LINUX Unplugged - 436: Hop on Pop

Episode Date: December 15, 2021

We each try out the new Pop_OS! and Carl Richell from System76 joins us to get into the details. Plus why we feel Pop might be the new Ubuntu. Special Guest: Carl Richell.

breaking news here on the show. It looks like it's coming from Mike Larbs over at Pharonix. This is CNN breaking news. Amazon is hiring DXVK, Mesa, and Proton Linux developers for Luna Cloud Gaming. Is that their streaming thing, Luna?

That's their cloud gaming thing. This is big. So now you're going to have Collabra, Valve, and Amazon all funding developers to work towards this same stack. Wow. This is a big news day. There's a lot going on today.

I wonder if that means Luna is rebasing from Windows to Linux. Yeah, you would have to think, right? The job posting also provides some details of the work. It says, quote, the role involves working with Proton, a compatibility layer to run Windows games on Linux using Wine. Luna is committed to working with the open source community around Proton. This role will commit code to open source projects such as Proton and Wine in pursuit of running games in a stable and performant manner. There's a lot to kind of unpack here because it could suggest they are switching to Linux on the back end.

I mean, that would be pretty incredible because that would mean both Stadia and Amazon's offerings require that the games work on Linux. Then you had the Steam Deck coming. Man, that's a lot of momentum towards games at least getting some level of compatibility with Proton, right? Maybe not native Linux games, but Proton games. Because this is huge, I think. If you're going to, if this, if Proton, if targeting for Proton now means you get your game running on the deck and you get your game running on Luna,

that incentivizes developers to actually make that happen. It's a starting point, right? Like if they're doing this, then they're definitely working on a Linux platform to run games on, which means this probably is the first step. First having their existing portfolio of Luna games working. And then their next step is opening the doors for Linux native ones.

That's the optimist in me. I'm hoping that's what's happening. Yeah, right. Yeah, no, I'm with you. Well, and what is this also going to do to the Steam stats? Because I'm sure there are internal stats that Steam tracks of how many people are playing games on Linux. If more games are playable on Linux, does that increase the percentage of Linux gamers? I mean, they'll probably benefit just from seeing developers more interested in targeting that platform now. And the pricing's not bad. I mean, it's something that like only a huge company like

Amazon could offer if you think about what they're doing on the back end. For the US right now, it's going to be $6 a month and you get access to games with that price. And then they're going to offer like a package that's a step up and you get higher refresh and you get access to even more games. And then there's going to be a family plan they're going to have where for like a small, like $3 a month additional fee, your kids can get access to it all. And it's filtered for kids depending on their age. It's a family plan for like multiple people. I don't know. It's all so early days on this stuff,

but I like seeing the tech involved. And like what kind of investments will this get? How much adoption will it all be? Kind of similar. I mean, Amazon seems to have a better stick-to-itiveness than Google does. Maybe we'll see something interesting here. Yeah, maybe.

But also I feel like Amazon Music and Amazon Photos, those are not the big services. That's true. I use them. They're nice. Yeah, they are. Yeah, I agree. And they often have worked with Linux. So there's that. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wenz. And my name is Brent. Hello, you two.

I like the outfits. Nice job on the coordination. Well, thank you. It's the purple. We have a very fresh edition of the show. In fact, we'll be talking about Pop! OS 2110, which was released just a couple of hours ago as we record, but we've had our hands on the ISOs for a little bit longer than that, and we've tried it out on a range of hardware

from the high end to the low end, and we'll give you our take. Plus, Carl Rochelle, the CEO of System76, will drop by to talk about a few of the features and correct a few things that are out there as far as, like, versions of gnome and whatnot and on top of all of that we have our community news and well a few things i gotta tell you about and as always we're gonna round it out with some pics and some emails and all of that so before we go any further let's say time appropriate greetings to our mumble room hello virtual lug hello

hello hello hello all of you man we got a great showing today i'm really really grateful you Hello, virtual lug. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello, all of you. Man, we got a great showing today. I'm really, really grateful you're here because this is like one of our last Tuesdays. And then we're moving to Sunday for our live time. Next week, it's the Tuxes. Very excited about that. So Tuxes.party, if you haven't gotten your chance to vote yet.

So that'll be the 21st. And then our last Tuesday live stream, which is kind of actually making me sad now that I say that, will be December 28th. And that'll be our predictions where we not only own which predictions we got right or wrong, but we'll make new ones for 2021. I know. I know. I don't even know. Like, I've been thinking about it. There's a lot going on.

It's going to be a hard one to do predictions for, but we'll have to figure that out. And then just shortly after that, on January 2nd, we're going to do a potluck and new server christening at the studio, right here at JB1. And I'm trying out GetTogether for this one. This is an open source one that you can self-host. It's a meetup alternative. It's get together dot community slash JB HQ.

If you want to see our page, and I'll have a link in the show notes and go there. I figure why not use like a small scale event like this? Cause it's just going to be a hand. It's going to be an intimate gathering and great opportunity to try a meetup alternative that people have suggested before. So we'll have a new server christening get together link in the show notes. I don't know if you join it.

I don't know how it works, but I'd like you attended. That's their option. You attended. I want to know how many of you are coming. I've heard from like three people and I expect it's going to be somewhere between three and a dozen. Now, look, I know. I know this is, you know, the Pacific Northwest is like the westest of the West Coast and it is way up in the corner of the country. I appreciate that it is difficult to get to because I frequently have to drive here.

It's a pain in the butt. And I know it's not it's not possible for everybody to get here. So we are going to attempt to live stream this thing. I mean, I don't know how it's going to work. I'll attend virtually if you let me. Yeah, I'm going to try. So Brent didn't know it, but like yesterday, he kind of volunteered to be like the camera guy. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, sure. MC Jerva. What else do I have to do? Well, here's what I'm thinking, Brent, is you'll walk around with my internet phone connected back to OBS, right? So we could take people out to the server garage when we kick it on. Now you're talking. I mean, keep the dreams going. And then what we'll do is we'll just transition

to a traditional stream. So my thinking is people will show up around like 11.30, 11 a.m. maybe, 11 a.m. JB time. We'll get the potluck going. You know, we'll eat around 11.30. Around noon, we'll get the servers fired up, hoping all that goes well. And then around 1, we will, the three of us, you, Wes, and myself,

we'll move into the studio, and people can hang out in the living room and listen to the live recording from the living room of the studio. We'll put the speaker out there. We'll bring it up on the TV so that people can attend a live LUP if they like. And then we'll wrap up the show, and can, you know, say their goodbyes and that'll be it. It'll probably be like, you know, from like 11 a.m.

