LINUX Unplugged - 391: GNOME 40ified

Episode Date: February 3, 2021

We try out GNOME 40 and its new workspace layout. Who we think this works well for, and who might want to avoid it. Plus Wimpy, Ubuntu's Desktop lead, chats with us about his future after Canonical. Special Guests: Carl George and Martin Wimpress.

A really big happy birthday to VLC, the video LAN champion of open source reached 20 years old. Happy birthday! That's really all we have to say. Happy birthday to VLC. The project was released to the world on February 1st, 2001. And I've had that traffic cone on my desktop ever since. Hey, and sometimes it's Christmas and it gets a cute little hat. I do love that. I do love that. So really, we're kind of laughing and joking, but we have a lot of appreciation for good old VLC.

Hello, friends, and welcome into your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Wes. Thanks for bringing in the slow cooker to the studio today. That's going to be delicious. And this episode is brought to you by the all-new A Cloud Guru, the leader in learning for Cloud, Linux, and other modern tech skills.

Hundreds of courses, thousands of hands-on labs. Get certified, get hired, get learning at acloudguru.com. So here we are gathered together today on episode 391. And we have some really interesting big community news that actually impacts our local community as well this week that we're going to get into. And then later in the show, we've spent some time on GNOME Shell 40. And there is a lot to talk about here. And maybe something you should be aware of, especially

if you're a multi-monitor user, we're going to get into that a little bit into the show. We got some pics, we got some feedback, but we really do have some great community news to get through. So I want to start by saying holler over at our virtual log. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello. Hey, guys. Hi.

So last week we recorded early, and we still showed up and hung out live on the stream. And that's up on our PeerTube instance over at jupyter.tube if you want to see that. I don't know. I'm just experimenting. And, you know, people still show up even if we're pre-registered. They don't know. They still show up. So we figured we'll be there.

And we just did a little hangout. It was great. And that's up on jupyter.tube if you'd like to see it. But let's get into changes coming to Ubuntu. And some of them are quite significant. We'll start, though, with the refreshed Ubuntu, and some of them are quite significant. We'll start, though, with the refreshed Ubuntu installer. It's a new installer, and it's looking quite different than what we're familiar with, with the key takeaway being that it's built with Flutter. That is, of course, a project that

Google works on, and Canonical and Google work together to bring Flutter to the Linux desktop as a snap. Wimpy writes on the development discourse that the development process for the new desktop installer is being led by the Canonical design team and the Ubuntu desktop team. Both teams have a wealth of experience navigating the challenges presented when installing a modern operating system. Don't worry, though, the Ubiquiti installer will remain available in the Ubuntu archive for official flavors, remixes, or derivatives to continue using in their images. You don't have to change just right now. Today's timing couldn't be better because in the chat room right now returning to the show is Mr. Martin Wimpress. Hello, Wimpy.

Hello, how are you? Hello. So we have lots to talk about today, but why don't we start with this one? This seems like a big endeavor that the project's starting with, and I would imagine hoping to land before the next LTS. Yeah, that's the plan, to land this in time for 2204, and in fact, land it in time for 2110. For people that like to be on the cutting edge, that's something you can tinker with later in this 2104 cycle. Now, is the intention that essentially main Ubuntu desktop will use this,

and then flavors like Ubuntu Mate will use the traditional Ubiquiti installer? Yeah, I mean, we're not going to force people over to a new installer all at once, but we're definitely going to give them the opportunity to use the new stuff and get involved in that. Okay. So if they want to, they can, but the old one is essentially available. There's been thought to that in the development or there will be anyway to support all these, you know, other users. Indeed. And that initial announcement is not just sort of outlining broadly our intentions, but also, you know, a call for what's your feedback? How do you want to get involved? So if I'm an Ubuntu user, I should expect to see this not in this next release,

but the one in October, the first version of this? Correct. Yeah, we didn't just want to like throw it over the wall, you know, in a release, we wanted the opportunity for the community to get involved in a conversation and make sure that all of that's accounted for early on. What are your thoughts around the selection of Flutter? Well, I mean, it's no secret that we've been working with Google to enable Flutter for the Linux desktop. And we're not doing that for no good reason. You know, we're doing it for several reasons. One is, it's the fastest growing developer community right now. And there's lots of momentum and interesting applications being developed in Flutter. And we want to invite those developers and software vendors to bring their applications to the Linux desktop.

So that's sort of mission one. And mission two is we have a host of interesting projects that we want to work on internally. And they're not just for the desktop but the desktop as well so we wanted to pick something that could you know cover all of those bases yeah it seems like there's a lot of the advantages that and i hate to even associate this word with it but go with it for a second a lot of advantages that you get by using electron but without the downsides it's. It's a native application that is produced. It's built-in support for GTK3,

so it's going to look and act and run like a Linux app. Yeah, I mean, Flutter applications, regardless which platform you're running them on, whether it's a mobile device or Mac OS desktop or Windows desktop, they are highly optimized native applications. So it's not at all like Electron. They are optimized OpenGL, optimized 3D accelerated apps. It's interesting, just some of your comments there,

it almost makes it sound like some of this work is kind of dogfooding, you know, develop more in Flutter from Canonical directly, and that just sort of smooths out the issues for other folks that want to use Flutter on the platform. Yeah, and there are other projects at Canonical that are using Flutter that, you know, you won't have seen yet, but you will do in due course. Ah, very good.

And then do you have any details on this repair function that it looks like the screenshots are showing for the new installer? Well, I don't have any hard details about how it's going to work, but the fact that that icon is presented there is no accident. That seems like I can just, I don't know, the possibilities there seem like they're something that could be developed over time, but like a good one, like that's a great, that's going to be a great option for end users.

