LINUX Unplugged - 430: The Real Beefy Miracle

Episode Date: November 3, 2021

We check-in with Fedora Project lead Matthew Miller on the state of the project, then conduct our exit interview with Fedora 34, and review Fedora 35. What's new, what's changed, and what's broken. It's a Fedora special. Special Guests: Matthew Miller and Neal Gompa.

There's one story I've seen going around more than any other this week, and it's the announcement of a new project that promises to create a Linux-compatible kernel completely written in Rust. The aim is not to replace Linux, but to create something written from scratch that aims to be ABI-compatible. In other words, it would support running unmodified Linux binaries. Wes, I think you're a little skeptical pants about this one. Oh, no, I don't know about that. I think what I like about this project is it's

intentionally limited in scope. The project author is really just trying to make something that's Linux compatible, but that can run in a function as a service runtime environment, actually using Firecracker VMs, also written in Rust. And so, you know, you don't have to worry about things like kernel crashes because it's not doing long-running workloads. That doesn't sound impossible, does it? I actually was thinking of this as more like a tiny VM environment host, our guest kind of a thing, or container runtime environment that's just this itty-bitty

environment that's binary compatible. But I liked that the motivation was the conversation around how could we use Rust in the Linux kernel? That kind of evolved into inspiration for this project to say, okay, well, let's take this all the way. And it seems like the exact kind of thing that free software lends itself to, where you can have just these, it's not, this isn't necessarily a fork, but you can have these side projects that may never really ship, may never go into production anywhere, may never even be a container runtime or a VM guest OS. But it can be an R&D factory for things that do actually make it in the mainline Linux kernel.

Yeah, it teaches the person working on this, any contributors and anyone along for the ride, you know, like what does or doesn't work about doing it this way. And maybe it informs both future operating systems and the Rust language itself. Now, it is very, very early days. This isn't going to, you know, this isn't going to be like something you're going to have some weird distro Frankenstein thing with this kernel, which I think is BSD licensed. This isn't happening anytime soon. But I'll tell you what, if it does start to happen, we're going to give it a go. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.

My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Hello, you two. This episode is brought to you by the all-new Cloud Guru. You know, they are the leader in learning for the cloud, Linux, and other modern tech skills. They've got hundreds of courses and thousands of hands-on labs. Get certified, get hired, get learning at acloudguru.com. gethighergetlearning at a cloudguru.com. Well, coming up on the show today, it's Fedora 35 release day, and we're making a whole theme out of it. We're going to have a project check-in

with Matthew Miller. He's going to tell us what's going on over there. We're then going to do our exit interview with Fedora 34. We had an opportunity to give it a spin later in its lifecycle, and it's a totally different Fedora. So I want to have that chat. And then it's our review of Fedora 35. We'll tell you what's new, what's different, what works, what doesn't work. And then we'll round out the show with some great emails, some pics, some follow up, you know, all that kind of stuff that we do. So before I go any further, I have to say time appropriate greetings, Mumble Room.

Hello, virtual lug. Hello. Hope you're doing well. Man, hello, everybody. It's nice to be back in the studio this week. Everything's back to normal. I'm no longer in the woods. I don't even think it's raining right now.

You're right. It finally stopped. Oh, man, that's been nice. Although it was raining on the drive in. So it's really only stopped while I'm in here. But that aside, I mean, the weather does suck, but I kind of have I kind of have an idea. And maybe this is stupid with with getting close to the holidays and all of that. But there is an opportunity at the Museum of Flight here in the Seattle area to go see the new Mars rover and the Linux copter, you know, like they're clones.

They have a whole Mars setup right now at the Museum of Flight. And I thought, you know, maybe, maybe some in the audience might be interested in like a little micro meetup at the Museum of Flight where we go check this thing out. I don't know. What do you think? I'm in. All right. Sign me up.

Yeah, you go. You go. I mean, we can't go to Mars yet. I don't, I don't think Starship is ready. This seems like the next best thing. Yeah. Yeah. That would be nice one day to be able to go visit Mars and see the Linux copter.

What a thought. I haven't really thought it all through yet, but here's what I do know. The copter and the rover will be there October 30th. So they're there now through April 3rd, 2022. And I think maybe we should pick something in there sooner than later with the holidays, but let me know if you'd like to go and do a little micro meetup at the museum of flight, linuxunplugged.com slash contact or the Jupiter Broadcasting Telegram group, jupiterbroadcasting.com slash telegram or on Twitter at Chris Elias. Let me know if you'd

be interested in a little hyper local meetup. I know this doesn't apply to 99% of you out there, but what an opportunity. I thought if some of us got together and went down there, Wes and I could bring our microphones. We could capture a little bit of it and we'd, we'd share it with you guys. So it kind of be like you went, um, but I don't really have any other details in that. I guess I've been back for what? Two months and I'm Jones in for a meetup again already. I guess that's how long it takes. I get back from the woods and I'm ready to see people. I guess that's a good thing. Well, I think it speaks well of our audience. Yeah. So let me know. Contact page is probably the best place. And once I hear from a few people, if I even hear from, I'd say four or five people, really, it doesn't need to be a lot.

Yeah. Just enough for like a, you know, like a lunch crew. So we can, we can share all our fun learnings. Although I have to say, I'm a little upset because just about every week I get an email from somebody in the quote-unquote Seattle area, and I'm like, how come I've never met you? Why have you never been to anything we've done? Why don't you go to Linux Fest?

Like, there's a lot of people who listen in the West Coast area. Secret Seattle JB fans out there, what are you doing? I think they're all hanging out with you downtown. That's what I think, and you guys just aren't sharing. But that's fine. That's fine. Well, I mean, we already had a crew.

It was a lot to invite you. And I'm so far away, you know. You've got to wait like a half hour. Right, right. Think of Levi. That's true. That's true. That is a good point.

Well, this is our Fedora episode, and we wanted to have a little project check-in with Matthew Miller. He's the project leader, perhaps maybe better known as the real Beefy Miracle. Matthew, welcome back to Linux Unplugged. Hey, glad to be here. And thank you very much for taking the time to join us on release day. Yeah, absolutely. It's a little chaotic, but, you know, I got some time. Well, we appreciate it.

And we've been checking out the new release and I want to get there. But, you know, trying out the last several releases of Fedora, I really felt like this trend picked up momentum in 33. Then 34 brought us GNOME 40. Now 35 is bringing us Wire Plumber and GNOME 41. Where I sit, and having watched this stuff for a long time, I think there was a period of time where Ubuntu was really setting the tone for the desktop. And I feel like the transition of that baton has been completed with the last several releases of Fedora. And now it really feels to

me like Fedora is leading the direction of future desktop Linux. And people are looking to the Fedora project to see what direction things are going in. And as a result of that, I think we're seeing some better traction with things like Wayland and Pipewire and the entire ecosystem is improving as a result of that. And I think it contributes to that momentum. And I'm curious if you see this from where you're sitting at in the project and what you're, or maybe you think I'm wrong, but just what your observations are about this trend. I'll take it. I think people in Fedora have been working on these things for quite a long time, you know, longer than that. I won't speak bad about the other Linux distributions at all, longer than that. I won't speak bad about the other Linux distributions at all. I'm going to try to just completely avoid the comparison. But I think it's often the case that we've had a hard

time getting those out to users in a timely fashion. We struggled with meeting our own schedule for a while. And despite a one-week delay this time, it's fine. We've really been meeting our six-month schedules really reliably, which helps. And we've been doing a better job about kind of talking about the things we've done. There's been a lot of cases where people working in Fedora, people in the Red Hat desktop team actually made stuff that ended up being headline features in other distros first. So we're actually getting it out and talking about it sooner. So I think that's part of it. I think that we generally have a lot of new, positive, growing enthusiasm and energy around Fedora as a project overall.

