LINUX Unplugged - 444: Much Ado About Ubuntu

Episode Date: February 7, 2022

There's just something off about Ubuntu these days, this week we put it all together.

Talk about controversy. It looks like Ubuntu Mate 2204 is going to support Flatpak out of the box. Yeah, I guess this just means having Flatpak installed. No FlatHub or anything by default just yet. Oh, okay. I mean, it actually just feels like it just makes a lot of sense. Does make a lot of sense. It makes software easier to install.

If you have both Snaps and Flatpak, then you really can have anything on a system, right? But, I mean, let's be honest. It is notable that a major Ubuntu flavor is doing this. That actually does kind of seem like a big deal. Hopefully it's the first step to flat out being there someday. Oh, hey there, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes.

And my name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen. Nice being here with you today. Coming up on the show, what's going on with Ubuntu? We're going to run down the issues that we see. We've been dancing around this and taking different passes at it, but today we're going to take it head on. Our thoughts on the new Ubuntu Pro integration

that's been announced for 2204, where we think all this could be going in the state of Ubuntu, and then we'll round out the show with some great feedback, some really great feedback, some picks, and a lot more. There's a whole bunch of show today, so before we go any further, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug, Hello Mumble Room.

Hello! Hello! Hello, Chris, hello, Wes. Hello, everybody! 30 strong going today. Nice to have some up in the quiet listening. This is great joining us on a Sunday. Oh, yeah, all wearing their uniforms just like we asked them to. Well, it helps when you hand them out for free. That's right. You know, that does help. So before we get going, we got to acknowledge there's just a little behind the scenes thing going on during the show today. And I just want to get it out in the open in case something seems a little off. As we record, Brent is providing remote tech support, remote operational support for my wife, who is back at the RV right now, Lady Joops,

affecting emergency repairs. How's it going on the ground, Brent? Brent is two-timing us? Yeah, yeah. What? I know, he's multitasking. I mean, I'm trying to just, you know, be the best me I can. What I'm getting is really photographs, Chris, of your RV wires that look like they've been

chewed by a bunch of rats. Well, I don't know about a bunch, but it's bad. It's worse than bad. It's, oh my God, scary. We just came across something. All right, okay, all right. Stay a while and listen. It all comes back to when we got stuck out in the woods.

When it got real cold. Oh, yeah. We were snowed in for a week. You freeze out. So we brought Lady Joops back to a safe spot and she was frozen solid. The tanks were all frozen. So we put in heaters, we took all the steps we could, and then we abandoned ship for a week and we

crashed at the studio. And while we were gone, and probably because it was so damn cold outside, a rat got inside the RV. I knew something was wrong because I have motion sensors around Lady Joops and a couple of nights in a row, my motion sensors went off. So it's either that or a new ghost.

Yeah, could be. You know, I'm always looking. But the cameras never caught anything like the cameras would snap on. And by the time the cameras initialized, which is like, you know, two, three seconds, whatever it triggered, the motion sensor was gone. whatever had triggered the motion sensor was gone. Until one night, I looked at my phone in the morning, and I saw, unlike, I think, I guess, it's the axle, I saw a big fat rat running along the axle of Lady Jupes.

And that's when I was like, oh no, right? Okay, we got a problem. So let's go pack up Lady Jupes. Let's get out of here. There's rats. I mean, if if your home can move this is one of the times to move it i don't want them you know doing any damage so we get in there and we're spending the whole day yesterday getting her packed up doing all kinds of stuff and of course we had to run down to the studio and pick up some supplies that we had hired of course so we're running down the studio not once but twice to grab stuff running back up to the RV. It's taking us all day.

We've got kids running around. Their friends are coming over. All right, well, we packed up in another hour. Another hour. That's exactly the scenario. Like, okay, how much longer can I play? You got about an hour. And then two hours go by.

So we get everything ready. The sun is setting. We're way later than we wanted to be, but we got to get out of there to protect Lady Jupes. And I go to check the tanks make sure we you know we need to take any take any water on board or anything like that and the little it has these little lights these little led lights that light up to indicate how full it is and the light panel comes on for a moment and then sort of blinks and fades out oh and then none of the buttons work and And I start going, oh, that's not good. But you know, she's like six, seven years old.

These things happen. We were on rough roads. Maybe there's a wire loose. Oh, yeah, sure. So we keep packing up. I bring in the living room slide. That was the slide we were having problems that sent us to Tucson. I bring in the living room slide.

I bring in the bedroom slide. We keep packing up. Kids are running around. I hit the button to bring in the kitchen slide and nothing happens. No noise, no air lights. It's like I didn't i hit the button to bring in the kitchen slide and nothing happens no noise no air lights it's like i didn't even push the button so i hit the extend and i hear the motor spin up and they start but then there's nowhere to go because it's already extended so then i push the retract button nothing yeah and i start doing the math and i start thinking

okay i saw a rat running on the axle. My LED lights just went out on my status indicators. And now this button doesn't work, right? I'm just adding it all up. Yep. And so from about 10 minutes after that point, we had a couple of false, the false floors in our, in our cupboards removed where there's some different clusters of wiring. And we found, yeah, a rat got in there and chewed up the wiring that controls the slide.

