LINUX Unplugged - 435: Desktop Burnout

Episode Date: December 8, 2021

This was not the year of the Linux Desktop. We’ve been slacking on the mailbag, so we go on a feedback frenzy and answer some hard questions about desktop Linux. Special Guests: Carl George and Martin Wimpress.

I want you guys to know I am exercising an intense amount of personal control today because I'm still freaking out on the inside. Yesterday, I learned that the city of Miami has created their own cryptocurrency called MiamiCoin, and you can mine MiamiCoin. So I had to put out an extra about this because I feel like I got to have an outlet for this. Otherwise, I'm going to end up packing our linux show full of full of cryptocurrency chat but after i discovered there's a miami coin i just about lost it so i had i had an idea this is this is my solution colonel helped me create a jb crypto enthusiast discussion channel in the matrix and what we'll do is that'll be our crypto bull den. We'll keep all the enthusiasm and all the chatter there.

So for everybody else out there who couldn't care less, who doesn't want to hear about it, they don't have to be inundated with it. We'll just keep it all over there. So that'll be linked in the notes and we'll have it in our matrix room. Yeah. But what we all really want to know is how much Miami coin do you have now? 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, gentlemen. Glad you brought your JB coin with you today. Well, you required it for entry. I mean, we had to. Yep, and you must hold. You must hold. Well, coming up on the show today, our inbox was packed with some rather thought-provoking emails, including some that push back on a few things we brought up on the show. So, we'll get to a big batch of those and tell you about some of our upcoming plans we have that are absolutely ridiculous and could potentially blow up on our face. And then, because no one should ever try this, I attempt to use CentOS Stream 9 as a desktop, so that way you don't have to. Then we'll round out the show with some great picks and more.

So before I get any further, before we get into all of that, we've got to say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room! Hello, Chris! Howdy! Hello, Brent! Namaskaram! Hello! we gotta say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug hello mumble room hello hello you know i mean it's 16 people isn't bad but that's not a that's not a high number by a long stretch and this is one of our last tuesdays that we're going to be live oh i know i know change is hard it is New year, new server, and a new LUP time It's all starting January 2nd We will still have a Tuesday transitionary period

Where we'll still have some live streams for a little bit And there'll be some virtual lug action And some mumble room action going on on Tuesdays So that will still be there There'll still be something for people that have a Tuesday availability, but the show will be moving to Sunday, January 2nd. And if everything goes as planned that day in the, we'll have like a potluck brunch. That's right. And a new server christening party. And then later in the day, in the afternoon, we'll have our first live LUP. You'll be welcome to stay here at the studio and listen in the living room, assuming things are safe and the news hasn't taken a turn for the worse in that regard. And then shortly

after that, we'll also have a new Linux show launching on the network as well. So it's a great time to be sure you're signed up to the all shows feed because then you get the extra I just released yesterday and you'd also get the new show when that launches. We have a link for that at jupiterbroadcasting.com. But there's a lot happening. If you just listen to the feed and you don't tune into the live show, nothing's going to really change much for you. It's still going to have the same great Joe production. And we're probably just going to be out a little bit earlier.

So perhaps where you listen to land before, you'll now be listening to LUP if that time slot will just be kind of swapped. And we'll have more information about that soon. But it's all coming up. And we'd love to have you here for one of our last Live Tuesdays, which we do have a few more as we round out the year. And of course, coming up very soon is the Tuxes and our Predictions episode. So those are some really fun episodes to be here live.

But let's talk about Stream 9 that came out since we gathered together. And this is the CentOS I have truly, truly been excited about. Number one reason, it's based on Fedora 34. That's a great release of Fedora. They have been for a while. 34 brought GNOME 40. Additionally, this is really the CentOS that was born since the stream announcement that was built from the beginning as a distribution that's going to be a stream distribution. And I thought to myself, this might be a great way to essentially have an LTS Fedora desktop. Something that has GNOME 40.4.0. So it's, you know, not the latest Gnome, but it's still what some distros are shipping. There's still some current distros that are shipping that, right? So

it's not that old. It's got Firefox 91.3 ESR. So this thing's really focused at being kind of a long-term supported thing. I thought, well, how is this going to work as a desktop? And Carl, thank you very much, Carl. He kind of prepared me. We had a chat. We recorded a great chat with Carl for Linux Action News to talk about the release, to get the actual real details. But Carl warned me, like, there's a few things in the kernel that are missing between Fedora and CentOS.

And Butterfest was one of those. So that was good to know. So I didn't go in with the expectation of being able to format my drives with Butterfest and stuff like that. So that was good to know. So I didn't go in with the expectation to be able to format my drives with Butterfest and stuff like that. I went in with expectations low. But, you know, during the installation, you get a real nice minimal experience.

It's a lean desktop. It's just got a black background. There's not a GNOME extension loaded. There's no GNOME extensions loaded by default. And you can kind of then work it up and build it up from there. It comes with Flatpak preloaded this time. So that means getting FlatHub up and going is super simple. And then I had access to every single application on FlatHub. But it isn't a polished desktop experience. Like I had this weird problem where

GNOME just sort of thought Firefox was perpetually launching. So I'd launch it. And then after I closed it, Gnome thought it was still launching. So you couldn't use the desktop launcher to reopen it. I had to go to the command line and type Firefox and launch it that way. And the only way to fix that would be rebooting that I saw or maybe log out. There's just those little things. This UI is designed to give you a graphical UI on top of your server. It's not designed to be a desktop UI. But I could actually see over time kind of making it work. And Carl, I wonder if one of those things that would be helpful would be Apple in this regard. So, Carl, we had an ask before the show started to have you explain what Apple is and Apple 9 too, I suppose, might as well. Because it's a brand new release and that's an area you work at now at Red Hat.

So could you kind of give us the elevator pitch on Apple and why people love it? Yeah. So Apple stands for Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux. It is a subproject of the Fedora project. And you mentioned that CentOS Stream 9 is based on Fedora 34. You mentioned that CentOS Stream 9 is based on Fedora 34. And while it's based on it, it is only a subset of packages that get ported and brought over from that Fedora release. A small subset of packages. There's a lot of packages in Fedora, and it would be impossible for Red Hat to support all of those for all of RHEL's lifecycle.