And I think that reflects in both the actual technical output of all the people working on it and just kind of all the polish around it that goes into making a release and then in delivering a good experience to everybody. So I'll get to my experience in a bit. But while we're on this kind of trend line here, I'm curious if you could fill in the details on how something like the following will work for Fedora. So I've been noticing that Red Hat's been making a lot of significant hires that are going to have a big impact on future desktop features at some point. You know, I mean, it's very early because they're just opening the positions. But I've recently seen positions open for HDR support on Linux. I've seen more positions open for improving 3D and Vulkan and NVIDIA.

I've seen hiring in all kinds of areas that are really like the low plumbing of desktop Linux. And the Red Hat hires, but that work that's going to be developed, that must be happening in Fedora. Is that correct? Actually, generally that work, we try to make it happen as far upstream as possible because it's the right thing to do and it's less work for Red Hat really in the long run, even if it sometimes feels like harder work up front. So a lot of that work actually will go into the upstream projects and then kind of by its nature, but also because the same people are working on it, we then try and bring those things into Fedora as features pretty quickly and soon. And it obviously helps when it's the same person working on the thing in an upstream

and in the project itself. So like the Pipewire stuff, I think is a good example of that. I wonder if you felt like I did over the summer as I saw these positions. I counted it up for Linux Action News a few weeks ago, and I think it was like seven new positions that have been opened.

And since then, there's like another position. So I think in total, it's like eight positions. It just keeps going. Yeah. I saw that as, you know, there's been a lot of talk of post-IBM acquisition. What's it mean for Fedora? What's it mean for some of their free software contributions that contribute upstream? And some of us worried it could mean like the bean counters are going to get involved

and dial that stuff down. We're now several years into this now. And it seems like there's actually increasing investment in this stuff that doesn't directly translate to a RHEL product. I mean, I acknowledge there is RHEL workstation and all that, but you know what I'm getting at? Like, it feels like this is the actual walk

that is matching the talk. Yeah. Some of it I got to very carefully bracket with, like, I can't speak to IBM business or anything. I have no idea, let alone, like, even if I knew I couldn't, but actually the case is I don't even know. And my question really is about is does this feel to you like the real kind of validation that there is going to be continued investment here from just a personal feeling. Yeah. So, right. So, yeah, I can speak as, you know, just as a person and an employee. I think, you know, a lot of us at Red Hat were worried about this acquisition, what would happen. But we were assured at the time that, you know, REL, like that was really important to them and they wanted to continue to invest in it. It wasn't it was not an extract money thing. I think we kind of see some validation in the spinoff of Kindrel. I don't know how much big,

boring business news you follow, but that's happening like this week, which is like the IBM managed service stuff is basically going away. So Red Hat is going to be a bigger chunk of the new IBM than it ever was before. So it's really significant. So yeah, Red Hat RHEL success is very important to the future of IBM. And I think we're seeing that borne out. Another thing that's going on here, there's actually a lot of these things you're seeing are desktop related technologies, but they're actually hires related to an automotive initiative, which you'll see automotive keywords in a lot of these hires as well. And I don't have a lot of the details on that, but it is connected into things that are, you know, useful on the desktop, but also useful in other contexts as well. And, you know, the more we can find things that tie all these things together, the more we all benefit. It's funny, Wes, and I were just kind of remarking

about that off air yesterday, that even some of the work into Pipewire is about to enable AV in automotive Linux. Yeah, exactly. And then that benefits us all. So yeah, that's awesome. I'm down for that, right? Like, I think that's actually been one of the low-key brilliant things about desktop Linux that we underappreciate is how we have been able to leverage where the business is willing to invest to also enrich the desktop and benefit from that. It's just like the next level of shared infrastructure, right? The kernel is doing that, and the desktop is trying to do that too.

Yeah. Maybe Fedora is the king at that, really. Yeah. I hope so. Yeah, I think so, maybe. I think. So this is release day of Fedora 35, and GNOME 41 is in here. Fedora is going to be out ahead with GNOME 41 for a while. But when you look at the release overall, Matthew, I'm kind of curious, just personally, as a longtime to remember back to what's new. But I really do feel like this is a really like a polished release

and not in a bad way where Gnome 40 had a lot of changes. And then there's a lot of things that are responding to people's feedback about that. Like one of the things that's a big change that I appreciate is there's a setting for the multi-monitor workspaces now that wasn't there originally. And also a lot of little things like that were looked at and addressed. I think like the new power settings, things like those are some nice things that kind of build on features in Kodome 40 before. So I'm glad to see

those things. I think there's also a lot of exciting things going on in the project, like the Fedora Cloud Working Group is really energized. And I was looking at the Fedora Linux 34 statistics, and we have something like 15% of Fedora systems are Fedora Cloud when you look at systems that are installed over a period of time. So we don't track individual systems, but we have a thing where systems by default will report in once a week just with a count me. And so we can tell if a system and there's no UID or anything attached to it. So we can't actually tell which systems they are, but we can kind of get a difference between the number of systems that just show up once, like test systems and so on, or systems that show up beyond that.

So of those test systems, 30 percent of them are Fedora Cloud, and another big chunk of them are Fedora Container, not surprising. So it's interesting to see how much non-desktop use is going on in Fedora as well, which I think is important because I was talking about that synergy, and synergy is a terrible business word, but just that thing we get when we've got lots of different things working together in the same project. If we become just a desktop OS, it's kind of harder to get all of the investment from Red Hat, but from everybody who has all these different interests working together in one thing that lists everything. So I think it's exciting to see.

Even though the cloud stuff isn't desktop focused, I think it will help lift up Desktop Fedora. And just like the enthusiasm around Desktop Fedora and Gnome and so on kind of helps, I think, support that enthusiasm around our cloud offering as well. That wouldn't even be there if the desktop weren't there and people were not paying attention to that. So I think it all works together really nicely. Well, you can see that maybe with cloud shipping ButterFS as the default file system now, right? After kind of having proven itself over on the workstation. Yeah, yeah, great. Exactly that. That's exactly what I was thinking,

Wes. I wonder if some of that adoption is because of that ButterFS switch. I've never really thought about it in the use case of like on a VPS, but I actually, now that I'm working through that, I could actually see the logic. Just like the data integrity stuff. I appreciate that from my photo collection, right? Like I want to know if some bit rot flipped, like that's important. And you like the send receive stuff is pretty nice as well for server uses. Yep. So I just overall, I just wanted to, this isn't really a question so much as I just wanted to pass along how impressed I was at how complete the ARM ISO felt.

This is the first opportunity I've ever had to download an ISO image of a Fedora ARM release. Usually it's like I get an image file and I flash that to an SD card. And I've never really gone through like the complete process like I would for a real x86 computer is how I put it, where I get an ISO image, and I run through the actual installer, and I install it on a computer, but I had a chance to run it in an ARM VM. And I don't think people would in fact, in fact, now that I think about it, my son didn't even realize he was on ARM Linux, people, you just wouldn't know It feels like a very complete implementation. And you maniacs have all kinds

of architectures you support. When I go and look in those download folders, I'm just amazed at the amount of ISOs you must be spinning out. Yeah, if you have an S390 mainframe, IBM Z, like we've got you covered. I know some people who have a power system lap or the workstations. Is it a laptop, the Talos system? I don't know. I've never actually seen one.