Of course. So I'm shutting down all the power. I'm shutting down my servers, my telcos. Everything's getting all shut down as we're repatching up wiring. So that way we can try to get jupes out of there. It has been like, really since Tucson, the environment, Mother Nature has been out to destroy us. That's really how it's been. Yeah, at this point, it's had to resort to sending little minions in to help out.

That's next level. I'm at a point now where if anybody in the Pacific Northwest has a large garage with a large driveway that I could park jupes in for about two, three weeks so I can affect several different repairs now. Like, I found this wiring, and that wasn't the only wiring they chewed on. Like if we hadn't, right. If we hadn't found this, we could have had some sort of disaster. You did check your brake loads,

right? I got to check everything. I got to go. I got to pull everything out and I got to clean everything, which we have been doing. And I have to check everything. I got to go through every single system. So I need a place that's dry because it's raining here all the time.

Ideally rat free. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that let me tell you, we went to war, dude. I am not messing around. Peppermint, essential oils, noisemakers, traps, all kinds of stuff set up everywhere. More cameras deployed so I can see where I mean, I don't mess around. I deploy everything within my power to get these things out.

It's like a whole new game of tower defense you've got coming up. We even hired a professional to come out, a local who knows. So here's the problem. The whole damn town, the whole area, this whole block has rats. The whole block has rats. All the houses have rats. They're everywhere. So that's why we just got to get out of there.

It's like an infestation. I like how clever this rat was, though. You know, like disabling the slide. That's one of the things that can really keep you there. It really was. It was a clever maneuver for sure. So while we're recording the show, she's back at home trying to repatch these wires together, cut out the bad spots that have been chewed up and then connect them back together. Uh, and, uh, we'll see, we'll see if we can get the slide in and get the hell out of there but then i don't know where i'm going i don't really have anywhere to go so that's always fun i mean go back out into the woods but right how long is that gonna last i don't know so that's

a good time that's a good time but hopefully brent will have uh brent will still have availability for the show while everything gets patched up tell you what i mean how do you even you can't even take it to somebody to work on it when you can't get the slides in. So as I sit here today, it has been basically like, what, three or four or five months of Mother Nature onslaught. It's just been crazy. I can't remember the last week that went by

that there wasn't like a, you know, pretty precarious Jupes update going on at one time or another. Although you should learn a lot. Like we're learning like how the wiring works now on the slides more. So we figured out how to reverse the wiring. So that way, even the button, even when the button only works in one direction,

we can reverse the wiring to change what that direction of the button does and that kind of stuff. And you're going to actually apply like a nine volt battery to one of the prongs and it'll activate the motors because it just needs a signal to tell it to turn on. Sure. Right. That's all we need. So you got a MacGyver, a solution, you know, at the end of this, you're going to be like

customizing and building out your own rigs. It's it's sort of the perfect journey for a Linux user in that regard. It really it does match up really well. It's just a pain in the butt. So what you need is you don't have the hot standby RV that you can just jump through

when you're experiment RV. Or just live somewhere where it's dry for a bit where you can have like, where you can pull everything out of the rig and work on it. Like we've been thinking

like should we try to escape to Arizona or, you know, somewhere where, yeah, but that's a whole, that's a whole,

you know, financial thing and operational thing. Yeah. We'll figure it out. We're not, you know, financial thing and operational thing. Yeah. We'll figure it out. We're not, you know, we're,

we're not done yet. We still have a little fight left in us. And I wonder if that's also true for Ubuntu. I want to talk about this because it's something that we've been, it's one of these things we've been having a really kind of frank conversation off bike about, and we've touched on it in bits in the show. But we had a sit-down, and we really kind of put it all together

and realized there is a lot going on with Ubuntu, and this announcement of the Ubuntu Pro, it's now going to be baked into the desktop. So in 2204, when you boot up, it's going to ask you if you'd like to subscribe to Ubuntu Pro. And that started just sort of really, I think, solidifying our thoughts on this topic. Yeah. And well, rather unfortunately, when this new Ubuntu Pro integration first rolled out,

at least in the dailies, it contained a rather annoying bug. So like at first it's designed, it's intended that like, you know, when you're first booting up here, you're first upgraded, you get this, you just got a little notification. Hey, do you want to try out this new Ubuntu Pro integration? Now that notification box asks, like, no, you know, if you decline. Yeah, don't remind me. Don't remind me. I'm cool. Okay.

Yeah, that part didn't work. Yeah, you click it, but it just didn't register. Now, in fact, it made sure it was going to appear next time. So every time you boot, even when you'd say, don't remind me, you'd get this prop. Now, to be totally clear, these are in the daily images for a beta that just a tiny, tiny amount of people are using. But it's not like a great first impression. No, and it's definitely going to make you ask because you're going to see it a bunch. What is Ubuntu Pro?