to 4 p.m. That's what we'll probably do. Just to be clear, does this mean I'm invited then? Yeah. Yeah, you're supposed to be down here then. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, bring us in. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, I'd like you to show up, you know, before then, you know, because we got like this whole thing we're planning,

you know. I got to do some catering too. We got to have some food there, right? Yeah, right. You're going to have to do some cooking. Everybody's going to want a taste we're planning, you know. I got to do some catering too. We got to have some food there, right? Yeah, right. You're going to have to do some cooking. Everybody's going to want a taste of that brunch, you know. They're talking about brunch. And I've also decided to punt a new Linux show launch

that I had planned for the beginning of the year because I am, I'm trying to do too much. It's, you know, last year, the holidays were like, not even a blip on my radar because everybody just canceled all our plans. But this year it's like this fractured beast that has become this entire thing that I have to manage. Plus there's a business I'm running. Plus there's shows I'm trying to do. And I want to do a good launch when I do launch a new show. So I'm keeping my powder dry and I've decided not to launch a new show at the new year, but LEP is still moving to Sunday.

LAN will be moving to later in the week. We're still just kind of determining the details of that. So I don't have that for everybody yet. All the more reason to stay subscribed. So you've seen what happens regardless of what we say. Great point, Wes. You know what? Pro podcaster right there.

Good thinking. So we will have a new LUP Live Day. We will have a new year party and we will have a new LUP Live Day. We will have a new year party and we will have a new server christening all happening on January 2nd. GetTogether.community slash JBHQ for the link to that or link in the show notes. And with all of that, let's move into the news today. And really, there is one big story as far as the Linux desktop and Linux community is concerned, and that is the release of Pop!OS 2110. So joining us is Carl Rochelle, the founder and CEO of System76, of course, the place that makes computers born to run Linux and Pop!OS. Who better to chat Pop!OS 2110 with?

Hey, Carl, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me. Thank you for being here. Super last minute and all of that. But today, just like two hours ago, Bob OS was released. And so we thought, you know, we got to talk about this with you because it's a mix of really interesting components. I think maybe that's where I want to start with you. The kernel, for example, 5.15.5, right? Super fresh. But GNOME, 3.3.8. Yet at the same time, there's this new application library that is a totally new innovation from System76, and the refresh OS feature. So there's like a

mix here that feels like, are we starting to see the building blocks of what might actually be a full cosmic desktop one day? Perhaps visually, but not really under the hood. And actually, POP 2110 is based on GNOME 40. Oh, it is? Okay.

Yeah, so it's GNOME 40. Our last release was in June. It was 2104, which, you know, is supposed to be April, right? And this one's 2110, which is supposed to be October. But Cosmic, the first release, we wanted to spend a bit more time to polish it up and get it ready to go, and then it was a shortened time for this cycle,

and we wanted to get some things in. And adapting to GNOME 40 is what actually pushed it out further to make it to December. So we anticipate the next release, 2204, to actually be in April next time. But that's the reasons that that delayed. And GNOME 40, it was a lot of work just adapting the cosmic workflow to the changes that came with GNOME 40.

Right. So my thought there too is there were some backend changes too. So like the Launchpad transition happened from

Launchpad to, is it GitHub now or GitLab? I don't know, but you've moved off of Launchpad for the backend stuff now. Right.

Yeah, we're hosting our own packages. Those are the custom system 86 packages that we create for Pop! OS. Those are the custom system86 packages that we create for Pop!OS. The rest of the stack still comes from the Ubuntu repositories.

The main reason for moving off of Launchpad was during our last release, it would take, we probably lost a week or more waiting for builds. And so we'd push a new build, QA would get it, they'd run it through their process, there'd be some changes that needed to be made,

and then we'd push it up again and it would be hours until, sometimes a day, until we had new packages built. So we just got tired of waiting. So we built a new CI, built a new service for the packages that we built, and that dramatically increased the time, our iteration time from engineering to QA to release. and it's our predictions episode in a couple episodes.

If I were to predict that Cosmic would rebase one day off of Ubuntu, would I have a good shot of that prediction coming true? I think that's unlikely. That would be a pretty significant change for our users. I don't know if it would be an improvement for them. We've looked at Fedora and Arch and other options for basing Pop! OS. And at the end of the day, Ubuntu makes an incredible base to build desktop experiences off of. And we think we can achieve the same kind of advantages that there are on Arch and some of the advantages in Fedora and some of the things they're doing in Silverblue, but on top of an Ubuntu base. and some of the things they're doing in Silverblue,

but on top of an Ubuntu base. Sure. So you sort of feel that the compatibility that an Ubuntu base provides is maybe one of the features of Pop!OS. Right, yeah. So you can look at what we're doing with Linux kernel now. And we've been rolling on kernels for quite some time, although they were always based on the Ubuntu kernel

with patches for new hardware enablement that we required for shipping products. But there's a lot of other improvements that are coming faster in the Linux kernel that we wanted to deliver in a similar way to the way Arch provides that to their users. And so now we have a new kernel policy where we're tracking the latest releases and running it through the same QA process

that we run the latest NVIDIA drivers through. So the QA team has the full access to a complete lab of System76 hardware, which covers a lot of chipsets and configurations. In doing so, our confidence grew that we'd be able to do it in a quality way that matched what we were able to deliver before. And so that's one of the shifts and things that we're learning from other distributions is that users appreciate fresh packages. And so we're working on, it's one step on working on delivering that.

I love hearing that. You know, so that kind of stuff is really music to my ears. So yeah, I'm one of those users. There's a few other things in here that I just wanted to cover with you as much as you care to go into it. But a couple of features that I think are really sort of fascinating. One of them is this refresh OS feature that gives you the option to reinstall the OS without deleting user data. Can you just talk a little bit about the thought about prioritizing that as a feature?

Kind of what went into that? At first, it's actually been around for years. It started, I think, and it might have been, I mean, in 2018. But we wanted to build a new installer for Pop! OS. Ubiquity, we had some problems with the way that the out-of-box experience for an OEM customer worked. And so we wanted to build a new installer and we architected it in such a way that it would create a restore partition. And when you receive your computer, you're actually, during your setup, it's actually installing the operating system. But because of the way it was written and its efficiency, it installs it so quickly that it doesn't feel like there's some gap of time.

