LINUX Unplugged - 442: Liberty Leaks and Lies

Episode Date: January 24, 2022

SUSE had an awkward week; we breakdown the very mixed launch of SUSE Liberty Linux. Plus, we've cracked what's driving Linux Distribution adoption these days.

Brent has been officially initiated into the stay up all night at the studio, cramming to get a project done right before you got a travel club. Everybody gets to join that at some point. Yeah, it doesn't come with a lot of perks, really. There is a jacket, but we have to measure Brent first. Yeah, we forgot to do that. But Brent really banged it out with some help from my wife. Absolutely as well. Hadiyah, she helped.

And the two of them stayed up until 3 a.m. before Brent's flight to build something really special for us. You got to tell them what it is, Brent. I don't want to steal your thunder. Well, I'll just say, you know, originally I was disappointed because all my flights changed and I wasn't going to be able to do this project. And then last minute, Chris, I don't know, you must have changed things so I could manage to build the server rack. I bought out all the COVID tests around here. Clearly, I don't know how much you paid for that, but it must have been lots,

probably more than a server rack. I bought them all out, so that way you had to delay your flight. And yeah, it worked out perfectly. Yeah, we actually, you know, loaded the SUV up with a whole bunch of wood and went and bought some used casters that are pretty awesome

and built a pretty sweet custom case for all the servers that we have inbound. So 3 a.m. at the studio, totally worth it. Yeah. And now we have a sweet server rack for our server studio data center garage. I think we're going to need to remember to put some links on the show notes for this one. 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, guys. Both of you are looking sharp and ready to go. We have a great show. You know, we've been looking at the data, we've been following the trends, and we think we've cracked what it really takes to drive Linux user adoption these days. Like, if we were savvy YouTubers, we'd have a zany face, and our thumbnail would say something like,

don't miss this one trick all distros should be doing, and it'd be really kind of, like, attention-grabby. But we think we have something here. We're going to share with you our hypothesis that we formulated after some late night binging of server builds. But before we go any further, before we get into that and the pics and the feedback, we got to say hello to our virtual lug. Time appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello. Hello, Brent. Hello.

Hello. What a handsome bunch. Look at that. Oh, man. And they all got matching hats. Why didn't we get? Yeah, we weren't clued in. There's a whole like swag black market happening around the show.

We're not getting any of that action, you know. So I'm sure some of them will show up next Sunday because next Sunday is our meetup. Meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting. If you're in the Pacific Northwest, we're going to do a little. Here's what I think. I don't know exactly how it's going to go down yet because, you know, we're always, we're flexible. We're a couple of wild and crazy guys, so we're easy.

But I'm thinking we do a little meet and greet at 11 a.m. So start showing up at 11 a.m. is what I'm thinking. So that probably means you got to get here like 1030. Yeah, yeah. And then we do a little meet and greet do some introductions i'll have a couple of uh devices out that i'd like to see if people could get working the devices that brent and i've been playing recently a few meetup challenges to go around i like it there's so many of those devices yeah actually you know what i'm looking here's another one right here

we could throw that in the pile too i gotta get these charging though right i just walk through the studio and pick a few up that are sitting around the studio um then we'll do the show live right so we'll put the speaker out there people can hang out in the living room throw the live stream on the tv you got it right and uh then after we're done with that we'll go out there we'll start cooking it up and i i encourage people if they got a if they got something they can bring with them that they can heat up in a microwave or an air fryer or oven or on the grill, bring it with you or if it's cold. But if you don't, we're going to try to come up with a few things and then we'll just do eating and hanging for a bit. You know, talk about cryptocurrency, I'm sure, because that

always comes up now anytime you do a public event and talk about Linux, because whenever we're doing a JB event, that always comes up, too. So we'd love to see you meet up dot com slash Jupiter Broadcasting. It'll be happening next week during the live stream. And, uh, you know, we could probably have the stream going. I can see that people come in. We'll probably do, you know, a couple of chats on Mike, have them hot. Why not? That could be fun. Try to capture a bit of the experience. Yeah. I know it's, it's, it's limited because it's just up here in the corner of the States. We are, uh, but it is the times as

they are but we are actually formulating plans for a 2022 road trip by formulating i mean we're talking about how we should probably make plans that's how far we are in the planning but step one is think about needing to think about it we got real good intentions we sure do we got the best intentions uh we have some news to get into. One of them I just love covering because one of my predictions is already coming true. How great is this? Flathub is going to verify first-party apps and allow developers to collect the monies. We'll have a link to Gaming on Linux here where Liam did a write-up that's really good. And he says, Flathub is going to gain a way to process and verify apps from first-party teams,

as in developers who directly publish their app and manage the FlatPack package process for FlatHub. Not only that, but GNOME want to give developers a way to collect donations and subscriptions, too. Maybe important for sustainability. And there's some talk about having a way for developers to share some of that revenue back up with Flathub. So, interesting. That, I think, is a great idea, you know, because Flathub is a good service. And that listing takes resources to run. And I think it plays a good, important part in the ecosystem.

