LINUX Unplugged - 454: Double Distro Details

Episode Date: April 18, 2022

Has Fedora pulled ahead of Ubuntu? We take a look at the new Fedora 36 and Ubuntu 22.04 releases. Special Guest: Alex Kretzschmar.

A happy Easter, gentlemen. Did you get yourselves anything for Easter? Yeah, I found a few eggs just outside the studio door. I assume you put those there for me, right? Well, they were for raccoons. But I'm just hoping that Alex set out a little treasure hunt for Brent. How often is Brent down in the States for Easter? I hope maybe an egg hunt happened.

What happened this morning? Tell us, guys. How did you celebrate? Missed opportunity. Yeah, we didn't do anything. We didn't do anything about it. But what did happen two days ago was a massive, I mean, massive box of chocolates showed up at Alex's place here. And he's been trying not to get into it ever since.

Oh, man. Yeah, care package from England. Proper chocolate. Did anybody warn them that you just spent a week eating the croissants from the meetup? Like, this is not what you need right now. I literally did, man. Yeah, care package from England. Proper chocolate. Did anybody warn them that you just spent a week eating the croissants from the meetup? Like, this is not what you need right now. I literally did, yeah. Yeah, I bet Brent's been cooking good, though. So you're probably making it up on the other end, because he's a pretty lean cook in terms of caloric intake.

Yeah, I lost 20 pounds in the month before the meetup, and I've gained about half of that back since the meetup. That's how you know it's a good meetup. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. My name is Brent. And my name is Alex. Hello, gentlemen. Glad to have you all here today because it is indeed a talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. My name is Brent. And my name is Alex. Hello, gentlemen. Glad to have you all here today because it is indeed a big show. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and Fedora 36 are both landing soon, perhaps the day you're listening to this or near. They both feature GNOME 42 and lots of great new ideas baked in. So we're going to take a look at both of them and share our thoughts. And then we're going to round out the show with some great boosts, our picks, and all the stuff that we love to do.

But, you know, before we go any further, let's check the board. Let's bring in the Mumble Room. Time-appropriate greetings, Virtual Lug. Good evening. Hey, Brent. Hey, Chris. Nice to have you. Hello, hello.

Hello, guys. Hello, hello. You know, I want to say right here towards the top of the show that you are always welcome to join our Mumble Room, even if you don't want to participate necessarily. I know that sounds weird, but I mention it because Mumble's free software, so it has kind of a nice advantage there. And I want to encourage that adoption because I think it's nice to have decentralized free software voice communication tools. It uses high quality Opus audio. Also free software.

And you're getting a mix directly from our mixer here in the studio. And Mumble has super low latency. So it's just a great way to get a high quality audio feed using free software. And you can load it on your phone. We usually get the stream started around noon Pacific time, which is what, 3 p.m. on the New York side. And around the world, you can do the math there. But we'd love to have you join us live over at JBLive.tv if you want to watch it. Or you can use Mumble. Like we've got a handful of folks in the quiet listening right now just getting the

lowest latency audio stream. In fact, it is possible they are getting a lower latency audio feed of my voice right now than Alex and Brent are. I mean, Mumble's really impressive. And it's great because we can just run it on our own infrastructure. Or Noah's. It actually might be on Noah's server still. Either way, we'd love to have you there or join us live on a Sunday. So let's get into the show. Let's talk about Fedora 36 first,

because I think a lot of what we're going to touch on is probably in its more upstream form in Fedora. So I think it kind of makes sense from a conversational standpoint. We've all kind of been taking a look at it for a little while. So there's a lot to unpack in both of these releases. So we're going to try to break it up to what's relevant to each one. And Fedora 36, while outwardly, I'd say the headline feature for desktop users is GNOME 42, it seems like when you look at some of the other things like Wayland support with NVIDIA, Podman 4.0 under the hood, it kind of feels like 36 is going to have some really kind of changes that will improve the Fedora workstation and server experience for a long time.

will improve the Fedora workstation and server experience for a long time. Fedora is making a shift here with Podman and with NVIDIA and Wayland support. I think this is laying the groundwork for something, but we'll get into that in a little bit. Because I'm curious, Wes, I asked you not to tell me, you've been running them both, Ubuntu 22.04 and Fedora 36, and I'm curious which one you've chosen to run here on the show today. I know I said pick the one you like the most and wait till the show starts.

So which one did you choose? Well, let's just say that SE Linux would like you to know that Gnome Shell is trying to access its icon cache. I am taking that to mean Fedora 36. Yes, that's right. So you like the 36 desktop? I do. You know, it's very snappy.

And especially, I've been mostly using it here on this ThinkPad. So for the laptop use case, I kind of, I like the stock GNOME experience, you know, especially with that new dark mode support. Like, it doesn't take much to get this into a state that I'm happy with using it. It all works. And then I've been really impressed with the, the Pipewire setup on Fedora is getting. Ubuntu has made some advances there too, which is also good to see.

But, you know, I was able to download Reaper, started up, it figured out that it could talk jack back to Pipewire without me having to do anything. And then the whole system worked great with the new headphones I bought without having to futz with it as well. So it's kind of, you know, I'm living the pro audio when I want it

and it just works side on the other hand, which that's hard to turn down. Wow. Yeah. You're getting both. And have you done like, uh, have you done like audio playback with the headphones and they've stayed connected when you stop the music and then restart the music and stuff like that? No problem there. It's nice to see it get into that point. That is nice. It's nice to know you can go out and get yourself a pair of modern Bluetooth headphones and you got a good shot of them working with your Linux desktop. Uh, I'll, I'll save my thoughts, but I'm curious if Alex or Brent, if either of you got any much time with the desktop side of Fedora 36? Well, we actually decided to kind of do it jointly because as it turns out, Alex had a laptop here buried in his little closet over there.

That's fairly modern, a T480, I think it was, Alex? Yeah, Red Hat provided me a ThinkPad for work. And I've been running Fedora 30, I think three was the first one I put on there. I've upgraded it now from 33 to 34. It was on 35 when we started last night. So we thought we'd upgrade to some beta software and what's the worst that could happen? And actually the upgrade to 36 was completely uneventful.

