LINUX Unplugged - 419: What's Cookin' at System76

Episode Date: August 18, 2021

Live from Denver, we chat with old friends and new. We get the inside scope on what has been going on at System76, and what's coming up next. Plus we catch up with a few members of our crew, and find out what Linux tech they're loving these days. Special Guests: Aaron Honeycutt, Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, Carl Richell, Cassidy James Blaede, chzbacon, and Ian Santopietro.

Wes, it actually happened? We all made it to Denver. I wasn't sure we would. I wasn't sure you would actually, you terrorist. What happened? You got held up in security. Oh boy, yes. It was an early flight, let's say boarding at 4.35 a.m. I get to the airport. I'm walking to my gate. I got TSA pre-check. Not too worried, except I see a giant crowd. Uh-oh. I did not budget for this.

Not at four in the morning. No, right? I checked the app and said there was no line like five minutes or less. Okay. Okay. No, no. That's just a bunch of international people waiting for their own flight. And for whatever reason, the security check is passed all of these people with their bags. I'm going through lines, going through, and I decided to bring a microphone.

You know, we did the show. Yep. We needed to do the show. Are we using that mic right now? I'm using that mic right now. Okay. All right. So it may have been worth it. I got it. I got it through. I anticipated knowing from your experiences that there was going to be a little bit of trouble with the old TSA and their scanners. It just happens that the RE320 kind of looks like a pipe bomb on the x-ray. So here I am thinking about that. You know, I know that's totally fine. So I expect this. I see them start looking at my bag and I hear them debating. Like one of them thinks part of the stand is an extendable baton. So they're kind of debating. But another of the TSA agents thinks, no, no, that's a microphone. That's a microphone.

So they're like betting each other. Yeah, yeah, it's a microphone. She's like, oh, I knew it. Tells me, you know, you got to wait for your other bags. I'll be over here looking for things. Now, I knew this might happen. So the microphone right at the top of my bag. Oh, good thinking. Turns out, though, they're also very interested in the very dense pieces of the stand. I didn't think about that. There's just dumb pieces of metal, right?

There's no complicated electronics. There's no electronics at all. All right, so they're rooting around. I see she's kind of looking through my bags. Eventually gets to the bottom where the big, heavy base of the stand is, pulls that out, checks it. I thought that'd be it, but no, she keeps looking, keeps looking. And that's because there's this little extended bit that actually joins from the microphone to the stand part. I mean, it is the stand, right? But what could it be? It looks so weird on the x-ray. And I'm trying to be helpful. Oh, I think, I think I rolled that up. I mean, it is the stand, right? But what could it be? It looks so weird on the x-ray. And I'm trying to be helpful.

Oh, I think I rolled that up. I think I rolled that up in a shirt. And she's like, oh, okay. She offers me to come closer and like, you know, help look for this thing. She gets a look of confidence. Oh, I think I found it. She reaches in to pull it up.

It's wrapped in my underwear. Hello, friends, and welcome to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Wes. Yes, we are live from a very toasty sound booth at System76 in Denver, Colorado. And we have a very special show coming up for you today. Old and new friends are joining us here in the booth to chat about various different things.

It's going to be a great show. I can't wait to get into it. And I want to say thank you to A Cloud Guru for sponsoring this episode. They are 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 a cloudguru.com.

Yeah, so just like we said, coming up on the show today, it's a totally different format. We made the trek out here and we're going to chat with our friends about all of that. There is so much to get into that we're going to kind of do this a little bit differently. So right here at the top, I want to say thank you to our friends at Linode, at linode.com slash unplugged. You go there to get $100 in 60-day

credit on your new account, and you also support the show. It's a way of letting Linode know, hey, I heard about this here service on that Linux Unplugged podcast. That was worth your time. That was worth your efforts to sponsor them. So we appreciate you doing that as well. Linode is our hosting provider as well. So we enthusiastically recommend them. Everything we've built in the last couple of years has been on Linode. And this week, right now, as we are here,

marks the very prime moment in negotiations before Jupiter Broadcasting went independent. We are one week away from the year anniversary and Linode was one of the very first companies on board helping us go independent. When I contacted them, they were enthusiastic about joining us. And that has held true the entire time. When I reached out to them and started brainstorming about this road trip, I expected to really kind of have to convince them of the value. And they were 100% on board. They got designers involved. They got web people involved. They got people on their marketing crew involved so we can do giveaways and all kinds of stuff.

They really enthusiastically embraced the community. And that's because they started there. In 2003, they got into cloud computing before it was called that because they saw the features that were landing in Linux itself. They were developers. They were geeks using this stuff.

And they realized there was a way to build out Linux at scale like nobody had done before. Now, you flash forward 18 years later. Yeah, yeah, Linode's old enough to vote now. You fast forward 18 years, and they have refined and focused that strategy to a T. It is so impressive what they can do between the dashboard, the performance, 11 data centers around the world. And they have a lot of options for those of you who maybe have never set up a server before. One-click deployments from their marketplace, easy tutorials and guides. And they're always working with people out in the community to create videos and tutorials to help you as well.

But you have to get started. You have to go try it yourself. You have to see it with your own eyeballs. Go hook your peepers on it by going to linode.com slash unplugged. Get that $100 for your new account and try this stuff out. That's how you learn. That's how you experience something. Go build something. Go try something. Maybe go performance test your network because they've got crazy fast servers and you can

really, really push things. There's a lot of ways and a lot of different companies to host something. You know, there's a thousand options out there. a lot of different companies to host something. You know, there's a thousand options out there. But Linode strikes the balance between performance, price, the best customer service out there, and their community support.

So go shop local, support the show, and go to linode.com slash unplugged. Well, I just arrived in Denver today, but Brent, you've been journeying with Chris and really the whole clan this entire time. I think you need to catch me up. Where do we start, Chris? Well, you're Uncle Brent now. Well, that's true.

I think just yesterday, Levi confirmed that status. He was, you know, I've been sleeping on the sofa in Lady Jupiter, the RV. And yesterday I wasn't there. And Levi wouldn't have any of it. Yeah, he noticed. He protested. He was searching the whole RV nonstop. I mean, Brent's been with us for 2,000 miles, about.

I think a little over. How many states is that? Something like that. So we didn't count. But I went to a bunch of states that I didn't realize we were going to be going through. One of those was Wyoming, which was beautiful. Yeah. I really appreciate that.

We kind of cruised through most of the, I guess, southern part of Wyoming. And then we ended up in Nebraska as well. Yeah. And I had no idea we were going to end up there. So I've added that to my list of like experiences. And we found a beautiful spot to stay there and watch the stars and the sunset. It was your first time to Utah as well, right? You're right.

Yeah. So we've done Idaho, Oregon, Utah, Wyoming, and Nebraska. Washington. Of course, Washington. Oregon. And then we came down Highway 76 into Denver, which was rough as hell on the rig, really bad. I mean, that must be a big new part of this. Obviously, Brent, you kind of travel all over. Who knows where you are at any one point? But I don't know if you've traveled exactly this way before.

I have not. And I will say it's my first sort of somewhat cross-America road trip. Typically, I'm sort of jetting in somewhere and having all these great experiences. But this time, the trip was the experience. This time you sawting in somewhere and having all these great experiences. But this time, the trip was the experience. This time you saw the real America, didn't you? Yeah. Yeah. Hot holes and all. The stuff that's outside the cities that just goes on and on and on forever. And we had different challenges to solve along the way, generally related to the temperature that was always intense. And Brent just became part of the crew. You know,

we just kind of, we treat it like a low key submarine kind of earth vessel is what we do. Because, you know, when those slides are in, it's a tight space. Pressurizing. Yeah. And, you know, there's things, there's certain operations to like cool things down and just even moving through the hallway in the RV is kind of a system you have to adopt. Yeah, really. I mean, okay. So there's the adults, but then there's the children and the dog, and they're kind of all climbing all over the place. And we're trying to do the shows on the road,

which Brent was able to join me for a couple of them and watch me scramble to get technical problems solved at the last minute. Oh, yes, that guest appearance in the most recent self-hosted. Yep, yep, yep. So what, I don't know, Brent, like what's your big takeaway from the trip? Is this a crazy way to get to places and do shows? Because, you know, in some ways it's kind of torture. I mean, in some ways it's very enjoyable.