And I'm not quite sure because it seems like maybe it's not all done yet, but I think essentially it's a rebrand of the Ubuntu Advantage service, which reminded me, weren't you using that on a few of the machines? Yeah, these machines. These three machines here on the studio desk are all signed up with Ubuntu Advantage for years now, since like 2018 when we first deployed them. I signed up. It gives you additional patch support. So there's like an additional 30

packages they're patching. It gives you live kernel updates and it gives you a central place, at least Ubuntu Advantage does, where you can see your machines, see their version, get just some basic overall high-level information about them, which is nice when you're managing multiple machines. I did pay for it initially, but then they made a modification where up to three machines is free, and it seems like that's going to be true for Ubuntu Pro as well. Hey, that's nice. Yeah, it does look like they're in transition from Advantage to Pro. I'm not sure. I think Ubuntu Pro is probably a better name. It is. Yeah, I noticed in the code base it's still called Ubuntu Advantage to Pro. I'm not sure. I think Ubuntu Pro is probably a better name. It is. Yeah, I noticed in the code base,

it's still called Ubuntu Advantage and stuff. But, you know, these things take time. Yeah. Did either one of you guys try it out? I know we all loaded up the beta recently to give this a go. Yeah, I did. I mean, I don't know.

I don't know how much I really need it in my day to day. I do think like the live patch functionality, that stuff still fascinates me. I love that that's even a thing that we can do and that it works and that, you know, like, but at least on most of my Ubuntu machines, I don't need that. I also don't need like a bunch of the stuff

they have in here for compliance and hardening, but that does seem pretty handy if you're going to roll this out for like enterprise desktops. Yeah. Brad, did you get a chance to try it? You know, I actually didn't because I wasn't, I don't know, nothing really stood out to me.

Like, hey, yeah, this sounds really interesting. I'm going to go try this out. And I think it's interesting to me, maybe it frames this whole conversation is that we're putting attention on a little indicator. super exciting. And I couldn't even help myself but to jump in and try things even before they were released. And there's something about recent times that I think is worrisome maybe in that way. Yeah, I see where you're going. And I think that's why we wanted to talk about this too. And, you know, I don't necessarily think the service is a bad idea. We've recently been talking about ways to monetize desktop Linux development. Maybe this is one of those solutions. That is one of the things I think that stands out about this as well. Seeing this get a little more focus, attention, a little more draw, prompt, you know, maybe this is an area that Canonical's

plenty to push on. Yeah, yeah. But I don't think it's going to work. And I think what Brent was just touching on as part of it, if you look at, so you're kind of pushing this to anybody who gets Ubuntu now. And most people are going to deploy it, in a lot of cases, in a VM for development testing. Or you have a lot of casual users who don't really need live patching service or the compliance stuff.

They're not going to apply their updates anyway. Yeah. But I actually think there's larger macro problems that Canonical faces that are going to prevent this thing from really being successful. I mean, beyond just getting a high number of users, I mean, that may be a thing that they're going for is maybe they just want number big, but I don't think it's going to be a very successful initiative because I think, and I don't get any joy in saying this, the Ubuntu desktop seems like it's in a decline. If you think about it, if you go back to April of 2017,

Ubuntu had an amazing level of support from the community when they announced they were switching back to GNOME. I mean, yeah, some of us were like, oh, I wish it was Plasma. But this was 2017. And almost anything Canonical does is not well received by the community. But this one was. Yeah, and it was like, just thinking back to that era, you know, like when 16.04 had come out, there'd been changes over to SystemD, there'd been experimental ZFS support release. Like it was just, there were changes happening.

It was a time to pay attention. Yeah, they really had captured everyone's attention at that time. It was a big, big batch of momentum to lose. And they've kind of been slowly losing it over time. And I think it all started with Snaps in this most recent round. I mean, there's been a lot of things in Canonical's history. We could go through all of them.

But I really think Snaps created this weird dynamic between Canonical and the Linux community. And some commercial vendors love it, right? But the average Linux community just didn't really take to it. And the uptake for Snaps has been really kind of a grind for Canonical. And I think there's been resentment that's built up. The community resents Canonical for creating Snaps, and Canonical resents the community for pushing back on, well, just about anything they've ever done, including snaps. Fair enough. And I think that exasperation inside Canonical has built up over the years and it led to

focus drifting and focusing on other areas like server and cloud. And over this time, some of our good friends that we all know have left Canonical. And that passion drain has a real impact on a company, even if they don't want to admit it. It does, even one or two people leaving like that can change a company. But it's a real problem for Canonical

because they make money from the desktop. Yeah, sure, they make money from the other stuff, but they make money from those OEM deals with Dell and HP and others. And also, having a strong desktop offering is critical in an overall healthy developer ecosystem. You got to have a desktop for people that are building these apps that are going to run on Ubuntu.

There's also maybe it raises a question for the wider community as, you community as Ubuntu just ends up, even among some of my friends who are kind of casual Linux users who could set up Arch, they know enough to do that. A lot of them just run Ubuntu because it's still got that default mentality. And is that just going to get a little,

maybe embarrassing is not the right word, but you could imagine a situation where if that really continues to see a lack of focus or polish, it would just be a shame to have to either point people to other options or sort of have some apologetics and be like, yeah, I mean, that's not really representative of the best of the Linux desktop. Well, I think you're starting to see these red flags already. And I think Canonical sees these red flags.