It looks like there's also going to be a way to distinguish first-party publishers and third-party publishers. That's good. We've discussed this a few times already. It comes up a lot, unfortunately. Yeah. And so some clarity there. That's appreciated. And, you know, I think it means I've already won my prediction.

I think. I mean, we don't know the details, but I feel like... See, now, unfortunately, I'm hoping that somehow, like, Flathub goes bankrupt in the year. Like, if the Flathub doesn't exist at the end of the year, just so you... No, no. It's not worth it. Nevermind.

How badly do you want to see me lose? I've just been so good lately. I don't know. Did I, did I do all right? I can't remember, but I am, I am very happy to see that news.

And, um, isn't it fascinating that what, one of the things that's driving flat back adoption and just sort of user adoption and developer adoption is centralizing on FlatHub. But one of the very core issues that people had with snaps was the centralization at canonical. This is just a different group with a different kind of centralization. But because I guess it didn't start here, we're OK with it.

Or is it just because it's not canonical? I'm not sure. I don't I don't know. There is a fun. I mean, we're okay with it. Or is it just because it's not canonical? I'm not sure. I don't know. There is a fun. I mean, we're a funny bunch in that sense. You know, it kind of matters the some of the intention, some of the philosophy for how we built it. You know, the well, we could run our own if we wanted to.

We mostly don't, though, because why would we want to? But we can. Okay. Now I want to talk about the Seuss Liberty Linux announcement. This has been quite the clown show to watch. Now, our backstory on this, just under full disclosure, is we've been watching this since, I don't know, October, because there was some data that showed up in the repositories that suggested a distribution named Seuss Liberty Linux was hitting the update repositories and the Apple repositories. And looking at it, it seemed to be maybe there was even a good amount of them, you know,

not just like one or two. Enough to be noticeable, yeah. Yeah. But this week, we got the announcement of SUSE Liberty Linux, and it's not a Linux distribution. It is a support offering. I've been a fan of SUSE recently. But I have to say, this is one of the more hilarious boondoggles in Linux recently.

So they announced Seuss Liberty Linux, which on its own sounds like a Linux distribution. It does, yeah. Yeah. It turns out it's a support offering that supports Seuss systems and RHEL-based systems like CentOS. You know, those mixed Linux environments.

They use the offering of breaking you free of lock-in as like the main value pitch of the platform. But the entire claim is ironic because if it was locked in, they wouldn't be able to offer the SUSE Liberty service in the first place. So it clearly shows there isn't lock-in and that you can use different vendors

like TuxCare or others. Was that ever surprising? No. And so that's ironic too. But then here's the other thing, is nobody knew if it was a Linux distribution or not because it was the worst kept secret. Everybody knew there was a distro in the works for a bit. And clearly all of the marketing and all of the communication language and the branding is SUSE Liberty Linux. communication language and the branding is Seuss Liberty Linux. So when it launched, there were even Seuss employees on Reddit claiming it was a Linux distribution. And kind of embarrassingly, the register ran with the headline that reads, Seuss announces something for those

who miss the old CentOS Liberty Linux. And the whole pitch was it's their new distro. And they say it seems to be based on a rebuild of CentOS 8. Although, how they knew that, since there was no distro released, is anyone's guess. And everyone was confused by this, and it's hilarious. And I have a little bit of bacon. Oh, fry it up. Before I get to it, do you have any thoughts on this entire boondoggle since we've been watching this since the beginning? No, I mean, it just does.

Hearing you sort of go over it right now, okay, trying to laugh a little less, I just, it's unfortunate that there's not very clear communication here. You know, like, that's too bad. Maybe some folks will actually find this new product offering useful. Trying to look at that part of it seriously, it's just kind of unfortunate that that's all going to, you know, kind of get ignored for what we're talking about now.

Right, and then to kind of add to the kind of unfortunate that that's all going to, you know, kind of get ignored for what we're talking about now. Right. And then to kind of add to the kind of, kind of funny launch, um, it may not even still be, but the day that they launched it, when Wes and I were going over everything to really try to put this all together, because we wanted to get our, we wanted to get our first take in land. Right. And we did. What was this? Right. We didn't want to go out of the gate calling it a distro because it's not, but like at the time they launched it, I couldn't even see a way to buy it. They talk about it on their website, you can buy it online from the Seuss online store, but when you go there, it's not actually offered in the drop-down of product offerings. I tried to get you to, but you didn't seem interested in scheduling a call with them.

