LINUX Unplugged - 393: Perfecting Our Plasma

Episode Date: February 17, 2021

Something special has been achieved this week, a new benchmark in the desktop experience. We dig in. And why everyone will be looking for an open-source LastPass alternative. Special Guests: Brent Gervais, Neal Gompa, and Philip Muller.

So it's called Amplify, I think, Wes? Is that what it's called? Amplify, like Amplify, but with a Raspberry Pi involved. Yeah, or at least the compute module. This is one of these Kickstarters that I wasn't sure if no one would pay any attention to or if it would be a big success, and it seems like it's going to be in the big success category. They've already reached their goal, but it is a whole house audio system with multi-zone audio support, like the old school

amplifiers that you pop a Raspberry Pi into. And so you can imagine it's gotten a lot of attention and it also has an API. So of course you could now write scripts for your amp. This is so cool. I mean, yeah, not only can it do the kind of standard stereo stuff with analog inputs that you can hook up any of your standard stereo gear, but it can also stream directly from AirPlay, Pandora, Spotify, if you've got a DLNA source, and all of its open source, the schematics, the REST API is written in Python. They've got low-level control written in C, controlled by Python.

You can get all of it. Yep, if you ever wanted a free software amp for your home theater setup, this is it. We'll have you ever wanted a free software amp for your home theater setup, this is it. We'll have a link in the show notes. Hello, friends, and welcome in to episode 393. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Wes.

This episode is brought to you by the all-new Cloud Guru, the leader in learning for the cloud, Linux, and other modern tech skills. My name is Wes. Just now realizing that that's almost 400 episodes and having a mild panic attack while I do the introduction. But we won't worry about that today. No, no. It's a very special day in open source. A brand new workstation-grade desktop is rolling out today. And we've gone hands-on and have our opinions, our thoughts, and some procrastinations. Procastinations? I got nothing on that one. It's horrible. And some procrastinations? Procastinations? I got nothing on that one.

It's horrible. But we'll get there. We'll get through some community news. And to help us do all of that, we've got to bring in our virtual lug. Time of appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.

Hello. I see Phil from Manjaro snuck in there, too. Hello, Phil. Yeah, hello. How are you? Good. Welcome back. Well, I'm glad to have all of you here today because there's a lot to talk about.

And I'm going to start with a little bit of local news here at the Jupiter Broadcasting Network. We just hit 400 episodes on our Coda radio program, eight years of fun shows. And I think a lot of you are probably aware that Jupiter Broadcasting hasn't done any swag or merchandise in over two years, since before we were acquired and then now independent again. And that is definitely something I wanted to fix, but I didn't want to do the same old stuff everyone else is doing. I wanted something awesome, you know, something useful, something great,

something that can help you be productive and comfortable. And it took combining multiple platforms and shops, multiple team members researching and conducting calls. It's a product born of 2020 and early 2021, and we are calling it The Coder. Thank you, thank you, thank you. It's 100% terrycloth velour soft cozy robe. It feels great on the skin out of the shower, and it works well all day long. It's embroidered right here in the U.S. of A.,

and we are doing a limited run on a brand new Coder Radio robe, all black, white logo. It looks fantastic. TheCoder.shop. It's our first swag in forever. Pre-orders are now until the end of February. It's $65 plus shipping. And depending on how bad I screw this up or how good it goes, this will 100% kind of drive what we do in the future with merchandising. I don't think it's going to be robes, but I do want to do kind of neat stuff that nobody else is doing or

as far as I know. And I'd love for you to grab a robe, thecoater.shop. I'm getting you one, Wes. Ooh, does that mean pants are optional? Totally. That's the great thing about this robe. You could wear it all day long, and it could be the only thing you wear, or you could wear it over your clothes.

It's not a house coat. It's a house coater, thecoater.shop. But now moving back into, yes, it's really here in the chat room. Look at that. What do you think, Brent? Do you feel like you want a robe now? You know, I saw this in the Telegram, Jupiter Broadcasting Telegram group. I think that might have been a sneak peek.

And I'm not a robe guy, but man, you've got me tingling. So we're going to have to see. I think it's super awesome and hilarious. I love it. Everyone can be a robe guy or gal, and I hope people enjoy it. So I thought we'd start today with a bit of Linux history. 22 years ago, yesterday, as we record this, it was Windows Refund Day. We've talked about this once before on the show, but this was a day where Linux users, including Eric Raymond and others, got together to go to Microsoft and request that they actually fulfill an aspect of the Windows EULA.

In the Windows End User License Agreement, it clearly states that the agreement can be refused by the end user and that Windows can be returned to the manufacturer. However, in real life, the way that kind of plays out is the manufacturer says, sorry, you got to go to Microsoft for that. Microsoft says, sorry, you got to go to the OEM for that. And the user is left paying for Windows that they don't want. So this group decided to make a statement out of it and go down to Microsoft's office in the Bay Area and protest.

And they actually got a group together. They had signs, and the press showed up, and there was quite a bit of coverage. And I grabbed one of these clips from 1999, 22 years ago. It was a small, orderly protest calling attention to some big issues facing Microsoft. Some computer users who don't want Windows 98 on their computers want a refund for the software they say they're forced to pay for. High-tech business reporter Jim Goldman has the story from our San Jose News Center. These people don't just dislike Microsoft, they want a refund, and they may indeed have a legal leg to stand on. We don't want their Windows and we want our money back.