I don't think they're blind to these. The download numbers for the interim releases sound like they've been lower than typical. A huge red flag was when Valve announced the Steam Deck was switching to an Archbase, because that implies, behind the scenes, Valve developers spent hours and hours moving from a Debian base to an Archbase, which means that they did the math, they did the calculation and said, this is absolutely critical to the success of the device. We have to allocate time to this.

Canonical saw that. You know, that's a massive, massive thing. Recent Linux YouTuber challenges. They launch, they have their community submit distros they should try, and ubuntu was never even considered manjaro gen 2 pop os mint no one suggested ubuntu i mean you know kind of an elephant in the room when that happens and when you look at our tuxes results that we did recently yeah ubuntu clearly struggled in all of the results where it was one of the contenders.

And the reality is, is that where enthusiasts tend to go, then that starts to be what people recommend. Like you were just kind of inferring. And so now that the enthusiasts are using other distros, when new people are coming and saying, what distro should I use? The answer isn't Ubuntu for a lot of people anymore. No, not really. But I think the good news in all of this is that Canonical seems to have noticed, right? Like you can look at their actions and they seem to care because actions are going to speak

a lot louder than words in this case. And like they're hiring that Linux desktop gaming product manager. So is that maybe a start in the mobile room? Diddle Danny points out that maybe one way to look at this as, you know, people have left, but to what extent have those folks been replaced? Yeah. Dill, do you think it's like a transition period?

I'm not sure about that. A lot of the big folks in Snapcraft that have left, they just have not been replaced at all. That's interesting. But they have been hiring in documentation. They have been hiring in the desktop space. What do you think that implies? I wonder if it's some kind of downgrading of the importance of snaps.

Mini-Mac, what are your thoughts? Well, I think it's not really an issue. Ubuntu has become standard, and standard is not interesting for us Linux geeks. But still, you can do everything you want. And Ubuntu, they have some license agreements with computer manufacturers like Lenovo and HP. They have thousands of installations running on universities and colleges. It's just a standard. And I don't think this is really a problem. You can do everything with Ubuntu. I use it until it started. So I don't really see an issue.

Brent, do you think we are just in the red flag stage right now? Like this is fixable, right? You know, I started with the red flag situation, but I think with Minimac, I just perhaps might suggest a different perspective. And I wonder,

is this just a maturing of Linux distributions? You know, is Ubuntu the new Debian? You know, Debian used to be the kind of boring, really stable, you can install it and it would just work for a long time kind of distribution. And I wonder if Ubuntu sort of is the modern Debian in that sense? Is it just finding a different kind of title? I could be totally wrong there. I'm curious what you think. I wonder. I feel that if you want to set the standard, if you want to create something that developers are going to embrace and get excited about,

if you want buzz, that kind of stuff, you can't let your foot off the gas too much. Otherwise, before you know it, the whole world's talking about Fedora, Pop! OS, and Manjaro. Altira, I know I always butcher your handle, but you have some perspective too. Well, Ubuntu is like a great product and like a nice

operating system. But like for the past couple of years, they fired a lot of people and dropped the Unity 8, which was like most of their desktop projects at the time. Because up until then, they were like heavily involved in

creating things in Ubuntu that were then trickled out or get adopted by the upstream projects but when they fired a lot of people and just dropped their main desktop projects, the rest of the desktop team that was left was like

playing catch-ups and reacting to what the rest of the ecosystem is doing. And they do not have the research now to develop new desktop things, because the server seems to be the only funded space now.

It does make me think of us sort of wondering, well, are they going to catch up on the latest Gnome stuff? Yeah, I think what I'm searching for is I want to want to run Ubuntu. I want to want to run it. And I don't. It's just not even really a consideration when I'm reloading. When I was taking Mint off my ThinkPad,

I thought about Arch for a minute, and I just said, I'm going to stick with Fedora. And I went back to Fedora. I think it is especially hard with how good Fedora has gotten. And now that that's, I can see it, you know, if you've always used Ubuntu and you haven't played with Fedora, but like if you know how to make Fedora work well,

which does not take very much these days. And there's just so much more to be excited about every release and you get more releases more often. It's tricky, right? Because what Fedora has done is they've shipped the right upstream first and then they have put together

a really good system to manage all of it in a really clean modern design for a Linux system. And they, you know, the canonicals approach is much more direct. It's about creating that Ubuntu desktop experience. And they think about things like snaps and that it's just a different, it's a different set of goals. And the problem is, and it's just a different set of goals. And the problem is that I think it's just more noticeable when they take their foot off the gas. I don't know. I'm looking forward to 2204.

And with this bug fix for this Ubuntu Pro thing where you can say, don't remind me, and then it doesn't bother you anymore, that's a nice solution. And you can still enable it. If you say, don't remind me, and then decide to change your mind, you can go into the software and sources app and still turn it back on.

