LINUX Unplugged - 412: Going Deepin on Fuchsia

Episode Date: June 30, 2021

Is Fuchsia a risk to Linux? We try out a cutting-edge Fuchsia desktop and determine if it is a long-term threat to Linux. Plus, have we all been missing the best new Linux distribution? We give this fresh distro a spin and report.

I'm having a rough day, Wes. I've officially wrecked my uptime, and I'm struggling with that. Had to reboot, eh? What happened? Well, had to shut down. Had to shut down. Yesterday, we were in the studio, and it started to heat up, and we're looking at the forecast, and it's saying 104, 105 Fahrenheit.

And I just said, no way. We don't have air conditioning in the studio. The little portable unit that I have running right now basically becomes worthless after about 90, 95 degrees. have air conditioning in the studio. The little portable unit that I have running right now basically becomes worthless after about 90, 95 degrees. So I just, I shut everything down. I said, we're shutting the studio down. We bumped Coder from Monday and we're going to record it on Wednesday.

And I turned off the mixer, which we never do. I turned off the recording systems, which we never do. I didn't turn everything off, but I turned a lot of stuff off and I got out of here. I evacuated, everybody evacuated. And I kind of had a, I had like a brilliant moment. You know, sometimes I impress myself, Wes. It's really like a Star Trek scene here, you know, where you've got to turn down all the power so we can hide in the nebula. Although I don't know if we can really hide from the heat. Got it all shut down. Yeah. So I, I decided to go out and play in the snow. So the wife and I

loaded up in the car with So the wife and I loaded up in the car with Levi and we headed out to Mount Baker, which is about 45, 5,000 feet up in the air. So it was like mid eighties, which is still pretty warm. And you found honest to goodness, snow. Yeah, we had snowball fights. I'm out there having a snowball fight. And I, and I checked my phone because it was the first time we were in reception in about two hours and they have a tower up there. And I got a message from Daniel for it this last weekend, Wes and I helped them with their elementary developer weekend. We ran the stream. We were like the wizards behind the curtain. And I had forgotten to upload day two's file before I left. So I'm up there on the mountain playing in the snow.

And I see a message from Dan saying, Hey man, I'm at my desk. I'm like ready to edit and stuff like, but I don't have the file. And I feel like such a jerk. So we had to pack up. We threw a few more snowballs, but we had to pack up and get back in the car and drive for two hours back to the studio. I pull into the studio, open up the garage, I pull into the garage, which is also the server room. But at this point, I had the server off. And Hadid and I kind of at the same time, we open our doors, we step out, and we're just hit with this wall of heat, like somebody sitting there with a blow dryer in our face. It was so hot. We look at each other, and all we can do is say, oh my God, and run for the door. We get to the door, and you know how they tell you

if the doorknob's hot, there might be a fire on the other side? The doorknob was hot, Wes. The whole door was hot. The whole room, every object was radiating heat. It might have been like 120 degrees because probably since about 2 p.m., the sun had been directly on the garage front door and the heat in there had just built and built and built. So we bust out of there as fast as possible, get into the main studio, power up the OBS rig, get that file uploaded that I promised Dan I'd get to him. And then I went through the studio and I did a

complete shutdown like I've never done since we've moved in here. Every single device off, Wi-Fi access points powered off, cable modem unplugged, everything totally turned off because I didn't want anything to die because the heat was outrageous, 120 maybe in the garage and 100 degrees in the main studio itself. It was horrible. So I just turned everything off, and then I came in early this morning before the show, and it was like the bad old days of my IT gig where I would have to go around and get a client back online after a power outage. So I start with the Edge devices to get the cable modem going, get the firewall up and running. Then I get the server booted so that way all of our network services are available.

Then I go get all the client machines online. And then last but not least is the studio, which that has to be booted up in a very particular order. So I get everything turned on here. I sit down, and now we're doing a show. So hopefully everything works. Yeah, I can't believe you actually made it back online to the live stream. We'll see. Hopefully I have all the buttons in the right place. I have a feeling I forgot something.

Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Wes. Good luck keeping cool during this episode, which is brought to you by the all-new A Cloud Guru, the leader in learning for the cloud, Linux, and other modern tech skills. Hundreds of courses and thousands of hands-on labs. Get certified. Get hired.

Get learning at acloudguru.com. Well, coming up in a very warm edition of the Linux Unplugged program, we're setting out to try something that I think has been sort of rattling around in the back of our minds for a while now. When Fuchsia gets to a certain point, is it going to become a threat to Linux? We got an email into the show and they asked some really good questions. So we're setting out to find out. Wes is going to try the absolute state of the art of Fuchsia on the desktop and try to determine if long term it's a threat to Linux. And at the same time, I'm setting off to test something else. I want to try out the latest state in the art of desktop Linux for new users.

I think there might be one true distro out there that we should start considering we recommend to all new Linux users. And I'll tell you about that in a little bit. But before we get there, we have to say hello to our virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello, hello. Hello. Well, hello, everyone. It is great to see all 24 of you in there, including the mayor, aka Jack from Alma Linux. Jack, welcome to the Unplugged program. Hey, guys. How are you? Great. And we have lots to talk about today.

So if you want to chime in at any point, just tag me in the chat room and I'll try to work you in. The mumble room is open to our community and we invite people to join us. You can get details at linuxunplugged.com slash mumble and then join us live on Tuesdays. But let's start with the new goodies that your future Linux desktop will be getting really soon. Linux 5.13 was released, and I think the headline feature here, Wes, is really the M1 bring-up support that has landed now upstream. Of course, it's still early days there. There's no accelerated graphics and a lot more to work out.