So I wouldn't be surprised if the sales aren't off the hook. But I could see existing... It's still 404 in at least this product page. They changed the URL slugs for products so the link in the announcement originally they edited it now but originally it had a singular word product in the slug

but the URL is actually products with a plural that's just unfortunate too so there's that and then you have the whole issue of why did everybody think it was a distro like why did everybody get wrong? Besides the messaging just being totally wrong in the way they describe it, it sounds like a distro at first. I got my theory. Here's my bacon about this. I think it was a distro. I think it was a distro until about the end of the year. And then they pivoted strategy because maybe somebody listened to LAN or maybe it just became obvious or, you know, enough momentum buildup. But this was my take in LAN when we first talked about this rumor. And I think that all kind of holds out. Everything makes sense if this was going to be a distribution

and it was going to be part of this offering, right? It was going to be part of the support services. So if you wanted to get this, you could manage your SUSE systems, CentOS systems. And if you wanted to just maintain compatibility and not jump into stream, you could use their CentOS 8 rebuild. That is what they were going to do. But then they realized they would be creating the same exact paradox that Red Hat found themselves in, right? Red Hat had a problem where the thing that paid the bills was also be given away for free. And it was basically engineering versus sales. And you're never going to resolve that kind of conflict. Eventually, sales is going to win because sales has numbers they have to hit. They have a KPI they got to hit and they got to deliver results. So eventually that machine

turns inward and looks for where they're giving away the milk for free. And they stopped that. That's exactly what SUSE was about to start doing. They were about to start giving away for free a rebuild of CentOS that competes with SUSE Enterprise Linux. And how the hell can you charge a premium, which they do charge a premium for SUSE Enterprise Linux, if you're giving away CentOS for free. It just doesn't make any sense. And I think they had to have that conversation internally and they realized it's a lot harder to fix this once we make this launch

and we'll just end up committing the same exact crime in community's eyes that Red Hat did, right? This had to be the conversation. This is our chance to not make the mistake. Like we got to make this decision before we release it because once the cat's out of the bag, once the genie's out of the bottle, you know, it's really embarrassing to put it back in. It gets worse from that, right? Like if you, if you think about it, the, the other aspect of this that I don't think a lot of people think about is that those sales pay those engineers, right? Like, so it gets, um, what's the word I would use for this, particularly sadistic or masochistic, masochistic,

that's it. When you do this to yourself, because then you wind up in a situation where those people that you, that build those things that you enjoy for free aren't getting paid to keep doing it, and so they can't. And that makes things super, super complicated. Yeah, that's complicated is a good way to put it. So this Seuss Liberty thing, I know it sounds confusing. It's not a distro, at least not yet. Maybe that's still part of the plan. Who knows?

We're going to keep an eye on things. Linode.com slash unplugged. Now, I kind of feel like you should do this one somebody wrote in and said have Wes do the linode read I wonder if you've heard me do it enough

that you could do a linode read so it's linode.com slash unplugged go there for $100 in 60 day credit and support the show obviously I mean you gotta support the show

but why use linode Wes? oh there's so many good reasons I mean one it's kind of a it's one of the services that Chris can can use reliably you know it's one of the services that Chris can use reliably, you know? You can interface with all kinds of

programmatic APIs and fancy command line clients, but also... You could use your Kubernetes. You can use your Kubernetes, yeah. But you can also just spin up, you know, Linux machines. It's true. As soon as you want. They've got, like, the distros that you probably already want to run. I mean, oftentimes... All the distros, really. It's easier, you know, if there's a new server release.

I don't need to bother with something on my laptop because Linode's got the distro. They've just released it. It's on Linode. You can just boot it up right there. Yeah, you want to go play with Stream? It's on there. You want to try Alma? It's on there.

You know what else we use the heck out of? That block storage. Hoo-wee. I mean, do we store things any other way at this point? No, probably not. I mean, if you want to mess around with disks and partitions like an animal from the 90s, you could. That does not sound like our style. No.