So that's why they whittle that down to just the things that they feel strongly about supporting and providing to Red Hat customers. Every package in Fedora that doesn't get brought into RHEL then becomes eligible to be part of the Apple repository. And the same Fedora maintainer can just create another branch and build it and have a RHEL compatible package that they just maintain in line with all their other Fedora packages. So you could see how someone who maybe wants something that's not in that curated set of packages would find Apple to be kind of a bit of a lifesaver. So that's great. Something tells me like if we were going to try to use Stream9 as a studio desktop, we'd definitely be pulling in some of those Apple packages. Yes, definitely. Apple's probably the most popular third-party repository for RHEL. It's not something new with Stream. We've been doing it for a long time. I think Apple 4 was the very first one for RHEL 4.

And it works for RHEL. It works for CentOS and CentOS Stream. It works for other RHEL derivatives. And it's quite popular and pretty well respected in the community. Most people just kind of assume when they're using RHEL significantly or anything related to RHEL, that they just accept that there's going to be a few things they have to get from there. And those packages are completely unsupported by Red Hat. But now Red Hat is realizing that even though we're not going to support those packages, it's in our interest to make sure that Apple is well-resourced and stood up and ready for the

next RHEL major version, which is why now in a big change, we actually have Apple 9 available now five, six months, depending on exactly when it launches before RHEL 9. Right. That is really great to see it. It shows there's been real progress. It's a huge change that's only possible because of the CentOS stream changes

with it leading RHEL slightly. Yeah, it's been neat to see a little bit of knock-on effects building on top of each other with that change. It's been a lot of that. Carl, you joined us on Linux Action News 218, and we went into more detail on Apple, but also the CentOS Stream 9 release. And it was a great chat. So be sure to, after you're done listening to this episode, make sure you've listened to linuxactionnew.com slash 218 because there's even more stuff in there. And Carl joined us on a Sunday to help us go through all that. So double thanks for that.

Of course. Now, Wes has been awful quiet behind the scenes because he is working on a big upgrade for our members right now. And I'm not ready yet to talk about it because we have more show content we want to get to first. But Wes, like how many minutes out would you say from completion? Is everything done? Has it run now? Well, it's running currently,

but there's at least one of the steps that takes a bit of time because there's some downloading and some uploading and waiting on some backends, you know, computer things. All right, well, then we'll kill a little bit of time because there's some downloading and some uploading and waiting on some backends. You know, you know, computer things. All right. Well, then we'll kill a little bit of time. We still have a ton of stuff to get to. We have a packed show.

Linode.com slash unplugged. Go there to get $100 in 60-day credit on a new account. And you go there to support the show. Linode is simple, affordable, and accessible Linux cloud solutions and services. the show. Linode is simple, affordable, and accessible Linux cloud solutions and services. Easily deploy cloud compute, storage, and networking in seconds with a full-featured API, a command line, and a brilliant cloud manager that has a user-friendly interface. And with 11 data centers around the world, Jupyter Broadcasting has been able to locate systems close to our audience or close to our staff, depending on the function of the system.

And because Linode is their own ISP, the connections between those data centers and the internet, well, they're as good as it gets. And perhaps the very, very best part about Linode, they lead the industry in price to performance. They have some of the fastest systems in the cloud, and they're 30 to 50 percent cheaper than the lock you in hyperscalers and you always are covered by linode's outstanding customer support no handoffs 24 7 365 support you can actually talk to go see why we build every test system on linode we research we develop and then we deploy to production on Linode. We do it all. Go see why we love it and get $100 to play with it.

Go learn, go try something, go experience Linode. Linode.com slash unplugged. Go there to get $100 in 60-day credit on a new account, and you go there to support the show. Linode.com slash unplugged. So we have a lot of email and one came in that I can kind of connect with. Actually, I felt like this was a pretty reasonable email and it's one that's been crossing my mind too. So I'll start.

And it came from Jay and he says, guys, I'm a longtime listener and I appreciate the hard work that all of you put into the shows each week. I was listening to LUP 434 today, and that prompted me to write in. I've been a Linux fan for nearly 13 years, but over the past several months, I found myself growing increasingly frustrated by the entire Linux ecosystem. My frustration really began when the University of Minnesota's hypocrite commits issue came up, and then continued with release of GNOME 40. And it kind of accumulated today when I was listening to you guys discuss the state of flatback and software kind of accumulated today when I was listening to you guys discuss the state of flatback and software delivery in general.

What I've come to realize is that Linux might not be all that great. Here's why. The University of M scandal showed me that Linux as an OS has too many chefs in the kitchen. As a software engineer myself, I had a different view

than most did of that incident. In my opinion, if someone exposes a flaw in my code, that's on me. I don't get indignant or angry and blame that person for pointing out my mistake. I suck it up and I fix it. To see the kernel development team being so indignant and hostile about the hypocrite commits was really disappointing. I was expecting that the OS was being developed by a group of professional developers at best,

and a group of adults at least. They got embarrassed publicly by the scandal, yes, and they responded like petulant children instead of just taking their lumps and correcting the course. The simple fact that the commits even made it past QA is embarrassing. The BSDs don't have this problem. They have far fewer bugs because they actually seem to care about code review and QA is embarrassing. The BSDs don't have this problem. They have far fewer bugs because they actually seem to care about code review and QA.

Now he wraps it up. It just keeps going. In a nutshell, I felt like it was disappointing to see Fedora ship GNOME 40, but Ubuntu and Pop!OS hold it back for no other reason than they apparently had more extra work to do to implement it. Ubuntu's offering was mediocre.

Pop! shipped Cosmic, which I know I'm in the minority here, he says, but I thought it was a dreadful experience. The UI was just a dreadful experience. That brought me to my overreaching point. Linux will never be successful as a desktop OS precisely because of the thing that makes it appealing, the choice it gives users.

Don't get me wrong. I love the freedom to choose, but Linux has reached a saturation point, in my opinion. And he talks about all the different solutions we have for the same problem, X or Wayland or GNOME or Plasma, XFC, Mate, Cosmic. He says there's serious Unity problems

across different teams, no standards, no unified design language to fall back on, no totally agreed upon standards, which is true in some regards and not in others. But he wraps it up as he says, final bit here, I fear that without the unity

and a bit of consolidation of development efforts, Linux will never be anything more than what it is, a semi-polished, cobbled together mess that people enjoy tinkering with. That is, Jay, a pretty brutal criticism. And I think it's a kind of understandable position after the last year of news.