I think it's a big balance. The number one thing that stands out for me, actually, I think would be how wonderful your family is. I'm just going to put that out there. Aw, jeez. You know, I knew that before, but now I really feel that. You're going to make me blush, Brent. No. Blush on a podcast.

But it's true. Like, you were kind to say, hey, my kids are coming on the trip now. Are you sure you still want to? It's okay if you can back out. And I thought, no, no, this is going to be great. And it's even been better than I've expected. Oh, that's nice to hear. I mean, the kids love you.

Which kid are you taking back with you? Levi. Yeah, no kidding, right? I think some of my favorite moments were watching you fight with the kids in the pool. Yes. Pool battles for hours. I think I lost that one. Everybody does.

We all lose. And then there was the pool noodle battle out at the golf course. Well, there was no pool at the golf course, so we just made it work. Yeah, just does. So we all lose. And then there was the pool noodle battle out at the golf course. Well, there was no pool at the golf course, so we just made it work. Yeah, just the noodles. That was a lot of fun. And it was great to have you on board to help solve problems as they came up. Of course, we had all kinds of little challenges here and there. And that really, I think, is the quintessential thing about a road trip is the bad moments actually matter too, because that's when we kind of come together and have to like problem solve and get outside our comfort zone. And that happens both with relationships

in like an emotional way, but also in a technical way. And then we're problem solving driving too. You know, you and I were tandem driving, so you were chasing us and we're solving like traffic issues and we're solving all those kinds of problems at the same time too. And that's a fun way to drive, especially if you enjoy driving. It's a different kind of driving that you don't normally get to do where you're driving in twos, basically in pairs. I mean, yeah, you're a team and you're sort of actively scouting out and reacting to a new area you've never been to. And there was some times where Brent would scout for us or, you know, that kind of stuff. It was great. I was taking possession of lanes as well because I could tell,

oh, I know we're going to need to do this soon. And I knew... I would look in my mirror and see you getting over preemptively from, attaboy, Brent. Yeah, because I could tell you need some space in that thing. You do, don't you?

Man. So it's... So now we part ways here in Denver. It's an adjustment because Brent's no longer on board. You're losing one of your own. Yeah. And the family is having to adjust to it.

Like the kids don't like it. Levi doesn't like it. And you're like, thank God. There's always that sense of loss, you know, just you have to acknowledge the change in your crew. Yeah. Yeah. And it was fun because Brent and I, we recorded recaps and clips along the way of the trip while memories were fresh. And then we would organize and store those up on our NextCloud instance.

And so we're going to put together after the trip a couple of episodes of the experience itself, the best and worst moments. And there are some. Yeah, I think we're going to do some technical highlights, sort of some of the equipment. Some of the tech we used for the trip and all of that. So that will all be coming pretty soon. And we'll have more tech we used for the trip and all of that. So that will all be coming pretty soon. And we'll have more information about the feeds for that and all of that. But, Brent, it's going to be sad to see you go. I'm glad we still have a few days in Denver before we part our ways.

It's true. I think I might see you in Colorado Springs at some point. Absolutely. Before you head south. Yep. Then I head down after Colorado Springs. We're going to leave Denver. We'll do another round of shows from Colorado Springs and do some micro meetups there.

And then I'm off to Tucson, kind of off the books, to go get Lady Joops' slide finally fixed. Oh, that's the other thing. Oh, yeah. Brent had to do this entire trip with the entire family with a broken living room slide. We didn't have a living room slide. This is the first I saw it this morning. And I'm used to seeing Joes in her full glory slides out, you know, set up to party.

It's tight. It's, yeah, it's a bit different. It's tight. It's, it's, it's, you know, it's the... Your living room is gone. Yeah, yeah. It's a whole room is gone. And when you have an extra person on board,

you kind of need that. So congratulations to you for not only surviving, but thriving on the road trip. Thank you. It was such a treat to be a part of it. Mr. Cheese Bacon, welcome back to the show, buddy. Hey, thanks for having me, guys.

It's great to be back here. And now an employee at System76. Yeah. So that's pretty great. Yeah, really, we're back here. Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of awesome that the first time we got to come back in two years, you're now here and we get to hang out. Yeah, absolutely.

Well, it's great to see you guys, you know, especially after the pandemic and everything and, you know, the stress and things that go around, you know, go on when you can't kind of cohabitate and meet space together. So it's finally nice to be back together, all vaxxed up and sitting in this hot box. And having fun though.

At the studio. Having a lot of fun. Yeah, after this, we're going to all run over to the JB Airbnb and, you know, I don't know what's going to happen. up and sitting in this hot box. And having fun, though. At the studio. Having a lot of fun. Yeah. After this, we're going to all run over to the JB Airbnb. And, you know, I don't know what's going to happen. Probably something crazy like naps. Naps? Well, I think a big cuddle puddle in the living room, right?

Yeah, that's possible. I think first, though, is going to be lunch. Yes. So lunch, and then likely naps after lunch. Yeah. Especially if it's a high carb lunch. Maybe get some brats in front of the line. I mean, that's the thing. When you visit a place, and if there's a cheese bacon there, you're going to find some tasty eats. Yeah. Especially if it's a high carb lunch. Maybe we get some brats in front of the line. I mean, that's the thing. When you visit a place and if there's a cheese bacon there, you're going to find some tasty eats.

Yeah. You know cheese is making sure, like, we only go to the good places to eat. I'm new here, so I can make no promises. It's all right. You know, you've tried a few places. Yeah, a few. You and I were chatting yesterday, though, about how things have really changed in how you troubleshoot and look things up on Linux. Not to sound old, but when a lot of us started using Linux, the only way you could

look something up was really the man page. And you kind of had on-system documentation, and that was like this resource that was invaluable. And today, more and more, you see things like Flatpaks and Snaps and other software projects that just don't even bother with man pages or update them at all. And the on-system local manual that doesn't require an internet connection is starting to slowly become either unmaintained or even just a thing of the past, depending on how the software is distributed. And I'm wondering how that sits with you guys because it struck me as maybe we're losing something here. For me too, it kind of started with a physical book, right?

Before I knew how to use man pages, whatever distro that you purchased came with a manual that you could then learn how to use man to look up other tools and information on other tools. But it also gave you a little bit of insight, maybe a little more in-depth information than just a man page would give you. Like, you know, a man page is going to say, TAC-T is this vague thing. And you're like, well, what is that vague thing? And, you know, back in the day when you were looking up man pages and stuff like that, it was a little bit more difficult because if you did try to ask that question, like,

hey guys, what is TAC-T? Can somebody kind of spell that out? Can somebody kind of give me a little bit more detail on what this is? RTFM, man. The majority of the time you get RTFM. And I'm like, I'm literally RTFMing. It's not in there. It's not in there.