There's so many great reasons to use it. Plus, did you know, Wes, you might not have known this, best customer support in the business. Oh, yeah. Yeah. All the time, they're available for you when you need them. And 30% to 50% cheaper than those big hyperscalers that are just trying to vendor lock you in anyways. Yeah, and when you look at some of the, you know, those hyperscalers,

they're just going to, they've got everything. There's no way to tell, like, is this a good product? Is this one of your, like, premier things or just a random offering you have to be competitive? And I feel like with Linode,

the things that they offer, they're really, they're going to stand behind. You nailed it. You know why? They've been doing this for 18 years, almost 19 years now. And, like, legitimately, 20 years on the internet behind. You nailed it. You know why? They've been doing this for 18 years, almost 19 years now, and like legitimately

20 years on the internet is like 100 years in real life. Maybe even more. Same as dog rules, right? Yeah, maybe more, man. Like 20 years doing something on the internet is mind-blowing. They were really in on this stuff early. They just made a great product. And you know, they're

independently owned. They didn't have to go the crazy VC funding route. They got 11 data centers around stuff early. And they just made a great product. And, you know, they're independently owned. They didn't have to go the crazy VC funding route. They got 11 data centers around the world. And they've been supporting the hell out of Linux Media now for, like, almost two years. They've also got some pretty great out-of-band access for when you really break your machine. Not that I've had to use that. No. Or, like, when you want to load some crazy image on there that they don't have in the dropdown, you can't actually get it done.

Yeah, they're not going to artificially limit you. They're ready to get weird with it. We have. We have gotten really weird with it. Linode.com slash unplugged. All right. Well, if there was one trick to win over Linux users, maybe we've discovered it. I don't actually think it's us.

I kind of say all this tongue in cheek. Well, we've crunched the data, done our research, and maybe, maybe noticed a trend. I don't know. That's too serious. But, think we found something of a draw for Linux users. Yeah. What they're looking for in a distro. I think it's fair.

In 2022. At least a large percentage of Linux users. I think it's almost beginning to trend depending on what data sets you look at. Yeah, you know, it's hard to generalize. We're not trying to say this is true for everyone. But to understand where we're going with this, you got to come take a stroll with us through Linux Mint 20.3.

What? Yeah. Yeah, so this is going to get us to our point. 20.3 came out recently, and it's a nice looking release. Brent, I think, probably has the most experience with Mint as a former longtime user. So I think we should start with you and your impressions on 20.3. Unfortunately, I didn't get to spend like a week or two with it, which I probably would have loved to. Hey, not yet anyway. Not yet. There you go. But I do have a long

history with Linux Mint. When I first started, I used Subuntu for like, I don't know, six months or something, and then was desiring a little bit more and landed on Linux Mint. This was probably, I don't know, five plus years ago, maybe even more than that. And I used it for a few years. I even tried their Linux Mint Debian edition for a while, which is their sort of rolling release cadence edition. And I liked it. Eventually it felt, I've been trying for years to sum up why I moved away from Linux Mint. And I think it's because it felt like there were some restrictions on it. It's almost like Mac in that if you're doing what they want you to, it works great. If you're trying to do anything

outside of what they want you to, then it becomes a little bit of a challenge. But at the same time, I was really interested in jumping back in. It's been several years and I think I do have this fondness for Nulang's Mint, even though I haven't thought of it for several years. So jumping in was interesting because cinnamon feels exactly like it used to, which was really kind of nice, actually. It felt like coming home, in a sense. And then when I poked around, I started discovering, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, there's all these defaults that seem sane and are pretty lovely for what they advertise on their website, which is that most of their users come straight from Windows. And I think that's a really reasonable approach. But as I dug in, I started remembering all of

those limitations that just felt, I don't know, not quite our style these days, maybe. And so I got mixed feelings. I think that's fair. I agree with everything you said. It really is iterative improvements with Mint, which means that if you've taken a few years off from trying it, and I also tried the Cinnamon Edition, and you sit down and try it, I really can perceive the improvements over time. I felt specifically from just the last release to this release, out of the box, high DPI support is nice. The GTK theme is cleaner and so i just as a thought experiment because i haven't been using mint for a while i first installed the previous release brought that all up to date use that for a day and then wiped it and installed 20.3 and immediately just wrote down my thoughts on the differences just to kind of get an idea of

what kind of improvements. And for the most part, it's like new apps, like the new Things app, and the high DPI support out of the box is really nice. I also felt that Cinnamon was greatly improved from the time I'd used it previously, a little less shiny, you know, like less transparencies and window effects. But now it feels very solid, really stable.

I didn't have any crashes. I even threw a bunch of widgets in the menu because I used to always be a surefire way to crash it, but now it did fine. It really does kind of now hit that sweet spot between plasma and good. No, there's rough bits. Still.