But it's in, and that should provide a pretty nice base for development going forward. There are also new Linux 5.13 security features in the mix, like the new LANlock Linux security module, Clang Control Flow integrity support, and optionally randomizing the kernel stack offset at every system call. There's also some AMD fun this cycle, though, don't worry, around FreeSync HDMI support. Nice. Yes, I love to see the FreeSync support landing. The LAN lock LSM stuff is a really interesting story. And if that type of thing appeals to you out there in the audience, let us know.

We would happily do a deep dive. We just don't know if it's too niche or not, but let us know at linuxunplugged.com slash contact. Linus says, this is a fairly big one. You know, it's not like the biggest we've seen, but it's one of the bigger five series releases with over 16,000 commits. And if you count, I guess, all of the merges, it's more like 17,000 and 2000 different developers participated in this release of the Linux kernel. And it's not slowing down. 5.14 has some big things in the works, including dropping its legacy IDE code. Sorry, Wes, your IDE disks are going to have to go.

Oh, no, not my legacy NAS. I thought you'd be worried about your CD-ROM writers. But Neil says that's not actually true. We're not losing IDE support. This is the completion of, gosh, I think like 20 years of effort to kill this code. So a long, long, long time ago, the code around supporting what we call IDE drives, which formally I think are called parallel ATA or PATA drivesata drives, um, was unified with the code that manages SATA drives. And so that's all through the same subsystem. That's why, uh, you tend to, that's why you see, uh, SDA for, for drives, um, even on older systems, like the,

the legacy IDE subsystem uses the older HDA or HDB or HDC. We haven't seen those in forever. And that's what this code controls, I believe. I'm not totally certain. I think the only thing that still uses the legacy IDE code is the M68K port in Linux. All the rest of it uses the newer stuff. So the M68K code was ported to the new stuff, and so the legacy code can go away.

Let me tell you something. Linux was the best back when we called it HDA. It's been crap since then. No, actually, I'm also really excited to see ButterFS getting more performance tuning and other solid improvements in 5.14. We talked about this one before, but the Raspberry Pi 400 is getting mainlined.

Dell's been working on privacy screen support for a long time. That's going to make it into 5.14. Whoa. And Intel and AMD CPUs are getting some nice solid features that are getting added, including Thunderbolt 4 and USB 4 support. Plus, don't think you have to be a file system hipster to get some goodies in 5.14. No, no, XFS improvements for large-scale deployments are coming down the line. And one thing that really caught my eye, latency reduction work for USB audio devices.

Hey! Yeah, that's exciting. And you combine that with the improvements we're seeing in Pipewire. Pipewire is getting really great. They've done some big improvements with their jack stability. And you combine that with a low latency kernel and the improvements that are going into 5.14. Early, early tests are seeing audio latencies in numbers that we've never achieved before in Linux right now. Hackaday has been experimenting, and they're seeing two milliseconds in the entire chain right now. Hackaday has been experimenting and they're seeing two milliseconds

in the entire chain right now, which is what would be record breaking for Linux. And that's not even with the 514 improvements yet. Wow. Yeah. Very excited about that. Did you see the other kind of I don't know if this is really a feature of software so much, but it's going to make Pipewire at least more intelligent with Bluetooth devices. Oh, yeah. This is kind of a big deal they're talking about, at least with the release of 0.3.31, which is a database of, quote unquote, weird Bluetooth hardware. That way, Pipewire can apply specific tweaks for each of those devices. It's basically a bunch of stuff that Android has figured out over the years that now Pipewire can take advantage of to hopefully work a little bit better.

And I think it underscores the one little nice benefit of Pipewire that I didn't really appreciate or tune into at first was all this Bluetooth stuff. It's turning into a really nice implementation and a place where all of it can just work instead of sort of the weird like,

oh, you can't do it in ALSA anymore, only you have to rely on Pulse. It was just a mess. It's such a practical solution, but yet it's not really been done yet. And it's, well, we're going to make a list and we're going to make a list of stuff that just needs tweaks to work right. And, you know, we'll catch probably 80% of the most popular devices out there. And what they've done is they've grabbed the original data set from Android. So they have a massive data set of popular headset devices to start with.

So it's just like a ton of well-supported, well-known headset devices are just going to work with these out of the box. Assuming you can get it connected to your system in Pipewire 3.3.1, in 0.3.3.1. That is really great to see. And the project just continues to crank out really, really solid releases. So a big congratulations to them. We love seeing this kind of stuff. Keep up the great work.

Linode.com slash unplugged. Go there to get $100 in credit and you support the show. Linode is how we spin everything up in the cloud these days. And when it's crazy hot here and I had to shut down everything, I was so glad Linode had my infrastructure for the listeners covered in their data centers. They got 11 of them around the world and they've got air conditioning. I mean, they've been around since 2003. So they've been able to build like just these ultimate network pipelines between their data centers.

They've become their own ISP and they're able to invest in machinery that is just killer performance. So these are sort of like the top level reasons why I love Linode. But you know, Linode was so receptive to the idea of the Linode on the road road trip. The idea kind of was like a baby seed of like, hey, let's do a meetup.