But yeah, right. There is a tower. Yeah. But yeah, what you were saying, like this has actually been somewhat hard for Fedora because this has always been our aspiration. Then somewhat hard for Fedora, because this has always been our aspiration. Like when we have another architecture, we want to make it an equal thing and make it, like you said, just like you don't need to know you're in a different architecture. You get the full, powerful, complete operating system. And so some of this stuff where other distributions have been content to have specialized kernels and stripped down versions, which there's nothing wrong with that. It's just a different approach. And so sometimes we've been kind of behind because we're not able to get everything out so quickly because we want it to be so complete. But then the final result, you know, when it gets there is you have an amazing, fully functional operating system that you can know and understand and treat like something else.

ARM is now, I think there's the RISC-V stuff, which is pretty interesting. I'm talking to a lot of people about that as an emerging architecture. I'm not going to pick any winners, but I find it really fascinating. It's basically an open hardware implementation, open source hardware. And there's a lot of enthusiasm around that. So that's not an official Fedora architecture right now, but there are some unofficial builds of it. And we're looking at bringing that on maybe as a, at least as a shadow architecture and then maybe official sometime in the next few years. So I think that's pretty cool. That is really exciting. I love to hear that. I love that you just got your eye on it. Well, Matthew, will you please relay our congratulations and our gratitude to the entire Fedora community? They've created another fantastic release. And thank you for taking some time to come join us. Yeah, absolutely. And I'll be very interested in hearing what your experiences are. So I'm going to run off and do some other things, but I'm going to listen to that later when I get a chance.

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But I mean, that almost feels like caveman stuff. Like that's what we did back in the nineties. Right. I mean, and when you look at Linode's pricing, it's 30 to 50% cheaper than any of those hyperscalers. And you're going to get a hundred dollars from our offer to actually really

try it out. It's a great way to try out new projects too. As things come along, it's like my R and D place for sure. It's when you, when you look at the invoice that comes in, like some months. It's like my R&D place for sure. It's when you look at the invoice that comes in, like some months there's like all these weird R&D servers that come on the next month, they're all gone. And I'm just kind of messing around with stuff all the time. But I also noticed in the news today that Zoom announced the free versions of

Zoom are going to get ads now. Yay! Ads in your Zoom meetings. And this is maybe just one of those windows of opportunity where you can say, hey, y'all, would you rather switch to something free that we can host ourself and have control over? Because Linode's got a one-click deployment for Jitsi. This could be your window of opportunity. You get the $100 credit, you deploy that thing. $100 means y'all could try that out for a while and not have to pay a dime. They also have lots of other one-click deployments, or you can go the whole DIY route. I mean, like, nuke and pave and build up your own thing. Like, I have a crazy esoteric VPN distro for my PepWave on Linode.

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Linode.com slash unplugged. All right, before we get to Fedora 35, all the hype, all the new things, let's conduct a Fedora 34 exit interview. This is something we'd like to do more of, something like a chance to follow up on a distro a little later in its release cycle. And we should be clear about this too. Just because 35 is out doesn't mean Fedora 34 is going anywhere. It's going to be with us for a bit longer.

Actually, the end of life is scheduled for May 17th, 2022. So let's see, if you're a regular Fedora day-to-day user and you're not quite ready to try out 35, which just lands today, what's life like for you right now? Yeah, I recently had a chance to give Fedora 34 a go. And kind of like Matthew was saying, I never do this. I'm always trying out Fedora as it hits the beta cycle

that I really kind of get serious as it firms up and what you could kind of consider the RC phase. And then I'm always doing like fresh installs of the actual released version and I'm doing upgrades to the newly released version. And I'm always kind of in that mode of Fedora's life cycle. And I kind of live there. I almost never, ever go back to a late stage distro, if you will. Somehow you've moved on already. Yeah, I just don't normally have a reason to. But I've been thinking recently about how it'd be nice to move my son, and then if that works for him, my daughters, over to Fedora, because

then they'd be on what I'm using. I want to be able to recommend Fedora to friends and family, but I didn't feel like I could. And so I wanted to try giving a slightly older version a go and see if that changed my experience and what it might be for somebody who might have, like my son, a more gaming-focused desktop setup. Yeah, that's a good question. What does the support lifecycle of a Fedora family member actually look like?

But beyond that, I think Fedora 34 in particular, it just had a lot of changes going on and something of an elephant in the room. Because when it landed, we were kind of still reassuring people that Fedora was okay after all the big CentOS news. Plus, Gnome 40 had just shipped and was brand new and had a ton of changes that were quite controversial. And we were switching to Pipewire by default. And all of this was going to be the base for RHEL 9.

I mean, it was just, it was a lot of neat stuff and a lot to be excited about, but also a lot of stuff that had to be tested and maybe had some questions around it. Yeah, and so many like GNOME extensions were broken. Pipewire was causing issues for people that were joining like Zoom meetings. And so the question was, is what is this going to be like after things shake out? So we're six months into its life cycle now, pretty much right on the nose. And I did an update of a Fedora 34 install I did

today, just a regular update. And yeah, sure enough, you know, there's still every few days, fresh packages. In fact, I have to say, because they keep the kernel current and they keep pretty much everything else current, except for really they just iterate on the desktop environment. An up-to-date Fedora 34 install right now, even as 35 releases, still feels quite modern in just about every way. But the thing that's kind of nice now is just about all the critical, if you will, for lack of a better term,

Gnome extensions have caught up to Gnome 40 now. So the situation there's a lot better. And I noticed a significant improvement for third-party software for Fedora 34. Like you can go find prepackaged RPMs for Fedora 34 for like a commercial application or a popular open source app, or they'll have their repository already updated. Yeah, exactly. All those things that you're kind of understanding when you're trying out the beta because, of course, they don't have support yet. And then, oh, yeah, eventually they do update. And the other thing too, Wes, is like a lot of the guides are just, not all of them, some of them are still horribly outdated, but a lot of guides

have been refreshed for the new version of Fedora. And so by that point, six months into it, like if somebody is going to update their guide for Fedora, they've done it at that point. And that those, all those things, they're like, they remove paper cuts to switching. And I actually think a Fedora, they've done it at that point. And all those things, they remove paper cuts to switching. And I actually think a Fedora release six months into its release cycle is sort of sitting in a special sweet spot in the Linux ecosystem where it's got a lot of kinks worked out, especially if you grab fresh packages. It's got pretty good third-party support and community support at that point. It's still, because it's Fedora, a very modern install, and you've still got months of support.

So you could just ride that for at least another six months and then upgrade to the next version that's now becoming the old version of Fedora. I think it makes life a little easier. And I think this is the one, that's the version of Fedora, the one that's about six months into its life cycle that you can recommend. And I've teased people before that say, oh, wait a few months. When you're looking at it for like a family machine.

Just wait a release. That's what you're saying, huh? Yeah, right. Wait a release. Because each release gets 13 months of support. So you got some buffer time for everything to kind of get worked out. And they don't care if they're on the latest and greatest. That's just it.