The app store feels really low effort. Like they're just shipping the default and not putting any curation in there. Like when you go, for example, right now on mine, when you look at the editor's picks, there's, you know, half a dozen apps that are listed in this editor's picks as if somebody hand selected these. But then there's two entries for wine

with two different icons, and one's version 3.7 and one's version 4.0. And I can't really determine which one is like the one they consider the default because it doesn't expose that information. And there's no flat hub. There's no flat, there's no flat hub integration. Right. So that kind of stuff, I was a little disappointed to see, but I could see them adding that stuff over time. But what I'm really impressed by is if you get out of your head as a as like a longtime Linux user and you look at this as somebody who's just trying to get some

damn work done, you know, they have really nice things in there, like a USB image writer is installed by default. An application called Backup is installed by default, and it's a decent little app. We've talked about TimeShift before. They have just system diagnostic and information. You just click that. It's in there it's it's obvious and they've managed to keep it uncluttered which is impressive because you could see adding all these little tools and these x apps over time would really clutter things up but they've managed to keep it pretty clean and kind of decide when to pull things out as well so because they've done this iterative work and they've been evolving all this stuff for a while

and they've been able to keep up in this release with some of the more recent-ish GTK trends. I mean, of course, now GNOME 42 is out and LibidWati is now a thing and they're nowhere near that. You're right. I mean, in the longer view sense, it was nice to see the dark style support and added accent colors and stuff. None of that was there the last time I tried Cinnamon. Right, yeah. Like added, you know, accent colors and stuff. None of that was there the last time I tried Cinnamon.

Right, yeah. And it's just all like I could go over to like the advanced side and I turned on experimental fractional scaling. Oh, right. And I think I'm running at like 140 or some weird number. But, I mean, it actually looks fine. It doesn't look blurry. Like they did a good job. And that kind of like day-to-day steak and potatoes thing

somebody needs from a desktop computer like it used to always be, it really kind of feels like they're nailing all that stuff while not getting sucked into the technology stack of the week kind of situation. I'm curious on your thoughts, though. I think I agree. There's a lot of elements that stand out as being thoughtfully looked after. And then there are some holes where they're just missing pieces. Fair. I liked a lot of the welcome experience.

It detected and asked about, did I need to improve my video driver situation, which I thought was pretty nice. And there's just a few things prompting you to set things up. Although, once you start diving into, say, snapshots or the firewall, you do kind of run out of rope on having your hand held. So I think some of this stuff is maybe more easy in the welcome screen for someone

who's really just switching from Windows, and then it gets advanced kind of quickly. But I can't fault them for that. Those are just complicated topics. In the past, you know, I did use Cinnamon a lot on a work machine that I had to dual boot with Windows. And so that kind of, you know, the interface style matched up pretty well. And it wasn't a machine I customized.

I was just curious to revisit. Could I use it as a boring old workstation? And yeah, I think it still works pretty nicely for that. It's somewhere in between maybe the pure simplicity of a GNOME experience. You get some of the Plasma things, but without having as much customization to maybe need or be tempted to do. Because that's exactly where I think I would still deploy Cinnamon, is an environment where I just want to forget about the DE. It's not ugly enough to be offensive.

I can just forget about it. Gets out of your way, but does have some power features when you want it. It is interesting also, we mentioned sort of catching up in the GTK world, but catching up on the Ubuntu derivative world. When I was going through the boring old installer, I don't mean that in a bad way, but just the boring old installer still knows EFS.

You just get EXT4 if you don't go with LVM. Right. Made me wonder what's going to happen with that Flutter transition? Is Mint keeping the sold version? Are they going to adopt

where Canonical goes? I don't know. I bet they don't. I bet they don't, yeah. Good question. I wonder. Yeah, I'm kind of tired of that installer.

I mean, it sure does work, but I feel like I've been using it for about 10 years. I don't know. But I guess it gets the job done, right? It'd be nice to see some advanced options around ZFS or Butterfest, but I get that's not their demo. And I got to take that into consideration.