Can you give me, you know, a little bit more information? So then, you know, it was very primitive. me, you know, a little bit more information. So then, you know, it was very primitive. You would go try to look at the project maintainer site, wherever you grabbed the tar ball from, if it was some application that, you know, you would try to dig through their documentation, hoping that their documentation was up to date. But, you know, today it's different, especially with the container world. Should they be in there? I don't know. A lot of that stuff is obfuscated away from you anyway. So it's not like the days of going in and building out a stack for something or creating this kind of ecosystem for something you do. You don't really necessarily do that anymore. You're here's a package that has all the stuff, you know, whether that be a container, a snap, a flat pack, you know, any app image, whatever,

right? You're generally only going to get, you know, what is there. And so a lot of the stuff that happens behind the scenes is kind of obfuscated away, which I think is another question, you know? How are you going to learn this stuff if you don't, if you can't have an opportunity to really look and dive into it? Right. It kind of makes me think of IRC in the sense that what's actually happening, the interaction, you know, the core of it isn't going away.

We still have things like Matrix or Slack, right, these days, but we're switching how it is. And man pages, they use weird tools to put them together. You might not understand the structure of how to actually like navigate and what are these numbers mean? What are the different sections? How do I get to them? How do you actually read through compared to just like looking at a markdown file or some online documentation that you're linked to like it's accomplishing the same purpose but in very different means and then you have wikis right like so arch wiki generally a great place ubuntu's forums and support generally a great place their knowledge base generally a great place to go and i would say probably

easier to keep updated than man pages i would say so and i would say easier to maintain because then you don't have to push the man page to a package and a package update. Right, the only way you're updating that man page is by updating the package, which has to make it through the distros repo. And for some distros, that's going to take a long time. That could be a process.

So it's much easier just to take 40 seconds and push that update to a wiki. And it also, I think, also creates an opportunity for the community to actually get involved in documentation and help out a lot more. That's a good point. Because you don't necessarily have to be a maintainer of a package or be involved in the package itself,

and you can still contribute to documentation or things that you may have learned. Yeah, really. And we seem to keep reinventing these things. I know there's a ton of different projects, but PyCrash over in our IRC just linked us to TLDR, right? And here's another tool that you can use as an alternative to man pages that kind of gets the same thing across. But this one often has a lot of examples, which some man pages sorely lack. That was my favorite thing in a man page. And when they didn't have

the examples, I was like, well, what good is this? Yeah, I need my real world use examples, right? And I mean, that makes all the difference. I think there's an opportunity, too, for somebody, you know, like a site similar to TLDR or something, and I haven't looked at it myself, but to be able to show typical normal commands and how they can be used and how you can use, you know, TAC, whatever, to kind of help you, you know, navigate that application or get more out of it and make it clear for, you know, for that process to happen instead of, like I said, some super vague, like a developer put in this super vague sentence and you're like, what the, I don't, okay, it changes the variable. After we've talked about it, it kind of makes me feel like it's, it's ManPage's time, like they're still valuable, but their time in the sun has sort of passed. Like we have

so many forms of real-time communication from IRC to Matrix to Discord to all the things. And you've got wikis. It kind of does feel like maybe we've just sort of outgrown the man page. Like when you get a box piece of software, you'd love to still see a manual in there. And from time to time, it's very useful. But it's not the difference between getting like Samba up and running or not anymore right no i mean it's definitely not and you know for me back in the day whenever i would struggle with man pages and getting told to rtfm or whatever um i would oftentimes push to like a you know nutshell book

right so a command line book or uh yeah that's really where the books were useful right absolutely examples yeah because that's what gave you books were useful, right? Absolutely. Yeah, because that's what gave you that example, right? So for a lot of us, that was really, you know, starting out. That was kind of our foray into like, well, if you're interested in SQL, get a book on SQL. You know, if you're interested in, you know, firewalls, then, you know, get a book on IP tables or whatever. And because firewalls was especially one of those ones that was just a tricky pain in the ass, to be quite honest. Yeah, yeah.

And it was bad. And it took, you know, like just getting the syntax right and getting everything right. I still don't know how to configure IP chains. But it was just such a struggle, you know. So having that documentation was crucial back then. And I still have some of those nutshell books and command books and stuff like that that hang around that I will forever have because a lot of those, you know, some of those programs don't. Some of it is still relevant. LS isn't really going to change. I mean, yeah,

it may be iterated on a lot, you know, but it's just something, I don't know. It's a bit of history to those books. They're a little bit of history. You know, when I was in my very first, uh, well my, no, my second it job, my second IT job, the IT crew, I don't know, once a quarter, maybe a little more frequently than that, would take, like all of us, would take a long lunch and we'd get food

and then we would go to the bookstore and like we'd get the books we need for the software we were working with for that period of time. And we'd come back with five or six books and we had book shelves in the IT department with all of the information on it.

And everybody would kind of get a different book so that because each book had different examples and different kind of scenarios or whatever, you know. So like people would kind of intersperse and get different books so that you could swap books or still grab that book. And like the other nutshell books which were known for certain things. Then you had the books that were known for like helping you cram for a cert exam. And it was just very focused on that. And then you had the really technical books and then the more theoretical stuff. And you just had to know what kind of book guy you were and get the right one. And now they're just, well.

Well, now Cheese is just asking what TAC-T does on Stack Overflow and someone answers it. Yeah, that's it, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I got to admit, like it's been a long time since I've gotten an RTFM. Yeah. It's been a really long time. It has gotten better. It has gotten better.

So the community as a whole has gotten better. I think the documentation is getting better, especially with the advent of wikis and stuff. But then, you know, one day if we ever get thrust in some sort of apocalyptic scenario, guess what, we're all going to be scrambling for fan pages in paperback books or something again. Well, on that note, Cheesy, what do you say we go scrounge up some lunch?

Thank you for coming back on the show, sir. Hey, thank you guys for having me. It's good to see you. Good to see you. Alex, it is so good to see you in person.

My buddy from Self Hosted is here in Denver with us. How are you doing, man? Hello. How was the trip in? It was smooth with a sprinkling of bumpy as we went

across the tropical depression. That's a good way to put it, actually. Well, we were thinking like there's a million things you and I could catch up on. Really? But one of our favorite topics that we talk a lot about on Self Hosted, but don't talk about very much on this show, is one of my favorite free software projects of all time, and that's Home Assistant. Yeah, yeah. Who would have guessed? I know. And they recently had an update that adds a feature that both you and I are extremely excited about. I can't even imagine the possibilities. Once I start pulling in energy information into Home Assistant, the kind of automations I can build around that are going to change my life because I'm running off solar in that

RV. So it's energy monitoring. It's here, it's real, and it's built into Home Assistant with a new release, and you've had a chance to look at it. Yeah, with the August update, so 2021.08, Home Assistant have added energy monitoring, as we just said. And out of the box, there are several integrations that will just work. And luckily for me, Frank, who is one of the main Home Assistant developers, has a solar system with exactly the same integration as I use, which is the SolarEdge one. So for me, it just works. That's so great.

Yeah. So after the update... That's the Home Assistant lottery right there. You know how to pick a project. Yeah. So after the update, I ran through a little wizard, which said pick a bunch of sensors. For me, it was just a couple of SolarEdge sensors. It then does a bunch of smarts on its back end and integrates with the SolarForecast.io plugin to generate a little graph of what it thinks. The UV power is going to be or whatever. Oh, that's great.

With my azimuth, with my angle of dangle of my panels and all that kind of stuff. Man, I mean, so what that would mean for me is I could kind of plan how we're going to energy manage for that day. Because right now I'm kind of like, I wait for the sun to come up. How cloudy is it? And I just kind of, I just kind of guess as the day goes on. You're doing it yourself with whatever basic heuristics you've learned, but you don't have the data. And now, so yesterday, Lady Joop's got up to 107 degrees inside. Yeah, that's hot.