It's available in there. You know, the recent news around System76's scheduler stuff, I think that also maybe because System76 has been, you know, has been stepping up their focus on their own desktop efforts and are not distracted. Well, distracted is a strong word here. But, you know, do not have a server side to really dive into. That also makes, I think, adds a contrast. That's such a great point, because that is definitely putting pressure on this, because, you know, you can disagree with the direction they're taking Cosmic,

but it's... They're doing something. Yeah, it's a bold pushing forward, especially with the scheduler, too. And you see that, too. Like, I think Manjaro's really good about it. They have a very good, strong brand there. Fedora again, Fedora I think does a great job of having a very strong experience and not having to really make something that deviates very much from upstream.

Like these, they all have a spot there and where Ubuntu is carved out for themselves. It just, you can really feel it when they, when they let off. But I am heartened, I guess, by seeing like signs that they seem to recognize it to some degree and they want to address it. I want to believe that after the Steam Deck was announced, they had a conversation internal that said, so why didn't they go with Ubuntu? Why didn't they use Ubuntu Core on this thing? I hope so. Wouldn't that, I mean, isn't that the canonical dream?

Like a device like the Deck using Ubuntu Core, shipping everything as a snap, updating Steam as a snap, all of that. Doesn't it seem perfect? Yeah, maybe that would work really well. Yeah. And that's not what they're doing at all. They're going with Arch. They're doing it all themselves,

their own repos. They went the most 180. Arch and Plasma, right? Yeah. I mean, yeah. So what's that about? I hope they had a conversation around that. But I'd like to know your thoughts out there maybe you haven't noticed this

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We got some great feedback this week as always. So please continue sending those in, linuxunplugged.com slash contact. Micah says, first, I want to tell every Jupyter Broadcasting listener out there something. If you ever have a chance to go to a JB meetup, do yourself a favor and go. I drove up from Portland for the meetup last Sunday, and it was a blast. up from Portland for the meetup last Sunday and it was a blast. The JB crew is a warm and welcoming bunch and it was great to spend the day with a group of fellow Linux enthusiasts. It was like being with old friends that you've never met before. I can't wait for the next one. I completely agree with that. It's like meeting old friends that you didn't know. It's a weird thing because

I mean, you're human. So you've got about five minutes of like, Hey, hi, my name is so-and-so. Oh yeah. Okay. How do you do? What do you do? The initial social anxiety that we all have. If you can survive that five minutes after that, it's like you've been hanging out with these people for 20 years. And it was such a great group of people that afterwards, Wes and I were talking to each other. Like, it's pretty rad that a group of people that awesome live in the Pacific Northwest. We were like, yay, go Pacific Northwest.

No kidding. I mean, they're all over wherever we have an audience. Yeah, for sure, yeah. That some of the awesome audience is around us, wow. But I would totally hang out with that same group of people again, and I hope we will. Also, just kind of incredible is uh listener jose made the trip out here you may recall jose also made the trip to denver and he won a raspberry pie that linode

gave away jose is visually impaired and lives in puerto rico and made the trip out to seattle never been to seattle before but came out for us. It's just a highlight. It's wild. It was a highlight. It really was. And it's inspiring, too. And he's a developer by day, so we can sit down there and just talk shop, and it's so much fun. And he's got the perspective of doing it from Puerto Rico, which is fascinating.

And the whole crew is just great to talk to. Everybody was in conversation. There was nobody left out. Nobody was in the corner being socially awkward. Everybody clicked. There was food and cookies for plenty. I still have food and cookies here.

So I want to do another one in a few months. Of course, I want to do them on the road too so we can spread these out. And one day, I want to fly around the world and do these,

but that's more of a time and budget thing. We'll get there. We'll get there. But I could see doing one in the late spring or something. I don't know. I got to get my juke stuff figured out.

Once I get lady jukes figured out and I know what I'm doing with that, then I can start planning the rest of my life. That old hierarchy of needs. So you're still working on shelter. You know, if you do a string of meetups during the winter

as a regular thing, you wouldn't have these rap problems, Chris. I just keep moving and they can never find their way in. Although, you know, I'll end up just going somewhere else that has rats. These damn things. They're everywhere. Or you'll find exciting new pests from other regions.

So I know we got some Noppix adventures that we were, we got a lot of Noppix adventures, but I know there was at least one we wanted to talk about on there. We got a lot of them and we've been talking about them, which is really great. But we got one from Tristan that I thought would be a really fun story to tell. For most of the time my kids were growing up, I had a semi-profitable side hustle repairing Windows systems. I wound up doing it often enough to have a Nopics terminal server I could Pixie boot. it often enough to have a Nopix terminal server I could pixie boot. My daughters would frequently use the Nopix pixie boot option to bypass the network printer restrictions on their school

laptops so they could print their assignments out at my house. As many times as those speedy live sessions saved my bacon, I was asked to meet with her principal because my daughter had been selling live Nopix USB bootsticks to classmates who are interested in bypassing the school-issued laptop restrictions for less academic and savory purposes. Wow. The lesson? If you find yourself finding backdoors into systems when kids are around, be aware. They absorb everything, they solve problems quickly, and they don't always wrestle with the moral implications. Good advice.