That was Eric Raymond right there. The protest was organized by a group supporting a free alternative operating system called Linux that works on most PCs. It also happens to be in direct competition with Windows 98. Linux is also gaining in popularity but still mostly an operating system for hardcore computer users. Sixty computer makers from 14 countries now sell systems with Linux pre-installed just as Compaq or Dell sell computers with Windows 98 already loaded. The refund demand was

really a stunt to let consumers know there is indeed a choice to Microsoft. When you call a manufacturer, when you talk to someone, that Windows isn't your only alternative. Microsoft mostly took the PR nightmare in stride, even displaying a welcome sign to the Linux community. Protesters were not amused. You could be looking at a class action suit. They even tried to get up to the company's ninth floor offices. So you're not letting the people upstairs to... No, it's a business day.

There's a lot of people working upstairs. But were prevented from getting inside. The message is, it's okay to take your money, but it's not okay to listen to you or to pay attention to their own licenses. That's Chris DeBona. For its part, Microsoft says consumers are free to choose whatever operating system they want

and policies are already in place to get that refund. The license agreement that comes with Windows clearly states that if you do want a refund on a copy of Windows that comes with your PC, that's fine. There's nothing preventing you from doing that. You just go in contact to your PC manufacturer, and they handle the process and policy for that return. In enlightened circles, this is called a Catch-22. This subdued protest will not end here. Organizers hope to create somewhat of a groundswell to pressure Microsoft

into a new refunding program. But with 25 million copies of Windows 98 already licensed, at least at this stage, it appears Microsoft has little to worry about. In Foster City, I'm Jim Goldman, NewsCenter 4. Microsoft might not have worried about it very much, but I actually think it did catch the attention of OEMs to some degree. And it showed that there was a demographic of customer out there that was happy to buy a machine without Windows. Now, the process of OEMs unwinding themselves from Microsoft's grasp was an entirely different issue. You know what stood out to me from all this archival history? The rat tales.

Oh, yeah. Lots of rat tales. Lots of tuxes out there. And we will have a link in the show notes where you can read the original posts about it and the day. And then you'll also find links to the video archive, CBS, ABC, NBC, and Fox. Oh, and I guess CNN, but you can't get the video anymore. They all were there, and there is old retro video footage of it that is, well, it's very nostalgic.

So much has changed, and so much is still the same. Well, speaking of things that are about 20 years old, VLC 4.0 is coming later this year. Embrace yourselves. It has a new UI. Now, the player has reportedly been downloaded by more than, or it has been downloaded at least 3.5 billion times. That's what they say.

Now, I don't know if that even includes Linux distributions that have it in the repository. And work on version 4.0 is nearly complete. The stable release is expected in the coming months. And the user interface, as they say, will be redesigned from the ground up. Another interesting major feature will be what they're calling the Movipedia project, which is kind of like an IMDB competitor, but with Wikipedia-style user contributions. Interesting.

The new version will also focus more on playing videos from the internet, relying on extensions to find third-party content. And it sounds like they're maybe working on a WebAssembly version that could play videos right inside the browser. That's interesting. But going back to the plugins thing, hmm. Boy, I could see that being a real pain in the butt. You know, you go to play something and this whole dialogue comes up and you got to go retrieve a plugin. And what about the reverse case of like MPV integrates with YouTube DL already?

And that just works. That's true. Something like that. That's a great example of just being able to pop YouTube DL support into VLC and they don't have to develop it directly themselves. That'd be okay. All right, you got me on there. But did you see the bit in this article about that John Baptiste is mulling around the idea of an ad-supported video streaming service similar to what Plex did back in 2019 to support the project? Whoa. I don't know how I feel about that.

Yeah, more ads is not necessarily what I want. Yeah, and I don't really like what Plex has done so far. As a fan of Plex, you know, I've interviewed their CEO. I've been a user a long time. I like it. I mean, I wish it was all open source, but that aside, I really like it. And I have not been a fan of their streaming service. I have tried it out in various incarnations that they've updated it, and I have not found it to be particularly compelling.

And in part, it's really coming down to content licensing deals and stuff, because everybody who owns content that is worth a damn is just launching their own streaming service right now, and they don't want to license it. And it's not really clear to me that the VideoLand Foundation is really the best project to take that on. I mean, I want to support them. I use VLC all the time, especially with the handy new Chromecast features, good mobile support, all the things I like about it. But that, I don't know, just doesn't speak to me. Yeah. Colonel, what are your thoughts on them developing this Movipedia project? Yeah. I wonder why they're doing that because as a lot of people may be aware, IMDB

has been a crap show in my opinion for a long time. But a couple of years ago, there's a new competitor that has started up called tmdb.org. And it essentially sounds like what they're trying to create. So why not just partner with them? Because TMDB started because people didn't like the direction that IMDB took. So they go, well, let's just remake it and make it better. And TMDB is very much about community contributed content and making it that way. So I wonder how much of what they're doing is maybe they're not aware, maybe they tried and there's some issue there, or if it's a not invented here syndrome or what. Mm-hmm.

Pycrash, it could also come down to an issue of focus with a new streaming service. Yeah. I mean, one of the problem of implementing streaming services is that it moved from the core project on the core business. I mean, it's people that are not spending their time making the video player better but are working on code for supporting the streaming services and stuff like that. And that's, I think it's a problem for the project. Yeah, yeah.

I'm kind of skeptical of this plugin system. How about you, Brent? Yeah, you were mentioning that there are thoughts of putting plugins and I was remembering how VLC was so great because they solved that problem originally. So it almost sounds like they're creating a problem that they solved originally, which might be worrisome.