I think it's okay to say, too, that if what the Linux desktop is providing you isn't working, there's a lot more to the Linux experience than just that. I don't think we need to force it. I mean, I can see some of these flaws, but they don't bother me. I don't feel like it gets in my way.

I find both Gnome and Plasma to be perfectly functional workstation desktops, whether it's my personal stuff or development. But I also see how other people have different expectations. So I think to some extent we need to get comfortable with that too, and we need to talk about what our goal is. Is our goal to take over what remains of the computer desktop space, or is our goal to make a functional tool for computer enthusiasts? Yeah, Wes, I think it's interesting you use the choice of words, computer enthusiast,

because he mentions that maybe this will never be appealing to the broad computing market, and maybe that's totally fine. I don't know if it's realistic to think that we could, know if it's realistic to think that we could, you know, be the biggest desktop around, but we sure are quite good at being interesting to the enthusiast. And he specifically says the thing that makes it appealing is the choice that it gives users, but that's also what will make it not a successful desktop OS. So I'm curious,. You got to compromise a little bit, it sounds like, to sometimes be ahead of the curve and try some new things that may or may not succeed. Wes, something you said that struck me here is

there's so much more to Linux than the desktop. And a lot of people in our audience love Linux, think it's great, but they've decided to use Windows or macOS as their main desktop. And then they have a machine that they SSH into. And they spend so much time in that environment. It's where they spend the bulk of their passion project time is in a Linux environment, but they're connected from a Windows 10 or Mac box or something. And I think it's not a bad idea from time to time to take a break from the desktop

and focus on the areas where Linux really kicks ass. And to figure out where that is, just follow the money. Linux is going to kick ass on the server because that's where a ton of money is. And the desktop is a passion project for a lot of people from a very skilled few who are generous enough with their time to make something as great as it is but they don't have the benefit of samsung intel western digital and google all contributing code to the same subsystem or something like that

right where the risk five people do have that kind of advantage. And it's because that's where the money is. And so I think there's absolutely nothing wrong with taking a bit of a break from time to time. Also, I consider myself a former Linux hype man. I still see a lot of people out there that do this, a lot of my friends. I used to be one of them. I mean, that's what the Linux Action Show was. It was a lot of excitement and hype. I mean, remember that switch to Linux challenge, anyone? Yeah, I was just going to say that. Our mindset was everyone should be running Linux.

And now my mindset is there's probably a distribution for everyone, but Linux itself is a power tool. And I know this is such an old, tired analogy, but it is really, it holds up. Otherwise, you know, it would probably have faded by now. But you don't recommend that people commute to work in trucks or run their errands in a truck. A truck is something that has capacity for work.

It's something you use as a work vehicle, and it's not a vehicle for every day, every one. It is appropriate for work. It's something you use as a work vehicle. And it's not a vehicle for every day, everyone. It is appropriate for some. And we don't sit here and try to sell trucks to everybody all day long. But when you just come in with this hype that Linux is for everyone and that you should be able to do a one-to-one swap from your Windows machine to Linux, we're selling a false hope. And every now and then, we managed to sell that false hope to somebody who has like a large YouTube channel. And then they go on there and they call dolphin shit and they crap on free software efforts because they're looking at it with a completely

distorted perspective. And maybe one day we could say, yes, it's a one for one swap for everybody, but that's not it. So take a break, focus on the stuff that does kick ass, and then what you'll find when you come back in, you'll be really impressed and enthusiastic about the improvements in the Linux desktop because it always does keep improving. And so when you take a bit of a break, even a few months, and come back,

it's like, wow, look what they've done. And it's fun again. Hey, I like that approach, you know, focusing on the fun parts. You don't have to force it if it's not working, and there's no shame in that. I think maybe sometimes we attach a little bit too much hype and focus and just, I mean, I think we all would love to live in a world where the first-class premium desktop experience was also free software.

But if that's not the case, you know, we can still hope for better things. We can still admire the progress we get and then also just acknowledge the state of where things are and be okay with that. I don't think it's inappropriate at all to think of Linux as a raw material from which a lot of us are building our own desktop product from. And some of these desktop environments and some of these distro makers have made it so simple for us to build our own product that we don't even think of it as that anymore.

But if you look at where Linux has been massively successful amongst average users, it's when a company or a group has come along and taken the stack. They've made selective choices about what's in that stack. They've curated it and they've created a product out of it. Look at Chrome OS, look at Android, and now look at the Steam Deck. The Steam Deck is a curated product. Again, they took special effort into making a curated thing from these raw materials. And that's what we're really doing with our own desktops.

We just don't even really realize it. And end users that have come from something like macOS or Windows or Chrome OS, they're not thinking about it in those terms. That gets me thinking about, we've had our friend Popey on here once in a while, and he mentioned that there's a unspeakable number of sort of corporate users who are using Ubuntu, for instance. And I feel like there are a lot of people who are using it, and we maybe don't have the visibility there. But one question I guess I can throw to each of you, and maybe even to the Mumble room, would be, Chris, do you still get that same giddiness when you use desktop Linux these days? And what keeps you using it on a daily basis? keeps you using it on a daily basis. Hmm. Yeah, I mean, definitely around new releases, for sure.

I always am after that. I'm always on the betas before they're released and all that kind of stuff. So that always manages to still get me. I was thinking, you know, on my machines that I use, that I tinker with more, I'm bouncing around all the time. Distros, desktops, I still do it all the time.

I think it's just one of the things that appeals to Linux about me. But on the studio machines, we're going now on what? Three? Yeah, we're kind of on the other side of the spectrum deploying LTSs. 2018, right? These machines are running Ubuntu 2018

version, whatever the hell that was. 1804. Yeah. And we've not changed any of it once. We haven't changed any of the desktop environments. We have now, it's kind of funny, we have two plasmas and an XFCE. And that's what it has been since 2018. Just by constantly thinking about changing an XFCE, but not quite doing it. But my machine in my office, I mean, it's rare that a desktop environment or distro makes it three months.