And it was just unbearable. And I didn't want to run the generator here in the System 76 parking lot to run the AC. Because when you run both ACs, you're looking at nearly a three, almost a 3,000 watt when you also add in battery charging, a 3,000 watt draw consistently. And that generates heat. And when you are already 107 degrees, like you don't want to generate much heat. You're going to start killing your equipment. And so we moved in the middle of the morning, I guess is the way to put it very early in the morning. We moved to a spot with shade, but now I'm dealing with the fact that

I am like sitting around 60% charge and I really don't know like how long I can stretch that out. And so something that would give me the ability to even just forecast like that, but to take it to the next step, Alex, I could actually monitor the actual power generation of the solar system, right? So not only would I have the forecast, but I could see what I'm actually making in Home Assistant. And that becomes like a source of sensor information that the system can build automations around. Have you experimented with that at all? There's a bunch of stuff actually that you can do. And I'm going to show you in person. If you want to know what we're talking about have a look at the release we'll put in the show notes for this and the solar generation you can see there what the weather forecast is predicted i'm going to get at my location and then what you actually

got yeah so you can see the orange underneath the dotted line yeah there's a bit of a delta there so at the top is um there's like a energy usage panel and there's a few bars that say how much you've actually used versus how much you're returning to the grid. And then when you are returning to the grid, you could do some smarts to say, only run my AC unit when I've got spare capacity over, you know, a kilowatt or whatever. That is brilliant. Okay, so how much of this stuff, you know, with this update, is it just the connection to existing tooling? Or is it also some of that support at the dashboarding and like the actual software level too? I was pleasantly surprised. I opened a GitHub issue on the SolarEdge integration,

and Frank came in and changed a couple of lines of code because some of the templating of the sensors of that particular integration were a little bit wonky on release day. But now, as you can see, it just works just fine fine and the wizard that they walk you through when you first do this 08 update that wizard says you know which sensor is the input which sensor is the output all that kind of stuff and it takes you know a minute or two and then it adds a new tab on the left hand side or you've got overview map whatever there's like a now an energy tab on the left and it just works yeah jeez'm going to have to try that soon. That's great.

I'm really kind of impressed with the direction they're taking that stuff because they consistently come up with new ways of building automations off of information that I'd never even thought of before. And if I could just impart one bit of advice from this episode is if you haven't tried out Home Assistant yet, throw in a VM and let it look at your network and just see what it finds. And maybe just start playing with that because you'll be surprised at how many things it might detect. If you've got a Chromecast or an Apple TV on your network or a Plex client and server, it will automatically

figure that out and say, hey, I can integrate automations around that. For some reason, let's say you had a multicolored light bulb in your lounge and you wanted it to turn red every time that someone was streaming something from your Plex server, you could do that. And these are devices that are in totally different ecosystems. You know, a hue bulb talking to a Plex server doesn't really compute, you know, in normal people land, but in home assistant land, you can do it because it has tendrils, it has fingers in every single pie of what's going on on your network. And it can figure has tendrils, it has fingers in every single pie of what's going on on your network. And it can figure out, oh, this sensor just changed state from this to that. And then you write an automation that says, if this threshold's been exceeded for X number of

minutes, then do this. So it's essentially as if this, then that on your land on total and utter steroids. Right. And under your complete control and all that information about when you're doing stuff and when you came and left and when you turn stuff on, it's not going out to some cloud provider who's building a profile about you. It's staying on your LAN, on your box. And that to me is the ultimate win.

It's amazing how far this has come and it's kind of like lifted the level that you can do, right? You can write an easy automation that maybe three years ago, I'd be rigging something up on a Raspberry Pi by hand with a custom Python script. Totally. Well, Alex, I'm looking forward to going and doing a little cookout soon.

Yes, me too. Got any ideas of what we should cook? Well, we can cook in here. This room is hot as anything, isn't it? I'm very grateful they have a sound booth in their factory, obviously, because it makes this possible. But there's no ventilation because it's a sound booth. Have you seen me eyeing your thighs?

Now you know why. Oh, wow. Aaron Honeycutt from System76 joins us. Aaron, I think you were on the show like 100 years ago. I think it's been a while. I think we have chatted before. I think I took over a podcast for somebody itself. Oh, okay.

In the before times. Okay. Okay. All right. Yeah. In the before times. Exactly. Okay. All right. Yeah. Four times. Exactly. Well, just like a quick recap, what is, what does Aaron do at System76? I'm a happiness engineer on the support team. So to anyone who's outside, it's technical support basically. Right. Okay. Well, I noticed you have a pine time on your wrist. I do. And I haven't talked to

anybody who's actually using one on the daily. So I'm curious to get your thoughts on the Pine Time. And how much was it for that watch too? It was around 40-ish USD. Yeah. With shipping and everything. Wow. I don't even understand

how it can be that cheap. I mean, that's Raspberry Pi money. Is it worth 40 bucks? So far, I just got it yesterday, so I can't make solid conclusions, but I think it's very much worth it because I wanted a spiritual successor to Pebble. And because I've had Samson watches and I hate having to have all of this Samson crap on my phone since I have a Pixel. I don't have a Samson phone anymore. I'm like, I don't want all this

crap on my phone, just notifications. Yeah. And has it done the job of replacing what the Pebble gave you? So far, I think it's pretty good replacement for it. I don't know whether I would perhaps, I had both the e-ink non-color and color Pebble, so I can't say whether I would prefer one or the other, but I think it's been a good replacement. I mean, at 40 bucks too, it's worth experimenting with, right? It's like. Yeah. Like whether it's going to be good or not, it's kind of two lunches right there. I always wonder with Pine, though,

is the plan to just really put the prices low and just keep expectations low and keep it that way forever, or are they going to eventually start creeping the price up? Yeah, I don't know. It seems to have been in the same price point when it was non-sealed and dev kit potential versus the sealed one, which this is the sealed one, so I don't have access to any programming interfaces or GOPI pins. Some more consumer version. Consumer-focused version, I feel like.

Which is where they're going to have to take it, right, eventually. Yeah. Interesting. I just actually did a firmware update for the first time earlier because it shipped with 1.2. So is there like an app on your phone that does that? I have GadgetBridge and then you download the.zip file from GitHub and then click

it to open it on Android and then you can choose to open with GadgetBridge and then it does the firmware update for you. And that's progress bar on the app and on the watch. Nice. Yeah, that's not too bad. I mean, as long as you're comfortable doing those things but anybody buying a PineTime. I mean, you wouldn't buy one of those but you're're also just used to, some people just download APK files and just install them.

That's true. So the other thing, you get labeled as a gamer when I come in here. Like, oh, yeah, you want to talk about gaming. You talk to Aaron. Are you a big gamer? Is that true? Yeah, I have a guest stop at home just for work, pleasure, and gaming. Multi-purpose.

How have you done in this part shortage drought i had everything set up before the drought oh lucky i have an rx 580 so i had everything set with the 8 gig model so i was already set up for nice you lucky devil see the reason why i ask is um people suggested people have said that we should talk about the Steam Deck. And Wes and I have got a million thoughts on the Steam Deck. But I'm curious what your first impressions are, both from a gamer's perspective, but also, you know, your personal opinion as a System76 employee who watches a company produce hardware on the regular. You must have some thoughts in both regards. I love it as the idea.

thoughts in both regards i love it as the idea the first thing that kind of threw me off was if you look at the htc vive the vive index index on their page it has its own separate page on steam.com or steampower.com this is a whole nother website which is a little bit what do you take weird like it's like it's outside the ecosystem almost or it's hard to tell i think they're kind of just figuring out whether they want, this is a main thing. Right, is that a lingering hedge from getting burned by Steam machines perhaps? I see, yeah. And what do you think about it from a hardware standpoint?

