

So it's, I'm really happy with it. Yeah, it looks slick, but you can tell there's some logic behind the scenes there. Oh, tons. Yeah. And it was all really good logic because like I said earlier, Yeah, it looks slick, but you can tell there's some logic behind the scenes there. And now to make this highlight changed settings feature work, we created a sort of framework that they all inherit from so that when you write a new system settings page, you plug it into this pre-existing framework and that feature just works automatically. And porting all, you know, 100 of those pages to use this thing was a Herculean task. So I'm really happy that it works as well as it does. Yeah, and that's a feature now that I will mention

that I had no idea. I had noticed that button there, but I hadn't tried it yet. And I can only imagine the amount of work I went into it. And that's something I'll tell people to check out. Yeah, it's pretty nice. And a really cool thing is that because we've now ported all of these pages to use this common base, all of the pages now know what their default settings are.

They know how they differ from their default settings. So this opens up the door for us in the future to add a much-requested feature that will allow you to reset everything to its default settings because all the pages actually know what those are now. So we'll be able to do that without having to brute force it by just blowing away the config files. You know, the chatroom is thinking,

they're thinking, you know what we want now is we want to sync those settings between Plasma desktops. That's what they're thinking. So this is another feature. And again, it's something that's made possible by the plumbing work that we did for this. Now that every page knows what settings have been changed from their default values, it becomes really easy to reset them, export that. A syncing feature between Plasma desktops would be amazing, but that

of course requires a bunch more work on the server side. You'd need all sorts of sync and deduplication stuff. And that's a whole other can of worms, but that'd be great. Sure. But if you could get it out to a file, maybe something over in xCloud would work. Sync file. Yeah, I could see a DIY version of that working pretty well.

Is there maybe anything you want to touch on that maybe isn't so user noticeable, but still has been a good improvement? Anything on your mind there? There's another big thing that we did, which is the optional system de-integration throughout Plasma. This is something that probably nobody will even notice because it's not even on by default right now. We're hoping, I believe, to turn it on by default for Plasma 5.21. But of course, because we're KDE, you can turn it off as well. But the gist of what's going on here is that we have refactored the way Plasma starts itself and starts its components and starts apps to make use of system D slices and C groups and units. So now everything happens in a predictable order. Things can be parallelized without them running into each other.

This means that startup times will be improved. This means that we have things that are scoped properly. So when you log out of your session, everything quits rather than having dangling processes. It means that we're able to group an app's individual child processes into that app itself. This is especially relevant for apps in Flatpaks and Electron apps. Like if you run Discord or something and you look at the process tree, it has like 10 processes. So it's sort of hard to tell what it's actually doing. And when you now, with this new feature activated, when you launch Discord using Plasma, it will be scoped in its own C group. So all of its child processes will be able to be associated with the parent. And we can now have an applications view

that says, hey, here's Discord. And it combines together all of the different resource usages of the child processes. That is so cool. I know, isn't it great? It's super cool. This leads me to another really cool thing, which is the new system monitoring app. This is something that we have released as a standalone app, and it's going to be, I believe, included in Plasma 521 by default. But we basically rewrote KSysGuard, which is our old system monitoring app. And the new one is now fully C-group and slice-aware.

So it has that nice applications page. It has beautiful, pretty graphs that use a new hardware accelerated graphing framework that we wrote that now is used for other things. And it's 100% customizable too. So this actually reminds me of what you said before about Plasma being like a power tool used by pros. And I'm glad you mentioned that because this is like my personal idea of what Plasma should be. This is like a productivity tool for people who use their computers to make a living.

And we designed the system monitoring app so that it's super customizable. If you monitor like a fleet of machines or if you monitor specific aspects of your system, you can actually customize the pages on this new system monitoring app in a 100% granular way to make it show exactly what you want. And because it uses this fancy charting framework, not only is it customizable and powerful, it's also really pretty too. So that's a pretty nice improvement. That's great.

Oh, yeah. Wow. So that's probably one of my favorite things to see is that those kinds of tools are still getting investment, that they're not just sitting around and just, you know, oh, good enough. I really could have seen that argument made for something like KSysGuard.

Oh, it's good enough. If somebody wants something more, they'll go use something on the command line. One of those annoying top things we keep recommending. Yeah, I don't believe in good enough, personally. I think everything can always be improved. So where does 2021 take us? It doesn't sound like anything too radical is planned,

but more just continued investments. Yeah, so a lot of what I've told you is stuff that users don't have yet, because it's just been merged into Gitmaster, and it's planned for Plasma 5.21. And that's going to be released in a few months in the early part of 2021. So to a large extent, getting this stuff to users is what's in 2021. Personally, there are two things that I am really looking forward to for 2021. One is the remainder of our visual overhaul, which I, believe it or not, didn't even start to talk about. But we have, throughout 2020, been landing all kinds of visual overhauls of other things, too. Not just the system tray, but we've been doing Plasma.

Our Breeze theme for apps, technically speaking, lives in Plasma. It's in a Plasma-aligned release cycle product. So that's been happening there as well. And I think we're going to continue to do this and really make people think that KDE apps look amazing in 2021. One of the remaining complaints that I feel like I kept hearing about people would say, oh, it's lightweight now, and it's really powerful, but KDE apps are really ugly. So we hear that, and we're working on it very quickly to improve the look of KDE apps. You'll see that in 5.21 and Plasma 5.22 as well. Another thing that I think we're going to see in a big way in the year 2021 is more Wayland stuff. 2020 was a huge year for our Wayland session. We got tons and tons of stuff. We got screencasting, we got shared clipboard support, we got middle click paste support, we got multi GPU output support, screen rotation, task manager window thumbnails, the global menu now works on Wayland. We got high DPI screenshots with Spectacle. We have the virtual keyboard working for GTK apps. And we have configurable mouse and touchpad scroll speed on Wayland, which is also a thing that you don't have on X11. So it was huge. It was gigantic.

In 2019, Wayland was like a buggy mess. Our Wayland session, I just couldn't use it. It felt like a construction zone. Whereas today, in the end of 2020, I can almost use the Plasma Wayland session for And I feel like in 2021, we're probably going to see people start using it by default. Fedora, for example, in Fedora 34, they're planning on using the Plasma Wayland session by default. They're shipping it to users and turning it on by default. So you have to opt into X11. That's how much they think it's come. And you know, Fedora, they're very technology first forward people. They really like being on the bleeding

edge, but like, they think it's ready. So that is, I think, a good vote of confidence. And I think we're really going to see Wayland become totally mainstream in Plasma in 2021. Wow. Well, you know, I have been testing it on Fedora Plasma on my X1 Carbon, and it works really well for me unless I start using an external display, and then it gets a little wonky when I have both screens going. But otherwise, I can pretty much use it all day long. And I feel like it seems a little bit smoother to me. Yeah, it should be. So I like it. I am really looking forward to 2021. Like Jitty in the chat room said,

that it's just kind of a no-brainer these days to use Plasma. Oh, I'm happy to hear that. Personally, I feel the same way. That's the way I want everybody to see it. I think you shouldn't have to compromise to use our stuff. It should be lightweight. It should have lots of features. It should be stable without a lot of bugs.