Sometimes it happens. So it's kind of, for me, it's kind of like it depends on the machine. One of the things that I have been really enjoying is doing projects on the Raspberry Pi, Compute Module 4, and then regardless of what I've done to my machine or what I'm trying, whenever I want to just try something out, I just SSH into that. And that's been working really well for me. Now for another piece of mail, Lily writes in, just writing in about Flatpak. It has made it much easier for me to choose whatever distro I want. I was a longtime Ubuntu user who gave Pop!OS a try and really like Flatpaks. Now I'm on Fedora and get to use the same

apps the same way. Also, one of my most used apps is an older 68k Mac emulator named Basilisk 2 that is not always included in distro repos and is a royal pain to build from source. The flat pack has made it so easy to install and use that emulator for retro games and distraction-free writing on all my machines. I don't see myself going back to installing RPMs or DEBs for most apps. Love the shows. Have been listening since the days of the Linux Action Show. You guys make the best Linux content, period.

Best Lily. P.S. When I moved to Brooklyn, I got Fios for $60 a month, and it is glorious having a symmetrical 500-meg connection over Ethernet. I think a little poke there at the end yeah we're jealous but we're happy for you but i think that really touches on sort of the exploration we've been having with flat packs in that you know we heard last episode about endless os and the extensive use of flat packs we always using. And this is kind of a curious use to me.

I was asking you guys, I think off-channel, how do I move from distro to distro without necessarily needing to configure everything all the time? And do you think this might be one of those answers? Well, it can help you with the part of getting your applications. You don't have to worry about differing package names or setting up PPAs or adding repositories in a different distribution and how you might go about that.

The config stuff, though, some of that will still be on you. Yeah, I guess the nice thing it does, though, is it enforces a separation of applications and data, which is already pretty good on Linux, but this really kind of makes it a hard line. I think it also touches on our conversation around who objects and who it matters to. I certainly sympathize with a lot of the recent criticisms

of Flatpak and with containers and just bloat in software and everything getting more abstract and more complicated and layers and layers and layers. But you also see that for some users who aren't clued into that or just don't care, the experience works. I think we have to reflect on that too, right? That's why this is hard, and that's why software's so much about these trade-offs.

I have to say, I felt like it was a big relief when I got Flathub up and going with zero effort on Stream 9 because it just meant, oh, well, there's all my applications then, even if they're not in the official repo. I just got all my apps that I really need. That was nice. Well, over to the opposite end of the spectrum, Sean writes in wondering about no love for Slackware? apps that I really need. That was nice. Well, over to the opposite end of the spectrum,

Sean writes in wondering about no love for Slackware. With a lack of coverage about Slackware pretty much everywhere nowadays, I was surprised to learn that the project is still alive and kicking. Why so much silence? Has it just faded into obscurity over the years? Has it become the redheaded stepchild of the Linux community? I call for a Slackware server in the future. I'm curious to know your opinions on where it stands among the crowd. Hmm. I'm not opposed to a Slackware server. I must hate myself. Yeah.

When's the last time you really dove into Slackware? I mean, we gave it a go on the show a few years ago, but it's probably been at least that long, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's basically it. You know, Slackware, we really talk about it when people write in asking why we don't talk about Slackware. And that's almost exclusively it these days.

And the reason for that is, and I mean this with no disrespect, there's just not a lot going on, right? I mean, Slackware is a tried and true steady hand. And as a result, there's not a lot of new things to talk about. And so with the pace that Slackware moves, you know, it's not really that bad to really check in every few years and just kind of see how things are going. So that's about the pace we take it here on the show. 2017. That's apparently our last Slackware challenge. Maybe there's another one since then. Okay. All right. Well, time flies when you're having fun.

You know, I did a little search too, because I was curious when's the last time we mentioned it. And I used our notes.jupiterbroadcasting.com, which I don't think we mentioned enough. You can sort of search through all the show notes of all the shows, which made it very easy for me. And the last mention of it, at least in our show notes on JB, was in Linux Action News 64, which is a little while ago. And the mention was about some potential financial struggles that I'm guessing have been addressed because that was quite a long time ago. But you're right. We don't, it doesn't really show up that much, does it? We need a Slackware investigation. a long time ago, but you're right. We don't, it doesn't really show up that much, does it?

We need a Slackware investigation. And then like Brent, you report in like a reporter standing outside of Slackware HQ, which is probably some guy's house, right? And then like, you just got like the microphone and you're reporting live from Slackware HQ with an update on the financial situation. But first we'll have to get the news copter to get you out there in the news van

so we can do the broadcast. But once we get the copter in the van, then we'll send Brent down to Slackware HQ and figure out what's going on. Live from the scene, still no updates, and I'm being asked to leave. And it has started to rain. I don't quite understand what's happening here. That's all we have today for our Slackware news. I do think you're right, though, Chris.

The value proposition of Slackware has kind of just faded a bit. Not that it's bad. I think we all still have a lot of respect, maybe even love for Slackware, but you know, there's, there's systems like Gentoo, there's things like Nix. And if you just like want to assemble your system, but still with the help of a package manager, well, Arch is quite popular. So I'm just not sure that there's that many users that Slackware is unique enough to really draw unless you've been using it for a long time. You know, I am genuinely curious. I will admit I don't know Slackware that well. So could some of you with more experience than I do sort of give me what that proposition,

that value proposition really was in Slackware's heyday, if it had such a thing? Mini-Mac, I know you gave it a go for a bit, a little more recently. Well, more recently, no, I can't really say that. It was like 10 years ago i i felt i felt really ready to test all existing distributions that existed so i tried slack i tried gen 2 and everything and slackware was probably my fastest linux experience besides gen 2 i used gen Gentoo for like three weeks

and then I gave up because it took too much time to get my package up to date. And with Slackware, it was more like the package gap. If I remember well, I had to import some special repository to have the GNOME desktop because it was not included as default. And I was missing some packages, but the experience was really, really good.