You're right. Most people don't care. I mean, we care, but it's not necessarily rational. Yeah, part of it's enthusiasm driven for sure. But, you know, but it also means I could wait a little bit on my main machine, maybe three months after release, update a little bit before everybody, do a little checking around, see how things are going. You know, like there's, I kind of, I like this idea that maybe my main rig that I'm on, maybe three months into that final six months, I upgrade and I figure out what needs still to be fixed or what works fine.

And then when the next release drops, I upgrade the kids' machines. And then, of course, you've got, you know, you've got Stream in the mix, too. If you have something that might need to be even more stable than that down the road. Yeah, true. That could be interesting, a CentOS 9 Stream for family and friends, perhaps.

But when we were trying this out, we wanted to give this an honest go. Like, can I give this to friends and family? And what I envisioned is bringing everybody to Fedora, put everybody on Fedora, and put everyone on a Tailscale network, which is a WireGuard Mesh VPN solution. All right. So you've got everyone there. You can access every machine just right over Tailscale. That makes sense. Right. Super simple. So it's if they need support, I can SSH to their machine.

But I wanted to go a little bit further than that, and I wanted to do remote desktop support. And I love Rust Desk, but Rust Desk is X11 only. No. And, you know, in Fedora 34 and in Fedora 35, on GNOME, the Wayland supports, it's really nice. You get a better experience now. And I don't want to I don't want to go backwards for them.

I know. Right. It's sad to say in some ways, but when Wayland works, it works really well. Yeah, it's smooth as butter, but not butter fast, but butter. But so we were digging around. You and I were doing this, I think, after we did LAN one day. And we found that the recommended way to kind of do this now on Wayland with Gnome Shell is to use the RDP server that's built into Gnome Shell that I think uses Pipewire and all this kind of stuff on the back end. But we discovered that it's not actually shipping yet.

Some of the documentation talks about it like it exists, but it doesn't actually fully exist yet. Yeah, so like you might see this, you can enable the remote desktop stuff, but by default, it just exposes it over VNC. And we gave that a try, but it's VNC. It's not going to be great over a remote network. But at some point, they added via free RDP, RDP support baked in as well. But yeah, there's just no, because this is Linux, there's just nothing exposed graphically right now. And setting it up and enabling it and providing default credentials, well, there's a guide, but it's not exactly simple.

It wasn't horribly bad. Like, I think we ended up pulling down a few things from GitHub and building them and then moving them around, right? And then maybe we had to start something with systemd. So there was some futzing. Yeah, you're right. We did have to, there's like a little script that's posted. We'll have it linked in the show notes that you've got to compile, and then that lets you

configure, like, the credentials set up so that you can put a password on it, and then you go in and modify it with dconf some settings, and then I think, yeah, we just logged out, logged back in. It did work though. At the end of the day, that, that was the part that was pretty nice. It seemed decent. Oh man, it worked really good. If you had the right RDP client, like we tried a couple of them

and I wish I would have written down the one that didn't work very good. I want to say it was Romania, but I'm not sure. But if you got the right RDP client, like Microsoft's RDP client, or there's like XRDP, there's a couple. With the right settings, it's impressively high performance. It's much better than VNC. I think it was near real time because we had the laptop and we had the remote machine right next to each other. There was just a very, very slight lag, which makes me think that if I was supporting them over a remote link, it'd probably be fairly usable. Yeah, that's the test. I just need this to work a little. And it would work for family support machine, I think. I think it would actually do the job. So

the only problem is, and I haven't tested this yet. Dang it, now that I think about this, I wish I would have. I'm not sure if this is going to break when I go from GNOME 40 to GNOME 41. And I just did that on my machine that we did this test setup on. So after the show, I'll see if RDP is still working on it. We've got some follow-up to do. Yeah, I should have thought of that. I was just, you know, I was so focused on getting the upgrade and so worried that it was going to break my Fedora 34 install

because as I was going through this little journey to see if this was a usable setup, what I ended up with at the end of my Fedora 34 walk, if you will, is one of my all-time favorite Linux installs. I really liked it. It doesn't happen very often anymore, but it became precious to me and I was worried that the upgrade would break it. That's how much I liked the 34 experience six months into its life cycle. I'd say I

was impressed, but it felt early days when it released, but six months in it became my favorite setup I've ever had on that ThinkPad. It really rocked. So, yeah. I think this is a really capable family distro if you just give it a little bit for the community to catch up to it.

Because while Fedora isn't as just crazy moving forward as Arch, it is fairly out there on the edge of things. So, I don't know if this is just me being crazy, but, Brent, I kind of actually feel like, and maybe we'll get into this in our review, but I kind of feel like this might be the perfect Fedora setup for you. Oh, tell me more. Why do you think that?

Well, if somebody came to me, like I have this, I have, I always remember this conversation I had. There was this buddy of mine who was this big time PHP developer. And he said, Chris, I am so frustrated with Linux. I just want to get my work done. And he said, I installed Ubuntu and I can't remember what it was. It was probably like 810 or something. It was a long time ago. And he said, you know, this isn't working. That isn't working. My PHP environment is broken and went on and on. And so I introduced him to the Ubuntu LTS model. And I said, here's what you need to kind of, and so this is whenever the LTS was kind of new, so I don't know how long ago this was. And I said, this is kind of what

you probably want to be running for your kind of workload. And Fedora doesn't offer anything like that. They don't have an LTS version. They have 13 months of support. And then, of course, there's CentOS Stream, but it's not really quite the same comparable desktop environment yet. But I think this

model that we're talking about here, where you ride six months behind release, is essentially as close to an LTS model as you're going to get with mainline Fedora, because the upgrade experience is pretty smooth, and the reliability and community support is pretty high. So when you want to troubleshoot in the middle of the night, you can find a guide online and you can get it fixed instead of having to wait for somebody to, you know, like figure it out, who's still like maybe waiting for the bug report to come in. Right. Do you see what I'm saying? Like it's this, those are all things I love for sure. Yeah. It's a more reliable target for the, for if you wanted to be in the Fedora user land,

but you wanted that kind of reliability. I think that's the target right there. Well, and to be fair, I do the same thing with the Ubuntu LTS right now. I wait several months, actually, because the reality of how much engineering goes behind these things is that there's just inevitably some stuff that once you get it out to users, there's like thousands and thousands of users who find all these bugs and things. And then it's so three months later, six months later, of course, it's going to be more polished. So I think that's a good strategy for anybody who's risk averse, maybe is a good way to put it. Or the first job is that it's a work tool. The second job is that it's a Tinker tool,

right? Like my, see my thing, a lot of times my ordering slightly different, like sometimes Tinker tool is above work tool on some of my systems, but you don't have seven systems like I do. Right. So you've got to, you've got to narrow that focus a little bit more. So honestly, what I'm saying is if you came to me, like we just met at an event and you and I didn't know each other and you said, Chris, what Linux should I use? I'm a photographer and I want to be very reliable. And I have a lot of things going on right now.