And then it kind of widened into a conversation where Linode was like, you know, we've got a few ideas. And they have been instrumental in creating what I think is going to be a super important team reunion for the JB crew. I think it's going to be just totally critical because we haven't seen each other really since the whole transition to going independent because the pandemic's been going on and we've all been sort of isolated in our homes and we haven't had that human to human connection that makes working together a lot more possible, but also I think just sort of regenerates our creative energy. just sort of regenerates our creative energy. Linode's going to make that trip possible. And I'm so grateful for them because they have been, they're supporting our network. They're making these shows possible. They're making this reunion and our meetups possible.

But they've also supported things like LinuxFest Northwest for years, the Kubuntu project. There's a list on their website. There's a lot of projects they've been involved with for over the years. And that's really how I met them the first time. I think it might have been Texas Linux Fest. It was some event I was at, and they had a booth there. And when some of the other vendors weren't taking the time to really do all of the things necessary to have a good booth, Linode was there enjoying it. They were just enjoying it, you know?

And that was a couple years ago. I was like, I'm going to try out Linode. That experience. And then it transitioned into kind of a passion. And now here they are supporting our independent work and making our team reunion possible. And they just have such a great suite of options from object storage to super fast systems to $5 a month rigs. And they're 30% to 50% cheaper than the major cloud providers like AWS. And they've been around longer than AWS. They started years before them. And they do everything with Linux. They are all

in everything they're doing with Linux. And that means you can take it as deep as you want. If you want to build it up from scratch and build the whole stack, you can. Or if you just want to do the one app click deployment thing, you can do that as well. And they support a lot of your infrastructure management tools like Terraform and Kubernetes and Ansible. So you can pop it into your existing infrastructure with ease. So go get that $100 credit and support the show. That's a really nice way to get going and help your buddies here make a podcast. That's linode.com slash unplugged. So Deepin has a release this week, and we actually haven't really discussed Deepin much, but 20.2.2 came out this week, and it introduces a lot of interesting features that caught my attention.

And I have to be fully transparent with you guys. One of the reasons I haven't talked about Deepin a lot on the show is I don't fully understand the owner model behind Deepin. I've read their EULA, and I've read their privacy policy, and everything seems good there. I've monitored the network traffic behind Deepin. I've read their EULA and I've read their privacy policy and everything seems good there. I've monitored the network traffic to a degree. It's only been like 24 hours and I haven't seen anything sketchy, but I don't really totally fully appreciate and understand that whole relationship there. And so I've been hesitant just to cover it on air. But after today, I just, I couldn't hold my tongue anymore. I mean, I'm going to make that disclaimer to you. And it's something I'm going to investigate more. And

it's something I recommend you investigate. However, there is clearly some neat stuff happening here. So what Wes and I did today is we decided to divide and conquer the work on the show because we want to cover both Deepin and Fuchsia. So Wes went off into Fuchsia town and I went off into Deepin town. And I thought I'd come back and tell Wes that, you know, it was cutesy. Then it had a nice little UI on top of like Plasma or something. But, you know, move on. I thought that's what I was going to come here. I really did.

That was my bias towards this. That's what I'm expecting. Is that not what you're doing? I'm going to start with the with the what I would normally end the review with. And that is, I think this is the distribution, with some disclaimers I'm about to make, that people should look at and consider giving to new users of Linux who are just looking for a Windows replacement. They're not necessarily looking to become a quote-unquote Linux user.

And they want something that is fancier than, say, Windows 11. And I mean it. And what they've done now in Deepin is a brand new app store that includes the ability to install Android apps. So they're right there with Windows 11 on that feature as well. Now, in my version, it does not work at the moment. And I'm going to continue to play with that. But that wasn't really why I downloaded this distro.

Deepin is also the first Chinese distribution to support Secure Boot, and they've been working with Microsoft to get that signed. Interesting. That adds a layer to your conversation around trust in some sense. Yeah. It's not just you making some assessments about them. At some level, Microsoft is too.

Whether you trust Microsoft, that's another question, but it's a point anyway. And you know what else, Wes, is it's something we need to kind of start paying attention to more as Windows 11 is going to force this issue. And so Linux distributions are going to need to have secure boot support for a lot of Windows 11 compatible hardware. Especially if you're targeting new users, right? Right.

And so Deepin checks that box. And then they have a nice calendar application, which, God, that's like giving a glass of water to a man in the desert when you're on Linux. That's like giving a glass of water to a man in the desert when you're on Linux. They have a really, really clean, clean, consistent UI across all of their default album, draw, image viewer, mail applications. In fact, I took some screenshots of what I thought were some of its UI highlights, and I put them in an Imgur album that I'll have linked in the show notes and I've just put in the IRC. that I'll have linked in the show notes and I've just put in the IRC. And their desktop, their Deepin desktop, which is their own thing, is pretty special. It's pretty unique. This latest version is pretty great. And they're really clever and polite about the way they ask you if you want to go into, like, total efficiency mode or would you like eye candy.

want to go into like total efficiency mode or would you like eye candy and they'll walk you through it in a way that is totally approachable to either get a system that is just has all of the fancy turned up or is just really kind of lean mean on the gpu and i liked that a lot the deepen menu is clean it's very simple the most recently installed applications are highlighted with a blue dot your most frequently run applications are highlighted with a blue dot. Your most frequently run applications are in a list, most frequent at the top. And then of course, things are also sorted by category. The taskbar is the cleanest little system bar I have ever seen in an operating system, not in Linux, in a desktop operating system. They just nail it so hard. Everybody needs to steal what they're doing.