I think you nailed, that's exactly what it is for me. It's like VLC was my no plugins, no extra codecs required. I can just open a video file and I know it's going to play. I would feel a bit of a loss if that changed. But doesn't it, maybe it's more like Wes was saying and it's additional outside functionality. Well, right.

You know, things have changed since those old days. I think hopefully it wouldn't be dropping any of that support for just playing whatever you throw at it. But we now live in a world where you often aren't throwing a file at it because it's just some third-party service. True. Well, we've been sifting through FOSDEM 2021. They did a virtual event. They had Matrix as their chat. And they've been posting videos of the event as the people that did the talk approved the video. And one of the things that's interesting is a Facebook employee gave a talk at Fosdom,

and I think it's Michael Salem is his name, and we learned a little bit about Facebook's desktop Linux use. Yeah, isn't that interesting? You know, Facebook is known for their usage of CentOS on the servers, but when it comes to Linux on the employee desktops, it turns out Fedora is the primary target these days, but with growing support for CentOS Stream. For a while, Facebook internally recommended a bunch of LTS releases

in the past for their employees, but shifted to Fedora so they could leverage some of the internal infrastructure and tooling that they already had for handling CentOS on the server. Well, yeah, okay, that makes sense. Like, they're using Chef. They've got a lot of open-source Chef libraries. Now they can also use that on the desktop.

Yeah, though, the notable thing here, it sounds like from the talk, is that the Fedora CentOS stream on the desktop thing is going to be like an official stance supported by Facebook IT, whereas the prior recommendation, just if you're going to use Linux, you got to use Ubuntu, they left the employees to self-support that themselves with Windows and macOS remaining the most common platforms. But in addition to the standard Fedora repositories, when they have a Fedora image they deploy,

their own internal repository gets added, Facebook's own internal repo, they have one, and also they enable the RPM fusion on their Fedora desktops repos, and they allow the use of Flatpaks. So modern, right? And you can kind of see why CentOS Stream might be a good fit for them. I mean, Fedora is great for a lot of reasons. They've got a slide in the presentation sort of addressing this, but there are some downsides. You got to figure out how to keep up on the updates, a lot of change. Maybe there's employees who just don't care about being that cutting edge. I'm sure some do, some don't.

So with CentOS Stream, you kind of get a nice balance of a stable, quote-unquote, rolling release, binary compatibility with what you're running on the servers, good security posture, and still a close relationship with Fedora. I noticed that they packaged internally some of their dependencies, and it sounds like they try to get stuff they might need for their internal stuff, actually just packaged in Fedora or upstream or in user-provided repositories when they need to. This is an interesting development in that imagine if multiple large companies like this started recognizing this value chain, and then they start contributing towards Fedora.

In this article specifically to that end, Michael Larble says, you know, you look at some of the things that have come down, like enabling early out of memory daemon and stuff. That's because Facebook is now using Fedora and they're contributing directly. So Neil, I'm sure you've seen some of this go by. I'm curious what your thoughts are on this. So some of this is a little bit less of a surprise if you'd seen some earlier versions of their talks they gave a talk a similar talk at nest with fedora about their their growing usage of fedora on the desktop and last year not last year the year before um for flock they gave a keynote about their use their growing usage of fedora when they switched to fedora by default for the desktops.

A big part of the rise of CentOS stream for desktops mostly is attributed to the NVIDIA driver because the NVIDIA driver is only officially supported for RHEL platforms, especially for certain things like CUDA and data science and all that fun stuff that nobody really wants to talk about. But because those things are only really properly supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and derivatives, they are ramping up CentOS stream for desktop users, for people that need those things, and everyone else is generally going to be encouraged to use Fedora. That's pretty neat.

And you can see how that's a nice system for them. And for a modern company like Facebook who gets it, there's a lot of advantages to it. And you start to see serious contributions, real improvements get added to the distribution because one large shop uses it. And you wonder what if Google came to a similar realization or some other large organization, maybe not even at that scale, but still had developers that were contributing upstream and all of a sudden you start seeing a lot of really good code floating into the project. That's pretty exciting the way that works.

So I debated this one because I'm like, it's Facebook and I know that's not great. But when you look at the code contributed, it actually has worked out really good for Linux users. And so this is a positive development. And I also, as a former corporate user who was trying to use Linux, I always really like a story when I see the corporate IT staff for saying, yes, Linux is allowed.

This is like first party, yeah. They're saying, go at it, run Linux on your desktop. We need more of that. Exactly, so that's good to see too. So all in all, it was a good story and we'll have a link in the show notes if you want to read the details. Linode.com slash unplugged. Go there to get a $100 60-day

credit towards a new account and support the show. Linode's how we host anything online. Since JB 3.0 launched, we've put everything on Linode for a lot of reasons. I started using them a couple of years ago and I just realized how great they are at doing what they offer. They've been around since 2003, but they decided to focus on a handful of sensible services and just do a killer job. And that means the entire package. That means support. That means

web UI. That means network infrastructure. That means network infrastructure. That means disk speed. That means host speed. It means having packages available if you want dedicated GPU or if you need a lot of storage or you just need something simple or maybe you just want object storage. It means getting those things right and doing them really well. That's what Linode is all about. And one of the things that I like about Linode as a user, having a system I'll put up and then I kind of don't think about it very often, is they have really sensible defaults for alerts that they just set up automatically for you. You can obviously always go in, look at the dashboard, look at the charts, see what performance has been like. But if something gets a little out of whack, like on one of our PeerTube instances, all of a sudden we were using a ton of data, and there is a trigger that will automatically tell me that.