I feel like Slackware, it's a good educational experience. If you really want to get an experience for where Linux has been and how far it's come, giving Slackware a go, even though it's been modernized as it has, I think is still a pretty good taste of what that experience is like. And it's not me being dismissive. It's just, I don't really have a particular interest to revisit it anymore. Just like you'll never let us try Linux from scratch. Well, you can go right ahead. How about you, Wimpy? Have you tried out Slackware recently no not recently but you were asking you know why did i choose slackware and the reason was is it was the only usable distro that existed at that time yeah which would have been 95 something like that that's what there was before

debian that's why you used it right yeah i don't actually know when debian started so that would be an interesting time point but certainly when i was looking for a linux my first linux was idrisil and when i moved from that slackware was the distro that had the most momentum around it at that time. Debian was 1993. Wow. There you go. Red Hat was 95. SUSE was 93 as well. I used Red Hat and Slackware side by side on different systems back then. Right. Even though I'm not particularly compelled to use it anymore, I would be very sad if Slackware were to go away. It feels like a bit of living history and so patrick and whoever helps him if or maybe it's just patrick now whoever keeps it alive i am extremely grateful that they continue to do so and along those lines uh open susa which i believe very very early on started

life perhaps from slackware has been a topic on the show and some of you have noticed sort of a shift in tone. Kind of funny. I didn't grab a clip, Wes. Did I grab a clip, Wes? I don't think so. But we went back and we listened to the first episode of Linux Unplugged of 2021 of the current year. It's us really having a go at SUSE.

I mean, really giving SUSE both barrels. Not satisfied, not happy. Very dissatisfied customers. It was kind of, well, it was a bit rough. Some of you have noted a bit of a tone shift recently. And Matt writes in, he says, it did my little lizard heart good to hear all of the open SUSE love. It was good to hear Chris appreciating the improvements to YAST as well. I wanted to point out a couple of things. Number one, YAST is amazing, but if you're a command line config type sysadmin, all those things are still available and they're right where you'd expect them to be.

You can use YAST to change your host name, but then you can also use host name CTL like you would anywhere else. So right there, I got to say for me personally, that's one of the major things that has made this SUSE transition go so much smoother for me, is I decided to learn Zipper, and I've just been, like, when I wanted to change my host name, I actually, that was one of the things I decided to do with host name CTL.

I still think the experience falls down for me in YAST. It's better. It's cleaner. It's more focused. But I legitimately was confused on how I was supposed to change my host name in Yast. I went in there and took a look. I think we both were. I mean, yeah, right?

Yeah. So I just said, screw it. And I was really grateful that the command line tools were there. I will say I respect the design of that, that both things work. You know, it's not like you have to use Yast and Yast tramples on the system necessarily. So yeah, that's appreciated. Even if we don't actually opt in to really using it much. It's sort of the perfect sweet spot, isn't it? Because it means people who do want a tool like

that are free to use it. They can graduate up beyond that if they want, they don't have to. And people who want to use the tools at the command line are not penalized either. And I think that's been sort of my takeaway as I've kind of, oh boy, I'm going to lay it out there. I don't know. This know, this is all subject to change. It's all subject to change. But right now, if our new Tumbleweed server goes well, the one we're deploying at the start of the new year, if that's smooth, what I think I want to do,

and I don't know how the hell we'd actually do this, but what I'm kind of aiming towards is using this as an opportunity to really get my head around Ansible and then come up with a totally new Linode infrastructure layout, all based on OpenSUSE Elite. So we're talking a lot of Linodes. And we're talking like wiping it all because right now we have a mix of Fedora and Ubuntu and some CentOS. And I do have a couple of custom VPN boxes that would remain untouched. But if this tumbleweed transition we're going to do here on our server goes well,

and the tumbleweed that I'm testing on this Raspberry Pi continues to go well, I may also go tumbleweed on my Pis at home. And if all of those go well, then I'm going to start trying out Leap. And if Leap goes well, we're going to nuke and pave our, then I'm going to start trying out Leap. And if Leap goes well, we're going to nuke and pave our Linode infrastructure and move it all over to Leap and have it deployed with an Ansible playbook. That's the angle I'm going. That's how much my opinion is shifting on the SUSE stuff. And a big influencer here is actually the value add that I feel like they bring to the tools. It feels like there's some actual engineering. Zipr has been designed in a way that it displays the information to the user in a very

readable format. It is easy to understand what your next choices are, what the pros and cons are, what they suggest you do. It's all very well laid out. Your eyes focus on the right part, and it proceeds at a pretty nice pace, and it displays progress in a nice way. It feels like a mature setup. It seems like,, it seems like as you, you know, someone who used to admin a lot of servers, you jumped in and you're like, oh yeah, this is great. So friendly and comfy. I can get stuff done. Yeah. And it's just enough of, hey man, you know, you're on Tumbleweed and you want to do an update. You ought to, you know, use this command. Cause you know, here's a little bit of information about that. And it's just enough for me to go, oh, okay, so I need to switch over to using this now.

That's good to know. Good to know. Didn't blow up my whole system there. And there's just that little bits of value added throughout the OS. I feel very similar about DNF. I feel like that's a really good tool, and there's a similar kind of engineering and tooling around the Red Hat and CentOS and Fedora distros. That's one of the things that's been drawing me in there is I can,

as an end user, I can perceive a bit of the engineering going into it. And that is not to say Canonical doesn't do the same because they build some really cool tools, like the stuff around LexD and, of course, stuff around some of their quick VMs and, of course, the Snap tooling and all that stuff. Like there's a lot of value that they add on top of, like, the centralized management stuff and the live patching stuff. So there's a lot of value that they add on top of like the centralized management stuff

and the live patching stuff. So there's genuine value out there. But my type of use of a system, I'm using the command line package management tools. I'm using that stuff. I'm not using the stuff

that like enterprises find value that Canonical adds. It's the tooling for me. That's what I'm interfacing with. And that, well, that's built by Debian. And Debian, they're not particularly motivated to drastically change apt in any particular tooling for me that's what i'm interfacing with and that well that's built by debian and debian they're not particularly motivated to drastically change apt in any particular way or maybe

completely refactor the way it displays its updates or its outputs like that's just not really on their radar and so ubuntu is not really going to get that you know they're not going to want to replace the built-in tooling that would just go over like a lead balloon. But SUSE can. They are their own upstream, right? They can do that kind of stuff. And so they have. And as an end user who appreciates a little bit of nice engineering, I'm seeing that the more I use it. And that's appealing to me.