And it should be beautiful. That's my goal. And powerful. And, you know, I really feel like it's gotten there. You really could set it up and just, you know, pretty much any distribution set by default and use it that way. Or you could spend, like I spend about a day slowly going through and just setting something, using it a little bit like that, and then adjusting it. And after about that day, I never touch it again. And it just stays that way forever. Awesome.

It's great. I'm curious, what adjustments do you make to your Plasma? It kind of depends. I, for some reason, didn't totally like the new taskbar and all of that, and I ended up trying LatteDoc and putting it in the plasma mode, so it's still more like a bar, and I just kind of have liked that a little bit better. Although, on some of my plasma setups, the majority of them, I just have a standard taskbar at the bottom, you know, Kubuntu style, and have just left it like that on the work machines. And it's been fine. But for some reason on the laptop

I like to play around a little bit. And so I went for kind of a smaller dock down there. It doesn't go all the way edge to edge. It's more in the middle of the screen, but it doesn't do all the fancy magnification stuff. It looks like a plasma panel. You wouldn't even know it's LatteDock. Yeah, it integrates really well.

I know a lot of people love LatteDoc. I've liked it, yeah. I may try going back sometime, but it's worked pretty well for me. And then, of course, I try different dark themes these days. I try out a couple different ones. I really like how things now work with the global theme

to just change it there instead of having to go to each individual colors and icons and application appearances, window frame appearances, just set in the global theme now. Yeah, that's great. That's our intention. As a fan of that, I actually have to mention in Plasma 521, we're shipping a new global theme called Breeze Twilight, which has a dark color scheme for Plasma and a light color scheme for apps. Oh, interesting. That's great.

Well, Nate, I could go on all day, but we have some tuxes to get to you. I really appreciate you coming on, and I also really, really appreciate and thank you for all the hard work you do documenting all of these improvements. We will have a link, of course, to your This Week in KDE posts.

Is that the title? Is that the official title? Yeah, it used to be Usability and Productivity back when that was a thing, but now it's This Week in KDE. Yeah, and you know what? It's not always just Plasma. There's sometimes other things in the KDE ecosystem in there as well. And I want to stress that this is my view of the project. KDE is so vast.

We have like hundreds of apps, so I can only follow a small percentage of things. So there's always much more stuff going on than what I can document. But, you know, it's like Plasma plus what I consider to be sort of the core apps that most people are going to experience. Also, we should say happy birthday. I think Kate just hit 20 years old. It did. So happy birthday to Kate. I just reinstalled it. You can almost drink in the USA.

That's right. The chat room is joking that the Katie Christmas party is spelled with a K. That tickles me. Alright, Nate, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you for having me. It was great. Yep. Keep up the great work and happy holidays. Thanks a lot. You too. Alright, Wes. Well, I'll let you update your Plasma desktop

over there while I take a moment and take a break here and say thank you to Linode at linode.com slash unplugged. Go there to get a $100 60-day credit towards your new account. Try spinning up a server on their cloud infrastructure. They make it really simple to get a Linux server up in the cloud in seconds, and they have 11 data centers around the world. They also have features like object storage and node balancers and a dashboard to manage all of this, an API that makes it possible

to do it all from the command line, which is actually how I do it. It's not as nerdy as it sounds. It's pretty easy and straightforward. But they also have, well, brilliant support. Mr. S writes into the show and he says, I was introduced to Linode based on your mentions on the show. I am not yet a paying customer of Linode, so I'm having a somewhat particularly interesting challenge with an NGO I am volunteering for. I contacted Linode support. Now, mind you, this was after I contacted several major cloud providers,

some of which who I'm a paying customer, some who completely ignored me, others just simply brushed me off. But Linode was the complete opposite. Even after understanding that I'm not a paying customer, and, you know, to be honest, my particular problem won't generate any revenue for them, they went above and beyond to try to assist me, coming up with a resolution for the sole purpose of doing good. Their support team was just brilliant, Mr. S says.

He goes on to say they were responsive, kind, to the point, and above all, with a genuine will to assist and resolve problems. I'm dealing with a major cloud service and their support teams on a daily basis, and Linode's support team, based on my experience, really stands above and beyond. Kind regards, Mr. S. And I remember when I had that feeling, too, when it was like, wow, you stuck with this problem when you didn't have to. And it really feels good when somebody goes above and beyond.

And that's what Linode's support team does. And Mr. S, he felt so impacted by it, he bothered to write in. I mean, think about that. When have you, you know, he had to take a minute to actually write that email to us to share that experience. That's how much it hit him.

And that's Linode. I mean, that's one of the reasons I love them is they're independent. I get why they do this. They do this for a love of Linux. That's why they've sponsored sponsored projects like Kubuntu. That's why they sponsor this here podcast and other Linux creators out there, because they want to make it possible for independent content to give media about this away for free. That's part of what they're doing here. And it's just, it's a great company all around. Plus, you get that $100 credit when you go to linode.com slash unplugged. Go there and get yourself a special something.

Linode.com slash unplugged. And a big thanks to Linode for sponsoring the Unplugged program. All right. So I surprised Wes the other day. Are you ready for this, Mr. Payne? Oh, you sure did. And this was a lot of fun.

So we were sitting in here just a day or two or three or eight ago, and we were doing one of the things we do, podcast, and I had a moment to surprise Wes. So I turned the mics on, and I kind of didn't really tell Wes what was going on. I just was like, come on, sit down. Let's open up the Linux Unplugged profile. And he's kind of looking around.

He's thinking to himself, do I need to prepare? Just kind of going along, which was great because it worked out perfect for a special Secret Santa surprise we had for Mr. Westpain. You know what I love about you, Wes, is that we have been going at this all day. And I've told you all day long I wanted to record a Linux Unplugged segment, but you haven't actually really even bothered asking me until just

now what we're actually talking about. I figured you'd tell me when you were ready. I am, but I forgot my the box. So hold on, you stay right there. You don't move, I'll get the box. It's my treat, Wes, you're fine. You stay comfortable. I am comfortable.

Behind the red curtain. I didn't realize you got this indoor jacuzzi, but I don't know why you put it on. You hold it for me. Oh, it's heavy. There you go, because guess what, Wes? It is a surprise secret Santa for Wes Payne. What? That's right.

It's a Christmas miracle. It's a Christmas miracle. It's a Christmas miracle. An unplugged miracle right here on the show. So go ahead and unwrap your box and tell us what it is. Well, first of all, it's some lovely wrapping paper. Yeah, I think that might be Hadiyah's finest, actually. Yeah.

You got the wife's finest right there. You don't have to save it. You can rip into it. It's fine. I like that. I like that. So Wes has been a huge, huge help in the transition to Jupiter Broadcasting going independent. And I thought to myself, what can I get Wes for Christmas that would convey our appreciation for how damn hard he's worked for us? And you know, I thought about it, and I thought, pretty much nothing, because I can't afford to do anything.

So I thought, okay, well, what I need here. Here, I got you a knife. Oh, thank you, planned ahead. I was like, because, you know, I'd like to get him something, you know, something to reflect the appreciation. I think the audience can tell you work really hard for us, and I'm sure they'd like to see you get something. So I started thinking, well, since I can't afford anything, what I need is a Secret Santa.