Well, you know, if you've used things like Chrome OS, it has a power wash feature, for example, so it will encompass things like that, you know, that you don't have to go back to the very beginning with sticking something on a USB flash drive in order to sort of do a clean install or a fresh install. You can do that from an installed system as well. Am I getting the implication that maybe this is taking advantage of some of the ZFS plumbing that's been happening under the hood? I can't comment on that, but there are a number of technologies that this is going to be leveraging that are being developed elsewhere in the Ubuntu ecosystem.

All right, well, let's change topics. You have a habit you're going to have to break, and it's that we habit, because breaking news. This is CNN breaking news. This is CNN Breaking News. No, don't quite get rid of me just yet. I'll be around for a little bit longer. But yeah, I'm moving on. You will know this. One of the areas of work I've enjoyed most at Canonical is developer advocacy. You've seen that firsthand. You got to join us at the Ubuntu rally in New York in 2017, and then Snapgraph Summit in Seattle the following year, 2018. So you know the sorts of things that Alan and I have been involved in and I've loved that work. So I've been looking to do something where I focus on DevRel, developer advocacy and community building. So I'm moving to an organization called Slim AI, and I'm going to be working exclusively as a developer advocate for them. And I'm really looking forward to it. Congratulations. That's wonderful. That is really good. Yeah,

that's an area of work that, you know, you can drive a lot of passion for and get a lot of return from. So Slim AI is an open source platform that automates the creation of fast and flexible containers for cloud native applications. And they've recently gotten some funding. So it seems like they've gotten some people that think they've got a workable and potentially successful product. Are they in your neck of the woods? Is it remote work? What's the details there? It's a remote position. The whole company is remote, although the core of the company are based in Boston, Massachusetts. Well, I know a lot of us in the community will be sad to see you leave Canonical because I think a lot of us felt really good about having you there in that position at the top of the Ubuntu desktop. But at the same time,

I know that when you are available to interact more with the community, when you are in there as part of the conversation, it has a lot of net benefits that are really also going to be positive. And so part of me is sad to see you go, but part of me is actually really happy for you because I know this is kind of, this is kind of like unleashing you and letting you do what you do best too. And the net benefit of that's also going to be really good. So we all ultimately will win, but I'm ultimately, I'm just happy for you, Wimpy. Congratulations.

Thank you very much. Now, do you know when we would expect to hear who may be stepping into your old position? Do you have any kind of indication of when Canonical traditionally makes those types of announcements? I don't think Canonical ever announced like positions that get filled. It was a bit weird last time because when Will left, he was well-liked and well-known in the community. And I was obviously, you know, also well-known in the community. So there was a little bit of, let's say, a news cycle around that. But we're not in the position of,

you know, announcing when people leave and join the company. Yeah, it's kind of a weird thing, I suppose, in a way, isn't it? It's not something companies generally like to do. Well, thank you for letting us know. And thanks for helping answer

some of those questions around the installer. And, you know, on your run here, you got, I think, one of the best LTSs out under your run. And you'll always have that, regardless of what projects you go on to. You know, like 2004 is a hell of a release. And 2010 is really great, too.

Does that mean we can never update? Dang it. Yeah, from henceforth, they'll be called Wimpy Edition. And we'll run them till the very end. But yeah, well, very good. And I hope that means we'll be hearing more from you. Yes, you most certainly will. This will free up a little bit of time for me. So I'm looking forward to taking up a regular seat on Linux Unplugged again. Fantastic. Let's talk about OnePlus 6 and the OnePlus 6T, which may end up receiving mainline Linux kernel support in the near future.

And you can imagine the long-term benefits that could have. It's been nearly three years since the launch of the OnePlus 6 series, so it's not like it's the latest. But if you still have one or want to pick one up used, it may soon be possible to boot that with good old stock Linux. And that's thanks to the work of an independent developer named Caleb Connolly, who's been working hard to include the OnePlus 6 and 6T

in the mainline Linux kernel. Now, with the OnePlus 6 and 6T being built atop Qualcomm Snapdragon 845, the upstreaming effort shouldn't be too hard, mostly just adding all the appropriate device tree bits for the kernel. And thanks to the existing minimal mainline support for that platform, things like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, 3D acceleration are already working right now, which is great.

Yeah. What's more interesting maybe, though, is that users should be able to dual boot post-market OS and Android on the OnePlus 6 and 6T using the installer that the developer has already created. So you can try it out now. You can start using it. I mean, it's probably not daily driver-ready or anything,

but the results are already promising. It's a solid, I mean, it's not the latest phone, but that's a solid phone. Previously, there had been a build of Windows 10 ARM that they got bootstrapped for the OnePlus 6T by a separate developer, but just nobody really seemed to care. It just didn't get any interest. And so it kind of just whittled away, which I guess that tells you something right there is because when Linux is on there, it's headlines.

When Windows is on there, it's quickly, quickly forgotten. All is as it should be. All right, Mr. Westpain, you know what time it is? It's been weeks since an Arch upgrade, and we have committed to keeping our Arch server up to date here live on the show. And so we figured, enough time had gone by, let's do it again. Probably should have done it weeks ago. But this time, it seems like package creep has snuck in, and there's a lot more packages

than I remember being on the system. 125 packages need upgraded, Wes. How you feeling? Yeah, no kidding. You posted a little screenshot in an internal channel, and Drew was up in there making fun of us for all the weird stuff on our server, and I think rightfully so.