What that enables us to do is offer full disk encryption out of the box. So the restore partition was kind of free. We got that for free when we were redesigning the installer. And one of the slickest parts of it is that you can go into the restore partition, and you can launch it from within settings. You can go to OS upgrades or recovery, and you can just click a button that says refresh OS. And it will reboot to the recovery partition. You click a couple of buttons, reboot, and your system is brand new, fresh, out of the box.

And you have all of your files and documents and everything else there. So it's not only just a nice feature for disaster recovery if something goes wrong, but every once in a while you've been running your computer for an upgrading for a few releases, and you just want to clear out perhaps old dead apps that you haven't been using for a while. It's just a way to start out brand new without losing anything or taking a step back. Yep. And just to be clear, because there's been some question online, is that available on any machine that does a clean install of POP? Or is that only available on System76 machines? That's any clean install of Pop. All right.

That's a feature that I think is also going to be really great, like on my Raspberry Pi 400, which is one of the places I've been running Pop 2110. And that's an area where you could definitely get a little performance benefit every now and then probably refreshing your OS like that. Oh, yeah, and the other thing with the Raspberry Pi, or, you know, I mean, regular PCs as well, but if you're using it to tinker with stuff and you're building things and experimenting and you just want to start fresh, you don't have to download an ISO, burn it to a

USB drive or any of that kind of stuff. You just reboot to the restore partition, reinstall, and you have a fresh install. It's convenient. That really is. All right. I want to, right before I let you go, I just want to zoom out a little bit. You know, I've been following you for 16 years and I know how dedicated you guys are to this craft and to the Linux community and free software. And I'd like to pick your brain as we're at the end of the year. It's been a bit of a rough year with interacting with certain open source projects online for System76 over the year. I'm curious to know what you think will be different from a System76 standpoint in like 2022 and how the company goes forward with community interaction or upstream coordination and that kind of stuff? I think the recent kerfuffles, I guess they are. I think they're narrow when it really comes down to it.

The challenges that we tend to have are in areas that we disagree with the presentation layer of known. We think that a desktop environment should be a number of components that you put together to build an experience. And that experience can be unique for a user or unique for a company or unique for a project. And that differs in the way that GNOME is progressing, which is fine. It's just a difference. which is fine. It's just a difference. So I think now that we're working on a desktop environment that will be unique and we coordinate with other areas of the GNOME stack that aren't as controversial, I suspect that those type of things that have really come up since 2017

with theming or icons or any of those changes that we tend to think are necessary for our users. Since we won't be doing those things or modifying GNOME in that way, I think it's less likely that we'll have those type of controversies show up. Sure. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It's been an interesting journey for Pop! OS because it's clear there's a real natural evolution line here where I admit it, when it first came onto the scene, I was like, why do we need this? This

is essentially Ubuntu. Why do we need Ubuntu with a different theme again? And now here we are with 2110 and there's a lot of things Pop! OS is doing differently. And it's a lot of value add stuff. I don't have issue with any of it. And I wonder if just this desktop change and getting a stronger visual identity isn't just part of this evolutionary process, like it was always going to happen. And in free software, you have a lot of times people that are overworked.

There's a lot of passion on both sides. People are in it because they're passionate about it and resources are limited. And it's an environment that just can kind of sometimes lead There's a lot of passion on both sides. People are in it because they're passionate about it. And resources are limited. And it's an environment that just can kind of sometimes lead to conflict over passionate ideas. But it kind of seems like this was maybe always the trajectory. These things are going to kind of happen as a new desktop distribution kind of comes into mainstream and it kind of discovers its own identity. I think what should be expected is that people, I think in the value of open source and what it is,

is in that people can shape it to solve problems for other people. And I think that's one of the core principles of open source that makes me, the purpose of what we build is to enable people to do things with it. Sometimes we think about that through the computers we create, and we've been able to do that less so. We think a lot about how people get things out of our products. So when we develop a computer, we think about how can we make the best machine learning desktop? Not for people to put things on our platform, but to use our platform to get

things out of it. And with the operating system, that's just an extension of that effort is enabling people in the most efficient and best possible way to create things with the software that we make. And I think that's going to also be the case with Cosmic Desktop Environment as we build it. We want to build something that's modular, independent components that people will be able to put together into their own desktop environments and I think that that main mission of System76 to empower people is just being extended

by the work that we're going to be doing on the Cosmic Desktop. I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes. We'll have links in the show notes so everyone can check out Pop! OS. Carl, I hope you guys have a great 2022. Is there a particular tangential technology to Linux? Is there another technology that's developing right now that you're getting excited about that you're going to keep an eye on over 2022?

I couldn't be more excited about the Linux desktop in general. Everything that's happening, there's innovation happening in all sorts of different corners. And now, so yeah, we're digging in some of the deeper corners of what's going on, places like WLRoots and other areas of the desktop. I think what's happening with Silverblue and Immutable Desktop is really exciting work, and we're working on things in that area as well. and we're working on things in that area as well. Flatpack and abstracting the application layer from the operating system is another advancement that I expect us to grow and be more beneficial to users. Pipewire is exciting.

I hope to get it into POP soon. There's an enormous amount of innovation and creativity happening all throughout open source. It doesn't take much digging to see a lot of creative and exciting things happening. That's exactly how we feel, too. It's going to be a great year.

This is a really fun time to be a part of the desktop. I'm just excited about what everyone's working on and where it's all going. Well, Carl, we're excited about what you're working on. So thank you to you and the team for another great release. And thanks for joining us on the show. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. 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. So it's Linode.com slash unplugged.

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It's probably time for our takes. We've all been playing with the latest Pop! OS a bit. But Brent, maybe you should start things off because, as far as I know, Pop! OS is new to you, right? I'm a little embarrassed to say I've never actually sat down and played with it. I've seen, you know, lots of people. I've looked over a lot of people's shoulders while they're using it and was always intrigued, but never really got a chance to sit down. And so this was a perfect opportunity. And I gotta say, I had fun in the first few minutes.

I just, part of the graphic design of it all was just kind of fun and refreshing, which I totally expected from what I've seen before. So that's a little thing. And Wes, you suggested that I try Ventoy to get this going on some actual hardware. This is a little bit of a sidebar. Yeah. Oh, did you give it a try? I did try Ventoy. And I don't know how I missed this tool for so many years. Still writing ISOs by hand like an animal? Oh, gosh. What have I been doing? Which cave have I been in? So for those who don't know, Ventoy is this tiny little tool that you can get, and we will certainly link to it, where you just kind of run it.