It's clean. It's simple. It's easy to see the icons in the system tray. They've taken the best of what macOS and what GNOME 40 is attempting to do with virtual desktop management and multitasking overview, and they've nailed it. It's easy and simple to move windows between virtual desktops. They use a vertical layout, but the way the vertical layout works, you can see all of the applications and you can move them easily. The terminal is clean. It's consistent with the rest of the UI and it gives me more functionality

and tweaking than GNOME Shell does, but not like a crazy amount like console does. It like just hits that sweet spot. Happy medium, huh? And then the system monitor is one of the best dang looking system monitors out there, Wes. Yeah, I'm looking at this right now and it's sexy. Yes. I mean, it's really well done. The whole thing really comes together. Their appearance, configuration, and personalization is fantastic.

You can choose between light mode, auto, if you wanted to switch, dark mode. They support accent colors like is coming in elementary six. They let you dial up and down the transparency and the window effects with simple controls. You can even turn off the rounded corners or make them just slightly less rounded, but it's all done in a way that's so clean, it makes the other configurator screens

on other distributions look complicated while giving you more options. I mean, I'm telling you, this is so slick. And it's got built-in backup options into the system settings that are crazy easy to use. The file manager starts really big and clear, but then can be kind of refined into a more typical power users file manager. Again, striking a great balance between configuration options and not overdoing it and also making

those configuration options easy and approachable. And honestly, somehow they lay out in a way that makes it easier visually to go through the list and decipher what options are available, makes it more approachable that way. And it's all running on top of Debian. And something else they do that's kind of fun is they ship it with this what they call dual kernel mode. Dual kernel mode, huh? Yeah, how about this trick? Two kernels are installed at the same time. They, by default, are using like a more conservative LTS kernel,

but in the Grub advanced menu, you can choose a newer kernel with better, newer hardware support, and it'll just boot that, and everything works just great. And, you know, the Deepin Package Manager, which is apt, with their own repos, keeps it all up to date. Oh, so it's not like you have to do a one-time, point-in-time pick. I'm either going LTS or something a little newer. No, you can choose as per boot if you want.

Yeah, and I tried swapping between them, and I think you need the later one for the Android app support, so I just went with the later one because why not? I don't know how that's going to work out because, like I said, the software center never quite worked right for me. That's not why I'm using this distro, though. And there was still parts of the software center of the UI that are in Chinese. When you launch the browser, which is based on Chrome, the latest version of Chrome, when you launch that, you get the Baidu search engine, which gives you results in Chinese. So

you definitely would need to, and this is my disclaimer, besides just research the back of the company, but all of that, but you also would need to tweak some of the stuff for a new, new user, because some of it comes up in Chinese and you have to maybe switch the search engine to your preferred search engine, which is obviously Bing, and then tweak those kinds of things. But I imagine as every release goes on with Deepin, these problems become less and less because I have followed the distro for a while. I just haven't talked about it a lot. And these items have slowly been getting corrected. And it's been making it more and more approachable to a Western audience for a while now. And it's been trending in that direction. before a new user could sit down and really fully use it and have a great experience. But it truly feels like something different and fresh. It feels very well thought out.

It is a new experience to the face of Linux, and it installs very fast. It's probably the fastest Linux distro I've ever installed. And it's probably the fastest setup time because I was just on board to experience Deepin as they have it by default. I didn't want to tweak it much. I just turned on dark mode experience Deepin as they have it by default. I didn't want to tweak it much. I just turned on dark mode and then pretty much was happy there. And then when I'd open up each individual application, I'd maybe have to make some kind of tweaks, maybe, you know, to the file manager or to the terminal, but it'd take me about 15 seconds and then I'm done. And I was up and going in this thing in probably an hour.

Yeah, okay. That's not bad. It's a fresh take. And you can absolutely use the Deepin desktop on other distributions. I'm not saying you only have to use Deepin Linux to try out the Deepin desktop. What are the advantages there? I'm curious how that experience might differ to just getting the benefits, the surface level,

sort of DE experience versus something like that dual kernel stuff, which I imagine you need the whole system to have. Yeah, I mean, to me, it's like akin to running Pantheon on Fedora or Arch. It's like you get some of the experience, but it's not quite the full representation, and it's not definitely what they intended. So I wanted to try their take on it. I'm kind of, I think, in part of this, Wes, when I do these tests, I think part of me is hoping to just fall in love with a Debian-based Linux that I could just use for a long time. A base you're comfortable with, but something that keeps you

happy on the surface. Yeah, but still none of them have quite scratched the itch like Fedora is recently. That really seems to be, you know, with DNF and Toolbox and then the concept of just really close to rolling but not quite there, I like their term of leading edge. That's where for me, as my personal desktop, I'm going to, I think, stick there because I like being pretty current. I think it's overall it's better if in the free software ecosystem if you're fairly current and you're not lagging behind. And sometimes Debian does tend to lag behind in certain areas. And while Deepin makes up for that in some places, ultimately, it's not quite the workstation recipe I want.