Why do we have the Adobe Source Code Pro fonts on here? It's a server. Why is Wayland on there? How did that happen? Like, how did Wayland get on there, dude? Thankfully, though, it's not too bad. I mean, this is most of the system, and I think, by and large, it's a pretty minimal install list,

which was one of our design goals with this thing. We've got 500 to 600-ish megs to download. That's an install size of over 2 gigs. Hey, look at that nice, fancy compression, but still just a net upgrade size of 10 MB. I love that. I love a 2-gig download. Total install size is 2 gigs, right? But net upgrade disk space is going to be 10 megabytes for 125 packages. That's just fantastic. So this is

essentially absolutely everything on the system. And I'm thinking where we had this package creep come in, my guess is net data, but I can't say for sure. But that's the only thing we installed via a script that automatically installs dependencies and everything else we've installed by hand or it runs in a container. Yeah, you're right. That's one of the few things on the system that's not running in a container. All right, Wes, are you ready to kick off the upgrade? Standing by. I've already even put in the Y into the terminal. So I'm just waiting for the go ahead on hit and enter. Okay, let's just be clear. Are you doing Pac-Man or are you doing Ye? I'm doing Pac-Man. Okay, so we're not going to do the AUR, which I think is, well, what about ZFS? Doesn't ZFS come from the AUR? Yeah, we'll get there. I

mean, we still got the LTS kernel. We'll do the AUR next. No, I think that's fine. I just want to make sure that was your plan. All right, kick it off, Wes. Let's do it. And that'll take a little bit to run. So we'll let that go. And then we will come back and check how it's doing. And then maybe also keep an eye on it to do the AUR. Just let me know when it's going to reboot. My God, I can't believe we do this live. And you know that we use that damn server more than ever now. Well, there's no going back now. The new kernel just downloaded. That's always what makes me nervous. How was I thinking? That's always what makes me nervous. How was I thinking?

You know what you should do is you should go to linode.com slash unplug. Don't be like Chris and Wes and run a server out of your garage slash data center. Go to linode.com slash unplug and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account. This is really where I go when I need infrastructure. We have a bunch of servers that run the back end of JB 3.0. They are our cloud infrastructure. And we like to be strategic. We pick from Linode's 11 different data centers depending on what job we think that box is doing.

A lot of times if it's an internal tool that doesn't face the audience, we deploy it in California because we are on the West Coast after all. But we just can be strategic about that, and you can too. And Linode's been doing this for a long time, since 2003. So they've been able to secure really great data center contracts, really great connectivity contracts, super fast connections coming into the hypervisors, really fast native SSDs. You bring it all together with their great interface, and it's just the obvious way to deploy infrastructure. This is now my also go-to for making a safe environment for my kids to game. I've deployed Minecraft and a Rust server, the game Rust, on Linode. They make these one-app click deployments for a lot of stuff, including really great full stacks for getting your website up and running,

but they also do them for game servers. So I just deployed a couple, chose the boxes. I actually, it wasn't until just yesterday that I ever needed SSH into one of them and change a config at the command line. But the way they deploy it, it works the way you'd think it would.

So I didn't even bother checking the docs because I'm that guy. And I thought, let's see if I can just figure out how Linode deployed this. And so they set up the Rust server. Well, they set up a Rust user and in the Rust user's home folder, and that Rust user, by the way, is what runs the process, not root. And in there, it's simply laid out. It's a nice,

clean layout for a Rust server. I was able to get to the config, change the option I needed, so that way I could connect to a custom server under Linux from the client, which is essentially turn off the copy protection, and saved it. And the performance is fantastic. I played it from my desktop, and I played it from the G4 streaming connected into the server, running off of Linode. And it's just so great, because now I've created an entire world that runs on our Linode server. And you can deploy anything you need. Maybe it's a website, maybe it's a portfolio, maybe it's a gallery, or maybe it's the back-end infrastructure for your team's communication. Linode costs 30 to 50% less than major cloud providers like AWS. And with that $100 credit, you can really see what I'm saying without

having to put anything on the line. I mean, $100 lets you deploy some serious infrastructure and see how it works. And I get emails, and thank you for people who send those in, because it's really great to hear that. I get emails from people that tell me this is what they're doing now by testing it with that $100 credit, convincing themselves or convincing management that it works, and then deploying. For yourself, for your business, for your company, it's great. They've been around since 2003. They're going to get it right. So go to Linode.com slash unplugged.

Get that $100 60-day credit, support the show, help us stay free. And get yourself that credit. Linode.com slash unplugged. Let's do a little housekeeping while Wes is updating the server. I think that'll help. Give him some time. You haven't rebooted yet, right? No, no. Of course not.

We've got DKMS modules to build. Come on, son. Ah, what's being installed via DKMS? I'm curious. Well, we've got a new kernel, so that triggers things to rebuild for ZFS. Yeah, sure, okay. So maybe we don't need the AUR.

Oh, we'll find out. In the meantime, just want to give a shout-out to the LUP blog. Join our community that gets together and talks about Linux every Sunday. Also, a chance to play around with Mumble, so if you ever had a chance to join us on the show, you could try it out on Sunday.

We have all the information at our website for Mumble. And we have the calendar at jupyterbroadcasting.com slash calendar with our live times and also the love plug on there. You don't want to miss anything because, I mean, on Minimac, I don't know if you want to put anything on the record yet, but there's some great stuff coming up.

There is in fact some great stuff coming up. So we scheduled the next recording and i would pass the microphone to bite bitten because he will talk about that a little bit thank you so we all have usually our tools for um as an alternative for the big paid packages but sometimes we just want an overview of what is available or what others use and what is the pros and cons. So with the next recording, we will create an overview of all the available packages that are mostly used within our community. Interesting. That could be a good way to learn about new apps and stuff that people are using. Yes, and later on with other recordings, we will go more in-depth on some of those packages like Nextcloud, Mycroft Assistant, you name it. So that's every Sunday. You can join them, and sometimes Wes and I pop in too.

Sometimes we even do the show with the Love Plug. Check that out. Details at linuxunplugged.com. For Mumble, there you go. That's just about all the delaying I can do for you, Wes, before we check back in. Where are we at over there? All right, well, no AUR updates yet,

but we've gone through Pac-Man. We've got a new ZFS build. I say we give her a restart. Okay, Wes, kick it off. Let's do it. No going back now. Okay, we'll Kick it off. Let's do it. No going back now. Okay. We'll let that reboot. We'll check back in. We'll see how it goes.