That's a good little victory for a kid, too, when you figure out a bypass like that. and they don't always wrestle with the moral implications. Good advice. That's a good little victory for a kid, too, when you figure out a bypass like that. That's not even a thing we got into with the Nopic stuff, but it was also great for all kinds of stuff like that. A Windows system that was totally locked down, but the USB ports were there, and you'd just plug in and just completely bypass it. Yeah, a lot of people back then would forget to lock down the bootloader

or the BIOS. Yeah. Oh, brings back of people back then would forget to lock down the bootloader or the BIOS. Yeah. Oh, brings back the memories, the member berries. Okay, all right, we have an email from Justin. Yeah, Justin writes in, It was fun to hear you guys talk about Nopics and the live CD. A little after the turn of the century, I was working at Best Buy's tech bench, which changed to the Geek Squad.

And we had Nopix disks laying around when you ultimately had to ruin Windows install and needed to rescue data for the customer. Knoppix was an invaluable tool that saved countless people's family photos and documents. Yeah, that's a great point right there. I think it was one of the earlier times where you had access to that amazing recovery environment. Yeah, and the fact that you could boot up in Linux, mount the Windows partition,

and then use the network or another removable disk to save the data. Especially compared to having to boot into a Windows installer recovery environment, which is so limited in comparison. It's just no good. No good at all. It also made me think a little higher of Best Buy repair people. I don't know. Maybe it's just me and I'm fixing my own stuff at home, but I never really knew what they did behind that desk,

and now I know a little bit more. Well, they have to deal with the public, so you got to respect them for that at least. Yeah, there's that. They have to deal with, and people are not happy when their machines break, and they probably often- Especially when they broke them.

If they buy them from Best Buy, they probably come in there expecting Best Buy to fix them for free, too. So I could see them being just little turds about that. So they probably have to deal with a lot. So mad respect, actually, to them. And the fact that, you know... It's like helping your family, but you don't love these strangers.

There's probably a few bad ones. It's not the whole batch. Axel Roden from Sweden as well. He said, I know a live USB stick can save a PC, but has it ever saved your phone? A couple of years ago, my dad lost his phone in my parents' house and it was impossible to find. For some reason, the find my Android alarm didn't work, but I could see that it was connected to the Wi-Fi somewhere. The battery was draining and time was ticking. Turns out you can measure the Wi-Fi signal strength

to other devices in Kismet. Now, this is Brent speaking. I've never used Kismet. Has one of you guys used Kismet? I don't know if I've used it specifically, but I've used a tool similar to Kismet, and it is really amazing what's going on in the wireless spectrum when you start looking at it.

Have you ever looked at any of these Wi-Fi analyzer tools? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Wi-Fi analyzer is a classic app. I think I have used Kismet now and again, but it's been a few years since I had the whole, you know, Aircrack, the whole suite of tools for playing around with this stuff. Oh, yeah. Back in the day, I definitely had like a specific wireless card that I could put into. I think they called it promiscuous mode, but I can't remember.

It was some mode you put it into. Promiscuous card. Yeah, you were already in that mode, but separate story. Hey-o, that's true. But I remember getting like a specific card and it worked with very specific software and you could do all kinds of things back then. I mean, Wi-Fi is in a much better shape than it was a decade ago. Sounds like at least according to this page, Kismet now works to some degree under WSL.

So how about that? That's just great. So I actually said it was actually too hard for me to install at the time, which it sounds like these days is much easier. He continues, so I booted up a Kali Linux USB stick and walk around with my laptop until the signal was at its strongest. Turns out the phone was directly below me in the basement. I finally found it laying on a sponge. That is so great. What a great way to find your phone.

Yeah. That's a USB little like that. That's what I was saying last week, too. It's like, just keep a few of these with you at all times. You never know what problems you can solve. And he did it without a tile tracker thing or whatever you know like look at him go air snort was the app yeah diddle diddle and uh gerald's got it oh yeah air snort and air snort ng eventually wow you gotta have an ng oh great well that really was uh those those were all hitting the memories linux unplugged. slash contact if you've got something you want to mention,

an idea for the show, or a response to something we talked about. A few things to tell you about here in the housekeeping section. First of all, thank you to our members. We do only have one sponsor right now, and so the members are keeping us going. Like, it's literally that. So thank you to our members unpluggedcore.com and if you want to support the entire network get all of the shows ad free you can go to jupiter.party but we do also have that live version that's actually what makes it in the

jupiter.party feed that's where you get to hear Wes cursing and it happens you know talking about food I don't know random stuff really we just have two shows we actually I mean geeks. We talk about geeky stuff. That's what happens every single time. You get all that when you become a member. So that's at unpluggedcore.com or the whole network at jupiter.party. Also, I want to tell you about our Matrix community. It's growing. And one of the things that people say about Telegram is it's nice for your phone, but it's just one thread. So there's all kinds of conversations going on. Well, that's awesome. And a lot of our hosts pop in there throughout the week at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash telegram. Our matrix community, that's been separated out into topics and shows. And so things stay on topic and in the individual rooms. And

it's pretty great. It's where we also have our JB cryptocurrency chat going on where we have rational, reasonable conversations. And Wes is always trying to sell his NFTs. I was going to say, at least until Chris shows up. Zing, dude, zing. So that's at LinuxUnplugged.com slash Matrix for information about that. Our mumble room for information about that is at LinuxUnplugged.com slash mumble. And they were in there this Sunday chatting before we even got started.