There's also one for CPU and other basic system connectivity issues and whatnot where they will, they have set that up already with a watchdog, and they will alert you to that stuff. So it keeps us proactive because we can keep an eye on how our Peertube instances are doing without having to, like, hover at the dashboard all the time.

And they just set that stuff up for you, and, of course, it's all customizable. I mean, like I said, they've been doing this since AWS. So what they offer, they know how to do really well. I encourage you to go over there and try it out. It's also a fantastic platform to learn on. And there's really pretty much no downsides in terms of making changes and then being able to revert them or trying something, having it go wrong. It's like you get a save button in a game. Before you go fight the boss, you can hit the save button, save your game, and then go fight the boss. And if things go wrong, you just reload your save point. That's what it's like when you're doing servers on Linode. It's so great to have that peace of mind. So go to linode.com slash unplugged and check it out.

One of the things I do with all of my Linodes is I always turn on that backup, automatic backup. It's cheap, it's peace of mind, and they give you really good output on when the last backup was and all of that. It's just another way that Linode just keeps our infrastructure running and makes it possible, even with a limited team, to offer a lot of services to our audience.

So check it out at linode.com slash unplugged, support the show, and get that $100 60-day credit towards a new account. And thanks to Linode for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Linode.com slash unplugged. A few more bits of community news. So I want to talk about this one item just to give people some advice, and then I want to do some updates with Phil.

So let's start with this one just to get this out of the way because it's bad news. And I don't want to end the new segment on bad news. LastPass, if you're still using it, has made the final changes that are going to get you to drop it now. LastPass free users must choose between mobile or desktop computers for unlimited device access starting March 16th. If you want access on multiple machines, mobile and desktop, you'll have to pay. You'll have to pay. It's not an unreasonable amount right now,

although I'm sure they'll eventually raise the rate. It's like three bucks a year right now. But it's a pretty brute force kind of change. It's a real screw your users, we don't care about you kind of change. The kind that's going to get people really upset. And as a free user, you're going to have to log in after March 16th when this change takes effect, and you're going

to have to set your active device type. You're going to have three opportunities after that to switch your active device type and then lock it in. In addition to that change, email support will only be available to premium and family customers. So I thought this is a moment to sit around our lug and say, what are you doing for password management today? We've talked about Bitwarden before on the show, so I wanted to make that recommendation. You can also self-host Bitwarden, which I like a lot. Wes, I think you're a KeePass user?

I have been, although these days I'm pretty much all on Bitwarden, although I'm using 1Password for my work stuff. Yeah, I was going to mention that. 1Password is not open source, but it is well supported on Linux. They've recently just wrote a new Linux app, and it's well supported in business and enterprise. So there is that advantage of it. Looks like Kee pass XC is

getting recommended in the chat room, but a lot of people are saying they're using Bitwarden now. Pass P-A-S-S on the command line. The orange one uses key pass XC plus NextCloud sync and key pass to Android to put it all together. But I think if you are a one password user right now, you're probably going to be a little bit more happy with Bit you are a one password user right now, you're probably going to be a little bit more happy with Bitwarden or one password. And that just really stinks. And I hate to see this because password hygiene is super critical to keeping your online account secure. And there could have been a better way to handle this. And they claim they wanted to let us know as soon as possible. It's kind of funny to watch this.

They were one of the pioneers, maybe not pioneers, but at least in the broader public sphere. One of the first companies to really get broad adoption of using a password manager. And now they're kind of like a weird off-brand. The value has gotten worse and worse.

It's become more restrictive. You complaining about it, I think, every week or so when you have to log in again. It's just they haven't kept up. Yeah. It's time. This Band-Aid has to be ripped off. I just hadn't really come to a conclusion

on how I wanted to host my password database because of the scale of that decision. But they're making the decision for me. So I guess I don't really have a choice. I hope they have a great day. I hope they have a great day. So let's change gears and talk about something a little more positive. Phil's back from Manjaro.

Phil, welcome back to the show. It's good to have you, sir. Good to be here. We're going to get our Plasma on in a little bit, and I noted that your project recently did an update for Plasma Mobile. And I'm just curious how all of it's going with the Pine phone and Plasma Mobile in general. And any other updates you have for us? Well, we paired up with KDE Foundation and started to work much closer with Plasma Mobile and Plasma in general.

So we always have the latest and greatest software as we do daily Git snapshots, and you can always get daily built PinePhone images of all our branches from GitHub now. Wow, that's great. Pumping it out. And 5.21 lands with NeoChat, which we've talked a little bit on the show before, kernel 5.10.16. What else? What's new in the world of mobile? Is it anything noteworthy that we should share with the audience? Well, we managed to get the ringtone ringing on the phone on the first dial tone

when you do the FOSH image. So that is going on. And we're also working on the firmware. So the firmware will be replaced by Linux kernel. So all the Qualcomm firmware getting out and you can then replace it. So we have a really open source firmware for the hardware as well. So that's some of the things, what's going on for the PinePhone in the background. Well, that's great.

I saw too that shells.com recently launched. I might be talking about them more soon. And I noticed that Manjaro is on there. Tell me about this. Yeah, we partnered up with them as well. So we will ship out on launch day KDE Plasma. Then we have XFC on GNOME. And we will do also other additions on Shells.