I think boring in this case is probably a good thing. What was interesting was we were actually connected to my Thunderbolt dock as we did it, which was a CalDigit one, which is typically only a Mac-compatible dock. But my Thunderbolt monitor was picked up straight away, no problems whatsoever. Ethernet just worked. All the USB devices worked perfectly. And throughout the entire upgrade both displays and i'm talking about the internal laptop display and the thunderbolt display were completely

flicker free remember that being added a while ago all the way through the upgrade process everything was just completely smooth as far as the visual aspect was concerned there was a nice progress bar and i've got nothing really bad to say about the process. It just, it just worked. I mean, it upgraded what, 1700 packages or so? 1756, I think, if I remember. Yeah. A couple of gigs worth of updates and yeah, just, just worked. You know, you did, Alex, mention the monitors. We ran into a strange situation. I'm not sure if it's the monitor itself or if it's this hub you're using, but one of your monitors, which I'm sure you'll fill in the details, ended up with a refresh rate that was really odd.

Oh yeah, yeah. So I've got a 4K USB-C monitor, which I directly connected to the ThinkPad using the single USB-C cable provided with the monitor, which is a Dell 2723QE, I think. And for some reason, when we had 100% scaling turned on, we got 60 hertz, no problem. If we went to 200% scaling, which is about where I like my 4K monitor, it dropped to only 30 hertz, and that's painful. Actually, 29.98, I believe it was. Yeah, I've seen that. It's nice that it can do it. It is even better now than ever. And I really feel like there's pretty much zero Wayland penalty that I've run into so far, especially with the 36 release. And 42 is the best release of GNOME from the project ever, including even the very later versions of GNOME 2. In my opinion, obviously, this is the most refined, most expressed version of what the GNOME vision is that we have ever seen. And if you don't like GNOME 42, you're just never going to like GNOME.

Which is okay. And if there's elements of GNOME you've liked in the past and you haven't checked in in a bit, I think it's going to blow your freaking socks off. They have really nailed the light mode, dark mode stuff. It is significantly better than just a hacked theme to do dark mode. It really is. Yeah. It feels like you get on some of those other platforms. And they've made improvements to the default theme that just look great anyways, that just make it look like a polished professional operating system. And I even like it in the light mode now. It's just great. So this is a strong version of GNOME that really realizes the whole 4D transition because this is where you really see the Libid WADA and the GTK4 stuff really land. You got the new GNOME terminal called Console, right, I think, and the new text editor that's replacing GEDIT just called Text or Text Editor, something like that.

But they're both pretty good apps out of the gate. You know, we used to have this problem on the GNOME side where they would reboot an app, and you would then wait for three releases before it had the functionality that the previous application had that has not been my experience with the recent reboots of these applications and they look like really nice modern applications that are at home on the gnome desktop the other thing that's really i think palatable for those of us that pay attention

to just the way your screen draws and stuff like that with With GTK4 in here, with the Vulkan backend for GTK4 stuff, with a number of performance-focused tweaks that they have laid into all of GNOME 42, with some of the improved tooling, some of the leaner, meaner apps that are in this thing, like the new screenshot app, like the new terminal app, like the new text editor app, like the improvements to files, like the list goes on and on, you guys.

It really all comes together for the smoothest desktop and on, you guys. It really all comes together for the smoothest desktop experience on GNOME ever. And those are even realized like on the Raspberry Pi. I can even tell an improvement on the Raspberry Pi. Oh, you put this thing on the Pi?

Yeah, yeah. And it's great. It's really something special. And to be fair, Tumbleweed got it first. I already had Tumbleweed on the Pi, so I was good to go. It was great.

Like we thought Fedora 36 and Ubuntu would get there first, but Tumbleweed did. Tell them this hurts. I already had Tumbleweed on the pie, so I was good to go. It was great. Like, we thought Fedora 36 and Ubuntu would get there first, but Tumbleweed did. The lizards. I know. They're always hacking away at that kind of stuff. I think this is

such a great release of GNOME that it's, I think, it's going to be really hard for the team to now kind of eclipse

what this all accumulates to. And one of the things I love about Fedora 36 is you get the real stock upstream experience. Now, we'll talk about Ubuntu's take on that in a minute, but that's one of the nice things about Fedora 36 is you get to see sort of the project's vision there. The new Snapshot app is really nice. I like to take little screenshots and send them to Wes all the time,

so it makes that real quick. Yeah, it's true. It feels really just native to the system, you know? Yeah. That's nice. I like to take little screenshots and send them to Wes all the time. So it makes that real quick. Yeah, it's true. It feels really just native to the system, you know? Yeah. That's nice. The other thing that was different for this release cycle than like the last two or three Fedora release cycles was how we should probably clarify too.

It hasn't quite actually been released. We're getting here a little early because, you know, schedules. That's what we like because it's scheduled to land towards the end of April. As soon as the week, this comes out is maybe as late as the end of April, 2204 is likely going to hit its target,

which will be this week. But this is kind of where I was going. This beta of Fedora 36 has been the most solid beta experience I've ever had in Fedora. Like I have just about had every beta experience blow up in my face once, which, that's the name of the game. Yeah, it's not a bad thing. It's just part of the trying this out while it all gets assembled. And I'm just, you know, I'm just riding that horse, and I don't really count that against them in the review

because that's the beta process. That's what it's for. It did not happen in this 36 release cycle. It did not blow up on me once. It just, I did my daily updates. I like to do it daily. You know, when I had new stuff, I installed it. Every time I rebooted the system or whatever, it always came back up. And I think what's happened here is on Fedora especially,

I've migrated to installing most of my user applications via Flathub and Flatpak. Yeah, me too. So everything's kind of isolated from the system. All of my user applications via Flathub and Flatpak. Yeah, me too. So everything's kind of isolated from the system. All of my work communication apps, I use, I think my browsers are installed from the repo. Of course, I'm using the desktop environment from the repo. I mean, some of that stuff, right? But all my chat apps, all the tools I use for work. All the weird proprietary stuff.

Yeah, that's all Flatpak now. And so you take that and you combine it with just a smooth beta that isn't doing anything too crazy outside the desktop space. And it made for a really nice beta experience. And I really think out of the gate, it's going to be a solid release. I'm just going to go right to it. Like I was thinking with the last release, it was so rough. I was going to wait like six months. But yeah, no, I've no, I've been using this as my primary OS on the ThinkPad since we talked about GNOME 42 a couple episodes ago. And I've had the same experience. Just rock solid.