So I emailed our friends over at Synology, and I said, would you like to play Secret Santa for Wes Payne? What? So what you got here, and I think I know which one it is, but I'm not actually sure, because they just sent this to us. This is a Synology for you forever. It's not a review unit. It's keeps just for you. For keeps. And this is definitely one I would get myself.

I can tell you that. Oh, it's got a handle and look at this. All right. What's the model on the box? This is the DS920+. Yeah. Okay. This is the one with a little bit more memory so you can run some services on it.

Scalableness for demanding environments. Hey, that sounds like me. Yeah. Yeah, the DS920 Plus has a SSD cache, but also one of the things that we were talking about is, you know,

with this guy, it's got four-core processor. You can put some serious applications on this thing. Yeah, ASNI support expandable storage in RAM and, hey, two NICs on board. Awesome. Also supports running virtual machines. What? Yeah, so you can run some

VMs on it. Because I know, you know, you haven't really decided on what you're going to do for your home setup since you got in your new place. And I thought, that's true. This simplifies things significantly. And, you know, I'm a self-hosting kind of guy, so this just seemed... You were worried about my cloud usage. Yeah, yeah. Well, Angelus had a Synology for like seven years, and it has run flawlessly. So I thought, you know, it'd be just enough where you could mess with it, but also if you get busy with the day job, you're not going to have to worry about it.

It'll just sit there and run forever. You know, so it's best of both worlds. Well, this is amazing. Thank you. And thank you, Synology.'s best of both worlds. Well, this is amazing. Isn't it great? Thank you. And thank you, Synology. Yeah, thanks. It was really cool.

You know, it was one of those things that just worked out perfectly. So there you go, Wes. Merry Christmas and enjoy your new disc station. It's a Christmas project. What more could I ask for? Yeah, you know what else is, now when you get it going and stuff, you come back, you have to tell us how it works. Deal.

An unplugged Christmas miracle. Ho, ho come back, you have to tell us how it works. Deal. An unplugged Christmas miracle! Ho, ho, ho, ho! So it was the DS920 Plus, and I think they also put a couple of discs in there too, right? Oh, they did. Thank you, Synology. They put two 6TB Seagate Ironwolf drives in there. That'll get you off to a good start. Yeah, right?

You know what I love about this DS920 Plus? You know what I love about it? Mm-hmm. It uses ButterFS. And they're not shy about it. Actually, they've got a whole page on their website talking about the benefits of ButterFS and how it helps make a robust product for you, which that's pretty neat. So this thing's got four gigs of RAM,

expandable up to eight gigs. It's got two gigabit NICs on it. It's got an eSATA port. It has two USB 3.0 ports. I mean, this could probably last you a little while is what I was thinking, you know? Yeah, that's what's nice. Like it came with four gigs of RAM, but that's expandable up to eight. It came with two drives, but there's four slots in there. And I think you can go up to like nine drives if you buy the Synology expansion unit, which I probably won't even need that much because, you know, drives just keep getting bigger and bigger. And it's got a pretty nifty little 10-watt Intel Celeron processor in there, which is actually kind of similar to the processor

I've got in my Linux-powered router at home. So it fits neatly into the family. That's cool. What's the setup process like? Because you're not like hooking a screen up to this than a keyboard, right? No, no. You know, unboxed at night, nicely packaged in there. The disks were actually already in the unit, so I didn't have to do anything there. Disked in there, locked up tight, ready to go. So pretty much just found a spot for it, attached the power, plugged it in. It's got two NICs, which is awesome.

And then by default, before you've got it configured or anything, they've got a nice little quick connect service online, as well as a few other things like find.synology.com. And when you first boot it up, the firmware that it starts with goes and talks to their servers and sort of advertises like, hey, you've got an unconfigured Synology here. So all you have to do is go to find.synology.com.

It does a little magic behind the scenes to locate where on your local network, like what's the new local IP. So you don't have to go browse to your router or do ARP scans or just ping around the network to try to find where this new box is. And then it pulls it up right for you, prompts you to upgrade, install,

and then gives you a little screen to set up your first admin user and start configuring things. And it was just super painless. I mean, I have the know-how to find things on my network or go through whatever technical setup that I need, but just none of that was necessary, all in the web browser.

Could you do it over SSH if you wanted, though? I don't know if you can do the setup over SSH, but once you've got it up and running, turning on Telnet or SSH is super simple. It doesn't feel like they're trying to hide any of the Linux underpinnings. You know, it's not like a, yes, it is a black box in some sense, but it just doesn't feel that way

with all the applications that are available, with all the features that are available. Really what stood out to me was that this is clearly a robust and well-developed platform. Yeah, I would imagine, because like I mentioned, Angela's had one now for, I mean, it's got to be nearly eight years, actually. And I logged into it around Thanksgiving and did an update and everything just worked. I told her, I said, you know, there's got to be almost a zero chance that this thing isn't going to break because nobody's touched that thing in years. It went way too long and it just did it like a champ.

How's the noise level on yours? Not bad so far. I mean, my apartment's not the quietest to be clear, but they've got actual configuration for that. So if you don't mind a little more heat on your device, maybe that affects the length of life. Hard to say, but it's all configurable in settings. So you can set like full fans on all the time. You can set it to a slightly louder adaptive fan mode or maximize quiet mode.

You can also, which is nice. So after the first night I plugged it in, going to bed, I realized, like, oh, where have I got my router? I just put it in the area I've got, like, my router and my Wi-Fi and, you know, all the networking stuff, all the infrastructure, you might say.

And I can almost see that bright blue LED when I'm laying in bed. I was like, okay, well, maybe I'm going to have to rethink this. But that was before I discovered you can totally configure that in the UI, no problem, from very dim to very bright or just all the way off, which is just another little sign, I think, of like they've been through this before.

They've iterated on these platforms, and they've figured out a lot of what you might need. Huh. That's nice you can just turn it off even. That's pretty cool. The other part that impressed me was that, so they've got a quick connect technology where if you have like a Synology account, they'll run a proxy for you. You can log in there and then, you know, discover your Synology, go talk to it without having to actually forward ports on your network.

You know, kind of common these days, but a nice service to have if you just don't want to expose your home network or don't have that technical know-how. But if you don't want that, they've also got automation in place to talk to all kinds of different router brands and firmware. So first it checks to see if you've got UPnP enabled,

and it'll try to forward ports that way if you don't do the quick connect thing. But if you don't do that, you can choose your router brand, and then it's going to go like, you give it your credentials, it logs in and basically goes through the web UI or APIs if they have them and sets up its port forwards. And then if that doesn't work, they've got online documentation with a whole bunch of router information for various brands about how to do it too.

So it's kind of neat that they've got robust security support and upgrades and monitoring situations, SNMP support, for instance, if you're running this in a business environment. And they've got helpers for your mom or dad who needs help getting it exposed so they can go see it when they're visiting you. You know, I kind of was chuckling when you were talking about it,

because I'm like, oh, I wonder how it handled your custom Linux router. But then I was thinking, but also being able to do that means that my mom could buy one of these and she could stop paying for cloud storage and she could have it right there in her house because she works with large graphics files. And it's a constant challenge for her. But I also, while I could go over and set it up, I really would like getting her something that she could just do herself. I think she'd feel more empowered by that too.