I, particularly the hardware looks really good. I mean, a lot of gamers and myself included, my rig is all AMD. So I'm like, I'm all in on just AMD hardware on from the get-go. Yeah, I mean, as a Linux user, it makes things a lot easier. Yeah, because I don't deal with the pro driver from AMD. The one from the kernel works perfectly fine for everything. I've been playing, oh God,

playing everything that I don't need to deal with. Yeah, yeah. I've never needed to reload the pro driver. People say you got to have the pro driver. I've never used it. It doesn't even load on, I felt last I checked current Ubuntu anyway, because they're trying to hit older kernels and ubuntu is too new of a kernel for and they don't want to deal with it there's something hmm yeah i think it

also i honestly think it has potential as a little portable workstation for me like i could see using it to do work co-worker brought up that nintendo switch does 720p while mobile because the screen's on. It docks, turns off the built-in display to get the 1080 performance difference. This, all the videos show that the screen's fully on. So I'm just wondering how very powered it's going to be of you as a desktop replacement. Do you think it's going to be doing double duty, running the internal screen and an external monitor? It could be pushing it too hard? I'm wondering if they're going to change that later on

and just make it part off. It'd just kind of be weird looking at it from a just screen off, though, and it's just docked. The Nintendo at least covers the front screen up when they do that, so you don't really notice it. Yeah, that is a clever way. I never thought that's why they do that with the dock,

but that's totally why, so you don't expect that screen there. Yeah, you know, Valve seems to be really embracing this. It's a PC. So if a PC can do it, the deck's going to do it. And that's part of that philosophy, I think. You know, I kind of want a hybrid model here, like a game where I can SSH into my servers, but then I'm actually shooting zombies that are rogue processes. That might be a thing. We should look into that. That'd actually be pretty great. I'd like that. Now I'm just thinking of use cases if they leave the screen on. Yeah, I mean,

for Steam chat, for one thing would be nice or just watching the CPU resources and whatnot could be handy. What if you stream from it on Twitch and then you just

watch chat on it? Yeah. The ways you can abuse this thing, it's going to be great. It kind of makes you kind of think of the ways you abuse

some of the laptops that have like the little split screen above the keyboard. How do you use that? Right. Yeah. I'm always looking for more screens.

So if there's a way, I'll go for it. And the only problem for me for total portability is, of course, I'd have to have a dock and external monitor and all that. And so then a laptop just becomes more pragmatic. But I could see it around the house. It's kind of interesting on those like portable displays and whether, because Nintendo just limits the spec and their dock does the rest with Type-C. But if they're following the spec correctly,

you won't really need a dock. You just get a cable and lay it flat on the desk and a portable monitor would work. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah, I could see it. I also could see it as a decent kids' workstation as well. You know, give my kids a deck

and then they plug it into the dock at home and they have a full desktop. And they still have that gaming rig they've been begging you for. Well, Aaron, thanks for coming in and chatting with us. It's good to chat with you. Yeah, thanks. Ian, welcome back to the show.

And it's great to actually do this in person. I know, it's been a while. It has. It's been a long time, I think, since you've been on too. And there's been a lot of things happening in desktop land for System76 since we've chatted. So I'm really excited to talk about that. And I got to start with the thing that's on my mind. And when I asked other people, I said, hey, what should I ask Ian? This is the question they suggested.

Everyone's curious about Pop!OS's transition to GTK4 and what that looks like and how it's going. Because I imagine there's a lot of work that has to be done to get things, especially like with the theme and whatnot, to get things working with GTK4. That's most of what I'm doing with it right now is just working on doing the GTK4 port of the theme to make sure the style sheet is working and stuff's not falling back on Oddwaiter or anything like that. Because it looks a little strange if you're expecting your system to look like one way and all of a sudden you boot it up and one application looks off. It can be a little jarring.

But it does fall back, though. That's kind of interesting. It's kind of like Flatpak. If you don't have a Flatpak theme for your current theme installed, it will fall back on whatever is available. And it will always fall back to something. You won't ever end up with an unthemed, clear, transparent thing. I mean, that's reasonable, I suppose. Good defaults, yeah.

Now that I think about it. It's better to fall back on something that doesn't match than to fall back on something that doesn't exist. No kidding. It's just impossible to see. I'll take an ugly UI over a broken one. Yeah, at least one you can use, right? Well, and Odwida isn't even ugly. I mean, it used to be a little, it needed some help at one point,

but they've brought in some really good designers and now it looks really good. So, I mean, the pop theme now is actually basically just Odweta with some colors changed around and stuff like that. Like it's very close and that helps maintain the compatibility and stuff as well. Right. I would imagine the closer you can keep it upstream the well i guess one way to put as easier your job is oh absolutely yeah um and that's a that's another nice thing about it is is um it makes doing the gtk4 port very easy because i can just take the upstream autoada theme and apply our modifications onto it and and hopefully that that translates over pretty nicely and stuff so how's that going so far pretty good uh so i've been working on it now

for a couple days and uh there's a pretty good progress i'd say it's currently in a this is a usable pop theme right now it looks more or correct. There's some weird visual glitches working on check buttons right now, check boxes and stuff. So I'm so glad someone is. Yeah, right. Somebody's got to do that. Yeah. I imagine, too, that the transition to GNOME or sorry, GNOME 40 must be on the back of your mind as well with this. Oh, yeah, absolutely. They don't necessarily go hand in hand. Like more of the GTK4 stuff is more just to make sure that it's available for applications that use GTK4 as it stands. If you install a GTK4 application on POP today, you'll get an Autoweda theme. And that's not the best situation from our perspective. Yeah, from a consistency standpoint. Right. So we're trying to make sure that for Impish, that's not going to be a huge problem. And then with GNOME 40,

people are probably aware that with 2104, like Ubuntu, we sat out on the initial GNOME 40 release just to help make sure that everything got stabilized there. You know, we've got our UX designer here works with the GNOME design team and stuff like that to help, you know, make sure everything's good. And she was, um, she was basically just working with us as like a liaison between us and the, and the design team there.

But, um, you know, we wanted to, to gain some, some feedback about GNOME 40 and all that kind of stuff. Um, so we, um, we um we held off on 338 for largely similar reasons that ubuntu did and um as ubuntu plans to move forward with um i think it's going to end up being 41 or 42 not gnome 40 because then they'd be behind but uh we'll we're working on moving that uh forward as well and we we have quite a bit of stuff that we have to work through on that. Obviously, we have Cosmic, which is our desktop shell extension stuff

that does some relatively large-scale tweaks to GNOME that are tailored more towards our specific user base, you know, like different target markets, different products, that kind of thing. Right. And we're working full steam ahead. I know that Ian Scott, one of our other developers, is doing a lot with porting Cosmic to GNOME 40. Jeremy is doing a lot of that kind of stuff. So we want to make sure that everything is set up and ready to go once we're ready to make the switch over and all that kind of stuff.

So you're saying it's going to be a while until I have Pop! OS based on Plasma. Yeah. It's just a dream of mine. Let's do it. Let's go. Easy for us to say, right? Yeah, very easy for you guys to say. The entire infrastructure is built on GNOME.

I mean, Cosmic is a GNOME shell extension. It seems like this is kind of a test of that model, right? Of you kind of doing the dance of, well, how much can we just lay on top in an easy way? And how much do we really have to keep up with their changes? Is this hard? Right, right. And luckily, you know, with the extension model, it's not too bad. Most of it translates over pretty easily. And if there are problems, it doesn't cause the base OS is still usable because it's just an extension.