So here's where we're going with this. Even with all of this said, you know, it's a steak and potatoes. It is the what is on the label is what you get Linux distribution. It's a great landing spot for Windows users. And I think that makes sense for a lot of us. But there's still an element that's missing that seems to be drawing users away from Mint at a rapid pace. So much so that they seem to be attempting to address this

over the last year or so. And I wasn't familiar with this until I went digging around. But I've discovered that Mint is now publishing Edge ISOs. Have you seen this? Yeah. They've done it for the last couple of releases. And it is simply a version of Linux Mint

with newer kernel drivers. A newer kernel, like right now, they are shipping 5.4 in Mint. But in the Edge version, they're shipping 5.13, which has a bunch of nice improvements in there. And we talked a little bit about this on Linux Action News, so for an expanded look on this, it's worth listening to that. But BoilingSteam.com ran a post, and the headline is this. All roads lead to Arch, the of linux distros used for

gaming over time and you look at the data from proton db and from steam and it seems kind of obvious linux users are migrating over time in considerable numbers away from ubuntu and debian and mint those are taking it the hardest. And they're moving over to Arch Linux, Manjaro, Garuda Linux, and Endeavor OS. Boilingsteam writes, Arch has gained progressively some share, solidly now at 20% for several months, but the whole landscape looks a lot like Arch derivatives now. Manjaro is almost as big as Arch itself, and Garuda Linuxux and endeavor os are six to seven percent of the mix in effect almost half of the gamers on proton db are running some form of

arch and when you look at the data trend which they visualized here we'll have a link in the show notes over the years you just see a steady progression of Arch over and over. And it isn't really even kind of like a, it's not like a huge jump. It's just this slow and steady. It does seem to speed up as we get closer to now. What do you think this is? Do you think it's the Arch user repository, Wes?

There's probably a lot of things. You know, we've kind of mentioned maybe what could be perceived as a lack of investment or excitement around the Ubuntu desktop. There's probably also an element of some of these Arch derivatives being more explicit about marketing to gamers and having a lot of improved experience

around just getting up and going and having a system that's like ready to game. So there's probably a few factors maybe combining and Arch is just fun. Yeah, I think you're right. And I think that one of those factors, which is what Linux Mint recognized, is newer kernels because people want newer drivers. And they want newer drivers because they're switching over to Linux to try it for gaming. And they want the best frame rate, the best performance, the best hardware support possible.

And while I was on Mint, I tried out the tool called Mainline. So there used to be this Ubuntu kernel picker that would use the canonical PPA and install a Mainline kernel. But that developer quit working on the project, I guess. But there's Mainline now. It's a command line app that you install. And it makes it really simple to list all of the available kernels for your system. And then you can just do like a mainline install latest. Oh, cute, like a little kernel manager right there for you. Exactly.

And it takes care of getting the right headers and the build files and doing all the boot manager stuff. And it all makes sure it gets pulled down from Canonical's PPA. So it's a legit source. And so last night on my Mint box, and you could do this. You wouldn't have to get the edge ISO, or you could do this on Ubuntu, I installed kernel 5.16 using this tool Oh look at you, but hey I mean there's some stuff in Proton, for Proton in there

so why not? You get the Futex stuff and here's the reality now, is you get this really nice, tried and trued, slowly iterated Cinnamon Mint desktop that isn't going to change on end users very much. And with this kind of tool, or you could do it yourself, you could get the latest kernel

and you get a lot of benefits that way. And I think users are just opting to go with distributions that do it for themselves. And I think even Canonical sees this. They see what's going on with these trends because they're hiring a Linux desktop gaming product manager right now. And Canonical wants to, quote, make Ubuntu the best Linux desktop for gaming. And they want to, quote, work with partners in the silicon world

to ensure the latest graphics drivers and tweaks are built in for optimal frame rates and latency. Well, how do you do that? You got to get their code upstream in the Linux kernel. So that means you have to ship a new kernel, right? That's what the deck has to solve. You can have all this code going to Linux kernel, but if you're shipping 5.4, it doesn't matter.

It's not in a kernel that you're shipping anymore. So Canonical can't solve this problem. They can't work with, this is from their job post, quote, work with partners in the silicon world to ensure the latest graphics drivers and tweaks are built in. They can't do that. And they also say they want to work with mechanisms

such as anti-cheat capabilities and make sure that they are available to ensure fairness and product availability for Ubuntu users. They're not going to do that again unless they work with an upstream kernel because some of that stuff is landing in the kernel thanks to Collabra.

I mean, I suppose you do have, what, you have hardware enablement, you got PPAs, but does that just not, does that have a different lack of appeal? Does it feel more of a set as an afterthought well i think if you look at why people are deploying manjaro or garuda it's because it's just the default it's defaults rule supreme you got that plus then you got well they're not testing against it right like the idea is these other distros are building their distro with the idea that you're going to have the latest kernel like fedora but you know the ubuntu developers aren't the idea that you're going to have the latest kernel, like Fedora. But, you know, the Ubuntu developers aren't.