I tell you, we really should just do these offline more often. We shouldn't wait until we do it on air, because what happens is we have a busy show, and then we try to stick this in here, and then we're trying to do it live, when really it just doesn't work out. We should just do it once a week. Maybe what we ought to try for a while is a cron job. No, this is a horrible idea. Don't let me talk us into that.

Don't make me take your SSH privileges away. Now, I wanted to talk about GNOME Shell 40 on the show today, but I want to give a chance for Carl to jump in, and he's going to be joining us a little bit in the show. So in the meantime, I think we'll jump ahead to feedback. Let's do the email now. Let's just do it out of order, so that way we give Carl time to join us later in the show. How do you feel about that? Am I going to break all the rules? Yeah, good idea. Well then, later in the show. How do you feel about that?

Am I going to break all the rules? Yeah, good idea. Well then, shifting gears to the feedback here in the podcast, out of order. Zach writes in with a surprising solution for recent Chromium woes. I'll take this one, Wes. He says, hey, Chris and Wes, I shared your frustration regarding the recent news

that Google was going to cut off Chromium from Google's Sync API. I'm also in the same boat as you, waiting for Chromium Edge Google's sync API. I'm also in the same boat as you, waiting for Chromium Edge to get built in sync from Microsoft whenever that comes around. But in the meantime, I've stumbled on a browser that's hiding in plain sight this whole time, Epiphany or Gnome Web. I know what you're thinking. You've probably used Epiphany in the past, and it wasn't quite there really. But I was there too, until I recently gave it a shot again.

I had a fresh install, and I needed to check the Arch wiki real quick. By the way, he runs Arch. And I was blown away by how snappy and lightweight it feels when being still quite feature-complete. And it supports Firefox Sync out of the box. So you can migrate most, if not all, of your Chrome settings over to Firefox Sync service. They let you import, by the way. And it blows away all of the other browsers. By the way, it's great for video playback now. But for a while, I've had to choose between X11

and smooth 4K video, but a choppy desktop. Or Wayland with a smooth desktop but drop frames on video playback. I no longer have to choose. Epiphany can handle multiple 4K streams running in different tabs on different monitors on Wayland and on an integrated Intel GPU, no less. More than that, I tested my quiet profile on my XPS 15, which disables Turbo Boost and maxes my clock at 2 gigahertz. And I had no slowdowns, not one drop frame. And it has an unobtrusive UI that gets out of your way.

I could go on, but the bottom line is, if you haven't tried Epiphany recently, give it a chance over the weekend. I think you're going to be really surprised. Wow, it really sounds like it's already been Chris-tested there. I agree that, you know, where he's got me is the Firefox sync. That, to me, is a killer feature because I like having, I'm a two-browser kind of guy. You know, I don't just stick with one browser.

I've got to have multiple browsers. I could even be a three-browser guy. It's just a lot of effort. So I stick with two browsers primarily, and that's generally I divvy up, like like work or different account stuff between the different browsers or one browser is better at doing a Google app or something. I'll use that browser. But the downside to that is there isn't something like X marks anymore that would sync my Chrome browser with my Firefox browser. up having some bookmarks or some whatever, extension, history, whatever it is, something in Firefox that isn't in Chrome or vice versa.

And it stinks. This would solve a lot of that. And it would give me that two-browser lifestyle that I prefer while completely cutting Chrome out. And I don't know if I'm there yet, but I like that this is there as an option. And I think I am going to start using Epiphany a little bit more. Try it out. And I don't know if I'm there yet, but I like that this is there as an option, and I think I am going to start using Epiphany a little bit more. Try it out. It's probably an option I wouldn't even have thought of, I mean, despite having easy access to it, but to hear that it performs so well and

is up to stuff with modern CSS and JavaScript features, I guess, why not? Minimac, you point out that it has a really handy app mode. It really has. So I'm using Epiphany or Non-Web as my default web app browser. So I have a lot of sites that I use, like Gmail or everything like that.

I lose it in app mode with its own icon. It shows up in the program list and everything. And you know that it has a profile stored separated. So if you have a password, something is separated in a different profile. So it's really handy and it's really lightweight. So you can have multiple of these apps open. And I really, really love it. It's a good alternative to the Chromium app mode or the Google Chrome app mode.

That is a good alternative to the Chromium app mode or the Google Chrome app mode. That is a good tip. I think I knew that, but I think that's one of those things I've totally, totally forgotten about. While we are in this kind of community discussion section, I wanted and I've been trying to think about how to bring this up on the show because it's pretty supercharged. Drew DeVault has a blog that we've covered before on the show. Uh, Drew is a developer behind sway and,

has a lot of experience working with Wayland. And he wrote a post that is titled, I am tired of this anti Wayland horseshit. And I'm going to read parts of it. I'm going to censor some of it because I want this to be available to kids as well. Uh, but he starts with what to anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, 9-11 truthers, and anti-Weyland activism all have in common? All of them are characterized by a belief rejection of facts to embrace a narrative of victimland, the vague authority are a bunch of volunteers who have devoted tens of thousands of hours of their free time towards making free shit for you.

Wayland sucks is a conspiracy theory with no basis in truth, and supporters have spent years harassing Wayland maintainers, contributors, and users. It's time for this to effing stop. He doesn't say effing, though. A little more explicit in the full post. Maybe Wayland doesn't work for your precious use case. More likely, it does work, and you've swallowed some propaganda based on an assumption which might have been correct seven years ago. Regardless, I simply don't give a blank about you anymore. I've tried appealing to reason and rationality

and trying to debunk each lie that some Wayland detractor flavor of the week is touting to tow the party line. But it hasn't worked. So my new approach is F you. None of the Wayland detractors have a clue. They don't understand Wayland. They don't understand X11. And they don't understand Linux graphics

or OpenGL or Vulkan or anything else in the stack. They don't even understand what it's like to use Wayland because at most they might have spent five minutes installing it, realized that something was, gasp, different than X11,

and then uninstalled it and wrote their angry Reddit comment. This is a great reason why I advocate for developers and content creators to never read the comments. I think this entire rant was triggered by some comments on Hacker News and obviously some comments on Reddit. And you can tell Drew's really, he's burned out here. He's really kind of sick and tired of the armchair comments that kind of just repeat crap that has been said online a thousand times. And we've all seen it, experienced it in some form or another.