And I need to be able to just open up my computer and have it work and perform well. I would today, if you ask me that, I'd say Fedora 34. I don't think I'd say anything else. I'd say go get Fedora 34 and bring it fully up to date. UnpluggedCore.com. Want to support the show directly? Go to UnpluggedCore.com and become a member. You get the full live feed,

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And of course you get access to the two feeds, the live uncut feed or the fully produced shorter limited ad feed. That's just to thank you for everyone out there who supports us at unpluggedcore.com. Okay, I think we've stretched it out long enough. We got to talk about Fedora 35. It lands today. And the way the Fedora release cycle works is they kind of have some target weeks and they release when the blocking

bugs have been fixed or a solution is in place. It's not so much a date driven release as it is things aren't broken so we can ship release. And I have to say, I'm actually completely fine with that model. And we just kind of watch the bug tracker because it's all out in the open and you all can kind of just follow along and find out when they're going to release. And yeah, you know, we get it when it's ready. Why not? Yeah, no rush. And this version features GNOME 41, which has been out for a little bit. In fact, it looks like GNOME 41.1 is just about out. And it includes in GNOME 41 some improved power management options, which we can touch on in a little bit. Also, like Matthew was saying, those new controls for how the virtual desktop layout,

I guess is how I'll say it works with virtual monitors and some more work on that RDP backend that we were talking about. And I have to say the thing that I'm most excited about is the continued evolution of Pipewire in Fedora and Wire Plumber as the session manager. So in Fedora 34, we got Pipewire. And under the hood, it was kind of just using some default hard-coded logic. But Pipewire can do a lot more than that. And so what Wire Plumber is, is it's a session manager that's going to enable future customizing that we might use here in the studio of routing audio and setting things up in a very particular way. Eventually, there'll be things that sit on top of Wire Plumber. There's some graphical applications in the works right now,

one called Helvium, I think, that is a GTK patch bay. It really actually kind of replicates the patch bay of the early days of the music industry, where you're taking a wire from one device and you're running it to another device and that's in the works right now and underneath that will be wire plumber and you'll be able to save different sessions so you could maybe have like this is my jitsi meeting session where my audio comes from my microphone and i also am taking audio from my other browser so maybe like you have fire Firefox as your second browser, like I do, you could have a wire plumber session that brings audio from your USB microphone and from Firefox and sends it in as an input device that you have selected in your video meeting. So you could play audio from your web browser into the meeting or from VLC. It's going to give you this kind of flexibility. So

when you hear us talk about Pipewire and you hear us mention wire plumber, the session manager, what you're going to get as an end user, if you're never going to give you this kind of flexibility. So when you hear us talk about pipe wire and you hear us mention wire plumber, the session manager, what you're going to get as an end user for, you're never going to do audio production is you're going to get that kind of flexibility. You can do a, you know, a VoIP call with somebody and route audio in there and have your own soundboard

if you want and have your own wacky zoo thing. Or maybe you want to screen share your web browser and you want to play a presentation and you want to capture the audio from that as well. Now you're going to be able to do all that kind of stuff. And what Wireplumber does is it lays down the session manager piece of this that's going to manage how this stuff works. Wes, am I explaining this appropriately? Yeah, I mean, I think so.

Because I feel like I'm kind of not doing a very good job explaining it. Wireplumber replaces the, you know, some of the stuff that was built into Pipewire by default that was kind of just a simple bare bones version. But you can think of it, you know, Pipewire has all these

facilities, but you kind of have to make actual configurations of those actual sessions, actual arrangements of everything, and you need something that can help

manage that and provide tools for other things to interact with it. And that's basically the layer where Wire Plumber fits. So yeah,

as an end user, unless you get into the details of Pipewire, you probably won't care about this. But this is one of those pieces. I mean, like I play around with Pipewire all the time, building it from source. I hadn't set up Wire Plumber. I was still using the other stuff. This is like the area where Fedora is taking these disparate pieces and really thinking about it and building something more coherent together. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. Neil, give me an idea of what we're going to get down the road in the future. Like, Wireplumber is going to enable a lot more than we have today, but I don't think I'm giving it justice here. The biggest thing you want to think about when it comes to Wireplumber and Pipewire

is that what Pipewire actually does is quite a lot more than what people see right now. So Pipewire can manage audio sources and audio syncs. We're all familiar with that part. We introduced that in 34. And the other part that it has that we've had for quite a light longer, but we've just really not talked about it, is the fact that it can manage video sources and video syncs. So this means, for example, if you do a screen share through the Pipewire portal API to redirect an application or whatever,

like, you know how that Apex, RDP, WindowFX, remote effects thing that Windows has? You can do something similar with this. And the cool bit is because Wireplumber is a session manager for Pipewire that can manage sync sources and sites, you can do programmatic redirection of those things too. So you can do things like orchestrate the connecting of various different syncs and sources for video as well as audio from various sources like a camera.

If they're going through lib camera into Pipewire out or a screen share or an application share or any of these other things. For example, you were talking earlier about remote desktop through RDP. And yes, it does use Pipewire underneath. Pipewire and Wireplumber contribute to supporting the ability to do these sorts of things. In the future, if there's interest and development around this, you could also see things like an implementation of something like Windows' remote effects, which does, you can do per-application shares and screen sharing or replication on remote connections to applications. You know, like you have a more powerful server computer running GNOME on it with the application running there, and then you could screen share the application itself back to a weaker thin client.

Those kinds of things become possible. There's all kinds of interesting things that you can do for VDI use cases, for instructor cases, for screen shares, for video conferencing, for music production, for concerts, for whatever you want when it comes to AV, there's a Pipewire pipeline in there. I love the sound of that. And we're going just a little bit at a time, but overall, when you look at other initiatives in the past, I think I'm pretty happy with the rate of progression. There is a known

bug right now. Some people have no sound after they upgrade. We'll have a link about that in the notes. It's essentially maybe for some reason, Wireplumber didn't start appropriately. So if you have that problem after you upgrade, there is a note about it. It's a known problem and a note on how to just quickly start it up. It's not that bad. I guess I lied. You should know about Wireplumber. Yeah, maybe so. So I did the upgrade on that Fedora 34 install on my ThinkPad and overall things went really smooth. You know, it really didn't work as expected. We're a few GNOME extensions. A lot of them actually have updated for 41. That's nice to see, but not all of them. So, you know,

you're going to get that if you upgrade on day one but and i'm really happy to see this if you have that new gnome extensions app when you log in for the first time get to gnome 41 on your recently upgraded fedora session or whatever it might be in the future maybe it's a boon tour debian or whatever arch um that extensions app will give you a notification that says hey man some of your extensions have updates and aren't loaded. And if you click it, it launches the extensions app. And that extensions app gives you an overview of which extensions have been disabled, which ones have updates again.

And then it puts a banner along the bottom of the application that says, the next time you log in, I'm going to update some of your extensions for you. Would you like to log out now? And you hit that and it logs you out. You log back in, they're up to date. And if they're compatible, they're up and going. My dock extension, for example, hasn't been updated. My tray icons, I had tray icons reloaded.

That hasn't been updated yet. But anything that's pretty essential to the use of Gnome Shell for me, that's been updated, which is a pretty minimal set now. And then I have like a nice to have set. So that's good. I mean, outside of that, really no issue. I haven't tried RDP yet, but all of my apps work.

I think Flatpak's doing a fair amount of the heavy lifting there. A dream of containerized applications, the live Infodora 35. Yeah, and I think it's a good use case for things like Slack and Discord and Element and all the other, there's a few other ones that are electron based that I have to have open and, you know, shipping them as flat packs kind of makes sense. I kind of like having them sandboxed as well. And so that just all goes really smooth. Works pretty well for me. But I didn't have quite the same experience Brent did because I think Brent, you tried out the Plasma Spin, right? Yeah, we were talking about, you know, last week talking about which one I should try. And we kind of went back and forth. You said, oh, you got to try the GNOME implementation,

because it's fabulous. Obviously, you're a big fan of it. I actually decided to try the KDE Spin, because I'm super familiar with KDE. And I have to say say that I hardly spent any time in modern GNOME. So I thought, I don't want it to be so different of an experience that I'm not really focusing on the usability of it or the distribution itself. So I decided to try the KDE spin. And as some context, I will admit, Neil, that I haven't used Fedora for more than like a few minutes ever. So this was my chance to really dive in. And Chris has been basically talking really positively about it for a few years now. So I thought, okay, now's my chance. So if you want to find what I ran, which was Fedora 35's pre-release KDE Spin, it's actually a little confusing to find.