They're assuming you're using the kernel they're shipping. I would imagine that probably factors into some people's thinking. But, you know, it kind of makes it more appealing to me to use an Ubuntu or a Mint with a newer kernel. There must be a downside, though. So if somebody knows, linuxunplugged.com slash contact, I assume stuff breaks at some point. You know, like I can see maybe virtualization or, you know, container software thinking, you know, is linuxunplugged.com slash contact. I assume stuff breaks at some point. You know, like I can see maybe virtualization or, you know, container software thinking,

you know, have the wrong version of the kernel. I think you just have to try it and find out. So I'd like to know what you think of our growing hypothesis here that it's perhaps gaming that's driving this change. It is so common now for people to start recommending things like Pop

or Manjaro, especially in the YouTube community. Like, we just saw that with the recent Linux challenge. People just a couple

of years ago led with Ubuntu. Like, do you remember however many years ago when Noah and I did the Linux switch challenge? How long ago was that?

Was that 2016? Maybe. I mean, it was just, it was never a debated topic. The USB thumb drives that we were handing out had Ubuntu on them. It wasn't even a debate. And it made the most sense because it had the largest network effect.

And I still think it makes probably the best new user distro when you consider that. Because when you are on Windows, you have the whole world of software and everyone else is using what you're using. So there's tons of guides and information. But when you switch to Linux, it's a smaller circle. Yeah, and you haven't learned the right terms to Google yet.

So you got to hope that the generic results match and that's Ubuntu. And Ubuntu is the biggest supported one out there. And so I still actually think if new users are going to use Linux, I mean, you know, Pop and Mint get really close because they're the same structure and all of that. It is interesting how, you know, for the existing Linux user anyway, like, I guess I have to admit that as gaming has

so rapidly improved, again, we still have a long way to go, of course, but now that gaming is so viable, I suppose I might consider thinking about that more for my desktop install. Where in the past, you know what I mean? Like I might have a dedicated system or I might just not care about that so much

because I would just do casual gaming. But if it's really easy to do some pretty good gaming, then yeah, right? Maybe suddenly that's something you're interested in changing. Well, you and I have been following the kernel development

pretty closely for the last year and a half. And the thing is, is there's a lot of cool performance improvements landing the Linux kernel right now. There's been some recent major performance work gone into there. We cover that stuff in LAN

and it makes me so stoked to run a newer kernel. I want that. There's a lot of goodies. Totally is, totally is. All right. We can follow this up in the post show. So if you've got comments, save it for that or go to linuxhomeplug.com slash contact

and let us know. Do you think we're crazy? You think we're on to something here? I'd like to hear your opinion on it. We do have a spot of housekeeping around here. I want to say, first of all, thank you so much to our members unplugged core dot com or our network supporters at Jupiter dot party. You get access to the full live stream like everything. It's a whole other show in there.

Plus, um, no, like cutting stuff out. No swearing. It's like, Oh, it's like raw, man. Probably shouldn't put it out there, but we do. And we make it available for you in a feed. Uh, but if you're, and if you're a network member, you get access to all of the shows ad free out there. Also, I want to say thank you to the people who've been using the new Value for Value payments in their podcast app via Lightning. We got Helipad set up this week, and now we can read messages as they boost in real time. It's so cool, and it makes a little pew-pew sound when people boost. So if you have no idea what I'm talking about, you can go to newpodcastapps.com and go get yourself a new podcast app. It looks like the most popular one amongst our audience

is the Fountain podcast app. Yeah, I'm trying it myself. And it is a pretty interesting app. And what's neat about it is they have this little boost mode. You hit that, and you can leave a message, and it tells us what episode you're listening to, which that's a bit of data we've never gotten before. Yeah, unless people self-report, right?

Yeah, yeah. Oh, my God, that's so yeah. Yeah. Oh my God. That's so cool. Like it was like all of a sudden we were sitting there and we were working really late. It was like eight or nine o'clock on a Sunday. And we had, we pulled this thing up and right then somebody sent in a boost and it was like all of our moods. I called Brenton from the garage. He was working, he was working on the rack. I called Brenton. We all looked at the boost because the first time we brought up Helipad, and it changed our night. You know, it's not a bunch of money, right?

They're just a few sats. But it's so cool to see those messages coming in real time as people are listening. Yeah, and some of you are so sweet. Yeah, there was some really nice messages in there, too. And Helipad lets us read them, so that's pretty neat. I think we'll do that on future live streams. Our community on Matrix has grown like crazy.uxunplugged.com slash matrix. If you want to join that, we'd love to have you join us over there. And we have several rooms,

we have rooms for each of the show. We have a crypto chat where people are having rational, level headed, honest conversations about cryptocurrencies, even during a crash. And all that's going down at linuxunplugged.com slash matrix, and you can join us over there. And I suppose I'll plug the fact that we'd love to have you join our Mumble room, because we've got the LUP plug, we've got this year's show that we do live, we do other events in Mumble. Details, linuxunplugged.com

slash mumble, and you can hang out with us on Tuesdays. We've been doing a little live stream here and there. And every now and then we put them out as an extra too. Hey, it's just a friendly community of nerdy people. That's right. What's not to like? So the airline lost Brent's mailbag.