But this obviously isn't going to serve to improve the situation. And I think unfortunately, and I'm going to leave it to the listener to read the rest if they'd like, because it actually gets even more incendiary as it goes. But the key point here, I think, the key takeaway is don't be a dick to maintainers. And it's hard on their mental health. And I think this demonstrates it right here in front of all of us. I think it's unfortunate, though, that Drew will be associated, these comments will be associated, rather Drew intended or not, with the Wayland project and Wayland developers in general. And it'll sort of be generic and it'll just be nebulous as part of the Wayland developer attitude. That kind of stuff, those sort of associations happen with these sort of posts.

Wimpy, I know that you're still here, and I'm wondering if you have any thoughts in general on pushback around Wayland adoption and where Drew's coming from. Do you feel he's got a point or do you feel that he is essentially seeing it as too black and white? No, he's got a point for sure. I mean, it's been a while since Ubuntu last tried on Wayland to see if it worked for them. I think it was 2017. And you may have seen that, you know, we're And you may have seen that we're implementing Wayland by default in 2104 because some of those issues from a few years ago no longer exist. So now's the time to make the change. And Drew's comments about X11 are inflammatory but accurate.

We can't continue to kick that can down the road. Each time Ubuntu chooses to stick with X11, Canonical and the desktop team are basically taking on the maintainership of X-specific bugs in GNOME Shell, for example. And we can't continue to, you know, lift that on our own. So it's better to be a part of a whole and a group moving forward together. Yeah, that I totally agree with. And it is getting so much better than it used to be. And I was really happy to see that the next release is going to try it again.

Ubuntu is going to try Wayland by default. I was also extremely disappointed because the guys talked me out of making that one of my predictions for 2021. And I was sabotaged. So I was also upset. Yeah, I know. Here we are in February and already you've been scuppered by your own team. I know.

How unfortunate. Pipewire is baked in now already to 2104. Oh, see, now you're talking my language. Because also I think sticking with GNOME Shell 338 is also going to be a feature, but we'll get there. I'm going to leave this, I'll leave this link to Drew's post. Again,

it's not Drew, our Drew, who comes on the show and edits. It's Drew DeVault, the Sway developer, not our Drew. Different Drew, same first name, different Drew. We just want to make that a disclosure. And I guess buy a Whalen developer a beer when we can start seeing them in public again

because they are doing the people's work here. It is a great experience. And with a few exceptions, I run it at least, you know, on a couple of my machines. The ones I don't really are the one that has an NVIDIA driver. That's sort of self-evident. And I don't think my desktop at the moment with Plasma, with the multiple monitors, I'm not generally having a great whale in time. But it's getting really close, and the projects are doing a lot of work.

Plasma 521 is putting a ton of work into that. Good Home Shell has been doing so for quite a while. So the situation is changing. But if your assumptions are, it's sort of like the same thing we run into with ButterFS. If your assumptions are from your experience from a few years ago, then you're kind of out of date, and you kind of need to,

you know, the things keep improving. The code gets done. More people join. One last email before we move on and talk about GNOME 40. Ed wrote in. He says, Chris and Wes, you talked about Ventoy last episode, which is that USB solution that lets you just drop ISOs on the USB thumb drive and then it'll boot any of those ISOs. Wes and I have been using the crap out of that already.

No kidding. He says, thanks for featuring it. I've been using it for a few months, and I think it's a great program, but you guys actually told me a few more things that I knew you could do with it. I want to give you a tip. I first tried it with a normal USB thumb drive. That's what Wes and I are doing. He says it works, but I decided to grab an M.2 SATA SSD that I had laying around that I could install into a USB 3.0

stick. And boy, do I see a difference in boot times. So he links us, we'll have a link in the show notes for this, to an enclosure that is a USB, it's a big, it looks like a big thumb drive, but you stick an NVMe SATA disk into there. That's important. It has to be SATA compatible, but you install that into there and then close it up and it becomes essentially a super fast thumb drive. And it looks really like a great solution for booting. And I was, I've been running Gnome Shell 40 a lot, and I've been doing a lot of live sessions to get there, and the speed has been something that I have not been satisfied with. So I picked this up because the price is actually really quite reasonable.

So we'll put a link to this and the SSD that I got. The drive itself is $15.99, $16 for this thing. And you just pop it open and you put the MVME SSD, SATA SSD in there, and you're off to the races. And it just shows up as a thumb drive. And I paired that with just a cheapo $32, so it's not like it's a performance monster, but it's faster than a USB thumb drive,

a $32, 256 gigabyte SATA M.2. That is plenty for all of the VMs and ISOs you could need. For sure. I'm just thinking, Ed, that's a great tip. And so I wanted to pick it up before a bunch of the audience went and bought one and they went out of stock. Yeah. You know, we should also mention too that just Ventoy can do so much. Like, yes, it's good for this. Yes, it's also good for, you know, if you get fancy with SATA and SSDs. But you can also use your little USB to boot from files or VHDs or raw image files from a VM that are directly on your hard drive, just on your main hard drive. And they've even got a nice little thing you can chain load in your bootloader if you don't want to have to have an actual Ventoy USB involved at all. So there's a ton of options included in that project. Lots more for us to play with. on any plan. Odear was co-founded by the author of the Cron.weekly newsletter, listener of the show, a community member,

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And that API also means there's already a lot of third-party integrations that are totally possible and ready to go. A CLI client, Telegram chatbot, JavaScript SDK, Terraform provider, which, come on, how great is that? Talk about building into your automation. So right now, head over to odeer.app and start your 10-day, no strings attached trial, no credit card required. You can get set up in less than a minute. And then when you do sign up for a plan, use the promo code Linux for a $10 discount. And if they ask you, like via email or

something, or when you're chatting with support at some point, tell them you heard about it right here on the Linux Unplugged program. It's odir.app and this promo code Linux for a $10 discount on any plan. odir.app So we've been trying to wrap our heads around how to talk about GNOME Shell 40 because it's a pretty big change. And in retrospective, I kind of understand why they are calling it GNOME 40 and not GNOME 4.0. They wanted, I think, the space. You know, it's kind of like when Star Trek Discovery went 1,000 years into the future.