How did it handle? So with your setup, you just open up any ports you want or choose not to. I mean, you don't probably even need to bother with that, I would imagine. Yeah, I mean, it kind of depends on how you do, you know, your setup. Some folks just have a VPN and then VPN back to their house, or you can forward things. So far, I've not forwarded it because I don't know that I need to. I've got a couple other gateways on my router box.

So for right now, it just lives totally on my LAN. But I think I will try the quick connect stuff just to give it a go. I could also see in the future where maybe some of those applications and services move over to the Synology, like it becomes the VPN host. And maybe that's when you'd change some of the firewall rules. Yes. That's also pretty neat because it's got both support for virtualization and running Docker. So I loaded up a Fedora 33 box on there to give that a shot, and it just pops open a VNC window right in your web browser too. So it was really easy to get that configured.

And then on the Docker side of things, I got Jellyfin going. I loaded up a couple of media files to test things out, and it worked no problem. I mean, the CPU in there is not like a beast or anything, but it has a nice balance of power usage to performance, and it was totally fine for just me playing back on my local network. I don't think it was enabled. It didn't have the configuration, but that model even has QuickSync. No way.

Yeah, right? Oh, man, we were just talking about that on self-hosted, and that's a big game changer, not just in terms of CPU overhead, but a lot less power usage, too, by the CPU when you're using QuickSync. I'm legit jealous. That's awesome. I'm really glad. I'm glad. It sounds like a really nice rig. So what you should do is use it for a little while,

and then we should do long-term reviews, because I want to try to do a long-term review with the X1, and I'd love to hear a long-term review for your Synology. Yeah, definitely. You know, I've actually got a few more spare drives around, so this was really just a test setup, sort of evaluate things, put it through its paces before I committed to, you know, a particular setup.

Because they've got a lot of different sort of like integrated volume and storage pool options even before you choose if you're going to use ButterFS or EXT4. So I'm going to play with that a little bit more, maybe install two more drives just to fill the thing out, and then, yeah, I'm going to move over from my previous solution, which definitely needed an upgrade.

So thank you, Chris, and thank you, Synology. All right, it is time for the Tuxes. Ladies and gentlemen, the first annual Linux Unplugged Tuxes. Our audience voted on the best open source newcomers, projects of the year, text editors, and more. And it's our chance, after a real ball buster of a year, to say thank you. The Unplugged Tuxes 2020. We had a total of 221 submissions, which I love that number because having done, you know, some submission challenges before, that's a decent turnout. So you can get a kind of somewhat representative sampling. But I hope that we will crush it next year.

I hope we get like 800 submissions next year. And I want to, I'd like, you know, every year I'd like us to double the number because I really would love this to eventually be representative. But we put out a form for a few weeks and we said, tell us who you think is the best in these categories. And the results have been tabulated and we're going to run through the categories and then their winners. And of course, your hosts do reserve the right to challenge a result. Of course, your hosts do reserve the right to challenge a result, but we will have to make our case in a court of a public opinion. And to Drew, who is here to play arbiter. Hello, Drew.

Welcome back. And so if we want to challenge one of the results, we have to make our case, and then the other hosts have to buy off on it. But here are the categories for 2020, ladies and gentlemen. Number one, the best open source project. Number two, best newcomer project. Number three, best Linux game of the year. Number four, best text editor of 2020. Number five, favorite desktop distro of 2020.

Number six, favorite server distro of 2020. Number six, favorite server distro of 2020. Number seven, best desktop environment of 2020. And these are all of 2020. Then we'll just do a general best of tech. And then we ask you all what your most life-changing hardware or gadget was this year. We've tabulated the results. And we'll go through them and let you know what everyone voted. So we'll start with, why don't we start with the best text editor, because I think that's a good place to start.

Get the divisive one right out of the way. Yeah, we just got to, that's the elephant in the room. And this is the one I think maybe we even want to contest right off the beginning, but with 53 entries out of 208 answers for this category. 25%, thus the winner, went to Vim. Vim! And there was a couple of runner-ups in this category. VS Code came in at number two.

Emacs at number three. VS Code beat Emacs. And if you include the VS Codium votes, VS Code handily beat Emacs. And if you include the VS Codium votes, VS Code handily beat Emacs. 26 submissions for Emacs, 29 for just VS Code alone, but then there were additional five submissions for VS Codium. Kate's in the list. But Wes, what do you think here? Do you think Vim actually maybe performed better than the numbers suggest? Well, yeah, I mean, there's also NeoVim in there and some entries for VI,

so I think its lead would be even stronger if we had done a little more assertive tallying, you know? I did do a little cleanup here to try to make things fit into nice categories where there were some, you know, a lot of fun comments that people wrote in, which was awesome. Like, one of my favorites for this entry is we got one vote for LibreOfficeWriter.

We got some votes for Sublime Text and Kate and Micro and G-Edit and Mousepad. And K-Write didn't get much, only 0.95% of the vote for K-Write, which I've been using recently. Vim, though, I feel like it handily wins. I was going to try to make the case for VS Code, but even when you combine the VS Code with the VS Codium, I think Vim still won pretty strong by the audience. I mean, it's a pretty strong lead there. I don't really think I'm going to challenge this one. I feel like VIM is a little boring. So there is a trick in place to solve this problem,

and it'll be employed if VIM ever wins again. And then they just get, if they win two shows in a row, they'll get the Hall of Fame award, and they are disqualified from winning a future show. But we could give it to VIM this year, but that means if they win it next year, then they win the Lifetime Award and they are disqualified from winning in a future show. But we could give it to Vim this year, but that means if they win it next year, then they win the lifetime award and they're out.

Well, I also think that VS Code edging out Emacs, that's something to watch, right? One, that's a good idea because we should mix things up, keep it interesting. But then two, I think on its own, probably next year VS Code's going to be doing better against Vim, not worse.

Also, what's up to my nano brothers and sisters out there? Solid representation from the nano community. I mean, could have used a few more of you. Alright, I'm not going to challenge this one. We will award the first Tuxy of 2020 for Best Text Editor to Vim.

Congratulations to Vim. Congratulations to Vim. You've earned it. Now, our plan here is, of course, I still got to get my crap together and I could use some help if anybody could help me figure out how to take a two-dimensional graphic, a flat graphic,

and convert that into a 3D printable object. Somebody's actually done it before, but I want to take the last bearded penguin and I want to take the ring around him that we have where he's holding the rocket and the ring around it i wanted to say 2020 tuxes and i want to print that and send that out to the award winners so that's a you know it's a bit of an effort so i need to figure out how to do that alex has volunteered to do the printing though which is awesome and then we are we're starting we'll just have to start tracking down the projects and figure out

where to send this and vim you're going to be one of the first. Now, we get into the more interesting category. This one, I think, is, I don't know, this one's going to be challenged, I think. This is the best open source project in 2020. And with 7% of the votes, wow, this is really spread out. votes wow this is really spread out but with 15 out of 217 submissions for this category the winner for the community is the linux kernel i like to stretch it out a little bit the linux kernel and the reason why i'm a little hesitant with this one is it feels kind of uh boring in a way uh but i actually think maybe it's appropriate at the same time that for our first

Tuxes, it maybe goes to the Linux kernel. You know? Debian was a runner-up here, but then after that, things got a little more interesting. Things like NextCloud and Firefox were also high up on the list. Yeah, I'm disappointed

that it wasn't Home Assistant. I have to be honest with you. I think Home Assistant is just not a... It's just people don't appreciate how awesome it is, man. But really, you know, we can talk about text editors and stuff, but Home Assistant has changed my life. It's made my quality of life better. But my particular living situation, heating can be challenging. And having an automation system that has managed that has made this winter and last winter more comfortable than I've ever been in Lady Jupes. And then I combine that with a bunch of smart lighting that makes it much nicer and cozier and tolerable when it gets dark out at 3.55 p.m. in the Pacific Northwest.