I think I'll keep using it. The one thing I might want to adjust is I'm still not used to these offline updates. You know, like they get applied almost Windows style. Here I was playing with 2204, rebooting a bunch, accidentally choose Fedora, and then I'm waiting for updates. You mentioned how bumpiness is a fairly standard thing about running beta software. My experience has largely echoed yours this time with 36. It's been very smooth sailing, no driver issues, no messing about with, God, god you remember xorg stuff like i had two external displays just working out the box straight away you know no real issues the one thing i did have

was in the mirrors for some reason they seemed to be a little bit behind and my updates with dnf were looking for packages that didn't exist in quite a lot of the mirrors, like the 404s that came through, they were quite extensive. And so that led me to dig into the mirror process for Fedora a little bit. And it turns out that you can sync as often as every 10 minutes if you're a Fedora repo manager or, you know, like a mirror, but there's no, or seemingly anyway, there's no documented thing that says you must sync at least once a day or something a mirror. But there's no, or seemingly anyway, there's no documented thing that says you must sync at least once a day or something like that. And it's all done through sort of rsync,

which I thought was interesting. I suppose not too surprising, but I've never really thought about that. And of course, that's going to be distro to distro as well. The individual admin who's configuring those system D timers, perhaps. Yeah. And with, you know, depending on the mirror you pick, I guess it's sort of random what they decided to do. I think it's worth noting that it looks like Fedora 37 Plus.

That's going to be interesting. First of all, they're switching to a newer version of RPM just for better security. We'll cover this as it comes up. They're also planning to drop support for legacy BIOS systems. So long. This is the most probably, if you could label something controversial about this, this is probably it. There's a lot of mixed opinions here about, you know, deprecating old hardware. And, of course, there's valid arguments on both sides.

If you're interested, send us a boost if you want us to cover that and we'll get to it. And then also, speaking of X.Org, 37 is considering the removal of legacy X.Org drivers as well. So it's a big transition in terms of the underlying hardware support they're essentially going to, I guess, support. And it's going to change. It's going to change the nature of the user base for Fedora. And it's going to mean there's some users that can no longer move forward. But it also means that the team will be able to focus their time, talent, and energy

on the broader user base, better security practices, you know, all of the optimizations you get when you reduce complexity. And it seems like, you know, especially these last couple of releases, Fedora's really been shining on the leaning edge kind of idea that they're going for. And so I think these kinds of things are in that spirit and I'm all about it. Linode.com slash unplugged. Go there to get $100 in 60 day credit

and you go there to support the show. Linode's how we host everything. And Linode could also be part of your multi-cloud strategy. You know, one of the things that we're really proud of is that we've used Linode in a way that feels strategically smart. We've got a lot of our user-facing stuff, well, all of our user-facing stuff up in the cloud, where we can take advantage of Linode's scaling tools, their incredible customer support, their 11 data centers around the world, their super nice UI with an API that makes it easy to integrate with our tools. Like, it's great for that. But we mix it with kind of a multi-cloud strategy where we have our own little tiny cloud here on the land and they work really well together. In fact, Gardner estimates that two-thirds of all cloud

industry customers will adopt a multi-cloud setup as a means for avoiding vendor lock-in by the end of 2024. And the reality is the largest hyperscaler cloud vendors that try to present themselves as a one-stop shop, inviting you to become wholly dependent on them and centralize all of your resources, and they'll offer everything you might ever need. But you know the problem of relying on a single cloud provider like that. It's the same problem as relying on a single commercial software vendor. You get deeply entwined, you get locked in, and you get locked in to your infrastructure. That can be dangerous. And so with pricing 30 to 50% cheaper than other major cloud providers, Linode is great for the individuals, but it's also great for businesses looking for a multi-cloud strategy. Plus they combine it with great things like object storage,

Kubernetes support, DDoS protection, VLAN, a powerful DNS manager, and of course that cloud dashboard that's easy for beginners, total noobs, and of course industry pros. So go use our $100 offer to performance test your network. Troubleshoot something, build something, learn something, maybe create a backup. There's so many great options and they have tutorials to help you get started on anything you might need and one-click application deployments. Linode.com slash unplugged. That's Linode.com slash unplugged. Well, if Fedora is the leading edge, I think it's safe to call Ubuntu the mainstream and Ubuntu 2204, which will release later this month. This is going to be a big release because, you know, all your boring friends running the LTS,

they're going to finally upgrade. This thing's going to be supported till April 2027. So whatever we're getting right now, it's going to be here to stay. We are so spoiled with these LTS releases and the community just eats these ones up. These canonical stresses this all the time. Anytime we've talked to them, the magnitude of difference is substantial.

And so we thought, let's take a look at this thing, because this is the one people are going to be considering deploying on their VPSs, on their Raspberry Pis, on their servers, on their workstations. And it matters. And we also know that the interim releases are often just building towards the climax, which is the LTS release. And so once again, we all kind of took a look at it around the horn. And I'll start with mine because mine are pretty straightforward so far. I started by, you know, it's a funny thing for me.

My LTS systems are no joke, right? The ones that I'm running Ubuntu LTS on, I have something of value on them. And so it's a serious calculation for me when I'm like, which one am I going to upgrade before it's even officially released to test it for the show? But I love you guys. So I did it. And so I picked one of, I don't know if I've, I'll acknowledge this before on the show, but I have what I call support nodes that are in orbit of LadyJupes. And these run on different servers on Linode's cloud, and they provide support services for LadyJupes, like synchronizing data, moving things around for me, copying certain backups, stuff like that. And these both run Ubuntu 20.04. Well, they did.

But I decided to give these ones an upgrade because it would be a major pain in my ass if anything happened to them. But I'm not planning a road trip right now or anything like that. So I would have time to recover them. And I have to say, I think one of the experiences that I have over and over again when I try out an Ubuntu distro is when you use the server side of Ubuntu, when you use that like in a headless environment where maybe you're SSHing in, it's elegant in certain ways where they've built tooling where you can tell the team really spent time developing something and they really built it well, and they can just kind of iterate on it after that. And that's how I felt about their do release upgrade program. It's a really handy tool that lets you upgrade before it releases out or it lets you upgrade after it releases out.

And it just does a lot of sanity checking on your distribution to try to make sure you get the best outcome possible. And where the polish is, is you can tell that the team, they put a lot of effort into collecting a bunch of information about your system and then relaying it to you in a very relatable, readable way. and then relaying it to you in a very relatable, readable way. I put a link to an upgrade warning screenshot that I got in the process of one of these, and we'll put a link to this in the show notes so you guys can check this out. And it just walks you through here where it says, you're going to have to download a total of 741 megabytes of files. This download will take about two minutes with a 40 megabit connection, because it's benchmarked my connection,

and about 19 minutes with a 5 megabit connection. it's benchmarked my connection and about 19 minutes with a five megabit connection or maybe it's just giving you examples i guess fetch and installing the upgrade can take several hours it just kind of walks you through everything in very plain understandable language and the other thing it does is it makes sure you're not going to shoot yourself in the foot like maybe you're out of disk space because you didn't realize that your overlay fs2 folder had grown to 50 gigabytes. And so your root partition is totally full. And it checks that kind of stuff before you upgrade. Or maybe, maybe you were doing this upgrade, even though you know better.