So coming up as well to see. And the good thing is you can run it on any device which has internet access so if your fridge has some browser feature you can run your computer there and some people also told me that they run it successfully on their teslas okay yeah so if you're not familiar shells..com is a in-the-cloud virtual desktop environment that you can deploy, or you can just use it from your browser, obviously. And we've talked before about cloud desktops. Being able to run Manjaro is super appealing. You know, I wasn't going to be too surprised if they offered a Debian desktop or a CentOS or Ubuntu, but having Manjaro on there is really great

and means that people can get a really super up-to-date Plasma system in the cloud. These guys, these shells.com guys should come on the show. We should talk to them. Yeah, sure, we can hook you up with them, and I think they are really interested in getting some promotion out for the new systems and yes and some mini pcs will come along as well because we partnered up

with b-link and i just tweeted out some of the new devices we will support soon well speaking of new stuff all things uh going okay at the project anything new to report in general beyond just plasma mobile not really We're deep in development for the phone and shells, as you told now, and other things coming up. So yeah, we have a good stride for 2021.

Yeah, I don't mean to make it sound like it's not enough. It's plenty. You guys are doing plenty, so that's great to see. Well, very good. Thanks for coming on and giving us a quick update

on what's going on over there. It's good to see the updates landing on the mobile device. Very good. Well, thank you, Phil. Have a good one. You too. Bye-bye. Well, Mr. Payne, a couple of things I wanted to touch on in the housekeeping. So if you'd help me just tidy up a little bit around here.

First of all, I've got to mention the Telegram, because I feel like Telegram's new again all of a sudden for a lot of people. And if you've recently signed up with Telegram and would like to hang out with like-minded folk, well, you can join the Jupiter Broadcasting group at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash telegram, where we're hanging out 24-7 and chatting. And then also, if you want to take it up one more notch, you can join the Luplug. That goes down on Sunday. One more notch, you can join the Luplug. That goes down on Sunday.

Obviously, it happens right now during the show, but Sunday is the official Luplug gathering right there in the Mumble lobby, and you can hang out with everybody and chat Linux. We have anything we should plug for the Luplug, guys? I'm a little bit in vacation mode, but we have our recording scheduled for next Sunday. I don't know if it will happen, but otherwise it will be in a week. So if you follow the Telegram group, you will get any information about LAPLUG

and the recording of the next show. Pow, that's right. The recording's coming up soon. We also have the Matrix chat for the LAPLUG and that information, links to all that stuff's at linuxunplugged.com. If you're looking for something to listen to, I was on the recent episode of The Opinion Dominion,

chatting about the podcast markets and whatnot, episode 28. We'll have a link to that in the show notes. And we get into the business end of podcasting. And let me tell you, the business end, there's a lot going on there. So that's The Opinion Dominion, episode 28, if you want to check that out. I think we did it. We are down and efficient with the Tidy and Wes. We got this.

Yeah, well, I mean, once you do that, then we can have the drinks, right? Let's pour one and talk about Plasma 521, which is, this is something special, you guys. We don't always talk about the point releases here, but as I hope you'll come to understand at the end of this segment, the KDE Plasma team has done something special here. They've cleared another castle. This is a fantastic release. This is a fantastic release. This is a benchmark for free software releases. And look, I really enjoy Gnome Shell still these days. On my single monitor gaming setup, it is choice.

It's great. I am in my happy place, playing with my machine, using Gnome Shell. I'm even down to give 40 a good go. But Plasma, that's my workhorse. Plasma is becoming the ultimate professional workstation. And it's getting better and faster while doing it. There's so much we could talk about in 5.21. I could spend the entire show talking about 5.21.

And it probably deserves it. But a couple of things that are worth mentioning. The new app launcher is great. I have it installed right here because I'm on Neon. And they've nailed it. I'm so proud of them. I'm so happy with this. They have really, really nailed this.

And it looks great. It's functional. It looks beautiful in dark mode. You know, the old one, I kind of just ignored, honestly, especially since KRunner also exists. But, yeah, the new version, I think I might actually start using. KRunner's had some improvements, too. They have the new system monitor.

They have that new Breeze Twilight, which is an interesting idea. If you like a dark plasma theme, but you want your applications to be light themed, that's what it does. There's a lot in here, including new firewall settings, Discover supporting unattended updates, improvements in most of the applets.

What they, I feel like, have achieved here, oh, Wayland support. What I feel like they have achieved here is like a line in the sand. This is, with 5.21, this is a new grade of professional workstation desktop environment. And it's just, it's really well refined.

Has anybody in the mumble room had a chance to look at this? Of course. What are your thoughts? I think that with Plasma 521, we have reached a point where I feel genuinely very comfortable with saying that Plasma is something that I am willing to recommend by default to people rather than feeling a little bit like I need to wait to see if they don't like the GNOME desktop experience before going to Plasma because it seems to have that polish. It seems to have that integration. They're taking paper cuts seriously. They're doing a great job with the Wayland stuff

to make it so that the experience is smooth and competitive with Windows and macOS. And really the remainder bits are what do you do for integration? How do you handle things like preloading and stuff like that? And those will all come with time. But the fact that the desktop itself, that the core experience is now so solid and so well thought out, I'm blown away at how well it is. It's come a long way since when I first switched to KDE Plasma back in 2013, after just suffering for a couple of years

in GNOME 3 and not being able to deal with the workflow. It's the experience, that vision from when, you know, the first KDE Plasma active stuff and all that stuff back then in the KDE 4 era, and all that stuff back then in the KDE 4 era, that vision, I feel, has finally started to be properly realized. Yeah, to me, it's not a good Linux desktop environment. It's a good desktop environment, period, for any platform. And the other thing that I feel like I get with Plasma to a degree that I don't quite get with Gnome Shell

is true distribution independence. I can have any distro I want under the hood and I get a great Plasma experience. I can get there, absolutely, with Gnome Shell, but, you know, there's Pop's version of Gnome Shell, there's Ubuntu's version, there's Fedora's version, and each of those is a very unique starting point for building up the Gnome Shell.