Now, snapshots, their early adoption of ButterFS and building the tooling around that, that also has been appealing to me. And so those things I like. Now, the one thing we don't talk about in this conversation is the build service, the OpenSUSE build service, which Matt points out. And he says that's really where it gets great.

It works really nice with Zip or two. And if anybody's going to scale in March, Matt invites us to stop by the KDE OpenSUSE NextCloud League of Professional System Admins booth and say hi. Oh, nice. Say hi to Matt. Yeah.

So, God, I hope scale happens. That would be great. It's so tempting that conference season might just be starting again in a weird, normal capacity. We can dream, right? If you want to hear our old take on Tumbleweed, check out linuxunplugged.com slash 387. While speaking of ButterFS, Marcel writes in,

Hey Chris, Wes, and sometimes Brent, my question for you is, why is my ButterFS so slow? I know you're big fans and even recommend it as a root drive for servers, so I'm hoping maybe you've got some tips. I switched to ButterFS about six months ago, and while the snapshots are great and have saved my butt countless times already, the performance seems pretty bad. This is mostly anecdotal, but if I'm copying files in the background, my UI can freeze

for 30 seconds at a time. You can probably imagine how frustrating this is when you're trying to get work done. I seek out lightweight software like OpenVox and NeoVim, but still, these usually super speedy programs just hang. I read every guide I could, and I'm using all the recommended boot flags. So do you have any ButterFS tips that might not show up in those popular guides? Is any of this consistent with your experience, or is there something terribly wrong with my setup?

I know you're not my personal tech support, but I thought maybe other listeners would be interested in how to go about diagnosing their ButterFS issues. Doesn't Marcel know no one's allowed to have ButterFS complaints in here? This is a, no, this is all we only hype. Strictly hype. That's all we want. How do you get past the filters anyways?

I don't know. I don't know. You know, so a couple of things. When I hear about disk activity impacting your graphical applications, I do start wondering about your scheduler, and I do start going in that direction. But I was wondering, is LZO, is that the fastest compression available now? Or would something like Z-Standard be faster? And is that usable with Butterfess?

LZO is technically the fastest. Okay. But the better balance is Z-Standard 1. We actually did a report for this for turning on compression in Fedora. Okay. So you can look it up in the Fedora Z-Standard report for this for turning on compression in Fedora. Okay. So you can look it up in the Fedora Z standard change for Butterfest. All right, great. It does seem like maybe looking at Fedora's justification for using the Z standard compression

might be something worth looking at. But all things being equal, two one terabyte SATA SSDs and a RAID 0, you should actually be fine because I've actually done something similar where I have two one terabyte SSDs that are USB. Oh, yeah. And I'm I'm not getting that kind of yeah, I'm not getting that kind of kind of experience. So you might you might look into what's going on just overall in your system. Maybe have the journal up, you know, in a follow mode while you're using your system. Check in logs, maybe install something like NetData so you can see if there's, you know,

anomalous stuff going on with your disks. Take a look at the health of your disks. And then I'm also just curious, you know, what kernel version are you on? Are you running a new or somewhat new ButterFS? All of that would be helpful diagnostically. Yeah, we also got an email in just as a tip for those of you who've been using Nabula since we talked about it. Joe wanted you to know that, not Joe that edits our show, but listener Joe, that Nebula certs by

default do expire after a year. So prepare yourselves for that. Just a little bit of housekeeping on your Nebula VPNs. That is a mesh VPN that we've talked about before that we like a lot, but I'll take our last email. Well, this will probably be our last one. This is a good one, I think, to end on. So our good friend Tim Kahnem from JPL, former guest on the show, wrote in, and he said, I had a good chuckle at your command line episode, since, as you can guess, the command line rules on Mars, GUIs aren't much help there.

As we've learned how the helicopter likes to operate on Mars, we've actually been learning more command line tricks to help things go more smoothly. We're using task set dash C to put operations on other cores so they don't interfere with the core that has the critical timing on it, and chrt tack O, which is C-H-R-T tack O, to lower the priority of those tasks relative to the critical cores. But as a general comment, I agreed with Wimpy that the distinctive thing of Linux is the command line,

so much that even though most of my day is spent in Windows because of the office-centric business world, I do almost all of my development work on a Linux machine or in WSL2 under Windows. Once JPL is open again, by the way, it'd be so fun to organize a tour of JPL for the LA area Linux Unplugged listeners. We'll be in touch.

How awesome would that be to do a meetup at JPL in the LA area and get a tour of the Mars Base HQ for the little rover and helicopter? Oh, wow. That's, I just can't even. It's so great, Tim's listening. I love that.

And he's got a great point, like you're not going to be using the GUI on Mars. There are a lot of industrial applications where the command line is going to be your only bet. Doesn't mean it's the only way you should be able to do things, but there will be times where there's no avoiding it. Okay. All right.

Are you ready, Wes? How do you feel it? I feel like we could do it, even if we're not 100% yet. Yeah, I think we have to, because I'm still running into some issues on the backend side. We'll just ask for grace. We'll just ask for grace. Behind the scenes, Wes has been working diligently to plumb together every single member version of the show into one master membership feed. So you can subscribe to one place and get access to all the member benefits for every show,

support the entire network. And it's also now giftable for the holidays. So if you'd like to join a Jupiter Broadcasting Network membership, it's really simple. It's just the price of two memberships, but you'll get access to four special feeds plus whatever new stuff that we add in the future. So you sign up at jupiter.party. That's where you can go to get it for yourself, or you can go there if you'd like to gift it to someone.

That's been a big request we've had, and now we've made it happen. Come join our party. Yeah, come join our party. It took some paperwork. It took some technical work. It's been in the works. But it means now you get every show completely ad-free. Not limited ads.

Completely ad-free. That same upgrade is going out to every existing membership. So if you're a member of just a single podcast, it's going 100% ad-free for you. If it hasn't yet, it will soon with maybe just one or two things you'll find out, but it's all coming together right now. We've been working very diligently on this. If you sign up for the jupyter.party

whole network membership, you get access to the unplugged full live stream. That's what we're going to be putting in that feed. You get self-hosted with the member post show. You get Coder Radio ad free and the Coderly report. It's all just for 16 bucks a month. That's just the cost of two memberships. But because it's the holidays, I'm taking $2 off for a year.