You just unload the extension and it works fine. And then once you get the extension working, you can load up nicely and everything works well there, too. Right. And nicely, if you don't like Cosmic, you can just disable the extensions and you get a plain stock GNOME desktop. Can we talk a little bit about Cosmic? Absolutely. Why don't we just start with why Cosmic? So people might be aware that we, a couple of releases ago now, we introduced PopShell,

which was a tiling window manager extension. Basically, we wanted to kind of elaborate on that and what we would kind of be going for if we were doing our own desktop shell from scratch. The extension framework in Gnome Shell allows us to experiment with that in a way that it saves development effort on our end because we don't have an enormous team. We're adequately spread. We know what we can take on and where we should probably try to, you know, utilize upstream. Exactly. Right. Don't reinvent the wheel when you don't have to. Right. Utilize existing stuff when you can. And if there's something new that you want to do on top of that, build on top of it. You know,

collaborative development is a that's that's open source. That's the whole point. And so when looking at our customer base and our pop OS user base, we wanted to make something that was tailored specifically for the kind of person that uses Pop! OS by default. And so we would look at, well, what's the kind of changes that people that run Pop! OS make? What kind of things can we do from a UX perspective to help that type of user? we do from a UX perspective to help that type of user. And we found a couple of things that were different from the UX goals that GNOME has. And that's fine. It's just a different target market. But we wanted to tailor the experience with your desktop towards that specific type of user. And so we started working on Cosmic as a way to bring those changes about and help cater to that type of person who's curious about those sort of specific modifications that make their particular lives easier using their computer for the things they use it for. And is it also a bit about maybe being able to offer a set of consistency to your customers?

Because the Upstream project can change pretty radically, as it did between 38 and 40. And there's sort of a layer of consistency if the shell they're using is Cosmic. I'm not sure that that's the primary goal. I mean, I think that you're definitely not going to see as big of a shift going from Cosmic on 338 to Cosmic on GNOME 40 whatever, just because we're trying to maintain a certain set of cosmic experiences but uh at the same time like we don't necessarily want to hold people back on something if it's not as good and if uh we find a radically different ux pattern that helps tremendously with usability or discoverability, something like that.

We're not necessarily going to shy away from implementing that, even though that's a big change and you might otherwise have more consistency going with the, you know, one upstream to the next upstream release. But I guess that could be a nice benefit for this particular release. It's going to smooth the transition from 338 to 40 a little bit more. I would imagine, yeah. But it's not necessarily the end goal. You know, we want to make the best experience. We don't necessarily want to make

experiences that are stagnant or that stay the same. You know, consistency can be really good for UX and discoverability, but sometimes there's a pattern that works better. And we shouldn't be afraid to deviate from existing norms because sometimes you want something better. And if you never change what you're at, you're never going to get anything better. Well said.

Well, Ian, thank you for joining us. And also, thank you for hosting us here. This has been great. Absolutely. This is the first show I've done in weeks with Ethernet. So thank you. Oh, no. Yeah. Nice. Nice to have you guys. And always, always a pleasure. Cassidy, welcome back to the show. It's just been like a couple of days, it feels like, since we chatted last. Well, yeah, just one week, I guess. How has the post-Elementary OS 6 release gone? It's gone well. It's been, yeah, like it's, it's hard to like, I don't know what

time is anymore. This last week I've put in so much time just like combing through social media and emails and issue reports. And, and that's, you know, it's fun when a new release comes out. Cause like you get this flood. Yeah, I bet. Cause it's, it's just like new and fresh and different. But then also it's like, oh my gosh, there's so much stuff to like take in and address. It must be a lot to churn through too as you're actually trying to weigh out like what's first impressions versus things that we really want to focus on later. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a huge flood of new users too.

So it's people who either have never used elementary OS before or haven't used it for years and they're like coming back. And so then these are people who aren't, they don't know what issues have been filed already. So they're filing tons of duplicates and like we're doing our best to like hold their hand to like help them file in the right places and stuff. But inevitably it's just like a flood. Snoops.

Yeah. It's a good problem to have. It's a great problem to have. Like I'm super proud that that is like on release day we get all these people who like email us. They like, they reply to their receipt. It's like you when you buy it on the website you can reply to your receipt so that's like one of the little perks you get for paying and we'll like do our best to help you out or point you in the right direction and so they'll be like hey um so i

discovered after purchasing this that it's uh based on this thing called linux and we're like yes you're the best wow how do you suppose they found you? That's incredible. I mean, there's like, we have articles in like Ars Technica and stuff and Wired. So like, I think there's some of that, you know, just there's like the tech enthusiast bubble. That's like, you know, Linux is a small bubble inside of that bubble. Right. And so like, we're kind of leaking out into the more mainstream, I guess, which is always cool. I felt like I saw a lot more people in our Telegram channel talking about it and trying it out, this release. It seemed like people were ready

and some of the stuff really resonated with them. Yeah, a lot of curiosity and I think especially the flat packs speak to folks who maybe are experienced Linux users but haven't dabbled in elementary for a while. Yeah, yeah, and it's like such a great, you know, one of the biggest things we've heard as feedback is because we've decided to stick to the LTS basis because of the stability.

People are like, oh, Ubuntu apps are outdated. So like Flatpak kind of solves that. You know, you've got your development libraries, which if you're doing web development, every web development library has you install their own package manager anyway. So you're not using the repo ones. That's so true. It's something we don't talk about. Like nobody acknowledges that really.

Yeah, it's like you've got every single programming language has its own packaging manager. So like at that point, it doesn't really matter if those languages aren't totally up to date in the base. And then you've got your flat pack apps on top. And so you've got a stable base and bleeding edge apps. And it's kind of a great world to be in.

Yeah, with a nice clean UI sitting on top of all of it. Yeah. Yeah, Wes and I, we gave it a go for Linux Action News. And we both walked away, hadn't talked Linux Action News and we both walked away, hadn't talked about it and we both walked away from it going, this is like professional grade now.

It's a professional workstation OS with that combination that you just touched on with the base of LTS but the freshness of the user land and the cleanness of it and also some of the work

you guys did with notifications and the terminal and that kind of stuff. It just makes all of that a little bit smoother. Yeah. Yeah, there's been lots

and lots of like new little quality of life features and things we've put into this release. So that's been it's been really fun to get to that point where we can do that. We're going to like, you know, we know how to build an OS now. We've got the basics down and like now we can work on those quality of life things. Yeah. So have you been running it on your framework laptop? I have been running it on my framework laptop.

Yeah. Cat's out of the bag there. I've the framework's out so I can talk about it now. I've been testing, it's technically a pre-production model. So I can't share exact impressions of that specific fit and finish. Sure, sure. Yeah, it's really cool.

It's a really cool project, really cool product itself. Yeah, the hardware is way, like it's super nice, super rigid, like fit and finish is really good. Yeah, the hardware is way, like, it's super nice, super rigid, like, fit and finish is really good. Yeah, that's great. I have one major complaint, though. Oh. The screen resolution is wrong. Okay, so remind me, what do you mean wrong? I seem to recall it was like an interesting aspect ratio, right? It's three by two, which is fine. Yeah. I actually kind of really like that now. Yeah, I think I would too. I've seen would see people kind of whatever who like die hard fans of like the 16 by 10 or like the 3 by 2 ratios like yeah whatever like okay now i see it i don't actually watch that much video on my laptop i do a lot more coding and web browsing so like i want

some height yeah yeah it's actually that's that's fine no the ratio is fine the resolution is like 22 56 by 1504 at 13 and a half inches somewhere around there yeah so it's like native resolution everything's tiny way too small yes 2x scaling everything's fisher price giant yes huge chunky chunky giant yes 1.5x scaling if you've ever followed me on the internet half pixels are a lie they don't exist even if your software supports it, well, best case scenario, you have a one pixel line that's drawn by an app

and it has to decide if that's drawn over one pixel or two pixels and it ends up being blurry. So by having a higher than 1x ratio, but not quite 2x, you end up actually with blurriness at the pixel level.

So this is the exact problem I have on my ThinkPad and it drives me crazy. It's so, yeah. And like you can work around 1.5, like fractional scaling is a hardware workaround. And I understand that it has to exist for that reason, but it shouldn't. If you're making a new computer, you don't choose a resolution where you need fractional scaling. So that's my big downside on this laptop.