I have a bunch of lighting that comes on automatically that tracks the sunset and sunrise, so it's always adjusting with the sunlight of the time of year. It monitors the weather for me, and it brings together so many aspects of automation, even security aspects, that when you start to use a project like Home Assistant, it actually changes your day-to-day life,

and it changes how my family interacts with my home and how they interact with technology and what their perceptions of what it's capable of. And it has bridged all of these commercial cloud-connected products all together in one local LAN-based system that has a nice, easy-to-use dashboard. It's very family-t tolerable. But I understand that it even spent a good portion as the number one project on GitHub in 2020. That's why I really

thought maybe it had a shot at the best open source project. So that's why I'm a little, I'm tempted to challenge this one. But when you stack that up to the impact of the Linux kernel, I don't think I can argue that. You know, they clearly are, they've had a little more impact than a single open source project, regardless of the personal impact it's had on me. Yeah, you are in a particularly automatable setup, I think, right? I mean, you have some different needs, you have a very changing environment, you have a custom setup. But having watched Home Assistant rise the past few years, I mean, I remember we did a comparison with OpenHAB and a couple other stuff here on LUP in, I don't know, 2017 maybe.

And back then it was kind of like, well, what's, you know, there's a couple of solutions out here in the market. They're all pretty decent, but don't, you know, not everyone supports everything. And that's just totally changed. I mean, Home Assistant is king now. Also, the Home Assistant project has come across what may be a uniquely great sustainable profit model for an open source project. So Home Assistant is all land-based. But if you would like, for like less than $10 a month, I think it's like $8 a month, you can subscribe to Nebuchadnezzar's Home Assistant

cloud service. And that gives you secure remote access through their proxy system to your Home Assistant instance. And it works even with some crazy double carrier grade NAT system like I have. And it also allows for easy tie-in with the smart cylinders if you want. You can also custom build this stuff. So you don't have to use the cloud service. If you're comfortable with setting up your own cloud service yourself and you want to manage all of it and you want to manually connect to the different APIs, you can do all of this yourself. But they give you just a couple of checkboxes for like $8 a month that does all of this stuff. checkboxes for like eight bucks a month that does all of this stuff.

And on top of that, they give you a kind of like this peace of mind because you can now check in on like your system itself, the health of your system remotely, which is great. I can, you know, so anyways, that then goes into funding the developers. So now they've hired eight full-time people at Nebuchadnezzar who are contributing back to Home Assistant with the sole purpose of making Home Assistant better so that way they can pick up a few more subscribers and it just kind of is a really nice sustainable development model

where you're not the product, but they also have found a way to give something away that's extremely intricate and a lot of work. It's an intense amount of work. They've figured out a way to give that away for free, absolutely free, while also funding the people who love to work on it and give them full-time work that keeps the project going. And I just think that's something really special. And the way they've grown over 2020 is extremely – it's just – it's an open store. It's an open source success story. They've had a groundswell of support from people out in the whole world that are developing these integrations.

The core team has come together under some pretty clear and I'd say concise leadership. They've had a couple of missteps here and there with community communication, but then they listened to the feedback in both instances and righted the ship in a significant way that actually made a difference and addressed the complaints the community was making. And they pulled that off. And it's just, it's such an open source success story. But when people don't try it, even if you have a simple home automation system, you maybe have one or two smart plugs or light bulb. So maybe you don't try it, you don't get to see it. And I understand that's why it isn't represented here in the votes. But as someone who has watched

open source projects and developments for a long time, it's just so, it's so great to see something like that happening in 2020. And it frees me from proprietary lockdown cloud services. And it lets me, it lets me have a higher quality of standard of living in my home. It's that kind of project, right? But again, all that said, I can't argue that the Linux kernel has been more impactful in this year. It's just the math of it. So I don't think I can overrule it, but I wonder, Drew and Wes, you guys feel free,

but do you think, what about an honorary best open source project of the year? Well, I think it can absolutely get something like the Chris Pick of the year. Okay. But considering that it's tied for sixth, I have a hard time saying, you know, this particular project needs a special award from the whole group when there are so many other projects that are above it that really are hugely impactful too. I mean, we're not just talking about the Linux kernel, which obviously is hugely impactful to all of our day-to-day lives. There's also Debian and Nextcloud, both of which are huge and, you know, touch a lot of people. And then there's, you know, and, you know, touch a lot of people. And then there's, you know, Firefox and KDE, and then Home Assistant is tied with Fedora. So all of these are huge projects that really have

massive contributions to our world. So I'd say make a new category for a Chris pick, but, you know, respect the will of the voters. It's down there, isn't it? It's down in the votes. It's just, there's just, but respect the will of the voters. It's down there, isn't it? It's down in the votes. It's just, there's just, that's the math of it. I'll just give it, you know, I'll just say unofficial appreciation to the project. I think you guys can tell why I appreciate it. You're right.

You're right. It is what it is. But how does this not happen next year? Linux kernel wins again next year could be a problem. Well, didn't you make the rule for this already? You know, if they win again, then if it went again,

lifetime achievement award, it almost seems like they should just get one, but no, we'll see. We'll see. You never know. 2021 could be crazy. So I'll just say this.

Thank you to home assistant. You are my arbitrary appreciation pick of the show. And you get a little love explosion right there. Okay, let's step into a territory that until just a couple of weeks ago was not very controversial at all, but thanks to recent changes with CentOS, and people are still adjusting as we record this, the favorite server distro of 2020 results might be a little more interesting than we were expecting. And we had not as many people submit this category, but we got 208 submissions here.

And we had a winner, a pretty clear signal on this one. The community voted with 40% of the vote to give it to Ubuntu. Yeah. to Ubuntu. Yeah. Ubuntu got it with 84 votes out of 208, followed by Debian in second place and CentOS in third place, Fedora in fourth,

Red Hat Enterprise 9 in fifth, and there's OpenSUSE just above Arch at sixth place with six votes. You know what's interesting about this, Wes, is doesn't this kind of track close to what the actual web server market share stats are that we looked up? Yeah, it kind of seems like it, right? I mean, Ubuntu's way up there at the top, and probably rightfully so. It's just a trusted server platform these days with a lot of niceties,

all the software you could want, and a good track record. Oh, the orange one says that an honorary mention should go to Alpine for being pretty much all of the Docker containers out there that are getting used. That's a good one. Good point, orange one. I actually am a little surprised Ubuntu is this far ahead in our crowd. I actually don't doubt the numbers at all, but I think it shows you this is reflective of what the audience is out there running. Manjaro came in at two.