You hear about this? No. Yeah. Those airlines, you just can't trust them. Yeah, I guess I still don't really understand why you're putting all of the feedback out on that thermal printer and carrying it around with you. We could just save it on— Security, security, Chris.

I mean, okay, I guess. Just doesn't seem like a good way to do it, Brent. You know, I will say I had to start my fire with something, and I ran out of fire starters, and, you know, just saying. We do have a pick for you this week, though. This is so cool. Like if it was just one of these, it'd be worth it for the pick segment. But this is a suite of tools called SSH tools. Yeah, you heard me.

That's right. And the first one alone, I feel like is completely pick worthy. It's called SSH ping, and it checks to see if a host is reachable via SSH. Like, are your login failing is there is it you know denying you and is the syntax is exactly what you'd expect ssh dash ping then the number of times so like dash c3 for three pings and then the host and then it checks to see if it can get connected on that port and it tells you like the same kind of output you get from ping yeah it looks just the same and uh over here, my terminal, it's got some nice colors too.

So that's handy. Oh, really? Yeah. A few other nice tools though. Like I'm just, I'm like in SSH fax. Yes. And that's just, you know, what's the deal with this machine? Print out a handy little printout about, you know, what the server's running,

disks available, memory, that kind of thing. That is my, that is my other favorite one. It's also just a great way to figure out what your machines are advertising via SSH. So that one is really cool. So that one's called SSH-Fax. And then, of course, there's also SSH host keys, which prints the server host keys in a couple of different ways to read that. And you got SSH key info in here, a bunch of other ones, including SSH force, which enforces password authentication, even if they do have a key.

I mean, all that stuff. It's really neat. And they have packages for a bunch of different distros, including 2204 and a bunch of other systems. So we'll have a link to that in the show notes. Also, it's just bash. So you can download it from GitHub if that's your style. Oh, look at you.

Is that what you did? I assume. Indeed. That sounds like US pay. You maniac. I have no idea what we're going to talk about next week because I haven't been able to square, like, how are we going to do a meetup and an episode?

Like, right. So we're going to figure that out. I don't know exactly because I think so. I think we're going to homework now. Yeah. So that's going to be our job. But if you can make it, we'd love to see you. Come hang out with us.

Maybe bring a topic as well as a snack. That would be pretty great. But I know it's such a long shot for people to make it. But honestly, we just really want to see people. It's been a while. That's how long I can make it between road trips and meetups and stuff. I've made my... The audience is amazing and we miss you.

That's true. That's true. All right. And we'd love to hear more from you too. Linuxun we miss you. That's true. That's true. All right. And we'd love to hear more from you too. Linux unplugged.com slash contact. We'll probably have your feedback next week. You can also join us live. We do this now on Sundays.

You start around noon Pacific. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. And be sure to catch Linux action news to find out everything that's going on. Now it's released on Thursdays, and we're capturing what's going on right there in the week. I'm liking it. Turns out we really

nailed the kind of timing as far as the news cycle goes. It's been nice. And we'd love to have you join us. LinuxActionNews.com We put it out every single week. Links to what we talked about today at LinuxUnplugged.com. What else, Wes? What else do we got to mention? Hmm. Live? Did that. Did that.

If it's been a while since you checked out the Extras feed, now's the time to catch up. No kidding. That is... See? The man knows. Extras.show for that. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode, and we'll see you right back here next Sunday. Thank you. Hey, Brent, could you step over a little closer here? We need to...

Yeah, I gotta get in the cone. The cone of silence. over a little closer here uh we need to yeah i gotta get in the cone the cone of silence we got a we got a major problem guys major problem i didn't want the audience to hear this there's not a leak is there no no i mean that would be a big problem but uh i i don't i don't want to tell the audience this but i don't think the sunday crew is as good at making the titles like the tuesday crew was i don't want to throw shade i this, but I don't think the Sunday crew is as good at making the titles like the Tuesday crew was. I don't want to throw shade. I know how they're going to take that.

So I don't know what we should. We've got to come up with a way to inspire them. Some sort of title contest. I mean, this title list. Are you seeing this? Anyways, we've got a post show to do. Let's get out of here. The cone of silence.