But I've worked around it. Elementary OS doesn't natively support fractional scaling at this point because we're on X. And there are some ways to do it, but it's kind of hacky. What we could possibly do is somebody could spin like a framework image that includes some of the hacks, whatever, as out of the box and supported. Curious about those modules, though. I mean, as far as the OS things, they're just like USB devices, right? Yeah. Oh, no, the modules are brilliant. I want to see everybody adopt the modules. Like System76, if you're making a laptop, adopt those modules though. I mean, as far as the OS things, they're just like USB devices, right?

I want to see everybody adopt the modules. Like System76, if you're making a laptop, adopt those modules because they're freaking brilliant. They're USB,

I think they're USB 4 and it has four of them and they're all full power. They all support the whole protocol. They all support the whole like display input

or output and power input and everything, fast charging. It's not like some of them are limited. You can put whatever. It's all mix and match. That's great. So the cards that I got, they just sent me, were like a full-size HDMI, just a USB-C pass-through, a mini SD card slot, which I think is interesting,

and a, what was the last one? Oh, and a storage card, which I think is actually and a what was the last one oh and a storage card which I think is actually probably the most brilliant it's a it's just like a flash drive that is that like embeds into your laptop

so it's a 250 gig flash storage that you can just pop out and it has USB-C on the end so then you can plug it into your phone or any other computer

wow and that part I was like I've probably used that one the most because I'm like oh I hadn't even thought I hadn't even thought about the phone thing. Yeah.

Or like I've used the HDMI one to plug into another laptop to get an extra HDMI output because it's over USB-C. So it's like a display port, whatever. So like that, it's like dongles, but built in. As stupid as that sounds, it's like kind of brilliant. If you're going to do the dongle life, that's the way to do it. I just really embrace it. Wow.

Yeah. I never thought about using them on other systems like that. That is great so now i always have these four usbc uh dongles basically with me because they're built into my laptop but i can plug them into other devices i mean just today right we're scrambling here at system 76 to try to figure out recording and we had to figure out some dongles to get hardwired ethernet yeah yeah they they talked about doing like one ethernet it's thin enough they'd have to do like the flip down door thing. Right.

But like that's, you know, if you don't need Ethernet, you don't buy that card. If you need Ethernet, you can build it into your laptop. Like I think it's so smart. I would, I just want to see like a laptop with like six of these. Just like give me six freaking full powered ports and I can put whatever ports I want in them. Yeah. And half of them will probably be USB three for me.

But like when I want to swap in whatever port I can have it. So a rumor has it Westpain may eventually receive one. It's sort of bad timing because he's on the trip right now when they would be shipping it to him. Yeah, it's a little dicey receiving the package. We'll see. But I can't wait to hear more people's thoughts on it. I was concerned that this was kind of like a Kickstarter scammy kind of thing, although it felt pretty legit, but I was just a little concerned. It felt like it came out of nowhere in some sense.

Now, if you follow the people behind the project, you realize they've been doing some of these things for a long time, but just being a layperson, it was like, these are lofty goals. You're really trying hard and you're trying to speak my language. Who can do this? Well, and we've seen other companies that are bigger and well-known do similar things. There's like the whole Project Aria or whatever it was at the modular phone. Right.

Motorola did their like Motorola phone mods. And like, these are big companies because I think the Aria was Google, I think. But it was like, these are big companies who have tried this whole modular approach and it basically never panned out. And I think if they would have said oh the cpu itself is on its own modular platform and like i'd be like yeah that's probably not gonna pan out but even just the expansion cards and then being able to easily access the um ram and and wi-fi and storage and stuff like and making the the physical design of the hardware super easy to open with

captive screws and magnets. Like there's a lot of smart decisions that even if they went like upside down today, this laptop is still useful. You could still upgrade it over the years. And I think that's really cool and important too. Cassidy, thank you, sir. Yeah. Carl, welcome back to the show. It feels like it's been a couple of years since we've talked. It's been way too long. That's for sure. It has. And the last time I was here, there was not nearly as many people or things. Where are you fitting everything?

It's changed. Well, we're not. That's the thing. So I think it's changed a lot since you were here. Yeah, we were both back here. The Thaleo launch, I think? 2018 fall. Yeah.

Wow, really? Yeah. So time is moving at a different rate now, isn't it? It's kind of confusing. I think of things now with pre-COVID, COVID spike one, things are going to be great. COVID spike two. Yeah. That's how I measure where I am in time. And we still don't even really know quite if we're, well, we're not through it yet. So it's, we still don't really know where it's going. Has that impacted the business pretty significantly? It did.

The one thing I could say is I was really proud of our entire team for how we adapted so quickly to it. We were pretty used to kind of the engineering way of communicating through Slack and GitHub and those type of things. And so by the time we all moved to our homes to work, we realized we weren't actually talking to each other in person anyway. You're already using the tools. Right. So we were building stuff that way anyway, even though we were much closer together.

So there are things we missed about it, but some teams really thrive remote. Like the product engineering team is just doing fantastic. Then we learned that the technical support team, who I thought this whole time really needed to be very close to the lab, could actually thrive working remote if they had support from the QA team who had labs. So that ended up working really well. And so we learned a lot as a company because we used to hire people and everyone had to come to Colorado. And then we started just hiring anywhere in the United States.

And all of a sudden it was a lot faster to hire, a lot easier. A lot more people to choose from. A lot more people, right. So that's a change that's going to stay, you think? Certainly. Yeah. Wow. That is a big change for you.

Yeah. We operate, we found that we, I mean, in many respects, we're operating faster and better. It took some time to get used to. Right. Things like Thalia Omega, when we, it was on the cusp of being released and then we all went home and figuring how to design a hardware product remote was really challenging. That's what stands out to me here is, right, you've kind of got different sides of your business. You've got customer support, you've got the more traditional software side of the house, but then you're building physical hardware here. How do you make that work?

Well, I can tell you the beginning was very frightening because we thought they were going to shut us down and send us home, right? I mean, all these businesses were being closed. So that's a frightening prospect to face. Then we learned that we were considered essential because with work from home, computers were necessary to support that. And so then it meant all the mitigation factors to make it possible for us to be a safe place to work during a pandemic. So all the deaths were spread far apart. Everyone was in masks for over a year. And then finally the vaccines came along and we all, everyone at the factory got vaccinated. And then the CDC said you could take your mask off.

And all of a sudden I saw these people that we had been hired and I've been working with for a year for the first time. Wow. Because I never actually had seen their faces and it was liberating. What an experience. What a unique, you're going to remember that experience probably forever. It was striking, yeah. And amongst all of this too, there's the launch of the launch keyboard. Right.

How did that get impacted by all of that? Everything slowed down. So that was the, I mean, the first part was at least in the beginning. And then it began to accelerate again. And like everything in business everything costs more and takes longer than you expect and the supply shortages must have been horrible oh i have probably still are right yeah i have a horror story for the launch for that one so when we were we're ready to launch the product we have we have um we started with 500 because we didn't

know what the sales were going to be and we thought that we sold keyboards before but we knew it wasn't a reflection of this product that we were building. It was something very different. But we didn't know quite what it would be. And $500 with our old thing that was just there for convenience with purchasing a computer would be a hefty sales for us. And then we sold it, and they were all gone in a day. Wow. And then so we needed to order more PCBs. We needed to increase our production. We went to

order the PCBs and one of the controllers was out of stock. So then we did the electrical engineering. Jeremy and Daryl worked on that and made the modifications within a day. Looked at the spec sheets, saw that it would work. We went into validation. We went to order them. Another part was out. We had to do it again. So we reworked the – this time it was a more important component.