Now, remember, this is server. Unraid with one boat. Void Linux is on there. I don't think, oh, yeah, Alpine did get two votes. So Alpine did get some representation. Although that was the same number as the folks who decided to still answer, but write in, I don't have any servers.

Yeah, right. That's fair enough. Fair enough. So are you guys okay with officially giving that one to Ubuntu? I don't see any reason not to. I mean, the people have spoken. I think it makes perfect sense, yeah. They've worked hard on that LTS. And at this point, you don't get fired for choosing Ubuntu.

All right. Then Ubuntu gets our official 2020 taxi as the server distro of the year, which means we move on now to the desktop. So favorite desktop distribution, not desktop environment, but desktop distribution. This one got a 19% winning vote. There's 219 submissions for this category. percent winning vote.

There's 219 submissions for this category. And the winner for the favorite desktop distro of 2020 is Fedora! With 43 out of 219 votes. How about that? Ubuntu wins the server but doesn't win the desktop this year. Isn't that interesting?

Fedora gets 43 votes and Ubuntu gets 29 votes. Manjaro coming in at a solid third with 25, and Arch right after that, followed by PopOS and then KDE Neon. Yeah, after PopOS. I mean, there's kind of a close little running for the second, third category this year. It's interesting. Amex and OpenSUSE and Solus and Mint all kind of fighting for the same territory.

Zubuntu, Kubuntu, and Budungie, and Monte, et cetera, all of those, we put those down as like, not Ubuntu the primary, but one of the derivatives of Ubuntu got nine boats. So if you added the nine boats for all of the Ubuntu derivatives, Ubuntu looks a little bit better, but Fedora actually still wins, even when you add in all of the derivatives

to the results for Ubuntu. It's a stronger second place, but Fedora is still a winner there. So that's a clear vote for Fedora. I can't really think of any reason to challenge that. Honestly, not what I expected. I expected Ubuntu and Fedora to be swapped, that Ubuntu would be in first place and Fedora would be in second place. I'm just a little bit happy because I feel like it validates some of the fawning we've been doing over Fedora lately. Maybe, or maybe we've just pissed off all the Ubuntu users.

That also could be it. Well, Fedora did have a great year. They're shipping on laptops from Lenovo. I mean, they had Fedora 33 release has been stellar. There's a lot to really like in Fedora this year. Yeah, that's true. And Fedora 33 got a lot of recognition for pushing the envelope. And I think you can attribute a lot of that to the switch of ButterFS as the default.

You've got to be pretty happy about these results here, Neil. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, I'm super happy about this. Like, I honestly didn't expect it given, you know, how much, you know, I tend to hear how, you know, Ubuntu is the way of the beast or whatever. But like, holy crap, I just, I'm blown away. I'm blown away. And I feel like maybe some of what I've done over the past year might have helped tilt things in our favor, but I don't know what to say

except for, like, thank you? Well, and I think the switch to ButterFS and the project also, you know, they took a couple of other bold steps like switching to Nano as a default editor in some instances. You know, bold steps, Neil, that made a big change. It's fun, too, to still see all this cool stuff happening in 2020. It's been kind of a weird year.

So to see these shift around, I'm really going to be interested to see if Fedora wins again next year. I wouldn't necessarily bet on it. Well, I'm going to try hard to, you know, within the Fedora community, me and many others, we'll try our best to try to earn the vote for next year as well.

And also keep an eye on Fedora's server. That's coming back, hopefully, in a big way next year. So, hey, Wes, do a little back-of-the-napkin math for me before we fully lock this in, because we haven't locked it in yet. If we took all of the Ubuntu derivatives and we took Pop! OS, does that put Ubuntu ahead? Are we counting

KDE Neo in here? Well, hmm. See, the reason why we separated these out is I actually wanted to get a signal to people like the stock Ubuntu desktop or do they like the derivative desktops? So I actually think this is the vote result that I wanted.

I wanted to know, and it is clear by these numbers, that the stock Ubuntu desktop is the most popular, but on its own, it isn't the most popular in our audience. Yeah, so if you add up all the ones not including some controversial things like KDE Neon or other things that might be vaguely based on Ubuntu, but actual like Ubuntu Mate, Zubuntu, Kubuntu, things like that, it's a four-vote margin, so it's pretty darn close, 43 to 39. But Fedora is still in the lead.

Okay. Yeah, and then if you add in Papa West, it's kind of a smash. And then if you add in KDE Neon on top of that as yet another derivative, Ubuntu is far and away the most. And elementary, if you put elementary in there, which only got three votes in this lineup, but that's still three votes. And yeah, you could, if you combine all of the derivatives, which I think you could argue is fair,

but it's not the signal we wanted from the audience. We wanted to know how many people were using the stock experience. I don't know. What do you think, Drew? What's your judgment on it? Oh, I think it's still Fedora. I think if we wanted to categorize, you know, the base OS, that would be a different category altogether. All right.

So I think we're good then. We're agreed. We're going to lock it in for Fedora as the best desktop distro of 2020, as voted by the audience. It is locked in. So let's wander off into the best tech land, the best tech of 2020, as voted by the Linux Unplugged audience. This one got 155 submissions and the winner with 8% of the vote, which actually isn't a significant number,

but it's enough to make it the winner. It is, ladies and gentlemen, the PinePhone. The PinePhone was voted as best tech of 2020 in our audience. And that outbeat the Raspberry Pi 4 and Home Assistant, which got somebody included in this category. So Home Assistant got a few more votes over in this category. It's well represented across the board, I will say. And Librem 5 is in here too, but only two votes. So the Pine Phone got 13 votes in this category, followed by the Raspberry Pi and then WireGuard. Yeah, I could see that. I could definitely see that. Pinebook Pro got five

votes. Apple's M1 got four votes. Interesting. Interesting. That stood out to me, you know, in multiple categories, including the next one. There were a lot of references to the M1, although an entertaining number also included sorry, I know it's not really Linux. We specifically did not limit the category it did not have to be Linux I just wanted to know so that way we could get a sense of where things fit get a sense.

So what do you think? PinePhone? I mean 13 boats is a pretty clear signal. I think people are excited about, you know, this open hardware, run whatever you want, embrace Linux on the phone potential. Maybe it's not the thing that you're running as your daily driver in 2020, but it's the thing that you have as your second phone that you're playing with and excited about. Now, I do have to bring up one thing here, and that is the Raspberry Pi 4 versus the Raspberry Pi 400 combined those two equal up to 14, which just barely edges out the Pine phone. Yeah, but I feel like because they

are separate products, I think that is okay. Yeah, that's a good one. I don't know, though. Yeah, okay. I feel like probably that's a little bit of cheating, though, because, you know, the Pi 4 came out almost like a year

before the 400, and the 400 isn't exactly the same. It's got a revved CPU and a different board. So they're not really the same product. They're the same platform. Yeah, and I buy that. So they're not really the same product. They're the same platform.

Yeah, and I buy that. Although, that said, how many revisions of the PinePhone have there been? Fair. But remember, we're also looking at 2020 here. And I think the PinePhone has had a, they met their ship windows, they got the devices out into people's hands, and we've seen a lot of open source projects just in 2020 alone spin up development on these things and make it actually getting towards usable.