If you use the promo code, the signal, one word, the signal. These memberships, they keep our production production going like in a time right now where we've for actually for quite a while we've only had linode now sponsoring this show without these memberships one sponsor that just wouldn't that wouldn't make that wouldn't work it just couldn't do it it wouldn't make business sense to run the show but our members they give us the choice to wait for the right sponsorship and And it takes a long time to, to find the right sponsor and to work out a relationship that's equitable and that makes sense.

And that's fair to everybody like that stuff. It takes sometimes six months for a, for a single deal that you'll hear for, for a single read you'll hear on air. I mean, it's, it's unbelievable. And the memberships,

they give us that lifeline to be picky. So, you know, you're not hearing every single mattress ad or a box meal. The ones that we hear a lot from are like the, you know, like the loot crate type stuff where you can, you know, sign up and get a box full of junk. We don't have to take those. We can be picky about who we work with and choose the right sponsor.

That's our members help us do that. They help us when it's lean. They help us stay independent. I mean, it's a really big deal when independent content like this is funded from its audience. You just look at what's going on in the media today, and I think you can appreciate how important that is. So go over to jupiter.party to sign up. If you're a Jupiter Signal patron on our patron, you're already set. You're just going to have to claim your feed.

There's a process for that, and we'll do a Patreon post for that. It's just a limitations of APIs and tech platforms. But Jupiter Signal patrons, you're already good to go. You're going to get access to this stuff. As we talk right now, Wes is going through and backfilling the feed with all of the previous membership releases for every show. So if you've never been a member before you can now get access to everything in one feed one spot you'll also get access to exclusive you can actually if you don't want that you can go into the membership portal and just download the things you do want from time to time so you don't actually have to take the feed if you don't want it you can still just support us but it's there if you do all the great content none of the ads and i wouldn't be

surprised if there aren't a few kinks we work out with the feed stuff just as we're importing. These live stream recordings are super huge files, really long, so it's a lot of processing. But it's all happening right now. And when you go to jupyter.party and you sign up, you'll get an RSS feed and you'll see that start populating. And you can use promo code TheSignal to take two bucks off that membership for a year.

So not only is it a great deal because it's the cost of two memberships and you're getting access to all the shows. But then if you use the promo code, the signal, which is only going to be active for a few weeks, you get two bucks off every month for a year. Jupiter dot party promo code, the signal network wide membership is here. It's been a massively requested feature. And it was one of these where I had to figure out some business stuff.

Because, you know, I mean, going completely ad-free, that takes some work. You know, that's why it was limited ads before. And then, of course, there's back-end plumbing we have to do for our publishing system. And then we have different platforms

like Patreon that we had to connect. It turns out when you publish your podcast to every possible place, it gets complicated. It does. It does. So I'm very excited for that. And thank you, everybody who signs up. Thank you, Wes, for the hard work. Let's give him another round of applause.

Jupiter.party! And you can gift it now, which when I first set up the memberships, I thought, I didn't even cross my mind. Actually, I'd never even thought about it. But then as the year went on, people were like, I'd like to gift it every holiday season that would come up. I'm probably a little late. Hopefully not though. You know what digital gift you can always get the last minute. So there's that too. Yeah, that's right. You forgot, you forgot what your spouse wanted. Maybe they want this.

I also have a popcorn not update. So I got this little tiny popcorn computer. It's a really neat little device with a QWERTY keyboard and a 1080p screen and a SD card for USB-C ports, HDMI, and it's no bigger than a phablet. But, you know, it's early days and I don't think it's ready for a review so much as it is in. It's going to be in the lab in experimentation mode for a bit. There's a post-market OS image that boots now, and you can even get as far up as as to a graphical environment. But there's not a lot else going on on this thing right now. And there's still some fundamental hardwares that need drivers and stuff like that. So I'm holding off on a full opinion right now, and I'll continue to play with it. And I'm doing a reach out to anybody in the community

who has one of these and has some experience and would like to sync up with me, chris at jupiterbroadcasting.com for that. Well, before we go, I think we've got time for a pick. And this one, Chris, ooh, it's interesting to you and I because it's an editor for spoken word audio with automatic transcription. Something to maybe make editing those podcasts just a little bit easier.

It's called Adopolis. Okay, I'm glad you said that. That's not how I would have said it. I'm not sure why I would have said it. I would have said Adopholis, and that's stupid. There's no pff in there. So, yeah, this is neat, and it's competing with a commercial application that has a monthly subscription to do all of this. It's early days. It's an electron app where you

import a video file, an audio file, and then it downloads a model. They have different options and then it transcribes it and you can go in there and actually highlight sentences. Now, I'll give you, here's a great example of how this would be useful. Maybe there was a talk on YouTube, maybe an event, and it's like a four-hour YouTube video. You know how they sometimes just kind of like, they just sometimes kind of slot them all together? Publish the room's video for the whole darn day. Yeah. And it's like a six-hour video.

You could download something like that, run it through this thing, and then you could search for the actual words that you're looking for, and then cut it to that. Because when you make cuts and changes in here, it can make cuts and changes to the video file, or you can export just that section.

So this is an incredible way to take something that is a visual medium and convert it to a written medium. And it gives you a word processor-like experience for media editing, which is just so cool. And no cloud required. I never thought I'd see this in a non-commercial capacity. I mean, this thing's AGPL.