It required FCC and CE certification again. Oh, wow. So you're – I mean, this isn't a small tweak. You're, like, redesigning it to some extent. That's supposed to be, like, a serious decision, too. Yeah, they're not dropping – mean, this isn't a small tweak. You're like redesigning it to some extent. That's supposed to be like a serious decision, too. Yeah, they're not dropping it. Like this was the USB controller. It's not just another drop in there.

Some of the traces needed to be moved and modifications made. We had to do a new certification. We also had to do a new validation. So that was the struggle. And so what we started doing, which I think is natural for a lot of companies, is we started hoarding parts. So we don't know what our sales are going to be. We know what it is already, but now we're telling people it's going to be a couple of months for us to catch up. And so we had to, so we started just buying lots and lots of parts. When you could get it, you got it. Yeah. And, and no one wants to

operate that way. But now I'm thinking we're not only are, we're doing this because we want to secure our supply, but at the same time, we're part of the problem, just like all of us. Adding more stress to the system. Right, we're adding more stress because we're buying more parts, but I don't know any way around it other than to do our best to take care of our customers by buying those parts. Yeah, it seems like I bet just about everybody is in that position.

Right. And so it sort of, in a way, elongates the problem, but there's no choice around it. Right, yeah, yeah. Man. It's tricky. We hold ourselves this high ethical and moral ground, even with our partners,

and think about these things and our impact on the supply chain, and it's the Wild West today. So how much of a skill up was it to manufacture a keyboard? Because I took a quick tour out there, and it looks like that keyboard literally starts as a block of aluminum. It is, right. It is simply a block of aluminum that gets milled into its shape, painted, sandblasted and painted. That's a lot of equipment.

Yeah. And we also don't have nearly the capacity we need either. So we bought another half million in equipment that's coming in in the next few weeks just to ramp up production for launch itself. Where is it going to go? You'll see tomorrow. All right. Wow. Yeah, I mean, I actually want to buy another launch keyboard, so you better get that ramped up.

Yeah. We're getting there. I think our goal is to get there for the Christmas season. Yeah. I mean, I actually want to buy another launch keyboard, so you better get that ramped up. Yeah. We're getting there. I think, well, you know, our goal is to get there for the Christmas season. So mid to late October, we want to be in front of sales. Right now we're shipping, it's mid-August where we'll be able to ship by the end of September. I think we can get ahead of sales by mid to late October. Sure. The number one thing, I know you hear it, is, well, it's so expensive. I don't actually necessarily agree with that characterization because depending when you get into certain markets like headphones and keyboards, you can spend a lot of money. Is there a long-term System76 roadmap where a $100 launch is on that roadmap?

No. Just can't build a keyboard good enough? There is a roadmap for launch. It just doesn't go down to 100. I don't think that we can build a product that we would be proud of that fits with the design and the characteristics of launch itself. We don't want the quality to be any lower. But there are things that we can do to bring the price down for another model.

So the launch roadmap includes a model that's going to have a 10 key numpad. So that'll be coming, I think. Both of these are probably first half next year. So a 10 key, we've got to get a production of them running. And I caught up. But the 10 key, and then another smaller, I believe it's 67 key, which is going to remove the F row. So you'd hit the function row underneath the function key with one, two, three, and so

forth. So an even smaller footprint. Right. An even smaller one. So that cuts out a bunch of switches. We're also going to remove the hub from that. And my hope is we can get that to $199. Ah.

So yeah, the idea would be to be able to reach more customers that need more things in a couple different price points. Right. Sounds like it might be a model I'd want to throw in my backpack to take with me, too. Yeah. Yeah, that's okay. I could really see that. That's pretty great.

Now, along with all of this, everything we've been talking about, we've talked about equipment, and we've talked about some hiring. You know, you can use rough terms if you like, but how big are we looking now for the team size of System76? I think we have 63 employees. Wow. Did you ever think? Did you hope?

I don't know. The thing about making something like this is that you're so heads down all the time. Right. That. You don't think about it much. You just solve the problems. We do. We think long term, but the people that you're adding just feel like a natural extension of this body we've made. It's a lot harder to communicate with 60 people than it is like a dozen, though. That has a lot of challenges associated with that kind of growth.

It does. But I think what's interesting is the team leaders in most of the teams have been here for a long time. Right. And so we were all the people that were part of that first 12 that built the ethos and the character and the voice and culture of this company. And so I was actually just having a conversation earlier today about this, funny enough. We had a new director of marketing start and she said, you know, I've been all these different places places and this place like everyone knows why they're here and what they're doing and to me that sounded like strange that it should just always be that way yeah it is not right and i didn't and uh thinking on it more i think it's because we have that core group that we um instead of like i don't get up and do speeches or any of the, you know,

things like that. I don't get in, I don't talk in Slack about our mission. I think we all just know it. And it's in part because the leadership team, we've been together so long that it just flows to the people that are, you know, growing the company. You're on the same page anyway. That's very, that's an interesting observation. And I would concur from my perspective, right?

I come back every couple of years and a lot of the core team members are still here. And it's like catching up with old friends. And that's not true for other places I go. Usually it's a new set of faces. Maybe one or two people are still there. And I will also say that when we're out in private, everybody always speaks very highly of you. So you've been able to foster, I don't know if loyalty is the right word, but people genuinely seem to care and they respect you and they bought into what is happening here. And that seems unusually rare to me. We're the same people sitting here in this booth

that we are when we're having beers afterwards together. And that goes for our natural state is openness. Well, it also means you have had to adapt to accommodate some characters, too. Like everybody here really feels like they're unique individuals that are not like trying to fit into some corporate mold. Like people are fully expressing themselves and their individuality. And I could see that being tricky to accommodate sometimes. I think that's right, except when you have people that are secure in themselves. So what ends up happening is you have a group of a team of smart people that are secure in both their job and what they're doing and their understanding of things. And their place in the whole mission.

Right. To the extent that no idea is scary. that no idea is scary. You will just simply recognize a better idea because you understand what you're doing and what we're doing as a team. So it doesn't, there's not a lot of while we might debate and

talk through things, it's frictionless and kind of just flows organically. There's not a bunch of politics or second guessing or posturing. It seems like you guys trust each other. Right. Now the question is, as the company grows, can that be maintained? Do you feel like it can? So far, we've been able to do that.

I think about how we'll do that and we are hiring an HR manager with the idea that that role is going to help onboard people with the culture and the style and the way we work. So I guess we are growing up a little bit. Yeah. Thinking about those things. Making a little bit of a process to make sure people are on board and all of that. That kind of makes sense as you grow, though.

Well, Carl, it's been great to catch up. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. Well, that'll do it for this very special episode. But if you do the Twitter thing, you can follow the show at Linux Unplugged. The whole network is at Jupyter Signal. I'm at Wes Payne and you're at Chris LAS. And I have to say, there's a whole bunch of other podcasts.

You heard from Alex, our self-hosted co-host. There's Coda Radio over there. And if you're not catching Linux Action News, you're missing out on what's going on in the world of Linux in terms of how it impacts the industry and your daily life. LinuxActionNews.com. Go get that. All of it's over at JupyterBroadcasting.com. As for this year's show, yeah, we'll be live next week. We'd love to have you join us. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. But as for now, we are all done. Thank you so much for tuning in to this special episode

of the Unplugged program. Thank you to everybody who's reached out with messages of support for this road trip or listeners who had a chance to do a micro meetup with us. Those have been so much fun, more intimate settings. We did a diner in Cheyenne recently. It was great. Now I have spots to go visit when I return to these places as well. But the trip does continue. You can follow us at colonytracker.live. And then don't forget about that meetup. If you're in the Denver area, it's this Friday as we record. 4 p.m. Just start trickling in after that and come hang out with us.

But that does wrap up this edition of the Unplugged program. Thank you everyone so much for tuning in. And we'll see you back here next Tuesday. Thank you. you