It installs a little something magic on your USB drive, and then you just drop ISOs in there, as many ISOs as you want, and you can easily boot from them. I don't know why I've been DDing to USB drives for so long. This is embarrassing. So Ventoy was an amazing discovery in this kind of pop experience. So for me, that just started out really nicely. So thank you too. I found this little device. I've talked about it before on the show. You can probably find it if you go to notes.jupyterbroadcasting.com and search for Ventoy. But you might love this, Brent. I almost want to get you one. What it is, is it's a USB thumb drive, but it's like three, four times the size. And on one end, it has USB-C. And on the other end, it has USB-A.

And on the inside, it has an NVMe storage drive that I bought off Amazon. It's like 256 gigs and super, super, super fast. So when I use USB-C on like a newer machine, it's unbelievable how quick it is. And with 256 gigs, I've got like a dozen ISOs on there and still plenty of space to spare. It's my favorite way to try out distros.

And it's just this combination of the Ventoy software, which gets better and better, and this little USB device that I could put in a, you know, generic MVME drive in a cheapo one. And it has C and A. I just, it's, it's such a great setup. You know, I actually imagine that would pair very well with QuickEMU as well. Do the little, you know, the little wimpy shuffle. That would be a nice pairing there. Do you want to do a VM or do you want to do real hardware? You got the choice. It sounds like a great tool. It actually, it does work.

Like if you just pass in the USB device to QEMU and if you've enabled the EFI stuff, which QuickEMU helps you do, yeah, it just works. It's exactly like using it on your actual hardware. Oh, gentlemen, so much to play with. So to continue with Pop!OS, since that was quite the aside, I had a lot of fun at first. There were a few little things. I know this was a little bit of a beta that we were playing with, but I had experienced PopShop for the first time, which people like and some people don't like, from what I discovered. But for me, it seemed like a nice balance of sort of simplicity and choice. Like Flatpak was super easy to enable and was available in all the searches and stuff.

But it was a tiny bit buggy in my experience. But it was nice. I used it exclusively, which is unusual for me, actually, I got to say. I've been using PopShop exclusively for all of my updates and installs as well, which is totally unusual behavior for me. I tend to go to the command line, surprise, surprise. But talking about power user stuff, did you try out the tiling features?

I wasn't going to because I thought, oh, this is not the kind of a new feature of this particular release, but I just couldn't help myself. I was just in the top right corner there. And I remember watching Carl sort of buzz his way around his own machine when we got the tour at System76 this summer. And that seemed really great. So I did dive in. I'm a total beginner to tiling. This is the very first time I jump in because I always felt like it was a bit daunting. I do love keyboard shortcuts and all of that, but it seemed daunting from all of the other chatter I've seen everywhere about it. But I knew Pop was doing something maybe a little simpler from it.

And giving it a shot, it was, well, I will say I did find a really nice auto-tiling tutorial from Pop OS on YouTube. And that was like, I think it was like a minute and a half long. But did it ever get me going? And I got very, very excited about it. So I think tiling might actually, I could imagine myself sort of falling in love with it, and I may give it more of a go than just this little spin I had. So that was a really refreshing experience, I got to say. Have you guys tried it as tiling? I mean, in a past life, I was definitely a tiling window manager user and using Awesome, i3, Xmonad from time to time.

But that's, you know, that's a whole different setup. You kind of have to get into that mindset and worldview. Whereas I really like the balance that the pop tiling strikes where I can have just a little tiling. I don't have to spend a whole bunch of time configuring it. And for the most part, it just has some reasonable defaults.

Yeah, I would love it if I could just assign some workspaces to tiling and some to free floating. Like maybe my main screen is free floating, but my second monitor is tiled or something like that.

Or workspace one is free floating and workspace two is tiled. That would be great because the way I tend to set up my Linux desktops is Workspace 1 is maybe a web browser and Kate or G-Edit. And Workspace 2 is Slack, Telegram. Workspace 3 is Element and Discord. And Workspace 4 is a terminal, right? And it's just not very efficient

as I go down. The more I increase the workspaces, the less efficient I am about how I arrange them. Something tells me you really don't like being on workspace number two. Yeah, pretty much. And when I'm on Plasma, I actually use, I'll just, I just go all in on the KWIN rules, right? That's how I kind of make it all work. And it's not tiling, but it's at least kind of declarative about where things will go. And so for me, I kind of end up leaving the auto-tiling off in Pop!OS, even though it would be perfect for me in some scenarios. So what I find fascinating about everything you've said, though, Brent,

is you have not yet once made this a Plasma versus GNOME thing. And I'm wondering, because you do live in Plasma, I'm wondering how this transition has been. Is this a more power user version of GNOME for you? Oh, that is a great exploration. Hmm. I think it may be a little early to say, to be honest. But now that you ask that question, it surprises me that I didn't even think to compare the two. Interesting. I think maybe I wanted to come at it with really open eyes and not to have some kind of idea of what it was going to be.

Without expectations, essentially. Without expectations and without sort of thinking that it wouldn't work for me. Without expectations and without sort of thinking that it wouldn't work for me. So I approached it as a potential paradigm shift because I also haven't experienced GNOME that much in the last, I don't know, four years, I'd say. Nothing's changed in that time. Yeah, nothing at all. And so I thought, well, I should give all of this a try. And this is the Pop! OS version of it. Well, I should give all of this a try.

And this is the Pop! OS version of it. And so I don't have a good reference for what some of the other distributions have as a base. But maybe this is the beginning of that discovery. Well, I think what you kind of touched on here is sort of what the attitude should be for anybody who's trying Linux. Like people who are coming from Windows and trying Linux for the first time should try to take the mindset that you just took when trying out Pop for the first time. It's even more nerdy, but it's the same thing when you're trying a new tool on the command line or trying a new programming language. You've got to be willing to accept that

you might have to adopt a different workflow to maximally benefit from some of the things that this new idea is trying to share with you, even if you ultimately don't end up adopting it long-term. Right, and just be open to the idea that maybe there's a few things I learned and I'll just learn them in increments and then they build on top of each other. But the other thing you haven't really touched on, and it's the thing I have the most opinion about, it's that new app menu they have. They have a new app launcher that replaces the full GNOME overview. And it's more of a box

that comes up in the middle of your screen and it has kind of a clear folder system. So applications, utilities, that kind of stuff are all in their own folders. All of that's there. Plus, of course, You don't say. It's written in Rust. Of course. So what did you think of this?