Even though you know better, you were doing this upgrade over an SSH connection that wasn't in any kind of session manager or using any kind of reliable connection like a mosh, but just raw dog SSH. Maybe you did that, even though, you know, better. I'm not sure you've ever used T-Box. It will warn you and say, hey, man, maybe you don't want to do this in an SSH connection. And, you know, don't ask me how I know, but maybe that's you. And it just kind of prevents those kinds of mistakes. And then it works the system through the upgrade. It does the reboot. And the other thing it does that's really clever is it notices that you are using a third party mirror, which Linode caches, and the package install times are bananas as a result. Like they just stream down faster than you knew app could move, probably at the maximum speed of apt, let's be honest. Probably.

And so it says, hey, I notice you're using a third-party sources.list file. I can't guarantee that they're going to have the packages. I can swap the names for you, man, but I can't guarantee they're going to have the packages. So I said, yeah, go for it. Let's see if Linode is pre-caching the release. Let's find out. So I said, yes, it modifies my sources.list from Linode to keep the Linode mirrors, but puts the jammy name in there instead of the, whatever, Focal Foss or whatever the old release was. I can't remember. Right. And sure enough, Linode had the packages already mirrored. And so my upgrade on both of these nodes was bananas fast just because I was using the

local mirrors to upgrade. And Linode had what you needed. And I only had to solve the storage issue on one box. I mean, somebody did. Not me, but maybe somebody. And it went great. Both systems came right back up. They're running just fine.

And I really have no complaints. I think it's going to, you know, I didn't need to, but I think it's going to just be great. I'll run these for a little bit. And then my thought is when the actual shipping version is out, I'll probably start upgrading my pies in Lady Jupes. And then I'll report back on the self-hosted podcast on how that goes. Oh, nice. What about you, Brent? Did you get a chance to kick the tires? I did. And I was extra interested because I actually got the chance maybe, I don't know, three weeks ago, they were doing the alpha testing week and I got my hands dirty in there and found a bunch of bugs. And it was neat to see the progression. Most of those, the ones that I filed, which was about eight of them, all had lots of action and got kind of all fixed.

And I was interested in seeing that. So I would say from that perspective, it actually went great. Upon installing, I really was curious about the new Flutter installer. And I ran into a few probably edge case bugs, as I seem to have a knack for finding. But overall, it worked quite well. And I loved the look of Ubuntu as well the desktop edition um and no complaints really i thought as an lts it seemed stable to me and really quite nice to look at um i'm not a gnome expert i would say but it feels like chris that i'm getting in just at the

right time because everybody seems to have a really nice take on it i think 42 is a great release if you haven't checked it out for a while. That's my main takeaway from the show. So if you haven't tried GNOME, it's time to try it again. Alex, did you get a chance to try out the Ubuntu side? No, I'm more in the production deployment camp with Ubuntu these days. So my file server is on Ubuntu. So I think that's running 2004 right now, and it will stay there until 2204.1 comes out. Ah, yeah, that's a good strategy. I'm debating something like that other than just, I want to talk about it on self-hosted and how the upgrade experience goes.

Yeah, I know. The life of a content creator, huh? I got to make content, you know, that's the job. But also it's like, sometimes I feel like a little bit of like, well, I could do it and then I'll do it so they don't have to. And if it blows up, I'll tell them about it. And if it doesn't blow up, they'll know it's okay. I really think Canonical has nailed the Raspberry Pi support now for a while. It's so nice.

It is such a first, it feels like such a first class server OS on the Raspberry Pi, which is such a silly thing to actually say. But hey, it's where we're at right now. I mean, when it's just now that Raspberry Pi OS is like kind of catching up, but you need this has been kind of a haven for you for saying OS for your boxes. It's been great. I like it. I mean, personally, I like it a lot more than Raspberry Pi OS.

So Fedora 36, I believe, was rocking Linux 5.17. Ubuntu 22.04 is rocking 5.15. It's both pretty modern. This one came with that 5.15 is when they introduced the Samba server in the Linux kernel. Yeah, KSMBD. You know how much I love having a Samba server built into the Linux kernel. What else could you want? Now you can finally flip it on those pies, man.

Come on, replace your Samba setup at Joops. You know, I mean, everybody says that Samsung doesn't contribute much to open source, but that speaks differently. So what was your experience, Wes Payne, with 2204? You know, I'm liking it. I think we've lamented a little bit about how much has Canonical been investing into the Ubuntu desktop experience. And although I think I do kind of prefer the more stock GNOME feel going on on the Fedora

side of things, GNOME 42 is great on Ubuntu. It's a really nice experience. And I'm almost not used, I know this will change over the lifetime of the LTS, but for right now, I'm almost not used to how close these two releases are. You know, in the past, Ubuntu had kind of been a little lagging on GNOME. And then even just across some of the packages, like, you know, you get Ruby 3.0, you get Python 3.10, which is a pretty big release in the Python community.

A bunch of stuff like that. LexD, you get QEMU 6.2, which also includes jack support for low latency audio. There's a really nice pipe wire support on Ubuntu now. It's not quite as shiny or like automated. You know, they've still got the old media session thing instead of wire plumber. So there's a few tradeoffs. But I feel like for an LTS, that's probably what I would have expected them to do with the audio subsystem.

Yes. I think that's nice mix, too, because you still got pulse going. So, you know, that's all going to work just as you might expect. But there's still pipe wire things you can plug into if you do need to go above and beyond. This really switches to NF tables as well, right? It does, yeah. Isn't that a nice thing? Another thing where Ubuntu's really kind of catching up. And we get LexD5

finally, which we talked about on LAN recently. Indeed. I was a little disappointed to see, I mean, so there is a new little bumped release of ZSYS, which is sort of the, you know, their ZFS integration in the file system into more of like the system level of the operating system, but it was mostly just a compatibility bump for the, you know, the newer version of ZFS that in the file system into more of like the system level of the operating system. But it was mostly just a compatibility bump

for the, you know, the newer version of ZFS that they're shipping. So not a ton of work there. A lot of initial upfront work and then it seems very minimal iterative, but maybe I have the wrong impression. Also there, I gave the Flutter installer a go as well. Seemed, you know, it's still early days.