Yeah, I think I'm with you there. And it's also worth pointing out that it's not just the Pine phone that's on here. Pine 64 in general is all over this list. You've got the Pinebook Pro, Pine64 as a company. You know, there's PineSil. Pine is all over this. People are really excited about Pine this year. True, true.

Good to see OBS is in here. Plasma got in here. I actually really like to see that YouTube DL made it in here as well. Only one submission for best tech for Rust. Podman, that must have been you, Carl. Maybe. That's awesome. Yeah, Plasma got, KDE and Plasma were in here as two separate things.

Yeah, one thing, ZFS stood out in this too. I don't think it made to the top of any of these, but it had a healthy number of votes in several categories this too. I don't think it made to the top of any of these, but it had a healthy number of votes in several categories this year. Yeah, it was nice to see Matrix and Blender and Docker all kind of in the, and NextCloud all kind of in the same region too. All of them getting three votes. So this is obviously a challenging category because it's so broad and the submissions could be kind of variable and, you know, Pine Phone, Pine Space Phone, Pine 64 Phone, like a lot of variability to it.

So that's one of the things we'll refine next year. But this is after taking several passes at trying to account for all of that. And I think the Pine Phone still kind of comes out strong when you look at what has been accomplished, not just by Pine 64, but the community around it too. So I say we lock it in, gentlemen. Pull that trigger. All right, now we move on to the most life-changing hardware

or device or gadget for you this year out there in the audience. This one had 142 submissions, and with 11% of the vote, we have a winner. The Jupiter Broadcasting audience, Linux Unplugged Tuxy nominations go to the Raspberry Pi 4. And there

you go. They just win the next category. The Raspberry Pi 4 has been the most life-changing hardware for 2020 or gadget. See, if this is your vindication, Chris, you know, you didn't get the home assistant thing before, but I think this one speaks to you. That's true.

This has been, this is, I'm really kind of, I'm just as all in on the Raspberry Pis as I was when they first launched. I mean, it's really been great because on the desktop side, Manjaro has been the way I've gone on the desktop. And then same with the Pi 400, Manjaro worked great on there. And on the server side, Manjaro has been the way I've gone on the desktop. And then same with the Pi 400, Manjaro worked great on there. And on the server side, Ubuntu LTS 2004 has been exactly

like running it on an x86 box. And with the USB disk support, so I'm not using SD storage, I can unlock a lot more performance out of a Raspberry Pi 4. and I have gone off-grid many times, running off just lithium-powered batteries, and the power draw matters so much in that circumstance. And I literally sleep well knowing that I just have these Pis, two of them now, that are just sucking just a tiny bit of power. You know, it's not like an x86 machine that's pulling down 120 watts. And it has made it possible

for me to do things like go out and camp in the woods for longer periods of time because they are using less power. And that's awesome. And it allows us to go off grid and still have essentially a full online experience.

I talk about this in self-hosted, but I have a lot of local media and reading and audio and some wiki stuff cached locally on my Raspberry Pis. And we very much have like a near online experience when we go offline, but we're not getting notifications and messages. All of our smart control still works, home assistant running on the Raspberry Pi. All of our smart control still works, home assistant running on

the Raspberry Pi. All of our video streaming still works because the media stored there locally on a ButterFS volume of two USB disks. It actually all works. And this is also where I started to really kind of reevaluate ButterFS again, when I was like looking at the use case of laptop servers and Raspberry Pi servers and no longer these massive chassis with eight disks in them, but now something that's running over maybe a USB bus or even on SD card or some other less than ideal scenario. And I realized there's a real need for a flexible, powerful file system out there in a serious workload capacity. And when I brought ButterFS together with the Raspberry Pi 4 using Ubuntu LTS 2004, when that like trifecta of Linux technology came together, I was able to up my home hosting game to a whole other level. And the

Raspberry Pi has dutifully been running for me 24-7. And I even took them down into Texas, where the ambient temperature outside was 117 degrees, and they're inside a tiny enclosed booth, often never even getting below 100 degrees at night inside the booth. And I brought them back. They're still running. They ran, they, one time, one time I ran into some thermal throttling issues, one time when we were streaming multiple videos from a Pi 4. But now that we're back in the Pacific Northwest, it's a literal non-issue. It really is a solid machine. And then, you know, you look at the price and you look at what you get. It just, it's so awesome that that tech is available to us as consumers. When the world is dominated by $1,000 MacBooks and $10,000 desktops and all these crazy things,

it's really nice to be able to find a computer for $35 that can do so much. And this year they upgraded it to 8 gigs of RAM, too. Really, the Pi is better than ever. You can use it for more things. And this wasn't even, it didn't even need conflation with the Raspberry Pi 400 to win this category because it's just, regardless, it's so darn handy. The Pine phone also got submissions here. So did ThinkPad. System 76 got three votes in this category. Home Assistant got another three votes here as well. I noticed you skipped right over to the Apple Watch, though.

Yeah, so that's the awkward thing about this category. The Apple Watch got seven votes. The Apple Watch is actually our number two life-changing tech of the year. And I think I can understand why. It was a year of work from home and people needed help probably with their fitness more than ever, remembering to stand, tracking what they're doing, tracking their sleep. The Apple Watch is just simply the best wearable computer watch. If you want a computer watch that is modern and well-built and has great battery life, you know, you can find diehards out there that are still rocking all the other kinds of watches.

But the Apple Watch has just taken off this year. So, and really the last couple of years. I don't know. Has it had a particularly great 2020? I mean, it must have. It got a lot of votes. And this is from a Linux audience, right? So, think must have. It got a lot of votes. And this is from a Linux audience, right? So think about that.

So if you're walking around out there listening to this show and you're controlling the playback from your Apple Watch, have no shame. It got second place. It got second place out of a lot of nominations for the most life-changing hardware of 2020. All right. Then we are officially giving it to the Raspberry Pi 4 for 2020 as the most life-changing tech.

The best Linux game of the year. This probably won't be a surprise to anyone that has kids my age or has gotten sucked into the latest game. With 99 submissions, the audience has elected Among Us as the best Linux game of 2020. Ironically, not actually a Linux game. So that's where this category gets interesting, right? I don't know that we gave clear instructions,

because, yeah, this is, you can only play Among Us via Proton, although it is number four on their ratings for 10 most popular over at the ProtonDB. So clearly there are a lot of Linux users who are playing Among Us, and it sounds like it works pretty decently. Yeah, it is rated gold.

So as far as non-Linux native games being played on Linux, it seems like it's pretty well supported at least. Yeah, my son extensively tests it on Linux for me, so that way I can be up to date on the latest Among Us developments. A little junior show researcher over there. And yeah, and I did say Proton was fine. It's really, I think I want to celebrate the fact that we have more game options to us. And I think the great thing about Proton, it's not just Windows compatibility, but it's about preserving art.