But I wasn't just being obnoxious when I said earlier, I think this could be the distro for new Linux users. Right now, if you're recommending Linux Mint to people, then you're who I'm directly addressing at this moment. I want you to try Deepin out and take a look at it and see if maybe you could start recommending this to people, then you're who I'm directly addressing at this moment. I want you to try Deepin out and take a look at it and see if maybe you could start recommending this to people. Now, I'm not saying you have to change and it could be working great, but there's something really special here because it's a real fresh take on the desktop that feels more modern

than what Apple or Microsoft are putting out right now. Even with their, um, Mozarati coming out and the Windows 11, I think it feels like it's still ahead of where they're going. The team is really putting a lot of thought into it, and whenever you see a Linux distribution that's getting that much love and care and thought put into it, and they're doing something new and fresh

like that, it's worth anybody's time to check out. But if you're in right now and you're in that area where you're a Mint recommender, think Deepin has to be on your try list. Yeah, sounds like maybe there's some ideas over there that need to be more widely enjoyed and shared and thought about and, you know, an injection of

some of those fresh ideas into perhaps an otherwise stale Linux ecosystem. I'm going to stick with it for another week. Even though I think ultimately I'll be back on Fedora. I have it on my ThinkPad, and I think I'll probably reload that. I had Windows 11 on Fedora, I have it on my ThinkPad, and I think I'll probably reload that. I had Windows 11 on there, so I'm kind of in this weird area right now. I was trying out Windows 11 for Coder Radio, which I'm going to talk about tomorrow on Coder Radio. And then I thought, well, now that I'm done with Windows 11,

I'll try Deepin out. And that's been really great. And I think I'm going to stick with it for another week. But then I've got to make that decision after that. I think I'll probably go back to a Fedora distro. But I don't know if it's going to be a Plasma Spin or the GNOME one. I'm in this weird phase right now. So while I let that thought simmer, I'm going to enjoy Deepin for just a bit longer. Now, Wes, we got some cleaning up to do around here. This is ridiculous.

Ooh, yeah, messy. Yeah, I stormed out of here and just made a mess. Like right here, look at this. It's just laying on the floor. This says right here, hey, meetups, two of them coming up. One in Denver and one in Salt Lake City. Details at meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting. Let's go see.

Are people signing up? Let's find out. I hope so because, you know, otherwise, why are we going to Salt Lake City, right? So far, we have 20 that are going to Denver. Nice. And nine that are in Salt Lake City. I think that means those things are happening. That's awesome. Right there. Very nice. If you'd like to join us, get accounted, you know, be accounted for. Get counted, meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting. Our Telegram group's going right now, you know, that's where the conversation continues. The show wraps up. You can always send us an email, but every now and then it's just a quick thing. You might want to grab, maybe one of us are hanging out in there at that moment. You want

to grab us, something like that. We got a Telegram group. You can go in there and do that. Jupiterbroadcasting.com slash telegram. That's over there. Matrix info too is at our website, linuxunplugged.com. And then of course those emails at linuxunplugged.com slash contact. And then the last little bit of housekeeping wisdom that I will depart with. Don't steal our wisdom. Yeah, wouldn't that be great though? That'd be my power.

That'd be a great superpower. So if I had a superpower, it would be that I would take wisdom and transmit it to you that Luplug is going on every Sunday. And that it is wise to attend the Luplug. Because hanging out with like-minded Linux users rejuvenates the soul in a way that even antisocial, inverted, like, totally don't want to talk to people people benefit from. How do I know that? Because I've done it and I've benefited from it. I don't want to get on a thing and talk to people I don't know on a Sunday, but you know what? Every single time I've done it, I've absolutely enjoyed the experience. It feeds you.

And it happens every Sunday. LinuxUnplugged.com slash mumble. Join our virtual log and hang out. And then you've got that mumble software all set up and you can join us here in the pod on a Tuesday. I'm sorry I called it pod. It's weird housekeeping. What can I say? Alright, so we've got some fuchsia fears that I think reflect the thoughts

of some of our listeners. Do you want to take this email from Mr. Light Fixture? Mr. Light Fixture wrote in. Hey, just wanted to write in because I know you people like to keep up with fuchsia. Did you know there's already a desktop OS based on Fuchsia? It's called Dahlia OS, and they have two editions.

One based on the Zircon kernel, and the other based on Linux. It's open source, has an eye-candy desktop called Pangolin, and the devs seem to focus on Flutter-based apps as the main kind of programs on the system. If you did check it out, I'm curious to know your thoughts. Does it have potential? What does Fuchsia on the desktop mean for Linux distros as we know them today? Could Fuchsia supplant desktop Linux or even Chrome OS in the future? Big questions there, Chris. That's a good question. You and I have been kicking that around a little bit

because we follow the development of Fuchsia pretty closely for Linux Action News, and there's more movement there than in the past. Google has recently rolled out Fuchsia to the first-generation Google Nest hubs, and they're positioning it very much as a modular OS that could work for IoT but eventually make its way up to phones and, yeah, Chromebook-style devices. And one wonders, what would that mean for Linux? You know, what is truly the concern there?

Would it be necessarily useful in server workloads? You know, I don't know. But desktop workloads? Potentially. Mobile workloads? Potentially. And if that's true, the ramifications of that could be a significant drop-off

in kernel developers. Because when you look at a lot of the source code and development time coming into the Linux kernel right now. And the things that are driving features like even having an LTS kernel, a lot of that comes from mobile right now.

A good portion of that developer time comes from companies that are bringing up mobile support or fixing something so it's more efficient on mobile, which often has great, great effects too on the desktop. You know, we get better power efficiency or we get something that comes along as a knock-on effect of that. And I think if Fuchsia were successful, say, in the Android marketplace, devices, say, five years from now have a Fuchsia base and Chromebooks five years from now have a Fuchsia

base. I think the impact would not be directly felt by Linux users from that, but it would be a reduction in kernel development and contributes to the kernel. A lot of what happens at these huge scale companies is that kind of like custom development. We need X, we need a system that meets our needs here, and in the

current times, Linux is the easiest way to get that done. It makes the most sense, you can kind of leverage what other folks are doing, but there are also some impediments, right? Like Linux is an old kernel to get that done. It makes the most sense. You can kind of leverage what other folks are doing. But there are also some impediments, right? Like Linux is an old kernel. It's got the design decisions. It's made from a long time in computing.