It's quite minimal. Towards the end, it looks a lot like what you're used to. The time zone support seemed very early. It did auto-detect what I wanted, but I didn't see a great way besides manually type it in to change it. And although you can have it do LVM for you, there's no ZFS support. Yeah, that was interesting. I gave it a go early myself. I see where they're going with it. I think it looks fine. I'll be interested as more people get experience and exposure to that, what their take is. You can Google search. There's a build of the ISO that has the Flutter installer, if you'd like to grab that. I think it's also notable that one of the features we talked about has been pulled, and that is the switch of rebranding the LivePatch stuff to Ubuntu Pro.

That actually didn't end up in 2204. They ended up reverting back to the LivePatch branding and whatnot. Maybe they just felt, I think they actually did, I think maybe Joey had an article. Somebody had an article that, yeah, Joey has an article over at OMG Ubuntu that talks a little bit about their motivation in pulling it out. It just seems like it wasn't quite ready yet. It doesn't really change any actual functionality. LivePatch stuff is still all in there.

Right, yeah. You can still get the service if you need it, but just a little more consistent for now. Yeah, so the upgrade process on the systems I tried went smooth.

I also ran this beta nearly the entire time that it was in beta on and off in a VM, just kind of checking in on it. Not serious usage, but checking in and doing the upgrades

to see if anything breaks. Also very smooth upgrade. And I think as time has gone on, I have my take on Canonical or Ubuntu spin on the GNOME 42 desktop has softened. When we saw Fedora's take, which was basically upstream in the new Adwaita, and then we saw the Canonical Ubuntu version, I thought this branding that they're doing is starting to feel old. It's starting to feel like the way we used to do Linux. And when I see what the GNOME platform is doing

and the way they're iterating that design, and my fundamental argument always was, and I don't think I articulated it very well until just recently, if GNOME didn't want downstream projects re-theming the desktop, then the upstream theme just simply needed to be better quality. It needed to be a better theme if they wanted people to use it. Yeah. And they've done it.

That's what they've done now. And so there's a bit of a mind shift that happens when you compare these two distros side by side. And if, you know, you got some free, you got some free VM space or something, maybe give this a go at home, load up Fedora 36, load up 2204. And I think you can objectively say it's nice. They're both really nice, but I'm starting to feel like the custom brand theming is a bit akin to like OEMs loading up new laptops with their like dashboards to help your PC health and stuff like that.

It's not quite that bad. It's not like they're putting software on there that's stealing processor cycles and stuff. So I don't want people thinking like it's a bad thing necessarily, but it doesn't quite sit with me right anymore. Alex, what are your thoughts? Why do both of the major desktop distros both have to pick GNOME as their default? Why can't we have some differentiation in the space?

Why can't one be Plasma, for example, and one be GNOME and that be the differentiator rather than putting lipstick on a pig, you know? I think you don't want me to answer why. Oh, no, I do. Please. What it comes down to is, as someone who works on both Fedora Workstation and Fedora KDE, the most frustrating aspect of working with the KDE Plasma Stack is how huge it is and how discordant the life cycles of each layer of plasma is. So, for example, the frameworks has a completely independent life cycle. It's released monthly.

Then the KDE applications were to release quarterly. And then the Plasma desktop itself is released every four months. And it's out of sync of every distribution release cadence. And that makes it difficult for testing, for integration and all that stuff. Plus, because it's so big, there's a large surface area of things to manage. And differentiating on the Plasma desktop, in theory, would be great, except for it is extremely difficult to keep up with the Plasma desktop and differentiate on it in the first place. Think about how Ubuntu was originally using Unity, and it was a lot of engineering work for them to maintain that in

the first place. And when they decided to let that go and they switched to GNOME, the primary reason for doing that was because the other enterprise Linux distributions, the main enterprise Linux distributions, Red Hat and SUSE, both use GNOME. And so they could benefit from the work that was being done already with the focus of those platforms. Yeah. Tiny, that's a bit of it, isn't it? It's about retaining the developers that already have the skills. That's correct, especially because a lot of these distros have long-term support tied to them, whether it's Fedora eventually getting rolled into Red Hat or Canonical, they would have to maintain both a QT stack and a GTK stack for the lifecycle while both of them

are still around. Yeah, and we've asked Carl and the team at System76 when they launched Pop, why Gnome Shell and now building, you know, Pop Shell on top of that? Why not Plasma? And you could kind of just get to what you wanted using the Plasma tooling built and they were very honest about the answer is well the team and knows gtk tooling we know gnome shell we know this environment and that's where our developer skills are so it's potentially just one of those things where it's a network effect of of and it just means because it's been around for so long it's been the default for so long there's inherently just

more people that the market can hire that have skills in there. I don't know for sure, but that could definitely seem like a pretty reasonable component of it. Don't get me wrong, Chris. It's not that Plasma isn't possible to build out and roll out and have a good experience. Fedora KDE is a great example of this where we have it, and Kibun 2 is another one. And you can see this in OpenSUSE, where, you know, despite some people's protests, it's very clear that the KDE is the most loved experience of the offerings. But when you're trying to build a Linux desktop that you're going to commercialize and sell, having multiple desktops and not having multiple groups of people to maintain those desktops means you're splintering your effort

and it's much, much harder to get everything going. And if you think about all the work that Red Hat's doing right now to push forward the Linux desktops feature set to be competitive with Windows and Mac, think about HDR, think about the Wayland stuff, the hardware acceleration things, input stuff, touch gestures. Think about how much extra work it would be to pull that across a multitude of desktop stacks and multitude of implementations across the board. It's a lot easier for them to go wide on all these issues if they're focusing on one stack as a reference point and then leveraging that experience and expertise to build it out.

And then everyone else can essentially catch up afterwards. Would I like Red Hat, to example, have people working on both KDE and GNOME? Of course. But realistically, with the kind of stuff that they're working on and how far they're putting into it and how much investment that they're doing and how much that they're working on all many different touch points in the experience. I can't blame them for focusing on only just GNOME. I think that's well said.

Bitwarden.com slash Linux. Get started with a free trial of a team or enterprise plan at Bitwarden.com slash Linux or try it for free as an individual user, and you can support the show. Bitwarden is the easiest way for businesses and individuals to store, share, or sync sensitive data. I use it for all kinds of things like passwords, recovery keys, notes. It's fully customizable too. And in the enterprise context, you can turn certain features on or off just using enterprise policies to adapt it to your business needs. That's pretty nice.