Yes, you can get it on those commercial platforms like Windows and Mac OS, but there's also an app image available if you just want to play with it on good old GNU slash Linux. That's just, wow. I mean, okay, it's definitely really early days. They stressed that in the readme and from my quick playing with it, that should be stressed, but it's pretty slick so far and it seems like it has a lot of promise. We all three tried it. I think Brent, you probably had the roughest go at it. I did have an issue running the app image. It may not be associated with

the program, but I got it working. We had the an issue running the app image. It may not be associated with the program, but I got it working via the command line, which was fine. And then I got really excited. It was very, very neat what it was doing. And like you mentioned, it's early days, so it wasn't quite perfect, but just perfect enough that it got me all tingly. And it was really, really great, actually,

to see when you hit the play button after it transcribes everything, you could just kind of like watch it read the words with the audio as it follows, which is really cool. I just used like an Alan Watts speech that I found online. And, um, it even had a little music symbol for when like the piano came in between his words. Cause he, you know how he speaks with gaps in his, uh, tone and stuff. So that was great. But I did then, just as I was writing my excitement to you guys, it sort of crashed my entire system. At least your display server, right? Yeah, you had a sense of what was going on. So it kind of kicked me out into the terminal. And

I tried my very best to get back and never could without a reboot. So that felt a little disappointing. But hopefully, hopefully we can help them with that or they're working on it and something like that. So good and bad. So we're saying it's early days with this piece of software. It's early days still.

They are funded, it seems, until February 2022. So hopefully they'll get funding again because there's still a lot of work to do here. But this is one of those pieces of software that's truly a game changer. And if it hasn't clicked for you, why this is so incredible, you probably should go try it. It's revolutionary to be able to edit audio and video as if it was a written text document.

That's next level. And to have it be free software, this is something that's worth, I think, more attention. And so even though it's very early days, we wanted to give it that attention on the show in hopes that maybe it encourages funding past February 2022. Yeah, go try it out. We'll have a link in the show notes, but if you want it spelled, it's A-U-D-A-P-O-L-I-S. I could see that being a tool we use a lot, you know, for getting clips.

And we were just talking about, oh, it would have been great if we would have got a clip of some of our original Seuss criticism. Well, imagine a process like that. You got to sit there and listen through it. You got to find all of that, which is fine, and we do it. But if we could load it up into a document and just search for the words, open Seuss at Tumbleweed, and then go right to that and make a cut out of that, that's pretty great. Yeah, it seems really nice for finding things. And also I could see it maybe using it for content cleanup before you do a final pass to, you know, really dial it in,

but just to remove all the extra fluff that you're going to have to cut anyway. I wonder how good it would be at transcribing all of our Linux-specific program names and such. I mean, Chris can't even do it most days. Well, there's only one way to find out. Who would fare better, Chris or the AI? We one way to find out. Who would fare better, Chris or the AI? We should try to find out.

Yes, it is hammer time. We should get out of here. I do want to say thank you to those of you who support the show directly. I mean, you've been here since the beginning, and if this is the show that you're here for, this membership, it's not going anywhere. In fact, it's just going to get better. We'll have two options for you.

You'll still have the ad-free version, which has all of the Joe production on it, or you still have the complete live version. That's available to you as well with all of our screw-ups, what we cut, and more. And thank you to the UnpluggedCore.com members who have been there and validated this membership approach and have literally kept this show on the air for the last, I don't know, I mean, how long has it been now since we've only had just Linode? It's been a while. Months. It's huge.

I mean, that membership made the difference. So thank you. And it's still available at unpluggedcore.com. If you have any feedback or ideas or thoughts, maybe that the show provoked within you, some feels, linuxunplugged.com slash contact. We'd love to hear that. Don't forget, we are cooking up that meetup at the beginning of the year on January 2nd. It's a Sunday. So if you're in our area or you can get out to the Pacific Northwest, we'd love to have you there. And we do have that new crypto enthusiast room as well as lots of other conversations going on in our matrix community

at linuxunplugged.com slash matrix. Man, that's a lot of stuff. I'm trying to come up with a new outro here. I admit this is a new, this is me attempting a new outro because I'm done with the Twitter plugs. I just feel done with it. I've been debating it for weeks and I'm done. So I'm trying it out. I'm trying out something different. And the problem is there's like a hundred things I would like you guys to know about because there's so much you can do and there's so many ways to interact. And if it just wasn't such a great experience, I wouldn't be mentioning all of these things. And so what ends up happening, there's like a dozen things I've got to mention and I'm still sorting it out. I tried not doing housekeeping this week.

So this is what we're getting. So I apologize. I should have like some long outro that's just playing us out, I suppose. And these could just be credits at the end of the show. Consider these the show credits, I suppose, for God's sakes. Also, we got a lug that happens on Sundays. I think it's good. I think it's another thing you should try. You should go noon Pacific. Get it in your local time at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. We have details on our website. And last but not least, we'd love to have you join us live. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station.

Oh, I'm exhausted. This is too much. We got to have less stuff at the end of the show. One of these weeks, I just want to end the show. Boom, it's done. The no outro show. Whoa. No more Tuesday. No more links. But we do have links at linuxunplugged.com slash 435 for everything we talked about today if you'd like to get those. And of course, we'd love to have you join us on a Tuesday. We only have a few more live Tuesdays

at noon Pacific, 3pm Eastern at jblive.tv. Alright. I can't help but tell you about these things. I love you. 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. It's for people who like to mess with computers. And you know who you are.

If you're somebody who doesn't want to mess with it, I just want to surf the, I just want to buy something on Amazon, send an email to my kids, look at some websites. If that's you, you don't want to mess with it, probably not a good choice. All right, jbtitles.com, everybody go vote.

Oof, I am legit a little wiped out from that. I made a few tweaks to the show with the housekeeping and the links. I make a few small tweaks, and now I feel like I need a nap. The whole thing went off the rails. You don't appreciate how much of that you've just internalized over the years. I just felt like, I'm not kidding, I've been on the fence about not plugging the Twitter because I think the reality is the majority of our audience, the vast majority of our audience is not on Twitter, but there is some of them and, but they're out there now. Like if they're going

to get on Twitter, they've done it. And me mentioning the Twitter handle, it's pointless at this point, if people aren't following, they're not going to follow anymore. It's good. But then, you know, Jack Dorsey left Twitter and I'm like, well, why the hell am I promoting it? The damn CEO's out, right? They're like, I'm out. I'm out. I'm done. I'm done with it. I'm still on there, but I'm done promoting it. I guess if we get a, see a feedback saying, is the network on Twitter? Are you guys on Twitter? We can address it then. There you go. That'll be our, that'll be our data point. In the meantime, I'm just going to work it out. I'll streamline it.

I'll get there. That was my first attempt, and it was real bad.