And with Plasma, it's like it's... It just feels more independent, right? Yeah, for better or for worse, it feels more independent. And Wes, I think part of what appeals to me now too is the track record that we're seeing from the project. Yeah, you know, they've really hit a certain stride. We've gotten some great updates from Nate Graham's blogging around this, and it just feels like it's in a healthy state, especially with a lot of these whaling improvements finally addressed, that you can just count on plasma being there for you in the future. Yeah, and you know it's just likely going to get better and better.

If there is a regression, they've addressed it quickly. We were looking just before the show, and I can't remember the exact date, but, oh, yeah, I do. It was January 29th, 2018, is when we installed this Neon workstation that I'm sitting in front of right now. And I have updated it at least, at a minimum, twice a week since January 29th, 2018, with few exceptions.

And I've gone through a different base OS and many, many Plasma releases. And in every single release, I have noted something that I have liked about that upgrade every single time. Every upgrade. Yes. Since 2018. Sometimes there are

a few regressions, especially if you're riding the neon edge there. But those always come with other improvements. And I think, really, the track record has been borne out that they get fixed pretty quickly. I can't think of a lot of niggling little plasma issues that have hung around and kept bothering me on neon. They kind of just go away. Yeah. I really do agree with CM in the chat room.

It is the ideal desktop environment for a distro hopper. I now run Plasma on, currently, just out of my current mix, I run it on Ubuntu, I run it on Arch, and I run it on Fedora, and I run it on different versions of Arch, and I run it on different versions of Ubuntu, and I run it on the latest Fedora. And it's still the same Plasma. Still the same window rules. Everything's, I mean, it's

really great. It is really great, like, a tool like that. And I don't know why I don't have that same quite sensation with GNOME Shell, other than the distro makers generally just customize it more. Yeah. Well, and it does almost feel like there are some different use cases. I think you touched on it there. And my systems

are somewhat the same. Like, I've got a, you know, a distro set up for just sort of gaming casual use and Gnome or Pop works really well there. But when I want things to get out of my way, when I want it to be configurable, the machine I'm using right now for the live show, that's going to be Plasma. And I don't see that changing anytime soon. Where I'm really finding Gnome Shells working super well for me is that single monitor laptop setup. And the one that I'm using for gaming right now, that G14 that I

talked about recently. That's really a sweet spot for me. And I think for my son, we were talking about giving him a new machine last episode. I think for him, and

probably because I'll then hand down his machine and down to the younger, you know, each kid gets a machine iteration essentially. Like when I do that, I think all of them will probably be on GNOME Shell still. I don't think I'm going to change it for them

because they're using the computer somewhat for homework, but their school gives them Chromebooks for that. They're really using it for play. And if you have a more casual relationship with your computer, I think GNOME Shell's perfect for it. Right. It's sort of that area of, you know, do the defaults work really nicely for you, or do you have specific use cases where you need more tunability? And most of the time, no, but when you do, that's where Plasma really shines.

Yeah, and in a way, Wes, it lets me mentally context shift. So when I'm on the Gnome desktop, well, that's my play time. That's off work time. That's playing games. Maybe I don't have my work chat installed on that system. And then when I am in work mode, I'm in Plasma. And so in a way,

it's like it gives me a bit of a context shift that I otherwise wouldn't get between personal life and work. For me, it also sort of means I fuss less with the GNOME setup. I just let it be GNOME or POP or whatever it is over there and don't install too many extensions.

Don't try to fight customization there because I have that outlet in Plasma. Totally. Totally. That has been the same for me too. That has been totally the same. It's like just a few extensions. I do have Discord installed, but I don't have any other chat programs installed, so I'm not getting notifications when

I'm in the middle of doing something. That's worked out really good, and you could replicate that on one box. That doesn't have to be separate boxes. It could be, you know, you have both Plasma and Gnome Shell installed, and you log out and log back in when you're done for the day. Absolutely.

Anyways, 5.21 is super, super great. I invited Nate Graham on to talk about it, but he's really busy today, so we may get him on in the future to talk about it. But this is the release. This is the one that you want to try out. If you've been thinking about trying it when we talked about it, it's just super good, and I just want to give the project a ton of props

because I think this is probably one of the best examples of free software development. When you want to talk about innovation, look at what this project is doing, the features they're bringing that other desktops have never even thought about, and then just the continued pace of iteration. They lost one of their own to COVID

recently, and this release is dedicated to them. They kept going as a team, and I think this is a release they should be super proud of. Congratulations, guys. Your job is well done. You is a release they should be super proud of. So, congratulations, guys. Your job is well done. You deserve a release party for this one. And honestly, I'm looking forward to seeing

GNOME 40. That's going to be a lot of fun to try out, too. It just makes me happy in general. We've got multiple great desktops. The Wayland work is coming along really nicely in all kinds of areas. It's just a good time to be a desktop Linux user. Yeah, absolutely. Datadog.com slash unplug. This episode right here is brought to you by Datadog,

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a dashboard, t-shirt. Pow! And you get to see what I've been talking about. Just really beautiful analytics. You could communicate with other team members about what's going on with. That's what's so super valuable at Datadog. You got to check it out. Datadog.com slash unplugged. I have a wee spot of follow-up for us. We talked about a SATA enclosure a couple of episodes ago where you put an MVME style M.2 SATA disk in there, and then it's essentially a big fat USB stick, but you get NVMe speeds. Wes. Wes, you got to get one of these.