And of course, I love the fact, and I think you will too, that Bitwarden is open source and it's trusted by millions of individuals, teams, and organizations worldwide for securing their passwords and other information. It's what Wes and I have used for a couple of years, at least I think Wes longer than I. I use it for my two-factor codes as well, having it in one place. It works so well for that kind of thing, especially on mobile. It makes having secure, complicated passwords on mobile a doable thing. And Bitwarden has introduced account switching, so it's super easy to switch between your personal and business accounts, or maybe you have a personal account and you have like an open source project you're participating in. And I think one of the things that gives me and a lot of our community confidence is that Bitwarden offers a really good self-hosted option. You can get that up and running pretty

easily or even faster using the Bitwarden cloud, which is what I decided to do. And if I ever wanted to move to the self-hosted option, I could. And the nice thing is they have a large active community on their forums and on Reddit. So, you know, I have to say a couple of years into using Bitwarden, obviously I get the idea of good password hygiene. But what I've really started to appreciate about it is how fast and straightforward it is to share passwords with somebody on a certain project. And it's really simple to say, okay, just these passwords, I'm setting these aside and I'm sharing these with you.

I think using a good password manager, and I bet you would agree with me, is one of the best things you could do online to keep your account safe. You might already know that really, but maybe someone in your life, a friend, a colleague, a family member, maybe they need to hear that and they need to know about Bitwarden. So go yourself, support the show, or send people to bitwarden.com slash Linux. It's easy to get started. You just go to bitwarden.com slash Linux. Try it for yourself, maybe try it in your business, and you'll support the show. bitwarden.com slash linux. Try it for yourself, maybe try it in your business, and you'll support the show. bitwarden.com slash linux. As always, we got some great feedback this week, but I figured since many of us have been flying

recently, I thought I would give a little insights that we received in our mailbox. Chris, you might like this one. It was directed at something you said last week. A listener wrote in and said, since you were flying with Delta, you had probably a very old in-flight entertainment equipment. Yes, the old monitors used to run Linux. The new monitor hardware runs Android. They have native GUI with X11 and like GTK, QT based GUIs. The movies are just RTSP server connections and games are launched locally. The control units like your servers and network modules are all Linux boxes. The flight tracker or map can be two different things, either a single stream channel where each monitor and overhead monitors tune in and grabs images or more advanced new hardware where it launches

native Android app and gets information using more modern protocols so chris you were mentioning how you saw some linux scroll by so i guess you were in the old camp yeah and mine were old and crappy i think local apps would have been way better because this thing like you'd touch a button and you it wouldn't even register the tap for a second so you'd always do that thing where you're like did it register and then you have to do it again. But at that time, it's like halfway through changing. Every single time.

And even though you know it, you still like it. You still do it. And the delay varies. So it was not a great experience. So I could imagine something locally, you know, using some sort of network protocol would be a lot better. You know, I was on JetBlue for part of my flight. And it was an Android tablet right there. And I saw it totally freeze up on the guy next to me who unfortunately was actually using it to watch a movie. It was

just like tapping the screen. Like, well, what do I do? So they just basically put a tablet in the back of the seat? Seemingly. Yeah. Okay. I guess that would be the way people would solve this problem. Right. But then like, are they all on wifi or are they hardwired over like the USB connection? Because that's a lot of network traffic. And if you get even half the passenger streaming video, Wi-Fi is not going to handle that well. No wonder why it locks up. I've seen some videos previously of the like computer rooms that are included on planes. Have any of you had insights into that? Have you seen videos of those before? Yeah, like full on aerial data centers. It's insane. Like how do they fit all of that power in a plane it seems like that's why we have such small seats isn't it how much fuel are they burning hauling that gear around

right and how many of us just show up with our own devices with our content already loaded on it anyways like we should probably have a protocol you want to talk about saving fuel costs and lowering prices and in saving the environment how about you just take the like 700 pounds of server hardware off the thing and we just like have a mount for my tablet? Because that would make me happy. That's all I need. It's not, I'm not asking for a lot, right? And now, as the French say, it is time for Le Boost.

We received a boost yesterday. 20,000 sats. Thank you, Silas. He writes in. Folks, any suggestions for a backend file sync method that handles a lot of small files well? Hmm. I mean, I could just go the rsync route,

but I'm wondering if we could make the case for like a ButterFS or ZFS send. Sure, yeah. If you have those capabilities on both sides and are willing to use those toolings, if there's bi-directional stuff, then that might not work so well. But if you're just trying to back things up, yeah.

Alex is moving files around the world all the time. I'm wondering what you're thinking. Yeah, ZFS send is a great shout because that works at the block level. So, you know, if you're talking about lots of small files with rsync, it would have to compute every time it loads up a checksum of the source and the destination file, compare them and make sure that

they're not different, and then sync the delta if required. If you're talking about lots and lots of small files, that can get quite expensive quite quickly in terms of time and computing power. Whereas something like ZFS, because it's working at the block level of the disk, it doesn't care that there's 10,000 files in those blocks. It cares that there's, I don't know, let's say five blocks worth of disk that have changed and it will sync those five blocks only. So you've got five transactions,

let's say instead of 10,000. So it can be a lot more efficient for that kind of thing. So that's probably the route I'd go. Alex, in one of our technical escapades here, where you show me all of the infrastructure that you have set up, which I don't even think I have a 10% grasp on yet, you were showing me that you also use RESTIC to do a little bit of file-based syncing. And I wondered what is happening on the back end there.

I'm not sure I have even 10% of a clue of what's going on in my infrastructure some days. So yeah, RESTIC is an interesting one. That works at the file level as well. It monitors things like inode time and mtime for modified time on the file level. So that's a file level based one, which wouldn't be very efficient for this particular use case. But the reason I like RESTIC in particular is because I send all my stuff to an S3 compatible backend. So on my Synology box that is in England send all my stuff to an S3 compatible backend. So on my Synology box that is in England, that's running Minio in a Docker container. And I sync all the

files from here to England using AutoRESTIC, which is a wrapper around RESTIC itself. And so I actually have two servers in England. I've got the Synology at my mom's house and at my dad's, I have a normal Linux box running ZFS. And so I like it for the separation of concern. So if something goes wrong with my ZFS backup, I'm fat fingered in my Ansible configuration and I screw something up. There are two separate channels of backup and my automation isn't going to fail on both of them, I hope, at the same time. Sounds like in some cases, the cost of moving a lot of small files might be worth it. Almost never, I would say.