Well, you know, so I, again, haven't experienced the old App Menu. And so, but all of the excitement about the new App Menu, I thought, oh, I got to give this thing a try. And I knew the shortcut, you know, Super A. And then I wondered what was new about it. Not because I was comparing it to what was old, but I just thought, oh, this seems essential. And so I wonder what you guys think, because I didn't have a reference. And so it just seemed to me like it was an essential piece of software. And so I, from what I understand, it's different in that it's not full screen anymore and they've added some other features,

but can you guys fill me in? Cause I was a little puzzled on this one. I have to say, I, I did, I did try it out because, you know, of course, but I'm already so hooked on like the regular launcher, you know, like course, but I'm already so hooked on like the regular launcher, you know, like not seeing this whole graphical one, but just the really snappy hit the super key, start typing thing. I'm so sold on that. I feel like this doesn't really add anything for me

as nice as it may be. Yeah. So, you know, what's new here is maybe, I think what's subtle about the launcher is, or it's not the launcher, it is an application menu because the launcher is when you hit super key the launcher is when you hit super key this is when you hit super key a this is an application selector an application library is what they call it and to me it's both the most interesting thing about this release

and the most disappointing thing for me personally because to me it has a very utilitarian look it kind of just seems sort of a 90s style application launcher, but it does do the essentials. It lets you find stuff. It categorizes things very easily. Things are appropriately spaced out and it launches very fast. So in terms of like a version one, it checks the minimum viable product that I need, but it's no K runner and it lacks sort of the elegance that the Gnome Shell launcher and overview has. It's an odd area I feel personally for System76 to invest their time because this is an area that upstream Gnome Shell is actively iterating on and legitimately every single release for the last year has improved this area of the GNOME Shell. So if you're going to like innovate somewhere in that space, you're kind of like doing work that's already getting done for you free upstream.

a different kind of view of how that should look. So with Pop! OS now, you have two options up in the top left area of Gnome Shell. And one option is your typical like overview where you see your workspaces and all of that. And they've broken out the applications as a second option, or you can hit Super A. And that brings up this application library that's been designed as a relatively small window on your

screen that's very flat, but it has a couple of subtle features that are nice. And you can see maybe where they're going with this. Like, I'll give you an example. If you've got a multi-monitor setup, it's designed in a way that when you open it up on a workspace, it'll pay attention to where your cursor is and where your active windows are. And it will open up the application library on that screen and then launch the application that you've chosen on that screen. And if you have multiple monitors, that's a very, very,

very nice feature. And it does offer some things like that, that I think do bring value. But overall, I don't know if, if I were like directing all of the areas I'd like to see improvement. This would probably not be the area I would, I would spend my resources on because they already have a launcher, but it is nice to have a place to browse everything that comes up really quick that you can invoke with the keyboard, if you like, and all of that.

One other feature that I was looking forward to in the launcher, I called it a launcher. I called it a launcher. It's an app menu. Was the install suggestions. I discovered this in OpenSUSE as KDE take where I could just, you know, type the application I wanted. If it wasn't installed, I could just sort of quickly get it installed through the menu, which was really nice. And I did see an app suggestions feature in the app menu, but it never presented anything useful to me, even if I knew those were available to install. So I don't know if that's a little bug. Maybe it was just my own issues because it seems like I always run into the weird edge cases. But did you guys see anything useful in that area? I didn't even try that, actually. That's interesting. I got in a pop shop. I didn't even try that, actually.

That's interesting. I was, I got in a pop shop. I was like, boop, pop, beep. I got everything I needed on my Pi 400. And Thor bless him if they don't have Slack and Telegram right there when I open the thing up. So great. Like, they really do nail some of that stuff. Yes.

When I put myself in the headspace of a new Linux adopter and I want to get these core applications, they nail that stuff. Now we just need Telegram and Slack to finally, you know, actually sync our dark style preference, and then there'll be hardly any setup to do on a new system. But no, I mean, that stood out to me, just the whole thing. I mean, I really like the work in the installer.

It's one of my favorite installers. It just feels, it's a quick process. It goes smoothly. It's easy to click through. And then when you first load it up, you get that really nice welcome screen, and it gives you, it feels like it's one of the most customizable

sort of GNOME-ish desktop experience. It's not too much. I don't feel like it's the time I take to get Plasma up and going, but it does kind of let me make the system my own in a nice way. I agree there, yeah. And they've got some good backgrounds they ship it with.

And that final setup wizard lets you choose right there at the beginning which you like, light mode or dark mode. Yeah, exactly. There's also just sort of a snappiness, a modernness. I don't know. You know, we've been playing with other distros. We play with other package managers. We kind of give Apt a hard time.

And I don't know what it was, but I was the least annoyed with Apt that I've been in a while. Like, it just felt it was snapping up, it was getting out of my way, and part of it probably helped that, yeah, like, the Pop Shop actually worked. It was one of the better experiences that I've had installing a Flatpak in a GUI

where it didn't just sort of silently take forever in the background while it installed all those, you know, shared libraries and stuff behind the scenes. That was really nice. It just worked. Yeah, that is nice. But also things like it uses systemdboot.

It feels like they've customized just enough. They've modernized some of the stuff that I wish the Ubuntu and Debian world would change. And it makes it more like a system I might build in the Arch world than kind of the stuff I don't like and wish I could swap out, but don't ever spend the time to

on a Debian system. That's well put. You also did a little bit of digging into that recovery environment. Yeah, you know, I've been using Pop!OS 20.04 as sort of a gaming system. You know, I do a couple of things on there,

but it's really just a pure entertainment setup, so I haven't felt the need to update it. So it's been a little bit since I've checked in with Pop! OS, and when I was installing it, I was like, oh, hey, what's this recovery partition that exists now? And it's great. It's just like a little Casper

setup, much like the live CD itself, but they've added some tooling to the OS to, you know, make sure things happen, like the restore partition is updated prior to upgrading the OS, and it kind of keeps that all happening, And it just means if you want to refresh things, if you need to reinstall from scratch, that's available even if it didn't come from System76, just from a clean install, which I don't know, I probably won't need a ton of, even though I was interested technically in

like the nice stuff they've done to make it play nicely with EFI systems in particular. the nice stuff they've done to make it play nicely with EFI systems in particular. But if I'm installing this on a friend or a family's PC, that gives me a nice background sense of, okay, there's a safety net there. You know, you touched on something there, Wes, that resonated with me. And I'll take it just a little bit further and I'll say this. I wish this was Ubuntu. I wish this was base Ubuntu.