This is, I highly recommend this. It's that good? You're this excited? It's really good. This is going to be a game changer for me because if it was just the improvement of how freaking fast you can copy ISOs over to it, I'd be like, it's worth it. But it is a game changer for the live environment.

It is completely responsive. It is, I mean, it's got to be like near the best case you could ever get from USB 3.0. It is so fantastic, Wes. And, you know, with Ventoy on there, the combo is so nuts. That's what I was just thinking about. Like, oh, that sounds perfect. Yes. So that's what I have done is I threw Ventoy on there,

and then I have the big partition, which I reformatted. So this thing's only 256 gigs, but for ISO images, I mean, come on, right? And I think all in, it's like I'm under $100 for this whole setup. Anyways, so I throw Ventoy on there. I reformat the big ISO partition to XF. I'm from, what is it originally, Wes? Like FAT something? Yeah, FAT or, oh, XFAT. Yeah, that's what it is.

XFAT, okay. Anyways, I reformatted that sucker right away to Extended 4. Debated ButterFS, but just opted to keep it simple. Keep it simple, sure. Went to Extended 4 on there. And so you plug that into your Linux desktop, you mount it, and then it just shows up. It doesn't, the Ventoy stuff side, you just ignore that. And you throw the ISOs on there.

And then when you boot off that, you know, it just, it's lightning fast. And the combination of an enclosure that's like a big thumb drive, but with maximum USB 3.0 speed, it makes booting ISOs just so much smoother, so much faster. And if you do that a lot, if you're a distro hopper, or you're doing tech support, or you need to have multiple ISOs you carry around, you got to do this. Take Ventoy, take it off the USB stick, and put it on this enclosure. I'll have a link in the show notes. If I could make this as a swag product and sell it, I would. That's how much I like this enclosure. I'll have a link in the show notes. If I could make this as a swag product and sell it, I would. That's how much I like this thing. I would love to have a JB branded one of these that you could buy.

It comes with Chris's hand-picked ISOs. Wouldn't that be great? I just put the latest Manjaro GNOME Spin on there, and it's just such a great way to experience the desktop. It's...

I just wanted to give that little bit of a follow-up from just a couple episodes ago. And we do have a little bit of feedback to get to. And we wanted to start with some Arch upgrade tips. This one comes from, I'm going to say Omni, because that's a great name. I heard you and Wes were upgrading your Arch server a couple of weeks ago, and that you were considering giving Arch to your son. May I recommend a package from the AUR to remove most, if not all, upgrade uncertainties with Arch? It's called Informant. And as you know, Arch officially requires you to read its news before you upgrade.

It is on you to go read the news. There may be manual intervention, and that's where they're going to tell you about it, but it's a pain in the neck to do that every time you upgrade. It is on you to go read the news. There may be manual intervention, and that's where they're going to tell you about it, but it's a pain in the neck to do that every time you upgrade, which, if you're like some of us, is 10 times a day, he says. Well, Informant installs a Pac-Man hook such that when there is news, it won't upgrade until you apply the required manual intervention and then mark the news as read. And it's just a AUR install away. So I put that on my box right away.

I know we've kind of talked about this before, Wes. You ever tried it? No, you know, I haven't. I've sort of relied on my hopefulness that I'll check before upgrading or have the skill to figure out if I don't do that and fix whatever is wrong by then eventually reading the blog. That's worked okay. But this seems maybe ideal for a case where you're providing support

and you just want to say, all right, Dylan, well, if you run into this, I mean, if he's not comfortable doing it, that's a perfect sign to go call dad. That was your humble brag way of saying, I follow the news. Sometimes. No, but you're right. It is great. Like that would be great. That's probably a good, solid thing to have on the server, just to remind

us, since we don't upgrade it frequently. And definitely for a laptop for a kid or myself, I'd put it on my box because why not? Just see how it goes. Do you want to take Frank the Tank's email? Yes. I mean, we've got some great names writing into us today. Frank the Tank had a similar

take on thoughts for Arch on the laptop of Dylan. And he points us to some comments back from October pointing to issues with NVIDIA drivers and kernels greater than 5.9. Mostly to say you really should probably consider the LTS kernel. There might be changes, especially if you're using something like NVIDIA graphics, which I think on that laptop you are. Those two systems don't always play nicely. So either choose a distro that's not going to get into this, or try to find the bits of stability

that you can in Arch. I think that's solved now with the latest kernel. Remember that whole GPL condom inspired issue? I think that's pretty much resolved now, but it's a good note, Frank, that it is another example of the kind of thing that can come up that the LTS kernel will steer you away from. Right, and you're just going to be on that cutting edge right there.

Because yeah, sure, this one is solved, but there very well could be future problems like this. Not that they're huge problems, but just that they do have to get figured out. It can take some time. And if you don't follow the latest kernel development, maybe you don't listen to Linux Unplugged for some reason, then you might run into issues that you just don't want to deal with.

Don't listen to Unplugged. Come on, come on. That's not happening. All right, we have one pick this week. And I didn't even warn you about this one, Wes, but you were chatting about it, and I just grabbed it from our chat conversation and threw it in here because, man, this looks really cool,

and I would love you to explain it to me. It's called Sonobus, and the sub-headline is, it's a high-quality network audio streaming system. That's all I know. Yeah, this looks like a tool that we might want to adopt. So it's open source, easy to use, runs as just an application.