And sometimes you might have to go back and forth a little bit, look at some of the stuff like features in the Android kernels that have been hotly debated whether they should or could be merged up to mainline, eventually did. Some still haven't been. So there's also some friction there. And I think maybe some of the worry is that if Fuchsia or something like it gets far enough along, the value proposition might change where Google or Facebook or some of these other big companies decide that, oh, hey, this OS over here, it's just easier for us to get what we need here because we don't need it to support all the hardware in the world

or every possible type of computing, right? We have six different product lines. We need it to support that, and otherwise we don't care. Yeah, I think that is very reasonable, and it's not just maybe as simple as that. And we're going to talk more about this in a moment, but Fuchsia being the modular OS that it is, it may be very simple to bring up Fuchsia support on older

hardware as well for compatibility purposes. That may be a very straightforward process with the way that Fuchsia is designed. Maybe this is the context in which we talk about Dahlia OS, which is trying to kind of bring together the best of Linux and Fuchsia into a desktop experience. And so we thought, let's have Wes try this out and see how practical and realistic this is as maybe a one-day Chrome OS replacement or something like that. All right, well, right out of the gate, it's still super early days for Fuchsia

and the whole Zircon kernel. And because of that and because of their goals, WOS is looking to provide a fast and stable experience on nearly every computer, at least so they say. And including from their little notes here, including the 2004 desktop tower, all the way up to the latest generation of mobile notebooks. So right now they've got a dual kernel approach so that users with the newer hardware in theory at some point would be on Zircon, but to get all that legacy software support, all those older devices, they're planning to use good old Linux. So it's interesting.

Maybe it represents an approach of the future, a bridge, but right now the only thing that I could actually get to boot was the Linux version. Okay. And like we were kind of alluding to earlier, it doesn't seem like that's a weird kind of stretch for Fuchsia. It seems like you kind of can plug and unplug these different parts of the Fuchsia stack and plug in a Linux kernel to get access to device drivers and whatnot. How does that work exactly?

Well, I mean, I think it depends on what we're talking about in the Fuchsia stack. So one thing here about Dahlia is, yeah, a lot of it is targeting Flutter. And Flutter and Dart, of course, work just fine on Linux, right? It's got its own render. It's got its own setup. So that makes that part of the stack flexible. And then on the Zircon side, it's just so new, right?

Like from the developer perspective, it's just exciting to see something where you can make changes, you can learn from your past mistakes. And because it has this history of being quite minimal and leaving a lot of things out of the kernel, especially with some of its more asynchronous, non-blocking nature,

it seems like, if needed, there's a lot of areas where Zircon could be extended to support stuff that Linux previously did if it actually needed to. One aspect here is because of the asynchronous, non-blocking stuff, it might make it really easy for system calls to be serviced on a different core than say the one making the call. Just some other sort of like nitty gritty details like that that make me wonder if Zircon might end up being a better fit for some of these new architectures we're seeing with

more custom different cores than say Linux and being targeted at general computing. I think that is part of the concern that's gnawing at some of us long timers just a little bit. Like, we know in the back of our mind it's a low threat, likely on the desktop, in its current state for sure, it sounds like. However, the thing about Fuchsia is the whole entire thing, the entire OS os stack is being built with google's lessons learned with android and and linux and all of that like they're taking oh this didn't work so let's build

it this way and they're really clever people there at google and so i think we all kind of implicitly know they've solved some problems that are going to be appealing to developers, and Google has the might and the scale to really push something if they want. And those things are concerning because if it's going to save developers time and money, and if the simplicity means it's quicker and perhaps a little more secure, that's going to be very attractive. Like, for example, the Zircon kernel only supports ARM and x86 and 64-bit versions of that. Like, they don't have to mess with all the old legacy architectures that Linux supports. Like, they don't have to play.

That's not in their wheelhouse of targeted devices. They just, they don't have to do that. There's a lot of stuff like that in the security world too, right? Where there's just some more flexibility or compromises that were chosen a different way in the Linux world that they can choose a different path on in Zircon.

So when you're using it, Wes, do you get a sense that they're building it to work as a workstation? Because in the screenshots that you have linked in the show notes, I see that they have like a VM manager and stuff for virtual machines. Yes. So again, we should be clear on what different things we're talking about here. This is going back to Dahlia OS, which I think in some sense is a hedge. So we're worried about Fuchsia, we're worried about Zircon and some of these things. Part of that worry to my mind is,

I mean, we're not worried that it's not open because of course it is, at least it's open source. But one thing that's been so amazing about Linux is that it's community driven, right? Like it's not just, yes, as we mentioned a second ago, there are some huge companies that have major influences on it, but at the end of the day, it's the kernel maintainers, and it's Linus, and it's the community of people actively developing it that are making those calls. Google and Facebook don't get to do whatever they want.

Pufucia has been this weird little skunk work project in the background. And of course, we've got some kind of bad taste left in our mouth from, you know, the AOSP sort of just code dumps over the wall. Yep. I wonder if Dahlia, I mean, with their kind of clever, different kernel approach and building this technology on Flutter and in theory to support a future more developed Zircon kernel. to support a future more developed Zircon kernel. I wonder if this is a hedge against that success, because instead of just Google and some of these more companies building, I don't know, smart devices or running it on some container security system in the cloud,

this might be an area where it could be generating a real community that we might actually recognize. That is a wild thought. So this is a hedge. If the fuchsia on the desktop thing ever does take off, at least we've got some community driven, community built workstation OS. And it doesn't look too bad. So they've got their custom, some desktop environment called Pingolin. And it's kind of pretty. I mean, it looks like a Flutter app. It's got a strong sort of Google design-inspired aesthetic. And a lot of it is still super early days.