So reliable. And we loved it. That's great. You know, it's like a slice of the experience of the meetup thing because you get like-minded folks who are informed about this stuff and want to learn. New folks, regulars, a great mix. So that's pretty nice.

So details for our mumble, linuxunplugged.com slash mumble. Love to have you there. Now we do have a very special pick. We wanted to work it into the show this week because it's important, but it didn't fit with the overall theme. So we're making a pick out of it. I'm just being honest with you. Slackware 15.0 officially released this week.

It ships with Linux 5.15, which is the LTS kernel. Probably pretty appropriate. And I got to say, their release page is really a work of art. It is a time capsule in of itself. It's worth looking at just for that. I love that it starts with breaking news. Seneca, Minnesota. Good for them. And it's, you know, this release is also associated with some losses. People close to the project from the last couple of years. And it made me really appreciate the fact that Patrick is still around.

Yeah. Slackware is still around because some OGs in that project were lost recently. And that's going to be a thing that happens more and more as part of our community ages a bit. And I'm grateful that we still are getting releases of Slackware after all these years. I mean, this one looks like a good one, too. Like, there's some modern stuff in here. They brought in Rust and Python 3. There's Pipewire and Wayland support. Did you say Rust?

I sure did. Yeah, and it looks like you can get 5.16 if you want to go for it and get like really the latest stuff. And Sendmail has been moved and the way has been made for Postfix. That's a big transition. About time, I'd say.

We joke, but actually we have a lot of respect for Slackware Patrick and the entire project and we appreciate that really so go check it out we'll have a link in the show notes but we do have one more thing to get into this came up in the mumble room before we started it's something that Grubb's been capable of for a long time I didn't know about it and I gotta acknowledge that

because you know if I had told if I did know about it. And I got to, I got to acknowledge that because, you know, if I had, if I had told, if I did know about it, I would have told you guys immediately. But this week, we're going to link you to something that's going to take your grub bootloader to the next level. You can really crank it to 11 with grub tunes. And we have a website that Wes has found that lets you test out the tunes that will play when Grub loads. Give us an example there, Wes. I mean, how amazing is that, right? Your computer boots up and right before the Grub menu pops up on your screen, right through the PC speaker. Like, who doesn't want that blasting in their PC speaker? Now, we should note that this is all early boot time. Grub's not going to really work multi-threaded here,

so you do have to wait for the whole tune to play before booting continues. So maybe choose the short one. Yeah, like just a coin or something like that. I mean, and keep in mind, it is going to play through your PC speaker. So that's also something. See, that's perfect, right? So this website that we're linking to, it lets you test these out before you actually commit them?

Yeah, GrubInitTuneTester, because it's basically, let's see, the format is tempo, and then you have a series of frequency and duration. So you're actually specifying what frequency the speaker to play and then for how long. So it's a little unintuitive. You might want to be able to test this faster

than having to reboot or use a VM. Hey, we got a newbie. We got newbies in the chat room. You know, we do this show live on Sundays now. We start at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. And it's a lot of fun to have you guys in the mumble room, even if you're just in the quiet listening or in the chat room. It gives us like a special kind of energy. You know, it gets us going.

It's exciting. And you also get to help us title the show. And you get a lot more show as well. So we do that at JBLive.tv on a Sunday. And of course we always appreciate you just downloading and listening. Maybe you've always just got it via the podcast and that's what works for you. Huh? Well, you're about 99% of the audience, maybe even 99.8. So we understand and we appreciate you too. Uh, in fact, if I could add one more podcast, I mean, there's a whole bunch of good shows at jupiterbroadcasting.com.

Yeah, how are you going to pick just one? In fact, you know, like Coder Radio and Self Hosted, I think they are do not misses. But if, you know, speaking specifically to the Linux audience, you got to go get Linux Action News. Nice and tight, just what you need to know, broken down in a way that's easily to understand.

Gets you right through it without the hype. LinuxActionNews.com. It's like a whole other aspect of the show. We filter the fluff so you don't have to. We looked back at Linux Action Show and thought, let's take the news segment and just really hone that in and just give you the stuff that matters. And so you can get that at Linux Action News.

Go get that. Otherwise, we just appreciate you joining us. Show comes out now late Sundays, Pacific time, early Mondays for most of the world. Who can keep track? Just subscribe. There's like an automated feed. That's what I would do. Yeah.