Yeah. Wouldn't that be great if this was like the baseline and then what Pop was building on top of was already this good and they could just add more stuff, more value on top of that? That's it. I didn't realize it, but that's what I want. Yeah.

It kind of feels like it's the Ubuntu that if they had stayed really excited and focused on the desktop and were pushing forward, this would probably be areas they're pushing on. And this new application library, it's a good start because if they do want to build their own environment in the future, it makes sense to get the users familiar with some of these tools. Now, we always say this about switching people to Linux, don't we? Like have them use Firefox and LibreOffice and, you know, tools that they'll use on Linux like GIMP first, once they get used to

those tools, then switch them to Linux. And then it's only 50% of the switch. And it kind of feels like, and I tried to get that out of Carl and he kind of, kind of implied it, but it does feel like some of this stuff is laying the groundwork to get people familiar with a workflow that will become commonplace when they have their own environment. And I think an application library like this is a good start. I just don't really understand why there's a launcher and this, because this new application library launches just as fast as the launcher does.

And of course, it's written in Rust, so it just seems like it should be the supreme launcher. And if you wanted to kind of take my criticisms I have about the launcher, like the fact that it feels a little utilitarian, feels a little bit of Windows 2000, but just in dark mode, it's functional. And that's my way of saying it's absolutely 100% functional. It runs fast. It's not over frilly or anything like that.

It does its core job really well. But it really feels like because it is one of the very first things you interact with the Pop! OS desktop, it does feel like it sets a tone. And this is kind of an older workflow, an older environment, a little bit of a more of a mate experience.

And if you wanted to see something where they're just, where they're nailing it, it's over on the Mac side, actually. I hear about this from developers on Coder Radio. It's called Raycast. It's an app launcher, it's over on the Mac side, actually. I hear about this from developers on Coder Radio. It's called Raycast. It's an app launcher, and it's good looking. It has a super powerful feature set.

The hype is so real. Get this. A freaking app launcher on the Mac just got $15 million in VC funding. Yeah. People really care about this stuff. And that's for a platform, by the way, that comes with Spotlight, that is an app launcher built in, right? So people really care about this app launcher stuff. And what I feel like what we have right now is kind of like this weird hybrid where there's two components, the application library and the launcher, and they're both

extremely functional, but neither one of them feels particularly graphically innovative. And it doesn't have to be blow away, but it'd be nice to have it feel a little more modern. One thing I like about the older launcher now, I guess, is that it's at least minimal, you know, and to some extent that's what I want in a launcher, is just barely notice it because it's so fast

and it just gets out of my way and it launches the thing that i want that i'm less concerned but you're right like when it starts taking up as in the application version when it takes up more of your screen having it look pleasing probably gets more important yeah it just makes it also makes the desktop environment feel like it's more modern and when it feels more modern it feels like it's well engineered and when it's well engineered i think well if the well engineered, I think, well, if the OS is well engineered, then I bet those desktop machines are well engineered or those laptops are well engineered, right? So it kind of all connects together.

But I tried it on my Pi 400 and that's an interesting experience because I also tried this on an older Intel PC that a listener Mike had sent in for us that I use for testing. And it's an older Xeon with spinning Rust disks. And it's a perfectly usable machine. If you remember how slow it was to use spinning Rust,

that's what it feels like, the Pi 400. And I'm running off of a USB SSD, not an SD card. But it's usable. And it's perfectly usable as a work machine. And I'm talking fully up to date pop OS, right? 2110 with the latest Linux 15, five kernel,

the latest genome 40, and I'm using it on a pie 400, which is a keyboard. And I've set it up to do my email. It's got my browser profiles on there. My SSH keys. I like to have this pie 400 is like my go-to. Something's not right with my main machine. Maybe I'm trying some distro or maybe I didn't remember to bring my laptop or whatever, right? Like I just

have a machine here at the studio that I can get work done on. And it's great for that. And in fact, for some reason, that application library concept almost feels like it works better on that little 1080p display I have connected to my Raspberry Pi 400. Like as the constraints got tighter, the innovations they've done here in 2110 actually felt like they paid more dividends. And like why waste time with a big screen takeover? That's an interesting environment to challenge it. Yeah. Yeah, it pushed it, right?

So I like it there. I think I'm going to leave it on the Pi 400. But the one thing I'd love to see from Pop! OS is I'd love to see them put out a full-fledged ARM ISO image. Presently, and this is common for a lot of distros, you download a pre-built image and you flash it to an SD card or a USB SSD in my case. Then you boot off of it. And if you're lucky, they'll have a first-time setup wizard at first boot like Pop! OS does. And you set up your user account all that stuff's fine but i and a lot

of other pi users are actually beginning to transition to the compute module 4 with a built-in emmc and it has been so great for distros like open susa tumbleweed where i can just boot from a standard iso image and I run through the standard installer and I select the eMMC like a regular disk and then I have what feels like a fully clean install, safer, fresher, totally mine, right? When I flash an image to an SD card or to a hard drive, I feel like I'm booting into somebody else's install.

Like I'm using somebody else's computer and I'm adding my account on top of it. I know it's probably not much technically different, but I would rather just install on my ARM devices like I install on all my x86 devices. But I need an actual ISO to do that,

not an image file. But it is nice to have an image file. And the reality is with Linux 5.15 baked in there now, they're at a point where a lot of the upstream drivers for the 400 and the Pi 4 and the Pi 3 and a lot of other ARM

devices are just built in now. You don't have to have like a specific image with weirdo patches anymore. So hopefully we'll see that transition in the future because I plan to keep testing on ARM. Yeah, that's just it. I mean, we're finally in this world where you can have this more traditional behavior we got used to on

x86 in the ARM world. And okay, yeah, even if it's not strictly necessary, it's so fun to play with. It's true. A couple of things to cover before we get out of here. The Tuxes are next week. This is our second to last live episode on a Tuesday.

So if you'd like to join us on a Tuesday next week and the week after are your last chances. And then it's Sundays. I also want to say thank you to our members over at unpluggedcore.com. This week in particular, some of the best bits are actually in the live member stream. They're not making it in the show. We had to do an intermission this week. It happens sometimes.