Computationally, it's very expensive. In terms of disk IO, it's very expensive. So I would try and steer clear from it. Maybe you could compress those into a single archive and sync just that one archive. Lots of different ways to approach that. Gene Bean boosts in with 2,000 sats. I really appreciate y'all putting the effort

into running Synapse and promoting Matrix in general. I think it's got a lot of potential, but needs the visibility and battle testing that us home users just can't provide. After you get the colony stable, I'd love to see you dig into bridges, especially double-puppeting ones. A double-puppeting bridge? Do you know what that is?

I don't know what that is. Well, there's different classes of bridge based on how much control you can get on the different platforms, right? Because some platforms, say, let you add input as if you're another user, but some platforms don't. Yeah, I think that is kind of the game plan, is get it stable, and then once we get it stable, we want to embed it on the live page, like in a read-only mode maybe, so you don't even have to have an account. You can just see the chat on the livestream page, on the jblive.tv

page. And then once we got that figured out, I think it's bridging time. And I don't know how much bridging we're going to do, because the place where we run our IRC room, kind of anti-bridge and like the discord bridges are getting shut down and the telegram bridges always kind of look like crap to me when i see them for the most part not always but i will experiment you know i'm saying we'll take a look at it and we'll see where it goes gerald's mud nope that's not it uh boosted in with uh 10 000 sats two days ago uh he says the saved podcasting message should have its own URL, an easy one to share, and maybe a different message depending on the audience. I'm not tired of hearing about it.

And I really appreciated that because I did kind of, I got smacked down a lot and I kind of stopped talking about it. I just sort of thought, well, I'll shut up for a bit. But I appreciate that. I have decided, you know, a bit of what needs to happen is there's sometimes content that we want to share with you, me, want to tell you, and I really don't have a lot of outlets for that other than this show or another show. And so we end up stuffing stuff into the show that maybe we should talk about somewhere else. Right. And so I'm going to try creating essentially an audio version of a Jupiter newsletter. And I'm basically just going to do a really low quality, crappy podcast that nobody should listen to called officehours.hair. You go to officehours.hair to subscribe. What I'm going to do is I'm going to read some boosts that don't

make it on the air. I'm going to read emails and cover questions and feedback that come in about the network. I'm going to cover things that the network is working on. I'm going to talk a little bit about my thoughts on the podcast industry. And right now I'm kind of thinking fortnightly, but I don't know. We'll see if you like it. Officehours.hair if you want to check it out. And so some of the stuff that has ended up in the show, we'll have a new home there so we can keep the focus here on the show. And if this sounds like a crazy idea, that's not going to go anywhere. That is literally the premise I launched the show with that we're doing right now.

So it could go nowhere. It could turn into a thing. So go subscribe at officehours.hair slash subscribe. And I got an old episode that I just put in the feed because you got to have something in the feed. And I did an office hours like 200 years ago. And so that's in there, maybe a little bit less than that. And then I'm going to do another one. And I think I'm going to do them live. And when I do them, I think I'm going to do them on Tuesdays at noon where we used to do LEP.

So if you want to come in the Mumba room and give me feedback or ask me something, you know how you like to ask questions, you can come in there and ask your questions and, you know, I'll answer them. And I don't know. That's it. So that's going to be a thing I do. Thanks for the encouragement, Gerald, with your boost. Officehours.here soon.

There's already one in the feed, but you may have heard it before. I don't know. I don't know. The Computer Guy writes in with a thousand sats. Thank you. I just got accepted into college, and their email runs on outlook the it department said on their website that thunderbird which is my favorite email client was not supported furthermore they said that linux is also not officially supported i managed to get thunderbird working anyway and it looks like I'm going to be at constant war with the IT department as one of the few Linux users.

Any tips? I have been here. I have been here, and a part of me wants to say don't do it. Just don't even bother. But I'll tell you what you really got to do. Here's what you got to do. Stay the F off their radar. Don't ever let, I mean, you may have already tipped your hand too much.

Just stay off their radar as much as possible. Do everything low key. Find the holes in the system. Use them to your advantage. And just be patient because you're going to be using the infrastructure in a way that they don't expect. And so that could go sideways. And, you know, maybe consider just not doing it. But if that's already been considered and rejected, then stay off the radar.

Yeah, you know, you can do things like have a backup system if you need to, if you need to do it the official way. And then, yeah, as Chris said, be prepared to be your own support on this. It can be fun to figure out and make work and very satisfying when you do make it work. But, you know, when grades are at hand and you don't need one more complication at 3 a.m., sometimes it's nice to have a backup. And I will say, web apps, web apps might be an outlet, can't you? Yeah, I agree.

So I think web apps are a lot better now. I do think a backup's not a bad idea. It could even be a VM, possibly. Yeah, indeed. You know, this is how I started my damn career, like back in, like, I'm not even kidding, like in the year 2000. And it was legitimately like me trying to figure out how to get email off an exchange server when the entire company used Outlook, and I didn't want to run Windows. trying to figure out how to get email off an exchange server when the entire company used Outlook, and I didn't want to run Windows.

And I did all kinds of crazy things, including buying multiple editions of Zandros because it came with Crossover Office pre-licensed, and you could put an Office install CD, and it would auto-run the installer and install Outlook. And that's what they made money on, right? This has been a problem that has been in the side of Linux users for a long time.

It's way better now, though, so I think you could probably pull it off, computer guy. You just got to stay true. And like Wes said, have that backup. I also feel for the IT department here. And I don't think it's really their fault. I was in the same situation in college where, you know, being slightly contrarian, I may have tested some things, but for the IT department, like you're one person compared to, you know, how many people that are running Windows and Mac. So they just don't want to, they don't have the time that maybe they would love to have the time to help you and explore this, but they just don't have it. So I don't think it's really their fault. And so saying, you know, you might be constantly at war with

the IT department is maybe a little strong. I think maybe it's just that they just, you know, they're encouraging you to take it into your own hands, really. It's only a problem if you make it a problem, really. True, true. Tiny also has a tip, something you could try besides Thunderbird. My work has very strict policies around the M365 products and the Evolution EWS plugin works really well. It even works with OAuth.

So if they use Duo or some other form of MFA, it still works with that. That's a great tip. It's definitely worth giving Evolution a try. That was one of my go-to solutions and it still gets maintained. So that's a rarity. If you're out there with a new podcasting app,

a new podcastapps.com that support Boost, send me a Boost and give us an update on your NixOS challenge, how that is going, and on any tricks or tips you have for working in an Outlook-heavy environment. We'll just put it that way. Newpodcastapps.com. Get one that supports Boost and send it in. I found a cool tool I want to share with you guys.