As time goes on, the platforms will move on, but Proton and the different releases of Proton will be around. And you'll be able to play games that, you know, you'll be able to preserve games and still actually play them. You won't just have to look at them. So I think Among Us deserves it. You know, it was an extremely popular game. It's on all of the platforms. My kids play it on mobile and on their Linux boxes. And as a parent, I had that moment when they came to me and said,

Dad, can we play Among Us on our computers? And I always dread that conversation of, hey, I know all of your friends are talking about this at school. It's like the biggest thing on YouTube right now for the YouTube algorithm that you get subscribed to. And by the way, you can't play it on your Linux box because Dylan already knows, well, there's Windows 10 and you could put that on the same hardware because it's come up before. And I was just dreading that moment.

And I went on Steam. I saw it was available and I go on the ProtonDB and I look it up and I saw I had gold support. I saw it was available, and I go on the ProtonDB, and I look it up, and I saw it had gold support. I installed it. I had to make, like, I don't know. I think I had to change, like, one launch option or something. It was documented. And it fired right up, and it has worked flawlessly since then. And I felt, I don't know, man.

I just had, like, I don't know, a sense of, like, I'd done right by him. You know, I got him a good computer. It's running Linux, and he can play the latest games that his Windows and iOS-using friends are playing right now. And I think it deserves recognition for that. And same with Cyberpunk. You know, we were able to get that running on Linux, day one, super hyped game,

and it came in at third place. So Nautic, which is an open-source first-person shooter, came in at second place. Super Tux Cart came in at fourth place. And then the list kind of goes off from there to all the great games you've probably ever heard of. Even Skyrim's on there. But I really think it's appropriate

to give it to Among Us this year. Even though it's technically a Proton game, I think the fact that we're getting these games on day one while the hype cycle is at peak, that means a lot for gamers. Yeah, we're all Proton gamers now, right? Yeah, actually, yeah. I mean, I have a little bit of both.

I definitely still prefer Linux native. It's a lot simpler. Ironically, like the one of the few, I've been playing a lot of Proton games and I've been playing one Linux native game and that one is buggier than some of the Proton ones. It's funny how that can go both ways. So the chat room's making the argument, and I'm going to pitch this to Drew to see what you think, Drew.

They're making the argument that we should actually, we should give this award to Proton for best Linux game of the year. Even though it's not technically a game, it has made it possible to play so many new games. You know, it's at the core of this Among Us story. It's at the core of Cyberpunk being available on day It's at the core of cyberpunk being available on day one. It's not technically a game, though.

That's a tough one. I don't know. I mean, I do think that we should definitely be giving Proton a lot of credit here because it is doing a lot of heavy lifting for us. But it's not a game. I don't know. I really want to show my appreciation for it, but it's not a game. I don't know. Like I really want to show my appreciation for it but it just, it's not a game.

Yeah, I mean it could have won the best new tech and it didn't, right? I guess because it wasn't new this year. I guess if you look at 2020 it's been more of it being really awesome and it's great to see continued development but it's not like it's breakout year either. Mm-hmm.

All right. So you think we should give it to Among Us? I think so. Yeah, I do. All right. The best new game for 2020 as awarded by our audience. I'll have to figure out who gets the taxi for that one. That's going to be interesting.

So we have our best newcomer open source project in 2020. And this one had a lot of possibilities. Proton is on this list again. So is Vulcans on this list. Oh, my gosh. There's a lot of submissions on this one. The PinePhone, again, showed up on this list. Things like Rocky Linux and then Project Linux are on here.

Pipewire is on here. I think Rocky Linux could still qualify in 2021, to be honest with you. But eight out of 154 different submissions, 5% of the audience voted for WireGuard. WireGuard. And, you know, that's even up against things like Proton, OBS, Jellyfin, BPYtop. It's a close one, too, because obviously we've been talking about WireGuard for way too long. But it was just this last January that it really made it into the kernel. So I think we have to count it, right?

Yeah, I checked. It sounds like you did, too. It was indeed mainlined in 2020. It seems like it's because we followed it for so 2020. It seems like it's, because we followed it for so long, it seems like it's been around forever. And I use it still nearly on the daily. It's fantastic. I have no qualms about awarding this prize to WireGuard.

And I think I even know how to send them the taxi. What do you think, Drew? Should we give the best newcomer project any objections? No objections here. I do think we should recognize that BPytop getting a close second place is impressive because we've only just discovered it ourselves. True. Also nice to see PopShell getting some recognition in here.

Systemd HomeD got four votes. That's as many as Rocky Linux. OpenZFS got a few. Pipewire got a couple. Yeah, there were some good submissions in that category. All right, this is the one I was kind of getting us to because this is the one I think we've all been waiting for. Let's see how this one goes.

This is, as voted by the unplugged audience the nominations for the best desktop environment of 2020 with 218 submissions 34 percent of those went to gnome shell gnome shell wins with 34% of the vote from the Jupiter Broadcasting audience as best desktop environment of 2020. You know, you're supposed to hide some of your disappointment in your voice, Chris, when you're reading it.

Well, I'm waiting to be convinced, actually. I would have loved to have seen Plasma, as demonstrated earlier in the show, I would have loved to have seen Plasma win this category earlier in the show, I would have loved to have seen Plasma win this category. And they did come in at a solid number two. Interesting to see Sway come in at number three with 12 votes. I3 after that. Then Mate, Cinnamon, XFCE.

Then Budgie, Pantheon, and Awesome, Window Manager. And then from there it goes to LXDE, LXQt, and well, there's actually even an Emacs on there, as you would expect. Only one ex-nomad. Gnome Shell had a good year. They really did. They really, really did.

I have ultimately ended back up on Plasma, but, you know, different strokes, different folks, and you have to acknowledge the extremely hard work that that project has received from multiple parties, and it's shown. The work is shown.

So I could go with this. I don't know. Wes or Drew, do you have a counterargument why we shouldn't give it to Gnome Shell? No, I do think you're right. They've had a big year. The work continues. And probably next year is going to be even more exciting for the Gnome Shell show. I'm excited for it.

And even if that's not what we are using day to day in the studio or on our personal machines, a lot of people are. It's shipping in a ton of major desktops, and it's a backbone of the open source Linux desktop community. Yep. Yeah, I agree. Hey, look, I live in Georgia currently, so I know a little bit something about nail biting elections. But the difference between Gnome Shell and Plasma here, 74 to 68, that's not huge. It absolutely is a nail biter, but Gnome Shell definitely won. Well, definitely one. All right.

Then we give the 2020 Best Desktop Environment Tuxy to Gnome Shell. Congratulations, everybody over there. You've done a really kick-butt job. And this has been a lot of fun. Now the work begins on getting these issued. Thank you, everybody, who took the time to submit and go through this. We'd love to get your ideas on how to refine the process for the future. Also, if you'd like to support this show in future episodes,

please consider becoming a direct member, a core contributor of this here humble podcast. You just get that at unpluggedcore.com, and it helps us stay independent, keeps the ad load down, and also means that you get access to two additional feeds, a limited ad version of the show, same full production, just no ads, or the full live stream. It's even longer than this one with all of our screw-ups,

all the stuff that we talked about before we hit record, and everything we talk about after we hit record. It's basically like a show that never gets released, and now it's available as a feed for our core contributors at unpluggedcore.com but that does wrap up the tuxes for 2020 get ready and start watching projects over the year because we will be asking you again to submit your votes for the winners of 2021 at this time next year thank you very much and that's everything see you next tuesday