Don't let the machine handle it. And don't forget, go get a new podcast app, newpodcastapps.com, and then send us a boost. We're watching your boostograms, the highlight of our day when one of those comes in. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, go check out newpodcastapps.com. There's a whole new index out there. Of course, you can also subscribe directly at linuxunplugged.com.

That's where we have all the feeds. Or just download the MP3 and play it with VLC like I do sometimes, you animal. Thanks so much for joining us see you next week All right, jbtitles.com. Let's go pick our title and vote this thing. We got to give it a good name. You know, I wanted to mention the absolute highlight of my week, change my day sometimes is when one of these boosts comes in.

And they're often just like, you know, just a small amount of sats. But to get the live messages and to know the episode that people are listening to at the time, it's like, it's information I never knew I wanted something about the real time nature of these coming in with the show name on there and, and the little noise that helipad makes when they come in, it's a delight. And what I think for these, for these kinds of value for value payments to really work, we need to be able to embed a button on the website. Developers need to be able to have a button like in their about page, like a link that you click. Yeah, you want it low.

Low friction. Yeah, because I think we could take this beyond just podcasts, but it needs to be outside just the podcast apps. And a little bit like sending a message. I just, I thanked a developer for building basically a Python bot. And I sent him some Litecoin. he didn't you know when you just

send somebody Litecoin you don't know who it's from just some coins that show up yeah so then I had to like track down his contact page and I was like hey just so you know I sent this in just because I really appreciate you working hard on this and like it just would be so nice if it was just one button and it just does it all and puts a message in there and sends it

and they get it in real time. It's the greatest thing. It's the future. It's the way of the future. I have a question, a follow up question for you, Chris. Sure. What would it take for you to be interested in installing Ubuntu on your laptop? Hmm.

Well, probably the latest GNOME stack. And that includes like the latest GTK4 and and all of that or you know have them go wild with a plasma i mean that i mean obviously i would immediately try that without question i agree but i think uh just really something something like that something that probably address they could somehow address software availability a little bit more than just snaps and app packages, they probably need to redo the software center too. Like there's a few things in there. I'd love to have ButterFS support in the installer.

I mean, it's not mandatory. And you know, ZFS for my data storage is fine. What about you? Am I missing anything you can think of? I do like trying out the ZFS support in the installer from time to time. I'm curious to see what happens with like some of their new Flutter work. That's not enough to like keep me on a desktop necessarily, not yet.

That's something we didn't touch on in the show, so I'm glad you brought this up. There are rumors of a Flutter desktop one day from Canonical. That's one of the rumors out there right now. And that's something else I would immediately try with alpha labels or whatever. I would immediately try that. So it's just pushing the envelope forward a little bit,

bringing something that, you know, because one message that we've heard from a couple of developers now, and it really, I think, came clear in the Lutris developer interview that we did, is there was a period of time in desktop Linux where Ubuntu was setting the pace. And so if Canonical built an app in a stack, then other people used that stack.

And it wasn't universally true. I'm not trying to imply like that would never happen. But we've heard it from several different developers. And I think the Lutris one was the most clear about it. Like they were taking Canonical's lead. And so then when Canonical stopped leading, they don't really know what to go to or where to go to next and so i could see that being true for some developers i don't think it's as necessary anymore i think i actually i really think the whole gnome gtk flat pack stack is

really kind of starting to come together so it may be a maybe less and less of an issue that kind of thing going forward but it really was it was something that resonated with me is that there was a time where that was really true. And if they were going to do something like that with a Flutter desktop, or they maybe ever tried like an experimental version where they basically made an official Kubuntu version. Oh yeah.

Cause it's not, cause you can't, it's for some reason just using Kubuntu doesn't do it. Kubuntu is great. We've got it right here next to me. It's running on the OBS machine. Totally been a rock. But it's also something

about the underlying system. And maybe it's the fact that it's Debian. I also am not particularly drawn to Debian, even though I think it's a great

distribution. I've used it on servers. We use it. I think it's totally viable. I think I'm just, I want to be done with

apt. That's part of it. That could be part of it. Yeah. Not that it's, I mean, it works fine. It works fine. I just.

Feeling a little old? Yeah. Yeah. I wonder, this is a personal observation, but I wonder if there's something to be said for the lack of in-person canonical sprints. I know they were doing those very often and in many parts of the world for their team. And for obvious reasons, those have haven't happened in the last, I don't know, couple of years. I wonder if there's a correlation there to their innovation internally versus those kind of in-person sprints.

There's got to be something to that, right? I'll blame that. I mean, I don't think so, but I'll blame that. I like that. It at least doesn't help. I mean, if you could blame it on COVID, that's the best way to go, I think. Well, it's just, you know, I just came from a trip to the studio, and how much did we get done while I was there versus, you know, our typical pace with being from a distance.

That's true. I mean, it was 80% remodels, but still. That's true. And, you know, I've been to a couple of those sprints, and they really do just get a lot done. They all sit down in these different rooms and yeah, there might be something. Maybe you are onto something,

Brent. It's not one singular thing, but maybe that's a contributor.