I brought this one to class today. It's called RSS Hub. I guess one way to wrap your head around this tool is think of YouTube DL, but for RSS feeds from websites. And what I mean is it's an open source, simple, easily extensible RSS generator that you can pretty much throw

any kind of weird content at and it will build you an RSS feed for. Now with the caveat that it kind of has to know how to work with the data. So it has a huge wealth of websites, you know, probably more sites than something like a tool like YouTube DL even supports. I mean, hundreds and hundreds of websites. But also the tooling to create your own is just JavaScript.

And it's easily extensible. And you can also, the project is also willing to just build it for you if you give them a polite pull request. They've been known to do this. It's really simple to get running, especially if you do it inside Docker. And the way you work with it, RSS Hub, once you get it up and running is you just throw it a URL of the thing you want an RSS feed for, and it spits out the feed for you. And then you throw it in your feed reader of choice. They also work specifically with a mobile app that works together with RSS Hub. It's slick. If you're like me, and one of the ways I can sort of responsibly consume content, maybe I'm not in like a headspace where I want to be on Reddit or social media,

or I want to sit down and really analyze the news, RSS feeds are just unbeatable. And the only limitation is some content out there isn't in an RSS feed. That's what RSS Hub fixes. And of course, it's open source. The only challenge you might run into is there is a bit of a language barrier. So, you know, some things you kind of have to do the translation in your head a little bit, but it's super simple to get up and running.

Uses Redis for the database backend and takes very little resources even when you run it. So it's great. RSS Hub, go check it out. We'll have a link in the show notes. What do you think? You like it? Yeah, I can. Trying to impress you here.

I already can think of like a million uses for this thing. So we got to start playing. I'm wondering if we couldn't use it too, right like make mixed feeds and stuff like that i mean you gotta wonder there could be some potential with this tooling so i had i had to sneak it in today it doesn't really fit i suppose with the theme now that i think about it i've been trying to get these on theme that doesn't really fit it's good enough alex brent thank you guys both for joining us from raleigh i'm sure it's beautiful and wonderful there

and you've got lots of projects you'll be working on this week yeah it's always a pleasure I gotta say maybe part of the recording might be difficult because of all the birds singing in the sunshine

over here it's really really really really really nice rude well you know when the deer walk through they shut up it's hard to be angry

about anything when it's 75 and sunny oh you guys but as far as projects go we have an ever-extending list of temptations so i don't think we'll run out of projects while i'm here i love that you call them temptations yeah i see them as ways to spend money i've been uh showing off your server rack to people when they visit the studio it's one of the one of the requested items um i've gotten some feedback, too. Some people

suggest maybe we should have used metal, and they thought maybe you should have welded something from scratch, but everybody has their own opinion. Should we get into welding this week, Brent? Should we do that? Alex and I were just talking this week about maybe getting into welding. Come back. We'll weld a rack, because we're going to have the heat problem in the studio before we know it, too. So we're going to have to weld some kind of solution, obviously. It's going to have to be welded. All right.

Well, until then, why don't you join us live for a show, huh? Why don't you? We do this show every single Sunday at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern over at jblive.tv. If you are into the tech headlines, you're maybe in the industry, you want to keep apprised of what's going on in Linux and free software, make sure you grab every single episode of Linux Action News at LinuxActionNews.com. Lean, mean news, just what you need to know, none of the fluff. We're not trying to waste your time.

We know you're busy. There's probably a few things going on you should probably know about. So that's Linux Action News in a nutshell. That's my pitch for it right there. LinuxActionNews.com. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. All right.

Links to what we talked about today, including the work on Fedora 37 and future versions of Ubuntu and details about all of that, including extra deets about all of the releases, all that stuff at LinuxUnplugged.com slash 454. We have it all there for you. You'll also find links to our feedback page, our subscribe page, all that stuff. Whole catalog there. It's like a website. It's great. You can use it anytime you want. Anyways, thanks so much for tuning in this week's episode of the Unplugged program.

If you can't join us live, we're just grateful you listened. We appreciate that. And we'll see you whenever you want. All right. Go pick our title at jbtitles.com. What you can't see from here is how Brent spent the entire outro air drumming. Perfect time. It's in his blood now. Even the syncopations that Alex, you taught me that word last time I was here. Syncopations. I know. All right.

Look it up. Listen, listen, listen, listen, listen, listen. We got a title crisis here. This is a title crisis. I saw. All right. Look it up. Listen, listen, listen, listen, listen, listen. We got a title crisis here. This is a title crisis. I saw some pretty funny ones go by. Did you? Because none of them say anything about distro being reviewed or Ubuntu or Fedora. I'm out of here.

I said they were funny. I did not say they were on topic. We've got some good alliterative ones right here with double distro debate and double distro detail. I do like those. You're right. You're right. I do like those.

distro debate and double distro detail. I do like those. You're right. You're right. I do like those. Hey, I thought it might be kind of interesting to maybe itemize the tasks. What did I call them?

Temptations that Alex and I might get into. Alex has an entire, Chris, did you see this when you were here? Alex has an entire drawer of electronic to do. It's a drawer, not a list. It's a drawer full of like,

Oh, sure. Yeah. I love that. Yeah. I've got a, I've got a little crate that I store in the RV of like, oh, this is something I got to get to. All the crap that you bought and then it takes too long to get there. And you think, why did I buy this again? Or you bought it and then like something comes up and like that whatever came up took my

like my Saturday afternoon that I was going to work on that thing. And then like no other windows ever opened up again. And there's always something else to do. Speaking of windows that open up again, the skylight that we had in the bonus room last night, that was, that was a pretty good segue, wasn't it? That was a great segue. We took a, I had in this drawer, I had an Aqara Zigbee window sensor, like a little magnetic one. And so Brent and I put that on the skylight last night. What did you think of the, the pairing process with Home Assistant? Brent and I put that on the Skylark last night. What did you think of the pairing process with Home Assistant? I was like getting ready to sit down and absorb what the Home Assistant process

was going to be for this. And you were done before I even like got set up. So it was kind of amazing and really slick. From box to wall in what, eight minutes? I would say it was literally a five minute job, but it just reiterated to me like the progress we've made. If you think about Home Assistant and where it started way back when and where you are now, Alex, I would imagine things are pretty slick. We've come a long way, but Chris is still going to be running Python 2 in 10 years' time. So, you know, we can do all the progress we want. It's too soon. It's too soon. It's Rasta.