Our members get that content. The shows now also offer a totally ad-free feed. So if you'd like a version of the show with absolutely zero ads, that's now available to our members. And we have launched a network membership. It's been some work, but it's here. And it's at jupiter.party. Every member benefit. Every ad-free feed, the bonus content from this show, from self-hosted, from Coder Radio,

it's now available for just the price of two show memberships. But if you sign up before the end of the month, I'm taking $2 off for a year. Jupiter.party. You can also give the gift of a Jupiter Broadcasting membership. That's over at Jupiter.party. Jupiter.party. You know, Jupiter.something, super expensive, except for a couple of them, and. Party was one of them, so how could I not? So it's Jupyter.Party. Why? Because it was a great deal on Namecheap. As you might expect, hearing from you, our dear audience,

is a big part of where we get topic ideas, find out what you like or really don't like, and all the cool projects and software and services that you're following these days. And this week, Paul wrote in, picking up on the Slackware topic from last episode. I really enjoyed episode 435, and it was nice to hear Slackware being mentioned. However, I was a bit shocked that everybody thought Slackware was only updated half a decade ago. In fact, it's a lesser-known secret that there's another version of Slack hiding in plain sight. It's called Slackware Current.

It's a bleeding-edge, rolling release that's updated several times a day. Most Slack users are actually running this, as we have the latest staple kernels, Plasma on Wayland, Pipewire, and all the new goodies like WireGuard are easily accessible with packages. Switching from 14.2 to current is pretty easy as well. You just modify some stuff in Etsy and then run a normal system update.

And despite it being a rolling release, well, in typical Slackware style, it's still more stable and bug-free than the majority of long-term releases in those other distributions. In fact, I always upgrade Mylan Nodes from 14.2 to Current since it makes a super

solid and reliable server OS. But with all the benefit of the latest toys, it still makes a great desktop OS as well. And well, on that topic of updates, when Patrick's ready, he'll tag the latest Current as 15.0 well, on the topic of updates, when Patrick's ready, he'll tag the latest current as 15.0. Seems due out quite soon.

So is he saying like he's using Slack rolling essentially? Is that what I heard? I mean, gosh, I didn't really realize. And yeah, maybe we missed this option in our server pool. Yeah, wouldn't that have been funny to run that as one of our server OSs?

I knew Slackware got updated more than a decade, but I didn't really appreciate that there's more of a Slackware current. Although I would not be surprised to learn that Slackware's current is a little bit different than my definition of current.

I think there's only one way to find out, Chris. You're right. Perhaps a future episode, Wes. Staying with the Slackware for one more email, Tristan wrote in with a nod to our nod to Slackware. A long time ago when Windows support for friends and family frayed my last nerve and Macs were strange and exotics beasts I couldn't afford, I decided to build my first Linux machine. Against all popular advice and with an abundance of overconfidence,

I opted for Slackware as my distro of choice. This went as well as you might expect for a noob. Within an hour, I'd found that my video card modules weren't updated in the bundled Slack kernel, stumbled my way through a kernel upgrade, got my first taste of Tbenz C hell, then rendered my system unbootable. Within the next few hours, I'd been introduced to Lilo and Xorg.comp. As frustrating as all of that sounds, the ability to delve deep into the workings of my OS, adapt it to my needs,

and with a careless typo, break it entirely, hooked me for life. Eventually, the package management limitations, depths of dependency hell, and badly mucked up file system mess I had created led me to move on. While I don't see any reason besides masochism and nostalgia to ever go back, I will forever be grateful to Slackware for forcing me to learn the basic fundamentals of the Linux architecture. They are lessons that have served me well in every distro since, and a forced deep dive gave me a lifetime passion for the open-source concept community and the incredible OS it has spawned. It sounds like last week we heard a little bit, and even this week,

that that's not an uncommon situation for those who were lucky enough to try Slackware in its heyday. And I just thought this was a nice nod to that. Yeah, you know, what I connected with Tristan's story there was a lot of what Tristan explained about Slackware, I would say happened with me, but Gen 2. Like I learned so much about Lilo and Xorg with Gen 2. And I learned so much about like how file partitioning works and stuff by doing Gen 2. And so I always very fondly think of Gen 2 in that way. It forced me to learn the basic fundamental Linux architecture, just like Slackware did for them.

So I love that, Tristan. I think that exactly connects with my experience there. But just one branch over, because Slackware was around when I began Linux in my time, but there was other options at that point. I think I'd argue Arch is that kind of similar experience for many as well. I don't know if it's quite

as much of a deep dive. You guys would know more than that than I would, but certainly it has you, you know, knee deep in some technical stuff and learning. So that seems like a nice approach too. Yeah, I suppose it just depends

on how deep you go down that rabbit hole. And that's, you know, you hear that too about Linux from scratch and that kind of stuff as well. They're great learning opportunities. And, you know, almost from like a computer sciency standpoint, not necessarily even just from like a learn Linux standpoint, although you will absolutely do that. But along the way, you'll also learn a little bit about how computers work. And I do feel like that's pretty super valuable. We got to keep moving on. We're going long here. We have a last minute pick. And I got to assume this is a Wes Payne pick because, well, I'll read the description and then I think it'll be obvious. Quote, this app uses WebRTC to stream a desktop inside of a Docker container. Yeah, this has been floating around for a bit,

but it looks like there's been a few of these, and in particular, NetGo here has been revived, a maintainership taken over by a new user. I just thought maybe we could highlight it because it seems super flexible. Maybe we could use it, you know, in an OBS type setup,

or if you're just, you know, trying to hang out with remote friends and you want to watch something together, this could be a good option. There's a lot of stuff here. But what stands out to me about Necco is, A, it's just very smooth, but it's got chat built in. It's got emotes built in. It just seems very sophisticated and easy to get started with.

Yeah, fair enough. You know, I was thinking for this, Wes, if you were somebody who frequently recorded tutorials, how-to kind of videos, and you wanted like a clean setup that you could work out of. And then after you're done with the video, you know, just kind of destroy it like you would maybe you've used a VM for. Traditionally, you could probably use this, right? And the nice thing is, is with a WebRTC stream, I don't know for sure, but I would imagine there's a pretty straightforward way to capture that into OBS for recording that kind of thing. I would think so. It also seems nice just for, you know, we've talked about Jellyfin being able to do streaming. There's some sort of custom sites out there that'll do it just for YouTube or just for Netflix or some of the other big popular platforms. But this is kind of a nice

hack using a bunch of different technologies we talk about that lets you do this for basically any website. N-E-K-O. We'll have a link in the show notes so that way you can go see their logo with excessive cat butt. Oh, gosh. I can't help but notice that the cat is very well rendered. That's a very accurate, I will just say. It's a treat.