If you go to fedoraproject.org, it just kind of redirects you to the main releases. So you have to go to spins.fedoraproject.org. I found that, as someone who wasn't that familiar with Fedora, to be kind of confusing to find. And I tried it on some bare metal. I have a ThinkPad X240 that I guess I found in my basement that I wasn't using. And so I decided to throw that on a USB and give it a go directly on SSD. I didn't know anything about FDARA, so I did dive into the docs first, which I think is probably a good idea. The most worrisome thing was about how to update packages. I know it used RPMs, but I didn't quite know how to go about doing that.

And I loved the documentation. It was good enough. Like it went into enough detail to get you where you wanted to go. Or I should say, get me where I wanted to go with my level of knowledge about Linux and stuff. But it wasn't so exhaustive that it was hard to find what I needed. So kudos there for whoever's writing the documentation. I really, really appreciated it. I also, here's a skill testing question for you, Chris, and you, Wes. Do you know what DNF actually stands for? Oh, man, yes, I do. But now I've forgotten now that you asked.

I feel like I could like stall and be like, well, you know, it was inspired by Yum, which was the Yellow Dog update manager. Isn't it like the dandified package manager or something like that? Of course. Something like that, right? Yeah, I chuckled there. And so I thought, OK, Fedora is going to be fun. I really appreciate this. And I know Yum has a lot of history and I don't really know it that well, but I've heard a lot of good things about DNF.

So use the KD LiveDisk. And usually my typical method to do this is I have my main laptop in front of me and then I have some friend's laptop or family member or some laptop I'm playing with. And I like to use my main system and just do a VNC session over to that other system. So I have the keyboard that I'm used to and all of the programs and I can look up, you know, notes in my regular applications and from the live disc, uh, that didn't really work for me. And I was sort of, I was like, okay, well, it presented a black screen. I was like, okay, this is likely a Wayland thing, because I knew that was an issue in the past. So I can do without that. So I continued with the Anaconda installer. And I

know a lot of people say it's kind of clumsy and stuff. And I thought it was fine. It was actually kind of nice. And it was pretty visual, which I appreciated. I did notice there's encryption as an option, disk encryption, which I love. And I always put that on laptops because I do a lot of traveling and stuff. So that was a really important thing for me. Another thing I appreciated was that it told me my password was awful by doing a dictionary word check, which is such a small little thing. But I think for new users, Chris, like you're suggesting for family and stuff, that's actually really nice.

I was using a terrible password because I didn't care to, you know, it was just a testing machine. But that was actually a really nice thing that I think everyone should have. So there was one question or a warning that I didn't understand, and I'm going to read it to you guys. And even on Mumble, I want you to try to figure out what it means. So this was in the encryption section. So I was encrypting, doing some disk encryption. And it said, warning, you won't be able to switch between keyboard layouts from the default ones when you decrypt your disk after install so what are they actually trying to communicate there okay okay you won't be able

to switch between keyboard layouts when you decrypt your disks after install i think i know what this is okay what are they sayingimpy? If you've used special characters in your encryption passphrase using, say, a French Canadian keyboard and then tried to decrypt that using a US English keyboard, those special characters are not going to align. It's got to be it. He's got it. And I have run into this previously and i think anyone who's spent enough time with decrypting disks at boot you will eventually run into this but anyways i thought that was worded a little confusingly maybe visually it's a bit different than than that but anyways it all worked fine and it only took about eight minutes to install, which was really lovely, actually. But that's where things started going poorly for me.

On the first boot, you get the background of Fedora. And I am a visual person. And I thought the background they chose, which is not a technical thing, but I thought it's like this teal, almost like seafoam green pool reflections photograph i believe and it just made me feel a little queasy i think guys what was your take on that with all due respect to the to the art team and because i often like what they do um literally on every single install of fedora 35 i've done the very very first thing i did was change the background. I find it kind of jarring. I don't know, Wes, did you have that?

I bet if anybody's going to be chill about it. No, I had the same reaction. I've really liked some past ones. I was trying to give it an open mind, but no, this default background is not for me. I mean, I generally don't bring it up, but yeah, I agree. First impressions are important, right? Yeah.

Doesn't speak to the rest of the release. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So then I thought, okay, well, I'm going to try, you know, I've installed it. I'm going to try this VNC thing again because I really want to use that. So I'm used to using the KRFB, which is a KDE, I guess, VNC server. Has worked amazingly for me in the last several years. And I went to use the menu launcher and it just didn't do anything. And I thought, oh, that's odd. I'll just ignore that for now. And actually, now that I'm thinking about VNC, maybe it's a Wayland

issue. And I knew that. So maybe I'll try X11. So I logged out and logged into X11 and the KRFB menu launcher worked fine. And then I tried to connect to VNC from my other laptop and that just crashed KRFB. Ooh. So I certainly wasn't going to use my preferred VNC methods. I'm sorry, Brad. I'm so sorry. Yeah. So I decided to unplug my main laptop, you know, from all of my stuff and switch the two and just focus on the Fedora stuff, which is fine. So I thought, okay, well, the next thing I like to do typically on a system is play with some of the, you know, install some minor things like HTOP.

And I don't know, sometimes you have to install SSH server and stuff like that. So I'm going to do these basic applications that I like having. So DNF is the first time I use it, fair enough. But it's super simple. So I just did DNF install HTOP. That simple, because I wanted to see, okay, what's it going to do? How's it going to work? And it started downloading a package, but it wasn't very descriptive.

And then it just kept going and going. And I thought, okay, HTOP I know is very tiny. What's going on over here? And so the description it gave was Fedora 35 x86-64. And that's it. And it was just downloading. It downloaded 61 megs of stuff. And I was quite confused because I knew that's it. And it was just downloading. It downloaded 61 megs of stuff. And I was quite confused because I knew that was unlikely.

Wow. Where are you seeing the 61 megabytes? If you've used apt or most other, you know, it lists a package on the left and then gives you a progress bar of how much is downloaded. On the right-hand side, it gives you the total download or how much time is going to be left in your download. Fair enough I don't have a great internet connection here so 61 megs actually was kind of depressing. Here's what I'm wondering, you know, because when you are on Fedora Brent and you

install something using DNF for the first time if you haven't first updated the repositories, it will do that for you automatically because that's actually one of the things that drives me crazy about apt is it will actually let you go ahead and install something even though it's looking at all old versions of the packages because you haven't updated the repositories yet.

So what DNF will do is it will say, okay, no, actually I have to first refresh the repositories, but on a new install, it might be pulling that stuff down for a long time. Because, you know, I notice it takes forever to update the repos when I'm on a bad connection too. And because DNF does do that so frequently, it makes the overall experience feel kind of slow. You know, I think that's a great insight.