They've grayed out a lot of the apps that just don't work at all. But even in the ones you can open, well, not all of them work as nicely as you might think. But there's a lot in here to like, including a sort of Android-style settings menu that's very accessible, easy to use, including a sort of Android-style settings menu that's very accessible, easy to use, and a clever custom process and container monitoring app that looks like, once it's working a little bit nicer, could be pretty great. And these are Flutter applications, essentially?

These are, yeah. Okay, I mean, it looks very touch-friendly, but you could still use it with a mouse. Yep, and I was using it virtualized with a mouse, no problem, but you're right. I think a lot of the elements here, they could be touch friendly. It's definitely not anything radical. You know, if you're familiar with sort of a Chrome OS or a material or an Android design,

yeah, you're going to know what this looks like. Yeah, I'm getting strong Chrome OS material vibes from this, which is, I guess, what you would expect. You know, though, having Deepin on the same episode as dahlia it so is at opposite ends of the spectrum deepen is this complete polished fully feature-rich desktop environment with desktop applications in an app store and a chrome web browser and a full linux debian based subsystem right and then dahlia is this weird fusion of Linux and Fuchsia with the Pangolin desktop on top of it all.

And I have a hard time even keeping it straight, Wes. It seems like a whole new hybrid monster to me. Yeah, that's what's kind of fascinating, too, is seeing it all work out in these different ways. Like, I guess we could have a whole, you know, Flutter-based desktop running on top of Linux. Sure, some folks might want to run it on Zircon and Fuchsia, but maybe it's just fine for us to run it on Linux, too.

I don't know. I'm not saying I'm in love with Flutter or the look of this, but I do find it really interesting to see these ideas sort of built out and see more community involvement with it. Maybe Flutter could be a really great technology for us to build toolkits, you know, and desktop apps, just like we use GTK and Qt today. And I agree with ByteBit in the IRC. This could be a compelling environment for the Pinebook Pro kind of device.

Oh, yeah. Very true. You know, a nice ARM64 machine with a good desktop environment on it that really could have some decent features. I just am still adjusting to the entire concept. And I think I'm part of this where I'm kind of having to reassess is where I've come down on Flutter to a, to a degree because, you know, when canonical kind of went all in and announced their installer was going to

be in Flutter and kind of suggested that other developers follow them in that direction. I thought, ah, I don't think that's it chief. I don't think that's quite it. I don't think they are, but,

but you know what, when I see this and when I play with Flutter and I've gotten emails in from people who are building Flutter apps, I think to myself, maybe I misread Canonical's read. Maybe they got it right. And then you go through this album that you've linked in the show notes, and a lot of these apps are like 80% there already. And it's not like they've been around for years. They've been able to catch up to what we would consider modern standard features in a remarkably short time. And that's noteworthy because we really, really could use a healthy third-party developer ecosystem.

And I'm not saying Flutter is necessarily it, but I think going through this and having you explain this to me, Wes, I think it's made me reevaluate that I need to be more open-minded to it. And that if we want to see an influx of apps that are not Electron, I think I've got to consider this a little bit more freely than I had before. I have to be a little more open to the idea of Flutter apps on the Linux desktop. I think it's hard to maybe separate its origin and who's pushing it and all of that from, at the end, you know, the technical merits and what sort of interesting stuff do people make with it?

Unpluggedcore.com. Thank you to our core contributors. This episode, the last few have been brought to you right by, in this spot right here in the show, they've been brought to you by our members. Just members, people out there making this show possible. Thank you, everybody who's become an Unplugged Core contributor. You, you're my sunshine. I don't know. What else can I say? I mean, you make the show possible. We've been in a tight spot this month and a lot of you stepped up. And I'm really, just really very grateful. The summertime sale is going on for a little bit longer. A $1 off membership for the lifetime.

When you go to unpluggedcore.com and you use the promo code SUMMER. I could go on such a soapbox about how I think member-driven media is so critical right now and how I just am so grateful for everybody who stepped up and provided some support, but there are

still spots. We could still use more. We're definitely not at the spot anywhere close to where it would replace a sponsor yet. But maybe one day we'll get there, unpluggedcore.com, and use the promo code SUMMER for just a little bit longer, and you can get a dollar off the lifetime of your membership. John writes in regarding the AUR on Ubuntu. This was last episode where we kind of dove into

just about any approach we thought might work to get our favorite AUR hot apps on our boring old Ubuntu or Debian desktops. John runs LTS Ubuntu 2004 with LXD and LXC and says, I can run just about any secondary Linux OS in a container, Arch, Fedora, Alma, whatever, with pretty much a full system. Sans kernel, of course.

And they run blazingly fast and almost like the real thing. I can even run them in a VM if I so choose, although that's still a pretty early feature of LexD. I know Docker is the future, but I find myself using LexD more than I do Docker, frankly. Here's how he does it, though. By loading an X11 profile that automatically displays to my host system when I spin up a new instance, I can run, e.g., Arch, and install anything I want from the AUR. It displays to my host as if it's native, and if it's truly running in Arch,

which seems much simpler to me and more stable than some kind of hackery running the AUR compiled directly. Now, I don't have a full desktop, of course, but that isn't what you said you wanted anyway. At any rate, with this setup, I've been pretty happy. I can run any application I want from almost any distro and it runs as if it's native. Takes seconds to spin one up. It's great. Clever setup. That is not bad, John.