They needed the canon space to do what they needed to do here. But with that means that those of us who have used GNOME Shell in its current iteration for a long time are going to have our workflow changed. Primarily, it's this horizontal workspace. That's the main change that we're going to have our workflow changed. Primarily, it's this horizontal workspace. That's the main change that we're going to be talking about today. There's other improvements. It's looking like, in a lot of ways, a very good release. The team is really coming together. Canonical, even though they're sticking with GNOME Shell 3.3.8 in their next release, is still working upstream. They're still contributing patches upstream.

Right. It's not like they're going to stay there forever. It's just going to take a little while before that all gets integrated. But what's been recently merged now, and so we've had a chance to actually play with it, because the great thing about, quote unquote, journalism in open source, and I think more people should be doing this, is we can get our hands on the code. And a lot of times, it's in a state where we can build it and we can try it ourselves. And we can go beyond just reading what people write about it. We wanted to try it. And so Wes and I did just that. There's various methods to get it up and running at this point, GNOME Shell 40 with the new UI. We both used Fedora as a base. I used Rawhide. And then a

script that Wes found, I think from the GNOME team, to build the latest GNOME Shell 40 on top of Rawhide. And Wes, I think you did it via Copper at one point, and then you also did the build script as well. So you had a pretty fresh install. Yeah, you know, there's a couple of things. I think early on there was a Copper that got some updates to it. There's even now just a VM image you can boot and use out there, so we had to go the hard way.

But yeah, we were just kind of from the latest Fedora pulling down the development, you know, right out of the repos and building it. And thankfully, since a lot of this stuff happens on Fedora oftentimes anyway, you can just use DNF to install the build depths. That takes care of a lot of the complexity for you and just run Ninja and away you go.

Yeah, and you are Ninja Go. The changes are significant enough that I thought it was appropriate to try it on hardware, that while there is a way to get it working on BM, it just felt like this needed to be experienced with hardware. I wanted to try it with multiple monitors because I think that's one area that this needs a lot of discussion. And so that was the route I took. So a lot of this code's just really fresh, and there is more work being done upstream, but there are ways to try it out right now to see this new horizontal workflow. put up on our PeerTube instance of my three monitor workstation. So you can get a visual of this. That link is in the show notes and you can see what that looks like while we're talking about this. Because it's a hard thing to explain, but if you can picture the way the elementary

desktop works where, or not to the same, not the same degree, but the way the Mac OS multiple desktops used to work, where the desktop zooms into the background, the dock comes up from the bottom, a search launcher along the top, and then your workspaces are laid out horizontally to the right. And they are dynamically generated as you launch applications and place them on there. And this is all demonstrated in that peer-to link. But also, our buddy Carl did a great job of writing this up in what I think was just sort of started as a bit of a tweet vent, but actually developed into some solid observational feedback. And Alan Day got involved on Carl's observations about where GNOME Shell 40 is going. And what I love about this, Carl, is you are through and through a GNOME guy. You know, I know you've been using it for a long time.

You've often rolled with what the project is doing. This is the first time where it's kind of they're changing the default, and it's leaving you behind. And you're one of those particular thorn in the sides of the GNOME developers because you're doing this thing where you want your virtual workspaces to span all of your monitors. By default, GNOME Shell leaves your second or third monitor static

and only the primary display actually changes workspaces. But you can change that. Until now, that's kind of going away because it just sort of falls apart. So Carl, I think you do, I should let you explain it from here because you did such a great job on Twitter, but can you kind of going away because it just sort of falls apart. So Carl, I think you do, I should let you, you explain it from here because you did such a great job on Twitter, but can you kind of break down what the problem is and kind of why you feel like you're being left behind as a Gnome Shell

user? Sure thing. I mean, you already summarized it really well. I'm not sure what else I did. I thought I was, I thought I struggled. So I'm glad I kind of got it right. No, that's, that's it. I mean, like I said, I like GNOME a lot. I've used it for a while. I was so, so to it in the GNOME 2 days. GNOME 3 was weird at first, but eventually after I started trying it again, I was like, okay, I see what they're doing. You know, they got me hooked on the vertical workspaces and now they're taking it away. Why vertical?

Why vertical instead of horizontal? So for me, I'm a multi-monitor guy. I use three monitors spread horizontally across my desk. And whenever you have three monitors horizontally like that, physical monitors, adding a new virtual workspace vertically just gives you rows of three underneath each other as you keep adding them. So you just get this three by whatever grid of however many virtual workspaces you have. But in the horizontal layout, they get added side by side. So you go from a one by three to a one by six to a one by nine to a one by 12.

And it just quickly, I mean, I routinely have five to 10 virtual workspaces going for different tasks that I'm doing. And I like having three fresh, you know, displays every time I start a new workspace up. And now that just gets very unmanageable very quickly. Yeah, it gets really kind of awful too on my setup where I have three displays and two of them are vertical and then the center is horizontal. When I start to get multiple desktops, it's really awkward to navigate. This to me doesn't really like disrupt my workflow because I switch desktops all the time. I'm used to things changing

on me. But it does seem like a bit of a downgrade in overall efficiency. And I know, Wimpage, it's great that you're here today because I know that Canonical was looking at this for the next release of the Ubuntu desktop and decided not yet. Not no, but not yet. Yeah, and that decision has nothing to do with the design changes as it happens. Oh, really? I thought it was actually 100% about the design changes. No, it not yet. Yeah, and that decision has nothing to do with the design changes as it happens. Oh, really? I thought it was actually 100% about the design changes. No, it's not. Well, aside from GTK4, right? So, no, it's not to do with the design changes at all.