And I can't remember, and my notes aren't good enough to tell me if I did update sort of the indexes beforehand. I typically do because that's my process with Apt, and this seemed like a very easy translation from one to the other. But I kind of wish it just described that a little bit better. It was a bit cryptic to me. Yeah. Yeah. After it continued sort of doing a bunch of stuff, it did eventually change that to suggest Fedora 34, x86, 64 updates, but even that was kind of cryptic. And so I didn't love it. But anyways, it did ask me about downloading HTOP. So after you wait for all of the refresh of the repos and all the dependencies to be met, you get your 170 kilobyte application.

Yeah, that is sometimes the DNF experience. So after all of that, I decided, OK, well, I know I want to try Wayland because I haven't tried it that much. So I'm going to log out and go back. And when I logged in back to the Wayland session, KRFB decided to crash again, just on login. So I knew that wasn't going to be any hope. I did decide to change the desktop as you guys did, but I ran it immediately into some weird issues. I was changing the wallpaper and the apply button never appeared. So I couldn't actually make that change commit. And like, that's such a small, weird, basic thing. And it made me really worried actually about all of the

other things I was going to want to try, because it's like one of the simplest things. And so I had to quit the settings application, come back, and then it worked, but it was like, okay, well, what else am I going to run into? Um, so I decided to do a system update cause I knew, okay, well, I'm on, I'm on a pre-release and I downloaded a few days ago. Maybe some people have, you know, I knew the release was going to be today, but immediately I typed DNF upgrade and it gave me a little bit of information. It said there's a problem with some of your packages. So I hadn't done any updates yet. And already there was some conflicts that specifically being a KWIN common requires KDE decorations conflict. It said it cannot install 5.23 and 5.22 at the same time.

And literally, this was a brand new system. I hadn't done a single thing. So that too worried me because what was going to happen next? I bet you got caught right in the switch over to the newer version of Plasma. Perhaps. That's definitely a beta thing that what can happen sometimes, although it's not common, is some of the packages land, but not all of the packages land for the next version of Plasma. That could potentially be what happened there.

Right. And now that we explore this here, I'm seeing how this likely led to all of the other issues I ran into. So I updated the whole system that way and rebooted. And then things just did not work. Like abysmally did not function properly. Oh, no. I hate to say that because I was so excited about this. But upon reboot, I tried to log into Wayland and I just got this login loop and it never, ever would log into the desktop. So I was like, OK, I know I can try the X11 session. So I did manage to get logged into the X11 session and I thought, okay, I'm going to get some work

done. So I plugged in my external monitor and this was the beginning of the end. The super key on my keyboard didn't even open the menu, which is really frustrating. And then the taskbar was on one monitor, but then the menu, when I clicked on it, appeared on the other monitor. And none of the window controls were available on any of the windows, which is probably that conflict that I ran into because it had to do with KD decorations. So that's likely the issue. But then I thought, okay, well, it's been 12 hours and it's release day, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe I'll just bring up a terminal and try to like update again. And maybe some of these things will be resolved. And so I, you know, control alt T to bring up a terminal. And I literally got only the toolbar functions. I did not get a terminal. I did not get window

decorations to move things around. So I, it was just, that was the point where I said, I can't go on. I can't, there's nothing I can do. I can't even troubleshoot this thing. Like, uh, so I had to give up and that made me really, really sad. Oh no. There's a lot to this. And there's several, I think, really important lessons here. And one of them is this is why betas are not like for production use. Fair enough. There was a warning sticker on it, but still. Oh, yeah.

And we know that, right? When we're going into this, we have, we always have that in the back of our mind. We know that. In fact, you know, like if you were to install today and had these problems, I'd say, okay, well, it's time to start, you know, making out some bug reports. But I think what you got caught in is a beta transition that does happen.

But I think that's a good thing for people to know listening to this, that if say someone is basing their impressions on that, they got to give it a little bit. And this goes back to what I was saying about if you caught this, say, six months in, you installed Fedora 35 in six months, I bet you this entire experience

would be smooth as butter for you. All that stuff's completely worked out. And that's where I think it makes that, that's where it's really in a sweet spot. It's in a special kind of place. It's in a special sweet spot for desktop Linux six months into its release cycle. And right now it's still early.

I think too, one of the other things you probably got bit by is there was some and i have a vague recollection one of the blocker bugs was related to something in plasma and it was one of the things they had to fix right before release and it may have may have been this conflict i looked at some of the common bugs and didn't see any of those but maybe that is just for the main release not the spins And I think you're right. I liked the experience, errors aside, enough to give it another try after, you know, maybe in a few months. Wouldn't that be an interesting thing to do is do a follow-up review with it in a bit and try it again and see what it's like? Well, how about we do that?

Okay. All right. We do that. But one thing that I worried about, and maybe that will change my perspective in a few months, is how distributions treat their, you know, this is an official spin. And it seemed pretty officially busted. Like, maybe I'm one of the only people who ran into that. But I really hope that the next test in, you know, a few months is very different because I worry that the spins don't get the attention that the main release does. The Plasma spin has been on a trajectory of becoming more and more serious for the Fedora project. Like now, for example, a serious bug in the Plasma spin is a blocker for the entire Fedora project, right?

That means that they're not going to release the gnome version if something's wrong in the plasma version so they are they are taking it very serious now but and they might they might push back on this but i'd kind of argue that wasn't always the mindset uh but i think what you have here is sometimes very late in the in the phase they have to fix something and that was something they were working on but we'll do the follow-up and we'll see how it is in a little bit. And, you know, sometime, one of these days, I'll get you to try out my GNOME setup the way I have it

and see if you like it. Yeah, I could use a tour. I'd appreciate that. Oh, yeah, maybe you bake him an image. You just ship it over there, Brent flashes it on, tries it Chris's way. Could do. So, Mr. Payne, you got your hands on Fedora 35. Would you try? Would you think?

Yeah, well, I played around with the, you know, the main GNOME version a little bit, but then I thought I'd go even more out there than Brent. I played with Kinoite. Oh, yeah, right. There's Silverblue version that's Plasma-based. Yeah, come on. Immutable desktops for everyone, including Plasma. And flat packs for days.

It's been a while. You know, I have played with Silverblue, but it's been a while. Was it 33? I don't think I tried it for 34. So it has been a little bit, but I was pleasantly surprised. Now, you know I don't love Anaconda, but it does work. It works just fine. It did seem like the Kinoite install took a little bit longer,

but other than that, it felt just like a normal Fedora install. Of course, things get a little bit more interesting when you have to do some updates or start messing with the file system or packages or anything like that, because it's a mutable RPM OS tree-based system. It's really neat. I think this could be a great development workstation. For me personally, as someone who tinkers maybe a little too much with some of my systems, there'd probably be one too many roadblocks. But for a software development workstation, admin workstation, just getting work done where you don't have to do a ton of packages or customizations or you're fine with doing most of your things in Flatpak and Toolbox. It's really nice. I was

impressed how well this just worked in the KDE environment. I mean, it's not perfect. Discover's lacking some support for really working with RPM OS tree, for instance. But the FlatHub support in Discover was really nice because I could just flip that on and I got everything I need. It is encouraging to see that KinoNite development because I don't know if it's necessary that Silverblue and KinoNite be two separate projects. But I think you're never going to have Silverblue that can support both Plasma and Gnome unless KinoNite exists. both Plasma and Gnome unless KinoNite exists. It has to kind of be the project that keeps the Plasma torch burning so that way Silverblue doesn't become just a Gnome thing. Yeah, you need somewhere to organize the effort of all the little details

that need to get changed or fixed or packaged to make it a good KDE experience. And the idea, Wes, of a really rock-solid workstation that has this OS tree approach to very careful updates. And that combined with something like Plasma and, you know, ButterFS potentially, I mean, I'm really seeing some seriously awesome workstation potentials just around the corner in the future. Plus it comes with, you know, a bunch of the latest stuff like Python 3.10, which just recently came out.