I think that's a perfect use case in that scenario. I love using Toolbox right now. It sort of solves what I needed from it, but I could see you using a setup similar to this, Wes. I mean, yeah, you had me at containers and I'm a big LexD fan. And I'm sure you could set up something similar with Wayland too if you had some need or just desire for Wayland specific apps.

I kind of feel like I'm not feeling Docker is the future as much as it once was. I think it's going to have a very, very healthy long-term future, but Podman is getting more and more love and it's getting used just sort of Podman is getting more and more love, and it's getting used just sort of as a back-end tooling more and more by orchestration tools. And there's LexD, there's, I mean, hell, there's still FreeBSD Jails. Like, I think what we're going to have is the concept of containers and like an OCI standard, and we're going to just sort of mix and match the runtime depending on the application and use.

And it's going to be part of our jobs. I use that term very loosely, but it's going to be part of people that are in the industry's jobs to figure out which runtime and tools are correct for the right application. And I think it's less of a default that it's Docker more than ever these days. Yeah, really. I mean, especially if you're getting into some kinds of weirder use cases, more system-specific or admin-type use cases. I think Docker, especially with all the changes that happened to that company,

and they're kind of now focused on desktop and developer tooling, it seems like they're focused very much on that sort of, a container runs one thing, it's meant there to be sort of like running microservices, isolating stuff out and deploying it into the cloud or onto your container cluster. And that's all great, and of course you can do those things with Podman and

everything else, but between Systemdnspawn, LexD, or even just the sort of container primitives that are being leveraged by stuff like Flatpak, I think you're totally right. You just need a file system image. Maybe you want to build one yourself or pull it out of a virtual machine. And then at the end of the day, you're kind of just

assembling a collection of cgroups and some namespaces and running a process. And I think for a long time for me personally, it'll be either Docker or Podman using Docker Compose compatibility because I do really like that. But, you know, I'm a multi-container gentleman.

What can I say? It's a lifestyle. We have another pick, one of our famous picks for you here, a classic, a real spinner. It's called Mix, M-I-X-X-X. And we've talked, no, it's not, no, no, it's not dirty. It's like DJ software. We've talked about it before on the show. You remember, don't you?

And it lets you be a smooth operator. It mixes music together like a pro. And it has new looks, new tagging capabilities. And it also has new hardware support. And, very happy to say, it now has support for recording and streaming in Opus and high-quality AAC codecs. It can stream from the software itself out to your endpoint. Yeah. We love Mix.

I've used Mix a lot on our live streams over the years, so that's why I've mentioned it before on the show. It's so neat, though. If you just want to throw something on your machine and just have it mix together music for you, if you've got a couple albums or something, and if you do that local music thing. It is so cool.

And the way it displays the music and lets you crossfade everything, it just is the neatest. And it's just a fantastic open source app. Or maybe you're just a nerd who's forced to socialize. You're having folks over to your party. You don't really want to talk to them. But you can be there playing with mix in the background playing great tunes. Are we both just introverts? Because both of us, it'd have to be like a forced thing

to have people over. It's not just something we do, but some people do, Wes. You could probably also pipe it into your Zoom calls using Pipewire. Now there you go. Right. Thanks to our sponsor, Cloud Guru for sponsoring. You can find them on social

media, pretty much anywhere that's a social media website, they're just slash a Cloud Guru. It's really easy. So they're just about everywhere slash a Cloud Guru. We've got that thing, too, that social media thing. The show's at Linux Unplugged, and the network is at Jupiter Signal. And then if you just want a website, you know, if you're old school and you just want a website in your in your mosaic compatible web browser, you can go to Jupiter Broadcasting dot com. And if you are not catching Linux action news, you're missing like all the news, the stuff that's going on in the industry all the time and open source and Linux. We're covering it there.

There will be a episode next week. It'll just be a little bit later because Wes is going to be traveling like the gentleman man about town that he is. And like a pro, even after traveling, we're going to sit down and we're going to record an episode of Linux Action News. I mean, the news doesn't stop. That's right. I can't either. No,

just can't stop. Won't stop. So go get that at LinuxActionNews.com. But for us here, we do it live. We do it every single Tuesday at noon Pacific. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. We'd love to have you join us. Participate in our open mumble room and conversate with us in the real times in the IRC.

irc.geekshed.net pound Jupiter Broadcasting. Yeah, we're still on Geek Shed. I've had people asking. And I feel like we want to support an open IRC ecosystem. pound Jupiter Broadcasting. Yeah, we're still on Geek Shed. I've had people asking. And I feel like we want to support an open IRC ecosystem. So come hang out. I'm plugging it right now. It's been a while.

It's been years. It's been years. irc.geekshed.net pound Jupiter Broadcasting. I'm hardly in there, but come say hi. All right. Links at linuxunplugged.com slash 412.

Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged Program. And we will see you right back here next Tuesday! Thank you. It's for people who like to mess with computers. Everybody head over to Elementary's YouTube channel. I'll put a link in the show notes, actually. Their EDW went pretty great. Wes and I had a great time hanging out with those guys.

And they had people talk about accessibility and usability. They talked about creating great-looking icons on Linux and all kinds of topics. Dan did a State of the Platform video, too. It's all on the Elementary YouTube channel. So we'll put a link in the show notes, but you can go find it over on YouTube.