It's to do with where we are in the release cycle and when feature freeze happens for the next release, which is later this month. and there's simply not enough time for us to do the main inclusion request processing for the new stuff that needs to be in the main archive, which has to be security reviewed before we can introduce it to meet our deadlines. So we're purely putting it off because we can't get there in time. And in fact, I met with the Yuru team last night to discuss, you know, GTK4 and GNOME 40 and some of the design changes and how we could accommodate all of that. And they were very clear that it was business as usual. This wasn't going to present any major road bumps. So yeah, our move forward is for very different reasons curious what your personal opinion is

about the design change so i was quite fortunate to be invited to a session with the gnome foundation at the back end of last year they recently commissioned um some user acceptance testing to look at a number of different prototypes and way different ways that the gnome shell had been presented to users in different distributions to sort of inform some of the changes that they were going to make in gnome 40 so it's really good to see that you know the changes that they are introducing have been sort of you know user tested and there is data to support the direction that they're going in now from a personal point of view the business of switching workspaces and leaving a screen behind i'm really not a fan of i i know that's a configuration option right

now and it's it's a configuration option that I personally enable. But, you know, in the great scheme of things, I think the direction that they're going in is a wise one. Certainly, they've got data to support what they're doing. I could see how spatially it makes more sense for new users, because you see it laid out and everything's next to each other and you're kind of moving to them. What I don't like about it from an efficiency standpoint is with the current vertical stack, you can see everything in the overview mode. You can see all of the desktops at once.

That goes away with this. But additionally, it scales a lot better when you have multiple screens. Where this really falls apart is say you have three monitors, you have like three squares that you have to move through to get to the new desktop. It really kind of doesn't scale properly. And I think, Carl, there's two issues here.

The issue is workspaces should be spannable across multiple monitors, which right now they're not designing for. That's not the default setting. That's issue number one, right? And the question there is, are we ever really going to see traction on that? Because it doesn't seem like 40 is being designed at all with that consideration. Right. And the thing that gets me, I know they're doing a lot of user testing with this, but I honestly, I'm speculating here, but I don't think that they're doing any user testing on multi-monitor at least. No, they're not. Yeah, that's a huge oversight in my mind.

There is a reason for that as well, which was explained, which is that they did the user testing remotely and there's no way to simulate multi-monitor user testing under remote conditions. So it was a known sort of gap in the way that they were testing things. That's unfortunate

because even using sort of the latest builds, I'm not going from Copper, I was building it, and there's pretty obvious bugs moving stuff around in Multimon. It's not smooth yet. And I understand it's alpha, and I actually have every confidence that a lot of this stuff will be worked out. It's a really solid, you know, it's changed, but they're going to fix it. But it is troubling when I hear that, that it's not being tested on multi-monitor. It's a major shift.

And to make that major shift without the user testing experience of a multi-monitor, that's going to leave a large portion of the user base just out in the cold. Yeah, yeah. Just so that we're clear, Carl, that's really two main issues. Again, one is workspaces that span all the monitors. But what's the second issue here?

that's not a default. That's something you have to go in with either tweaks or decomp settings and change. The other thing is once you do enable workspaces across all monitors, things are messy in the horizontal layout because by default, the horizontal layout isn't a problem and it works well for them. So they kind of want to classify it as two separate problems there. And I can kind of appreciate that when just trying to break it down from how do we address this. And that may actually be the first part of figuring this out. Right. Yeah. Establish that there is value in having, you know, spanning workspaces across all monitors, not just as a hidden decon for GNOME tweaks setting, but something that perhaps is even right directly in GNOME settings to allow people to do and set

up. I'd even take something in GNOME tweakak. Put it in Tweaks. I guess the reason that Carl and I were talking about this off-air, and I thought, you know, after chatting with him and after trying it myself, I think the takeaway we have is if you're on a laptop or you're a single monitor setup, it's probably not going to be a big change

for you. If you're on a multi-monitor setup, this first release may be one to sit out and stick with GNOME 3.3.8 and upgrade to GNOME 41 or 42 when they get some of this other stuff worked out. Because I tried it here on my ThinkPad and it's actually really not bad.

It works pretty well. I feel like it's a bit of a loss because the way I can move windows around now is much smaller and it doesn't quite work right. And it seems a little buggy, but I can see where they're going with it. And on a single screen, on a laptop, it's pretty usable. Yeah, same. That was kind of my experience. Like, okay, yeah, I could get used to this on a single screen. I mean, I would have forgotten about it in a week's time. Yeah. On multiple monitors, though, this is where we kind of

wanted to put a bit of a disclaimer and say, hey, you might want to think about skipping this one. And it's not to be disrespectful to the GNOME team or anything like that. It's just having tested it, I think that's something you guys should know about. And we all have links to all this stuff, so you can see what the hell we're talking about and get a visual when you're listening to this in the show notes there. I'm sure they'll get it, right, Carl? I mean, you see the thing with the GNOME Shell team is like they, and I feel horrible even like criticizing them

because I know eventually they're going to work it out. But as it is right now, it just doesn't seem very usable. But I have the faith, I think. I want to have faith. Yeah, exactly. I definitely think they have good intentions. And I can understand, a lot of them have mentioned how the gesture support in GNOME 40 with a touchpad on a laptop with a single screen is so good they can't go back.