That's here. Like if you're using Fedora, you're up to date, which you often want for development. Yeah. All right. Well, I'm glad you had a chance to kick the tires. One question I have for you, Wes, and maybe Chris, you have some insights

or someone in Mumble is why make this? If they have Silverblue, why put some effort into something like this as well? What's the reasoning behind it? I think it is mostly just right now, Silverblue has always kind of been built with a GNOME first kind of perspective. And so you do your software management

through GNOME software and it's kind of using that entire pipeline. And there hasn't been a bit much focus on making sure that a system like Silverblue will work with something like Plasma, although it should, right? But, and that would be the time now to start validating that out and not years down the road when perhaps Silverloop starts to become

pushed as the predominant workstation spin, maybe, of Fedora. Could happen. Yeah, I mean, these big desktop environments really do have their hooks into a fair bit of how the system works. And so it ends up being that there are things you need to think about when you've so radically changed the system with these immutable variants. So while we're talking about this, a big thing that makes all of this work is a lot of your application, all your applications, right, are flat packs and flat hub integration with GNOME software landed for all the different versions of GNOME that use it. So including the, just a standard workstation version, but it's not like the full

Flathub, but it's pretty close, but it's not full Flathub. Explain this. Yeah, so I mean you can still of course enable Flathub as you always have, you know, by manually doing that. But now Fedora's providing a filtered list of stuff from their own repository

that they've sort of gone through and approved and made sure that doesn't cause them problems to include. It's an interesting start, and it means that some of these applications that you might want are already there without you having to do anything. And that's really nice for a new user.

Yeah, and of course, they do have that filter public, which we'll link to in the show notes if you're curious. I was. I'm like, well, what are they filtering out? It's in there. There's nothing really all that surprising. In fact, it mostly just seems like obvious organizational stuff, but it's nice to see them, including the flat hub, because flat hub has really grown. It has, if you haven't been over there in a while, go pop it up in your browser, flat hub.org and take a look at just like the new app section or

something like that. So having that built in to GNOME software is a pretty solid experience. And I'm glad they did it, even if they have to take out some stuff for platform reasons or legal reasons or whatever it might be. And Wes, you noted we've got ButterFS on Fedora Cloud now. That's good to see. Yeah, right? It marches on. Go a little ButterFS, go. And nice to have if you are using

Fedora Cloud. It does seem like a good sort of polished release all around. There's other stuff in this release that we talked about, like making sure that user services are restarted after upgrades, which is especially important when you're doing all kinds of audio stuff, like Pulse Audio or Pipewire running in the SystemD

user level instead of at the system level. They've also started shipping the Power Profiles statement in Fedora Workstation, enabling it by default. And it's just those little things, you know, those little things that the distro's thinking about for you that make Fedora, you know, a little more like a mainstream desktop and a little less like an Arch setup.

Yeah, real quick, this Power Profiles thing's interesting. And a lot of us are going to have a different experience because the way it's integrated with GNOME settings in your power area, you're going to see different stuff depending on what your hardware supports. And it's even integrated in with your thermal sensors and whatnot. So for example, if your laptop's running super hot, it doesn't make high performance mode available. It'll even have a little grayed out text that says, we got to wait here. Your laptop needs to cool down. Something to that effect. But if your hardware doesn't support this stuff,

you see limited reduced options. So they're only revealing stuff that your hardware has support for. But it also means that a lot of us see different things. And I know this is true because I've tried it out now on VMs and several different physical boxes, and they're all different. The ThinkPad has the sweetest integration. I think, Wes, I sent you a screenshot where it's like, high performance mode has been disabled while the laptop is in your lap. What? Yeah, it's impressive, honestly.

I mean, it also kind of speaks to the added challenge that these, you know, desktop environments, Linux distros have to work on all kinds of hardware and make an interface that can work in all the situations. So we have the link in the show notes to go download plus a link to some of the common problems people are hitting right now. But we'd also love to hear your experience, what you did to make things go smoother. I'd also like to know what didn't work so we can put the word out. Head over to linuxunplugged.com slash contact and fill us in on your experience and your tips and your tricks.

Now, we are kind of running out of time, so we're going to just do the picks really quick because we got something super cool. I think Wes found it. It's a Nintendo Switch emulator, and I gave it a go. Oh, you did? Yeah. Were you jinxed? I don't know how to say it, but it's an experimental Switch emulator written in C-sharp.

It's in the AUR as you would expect. And so I gave it a go on the Archbox and I immediately started getting error messages that I knew not what to do with. It's something about some, some file missing that you have to go get, but they're being cagey about how you anyways, it is legitimate though. And the GUI works and it promises pretty good compatibility and what's cool about this project and we have it linked in the show notes as i said um it is emulating the hardware really like accurately of the switch so game compatibility is good it's like pretending to be the right arm cpu and the right gpu and it's getting a lot of that right so even things like the newest Metroid game

that just came out appear to be working in it. I kind of got to give it a go. It recommends you have a system with at least like eight or 16 gigs of RAM, which probably most of us do. And, you know, some CPU. Yeah, this is really neat. And it looks like they've got a pretty nice website set up

as well as a blog. And I always find that the work that goes on behind the scenes to make this kind of stuff possible, just fascinating. It's worth a read. I have to be honest, when you linked it, I was like, oh, another one of these, huh? You know, how's that guy? But then I went and checked it out and I'm like, this looks legit. And so I went the next step and gave an install. And I mean, sure enough, it installed and I got the GUI launch, but then it just sort of, it just sort of broke on us.

All right, but we've got to wrap it up there because we're going kind of long. I'd love to have you join the LUP blog. We do that on Sunday, every Sunday at noon Pacific in our Mumble room. You can get the time at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. And remember, it is time zone wonkiness because Europe does the daylight savings now ahead of the U.S. So keep that in mind. That's why I just say go to the calendar page. And you can get our Mumble server details at linuxunplugged.com slash mumble.

We'd love to have you join the love plug. And then who knows, maybe you got a Tuesday sometime you can join us live because we do the show live on a Tuesday. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. Yeah, that's right. Noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. JBLive.tv. You got it. You know it. Wes knows it. LinuxUnplugged.com

slash Matrix if you'd like to join our Matrix community. And we'll have links to everything we talked about today at LinuxUnplugged.com slash 430 including all kinds of extra goodies in there. You never know. You never know. It's like we back it up with the links. We got the documents to prove know. It's like we back it up with the links.

We got the documents to prove it. It's all over there, plus our contact page, our subscribe, the whole shebang. And it's going to render in your web browser. It's incredible. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of The Unplugged Program, and we'll see you right back here next Tuesday. I'm a All right. Way too long.

I declare there is no post show today. Post show's been canceled. We've got to cancel it. What you're hearing right now, this is not a post show. Don't think of it a post show. We're not doing a post show. It's show's been canceled. We've got to cancel it. What you're hearing right now, this is not a post show. Don't think of it a post show. We're not doing a post show. It's not that we don't love you. It's just that, you know, we don't want to kill Joe. So this isn't a post show. There's no post show. Can I still have my dessert? Yeah, of course. Ice cream for everybody.