You're not going to forget that logo. You know, you're not. Absolutely. If you'd like more show, remember there is the Luplug. It gets together every single Sunday at noon. And when the show moves to Sundays, there's still going to be a get-together happening there because we won't really be live until about 12, 31 o'clock on Sundays. The pre-pre-show is going to happen in the virtual lug, and we'll also have an event happening on Tuesdays. an event happening on Tuesdays. So there's more opportunity than ever to participate in that virtual lug and chat with like-minded Linux users, ask questions, share experiences. It's a pretty

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but we will be back for a couple of more Tuesdays. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. That's right. So while it lasts, join us noon Pacific on a Tuesday at JBLive.tv. And then links to everything we talked about today, how to contact us, that's a big part of the show,

our mumble info, our matrix info, including our new cryptocurrency matrix room. Yeah, I did it. I did it. I admit it. That's all over there. Or you can join colony.jupiterbroadcasting.com. But thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Linux Unplugged program. And for at least a little bit longer.

We'll see you right back here next Tuesday. Today! All right. I need the chat room and everybody watching live to go boat over at jbtitles.com. And then if you guys would just allow for a second, we're going to have a little powwow. Brent, Wes, if you guys could just come over here just for a second. The cone of silence. Not the cone again.

Oh, I love the cone. Well, I've gone and done it. I'm going to scratch. You guys know I'm going to scratch this new Linux show we're working on. I'm just going to punt it for now. I don't think we're there. Yeah, I don't think Brunch with Chris was a very good title anyway.

And I don't have the new servers hooked up yet, as of right now. And I don't know if we're going to run into issues with the storage controllers. I don't know if we're going to run into any issues with the disks. There could be a bad disk because we bought them used. I don't even have a spot cleared out in the garage yet. So I'm kind of freaking out just a little bit because the holidays are approaching.

So I figured we got to let something go, right? We got to make a concession somewhere. And I feel like I just, I had to let, I got to punt on the new show so we can focus on LUP and we can focus on the server stuff. Is that new show permanently canceled or is it just getting moved down the line a few weeks or months or whatever? I don't know yet. So I'm either going to move it down the line,

which is my first line of thinking, or I'm going to take what we were going to do and I might try to integrate it into a little bit into land and a little bit into love. I don't know. It feels like, honestly, we got enough podcasts at this point.

And I, I could just kind of channel that into what we already do, but I have not figured that out yet. This is what I did is I, I don't know how it happened. I think it's because I'm a dumb person, but like, I just kept on pretending like the holidays weren't a thing and just sort of like bit off more than I could chew thinking, well, I'll just work through this, right? It's October. How hard could

it be? Yeah. Then you forget, oh, wait, no, there's a whole bunch of other stuff that's about to come up. Yeah. We did get really lucky that this show, and I don't think land either land on an actual holiday like that. That is rare. That's very unusual. Yeah. Yeah. So I think we're just, you know,

we're just going to do, you know, business as usual and then we'll move to the Sunday, but oof, I feel bad about it because I was pretty excited about the idea and the concept. So we'll see, we'll see what happens.

Maybe it's a Q like Q one, maybe early Q two thing. I have another show. I also want to do in the concept. So we'll see, we'll see what happens. Maybe it's a Q like Q one, maybe early Q two thing. I have another show. I also want to do in the meantime. So we'll see what happens. I got a couple of ideas going on right now. It's been a little bit, but you know,

it's been, um, almost 16 months since we went independent. Wow. Yeah. We're just like 15.5 months into it right now. Pretty awesome. And,

uh, so I'm,'m, you know, the first bit was really like survive and transition from being an employee to running a business and like trying to keep while all the shows, right, like without missing a week and trying to get all of that figured out and then figuring out how to like get the income going so I can actually get paid because like for the first four months or five months, I didn't, I didn't make a dime. And then like trying to just kind of figure out how to make it sustainable. And now I'm at the point now where I'm thinking, okay, where do we want to go? What's the next 10 years look like? What's the next big trends and open source and free software and that kind of stuff. And that's a really good place to be at. But it also means that I have to choose wisely

because we have limited time, limited resources and limited finances. And so while there's like a million options now available to me, I really have to be careful about it. And so that's why I'm just waiting for a little bit because honestly, if I can make the existing shows better,

that may actually be my first preference. And then look at what remains, what is still uncovered, and then see if there's a space for a show. That I think is going to be my approach. I also think we'd always rather do something well than quickly, right? And so that has kind of been our philosophy for a long time. You've taught me that, Chris. And so I think it's probably a great idea to push a little bit and see where it goes and see how we grow from now to then. Yeah. I also kind of feel like one of the things that's holding back how much we can get done is we're all remote.

And so if I had like what I really need is I need to not be the person who's like making infrastructure things happens. I shouldn't because I'm also the CEO. I'm also the editor in chief and I'm also the host on most of the shows. I probably shouldn't be the person who's like clearing space, moving servers, wiring them and getting the OS installed. Right. Like I want to be, but I shouldn't be. If our team was all in Seattle, if all of us were here, somebody, one of us would be working on the server right now. Like one of us, because that's, that's how we are. Right. But because nobody, it's just me here and Wes here, it's like, we're, we're spinning a lot of plates already. So the server is just not

happening. What I, what I need is like another set of hands that can just help with some of these things, like getting the server hooked up, getting the OS installed, that kind of stuff. And so many times, I think I wish there was like a listener in the area that had time to spare that wanted to do this stuff. But because the audience is so spread out, there's dozens of us everywhere, but we're just spread out enough that we don't kind of have that magic that happens when multiple people that have the same idea and the same goals are working in the same place. We get it every now and then, and we've done sprints in the past and we'll do sprints in the future. And that we've seen that really happens, right? That's where self-hosted came from. The last JB sprint self-hosted was born

like things come from that. But with the Rona and the budget, it's just, it's at a slower pace. And so here I am like still, I'm still balancing how I operate this thing. Like, because honestly, for me, doing the shows is a full-time job and anything that happens outside of the show productions and content preparation is bonus.

The irony is like, that means running the business, you know, sponsor stuff, taking care of infrastructure. Like it's so much extra stuff that it just, it's a slow pace. And I, I kind of backed myself into a corner because this hardware is dying out in

the garage. So we got to get swapped over. We got to move before it dies because we all know it's, it's on his last legs. Oh, good. Optimus is going to just mail us a clone of West well actually that that's that's great thank you problem solved yeah we tried that um already but it came out evil it was rough yeah you know what

we shouldn't have chose the goatee option every time you choose the goatee