You can get it on iOS even, or Mac, or Windows, or they've got instructions for building it on Linux. You can even run it as a VST if you want. And it's kind of like what some of the software we're using already to talk right now for the show, but runs as an application, It's open source and you don't have to rely on a hosted service. Oh, you mean we could do it for real time chat? Yes. And if you take a look, it's got a

really neat UI. It shows all the different tracks in there. It gives you some waveform previews. It's got recording. One thing I haven't figured out is if it's got local recording yet, that'll be next, but it's got Opus integrated right in there, configurability around what kind of bit rates you're sending. And then it does just direct peer-to-peer streaming. So perhaps future episodes of this here show could be recorded using such a thing. They've also got some nice docs too. So whether you're trying to record a podcast or maybe you're in a band and you miss hanging out and playing, you know, with your bandmates, they've got some good docs for getting this set up. And I think the biggest thing to me is that they do have those docs, they've got binaries available for Mac, Windows, and iOS.

That goes a long way, because sure, you know, we've all got Linux, we're comfortable building things from a Git repository. But when you add on that to the already sometimes complex nature of getting audio set up for non-technical users, you just want it to be as plug and play as possible, and Sonobus looks like a great fit. Yeah, check it out at sonobus.net, and of course we'll have a link in the show notes. If you've got a cool app or an email or feedback that you'd like to share with us, anything we've talked about is fair game. We'd love to get your feedbacks and your show ideas and questions for the show.

In fact, we're kicking around an email that was sent into the show this week, and we're holding it right now because we're thinking maybe we'll just base an entire episode off that email. It's possible, too. So we'd love to get your feedback at linuxunplugged.com contact. I also want to thank our members who have supported the Unplugged show with their contributions.

The Unplugged core is at UnpluggedCore.com, and you can become a core contributor, help keep this show independent for as long as this is a show, and you reduce the amount of ads we need to make the show profitable, but you get some perks, too, as a thank you. When you become a core contributor, you get access to two feeds of your choice, the limited ad version of the show, same production, just limited ads, or the full live stream where you'll actually hear us reformatting this show a little bit in real time on today's pre-show. And you get a lot more of that too. That's in the second feed.

on today's pre-show, and you get a lot more of that too. That's in the second feed. You know, we don't say this often, Wes, but it's also the best way to get the show immediately because Wes and I hustle after we get off the air to get the full live stream published. So that way if you can't make it, but you want to get the show for a Tuesday evening commute or something like that,

that's another good reason to become a member because we give it our best to get the full live feed published as soon as we can after the show. It's not immediate, but we do our best. You can get that at unpluggedcore.com, and thanks to everybody who does support the show. We appreciate you. We really do. And don't forget about The Coder, thecoder.shop.

It's Jupyter Broadcasting's first swag item in like forever, and you can get that at thecoder.shop. It's Jupyter Broadcasting's first swag item in like forever, and you can get that at thecoder.shop. Clear room in the closet, Mr. Payne. Yours is on the way. Oh boy! If you... Okay. If you do the Twitter thing, you can follow this show at Linux Unplugged.

The network is at Jupyter Signal. And all of the great shows, you can find more of them at jupyterbroadcasting.com. Self-hosted's coming out later this Thanks so much for joining us on this week today is at Linux Unplugged, linuxunplugged.com slash 393 for our links. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program, and I'll see you right back here next Tuesday! Thank you. JBTitles.com. So I tried out Enlightenment really briefly last week. What? Sneaky.

You know what I thought would be great is my center monitor stays on one workspace and then separate workspaces for my two edge monitors. I just wanted two so I could have like a business side, you know, so I could just flip between them. But had to hard bail, hard, hard bail on Enlightenment because first of all, I have this horrible thing where my monitor assignment when you first log into a graphical desktop is all crazy. My desktop is the wrong orientation because I have two horrible thing where my monitor assignment when you first log into a graphical desktop is all crazy. My desktop is the wrong orientation because I have two vertical screens. The monitors are all out of order.

The wrong primary screen is always set. I mean it's real bad. It's one of the reasons why I had to get off Gnome Shell in that box because every time I'd wake up from sleep, I would reorder all of my screens. And even an X-Ranger script could only do so much for me. So I have not had that problem with Plasma. So I log into Enlightenment. I'm like, oh, right. Here's the thing though, guys. And I was just, I just installed Enlightenment from, from Arch. So it's, you know, whatever is in Arch is repo. Wow. The display manager, it doesn't have a graphical layout for arranging

your screens. Like you have to say this monitor is left of this monitor. This monitor is right of this monitor, this monitor center. And then it doesn't identify which monitors it thinks are one, two or three. It just lists them, but it doesn't actually tell you like this one's monitor one, this one. So you, so you just have to say, I just had to start guessing. Okay. This one's going to be left of this one. This one's right of this one apply. Oh, nope. Got that wrong. And then I do that two or three times crash, hard crash, guru meditation air. So I, then I do that two or three times, crash, hard crash, guru meditation error. So then I do that a couple more times, crash, guru meditation error. Then I do that one more time, crash. Let's do that one more time, crash.

Do that one more time, crash. And it starts crashing every time. So then I reboot, log back in, make a few more changes, crash. And it was rough. And then because I couldn't just visually lay them out, and God bless it, I even launched A-Render because I have the GUI graphical front end to X-Render. Laid it out in there, hit apply. It applies for like two seconds.

And then like enlightenment says, oh, I need to resume your layout for you. And it reverts it back to the horrible layout. Even though I disabled that setting in the display manager, it still does it. And then when I go to change it, crash. And I could tell it was close at one point, but it just got so crashy I bailed. But Enlightenment does have the

ability for like my side displays to have their own virtual desktops. And that would be so awesome. I got close, but I had to walk away. I had to go back to Plasma.