And I can understand and respect that that's something that a lot of people will find valuable. you have to realize that that is, I don't know, maybe the best possible outcome is that they actually make optional vertical workspaces, not just an extension, but like a built-in native supported thing where you choose, do you want them horizontal or vertical? Mini-Mac, perhaps they could take inspiration from another desktop environment. Yeah, people are laughing about it in the pre-show. There is always a solution, and it's called Enlightenment. because Enlightenment has that for decades because it treats the desktop, every screen is treated independently and

that is so gorgeous. I can have four virtual desktops on my left screen and three on the right one and I can just skip these workspaces just on the left screen and on the right screen independently.

That would be the solution. That would mean you would have to rethink GNOME Shell, that it treats the screens independently. So imagine you would have just these possibilities as you have now, apparently you have in GNOME 3.38, that you can just have a window overview for your left screen and the window overview for your right screen. That is so gorgeous. And Enlightenment has that for decades.

And that was my primary thing because I switched to Enlightenment. A point that you, of course, wanted to make sure we did not miss. So thank you for adding that. And, of course, I think, Carl, I'm supposed to tell you to try Plasma. Has that crossed your mind? I still haven't seen any way to do dynamic workspaces in Plasma or Enlightenment or any other desktop. If I'm missing something, please let me know. I'll try other desktops. I like GNOME, but I'm not married to GNOME. If there's something else that does it, then I'm all ears.

You just got to pre-allocate like three times more than you'll ever possibly need. Just get a giant grid. That's right. There you go. That'll take care of it. Hashtag Mate Desktop. Oh, yeah. Also, I think just to allay concerns, Ubuntu Mate remains under your stewardship with this transition, right, Wimpy?

Yes, indeed. That is my passion project. It's the thing that I love doing in my spare time, and I will continue to do so. Yeah, that's good to hear. All right. Now, before we run and before we update, before we get an Arch Server update. It's not the distro. It's how you use it.

I want to mention that if you want to follow your stonks in the terminal, we've got an app pick for you. It's called Ticker. It's a terminal stock ticker with live updates and position tracking. Why wouldn't you want to have that in your drop-down terminal? And it's not written in Rust, is it? Because that would be really perfect, but it doesn't look like it is, unfortunately. So we won't be able to play the Rust horns.

It does look like you could probably run it in Docker. So, I mean, maybe if we had some sort of... You know, it is written in Go. That's got to be a close second. Okay. We just don't have any theme music for Go. Yeah, yeah.

Also, it'll track cryptos, I believe, as well. You know, so if you're investing big in the Doge over there like Wes Payne is, you can keep an eye on that as well. We had to.

I mean, with everything, with all the news going on, that had to be our pick this week, right? You need a nerdy desktop terminal client to keep track of things. Yeah, if you don't have an option for every possible single use case so I can avoid a web app,

what are we even doing here? I want to say a special thank you to the scientifically confirmed most awesome people in the world. That would be our Unplugged Core contributors at unpluggedcore.com. Keeping this show indie, helping us reduce the ad load, and getting yourselves not one but two different feeds. Limited ad feed, just the same full production but limited ads,

so it's a little bit shorter run time. You know, you get just what you want in there, not a little bit too much. I appreciate the busy, busy core contributor, and we value their time. If you're on the other end, maybe you want a little more content. Maybe you like the bootleg kind of music. You know, you're one of those people. You like the live tracks. Well, that's feed to full live stream, all our screw ups, all the stuff that Joe cuts from the show, because thank God he makes us sound better, but we leave it in for you. Transparency is the name of the game with free, with full pre and post shows. It's basically an extra show.

It's right there. You just don't even know about it. So I'm jumping around the room. I'm so excited about it. It's unpluggedcore.com. And I think if we could get 15 new members for next episode, I'm going to get Wes Payne to drink three beers before the show. Does that seem – that's fair, right, Wes?

That's fair. Yeah, all right. I will sacrifice my body for the show. I think that's a bad idea because I had three beers before this show and I've been having to dash to the toilet. Oh, there is that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, we'll just get him a wireless mic, right?

I mean, podcast from the potty. Yeah, I know how to you know, we'll just get him a wireless mic, right? I mean, podcasts from the potty. Yeah, I know how to mute appropriately, I think. Yeah, yeah. It's all about appropriate muting, exactly, like a pro. All right, well, I want to mention you can join us live. You may hear us mention mumble rooms and chat rooms and stuff like that. Well, we do this show live every single Tuesday at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. See you next week.

Same bat time, same bat station. And wouldn't it just be great if you could join us for that? So do make an effort one of these days if you can, or maybe on a Sunday. We just love hanging out with you. It really does feel like one of the happiest, best communities on the internet, and we'd love for you to be a part of it.

Thanks to everybody who goes over to linuxunplugged.com slash contact and sends in feedback or tips to the show, helping it make it better that way as well, or shares it with a friend. All of that is very, very much appreciated. The entire network of Jupiter Broadcasting, easy for me to say, Jupiter Broadcasting shows, that's over at jupiterbroadcasting.com.

Links to everything we talked about today, that's at linuxunplugged.com slash 391. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program, and we'll see you right back here next Tuesday. To the world. All right, everybody, let's go pick our title. JBTitles.com

JBTitles.com Head on over there. Oh, no. There's only one place to vote. JBTitles, JBTitles, now you all got to go vote. Jamby titles, Jamby titles. Now you all got to go vote. Hey, Wes Payne, just real quick, just curious, how did it go over there? We are back online. So the update was done?

Yeah, flawless. ZFS mounted? No problem, yeah. Docker containers are up. I'm right back on the box. So that's pretty anticlimactic then. problem, yeah. Docker containers are up. I'm right back on the box. So, that's pretty anticlimactic then. Well, congratulations. I will say we didn't

have any ZFS updates this time so that kept things simpler. Ah, yes. And that's because the AUR package has been flagged out of date. There's been actually just a point release out I think today or yesterday and another one a little bit earlier this month. 2.0.1 and 2.0.2. Oh yeah, that was from yesterday.

So presumably those will be there soon and maybe we can do this whole thing again next time.