LINUX Unplugged - 469: Tough Linux Love

Episode Date: July 31, 2022

Is the Linux desktop hard to love? A long-time user experience developer argues it is, and we respond to his criticisms.

We are wading into a territory this episode where we're going to have a little tough love to share about the Linux desktop. So I thought maybe we'd actually start by acknowledging there's a lot of places where it's working really great. Google's in-house Linux is a great example of this. We recently covered on Linux Action News some changes that they're making. Lots of shops like Red Hat and many, many, many others run Linux as their daily driver. So do we. hat and many many many others run linux as their daily driver so do we so today's episode might have a little bit of tough love but if you're feeling down we'll have a link in the show notes you can read all about the inside story on google's home grown google desktop operating system this is one we got to get you to try brent is it publicly available then no that's why it'd be a really great episode oh oh yeah you want me to infiltrate. I'm all for it. Brent goes undercover.

Hello friends and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. And my name is Brent. Hello, Brent. It's just you and me this week. I almost said, and my name is Wes. That'd confuse everybody because Wes is out on assignment doing something awesome, I would assume. As always, yeah. Whenever he's not with us, he's still doing awesome stuff. Well, coming up on the show this week, is the Linux desktop hard to love? Are there just compromises that we make on a daily basis to use it? We'll talk about some of the tough spots there. We'll respond to a thought-provoking article that was recently posted this last week. And then we'll round out the show with some boosts, some picks, and a lot more. So before we go any further, I'm just going to say hello to Carl. Hey, Carl, in the virtual lug. Howdy. We've got some folks

in the quiet listening too, but we're recording this early on Thursday, not our normal Sunday time. And we decided that we would do this about 17 hours ago as we go live. So we didn't have any heads up, but I promised the kiddos that we were going to the beach this weekend and that it would be a dad doesn't work weekend so we got to rearrange everything that's a big promise that only happens a few times a year right i know they've been asking for weeks giving me the full-on dad guilt trip every sunday morning so i figured you know i'd have to give eventually. So that's what we're doing this week.

So we're here. We're doing it on a Thursday, but I still want to say a big good morning to Tailscale. You know, Tailscale is a mesh VPN protected by WireGuard's noise protocol. It's one of the best VPNs in the game. You can get set up in minutes on just about any device, mobile device, ARM device, ArchBox, Red Hat Box. Get it for free for up to 20 devices when you go to

tailscale.com we love tail scale so yeah we are on a thursday so we're a little out of sorts but we did want to remind you we have the london meetup just days away as this episode goes live keep an eye on that meetup page as the time gets closer and closer you never know what could happen brent's down there at operation center one you'll be one of the first people you'll be reporting as the time gets closer and closer. You never know what could happen. Brent's down there at Operation Center One. You'll be one of the first people. You'll be reporting on the scene remotely. Today, we check in on the London meetup to make sure it's actually still happening.

All reports are London meetup is still go. Green light. Green light. Thank you, Brent. Keep us informed and stay safe. Back to you, Chris. And the West Coast meetups are getting serious, seriously serious. I got my wife, Hadiyah, now in the West Coast crew chat room. She's chatting with people about locations.

If you are on the West Coast, check out meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting. We got a bunch of meetups coming up. And we got a chat room in there where maybe some pictures of Levi got posted. Ooh, those are worth seeing. I think we're actually considering doing one of the meetups at a dog park so people can bring doggos if they want. That is a great idea. Yeah. Not just dogs, but humans too can go, but you don't require a dog to be there. You can, you can also, okay, great, great, great. You don't require a dog to be there? Okay, great, great, great.

Levi's a community dog, you know? I don't own that dog. That dog just lives with me, and he'll hang out with whoever he wants to hang out with. You know it! I do. I was just picturing drone chasing at some recent events that we were at. A couple of years ago, we were at LinuxFest Northwest, and we were doing a big barbecue. I mean, no exaggeration. Hundreds of people were at this barbecue we were doing. Yeah, lots of brats. Yeah, lots of brats at the front of the line. And we had a couple of folks there. Jeff was probably one of them with racing drones. And Levi successfully managed to leap up in the air and pluck a drone out of the sky. And then he ran around very proud. And I had just the luck of timing.

I had the first person goggles on when he did it. So I got to see from Levi's perspective. And he had the camera pretty well placed, right? So I could see where he was going. It was hilarious. So he does make a meetup a little bit more fun. And then lastly, we're putting the word out. And then lastly, we're putting the word out. We'd like your ideas for the best used or cheap, super cheap Linux PC build. So something prebuilt could be used or something from like PC part picker or whatever that you put together. And I'm thinking like sub $300 would be great, but with a couple of requirements, it needs to be good enough for most day-to-day casual work, you know, web browsing, office work, that kind of stuff.

And ideally, it could be a computer that lasts a couple of years. So send us your PC part picker links or eBay links or whatever you might have out there. And if we get a really interesting build idea for like a really cheap usable Linux PC, I might pick one up and give it a review here on the show or build it, whatever, whatever it is. If there's a good one, if there's an interesting one that seems like it could have a practical use, I think I'd like to come up with like a, if you're looking for a $300 ish PC that to run desktop Linux, go look at this, right?

I just want something we could recommend to people that we can vouch for. So I'd love to get your ideas. You can boost them in or go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact. I'm wondering, Brent, if you have any suggestions just off the top, because you kind of can live in this area sometimes for weeks, years. Feels like my normal lifestyle. It's your comfort zone. What are you hoping to get out of it?

Like, how long will you use it for the review? Is there some other purpose that might be a long-term thing you know can you set some more boundaries for us well after we're done i'd like to give it away for somebody just use as their as their linux pc but i kind of want to be able to say hey if you're on a tight budget and you're looking for a desktop computer we recommend this here's an episode where we talked about it, that kind of thing. I'm just looking for something to just sort of, I guess, help us get an idea of what is acceptable performance at what price point when you're looking at the Linux desktop. Where is that right now? What are you getting for around $300? What can you get? Do you remember back in the day,

some of the netbooks were that recommendation? I mean, I don't think they are anymore, considering no one makes them, et cetera, et cetera. You know, for years and years, you've seen me with this computer. I used the ThinkPad X220. It's mildly portable, but that would be my temptation. You can go to eBay and find lots and lots and lots of variously configured X220s that are still, some of them, in very good shape. They were, I think, leased quite a lot to large businesses. And so there are just hordes of these things. And they're a great computer. It's one of my favorite keyboards of all time. Actually, these days, whenever I'm using a laptop, I always wish I had that keyboard. And the thing's not too bad in terms of performance. Like you can squeeze in 16 gigs of RAM in that thing.

It's not officially supported, but I've done it for years and it works perfectly fine. You're not going to get away with lots of processing power, but for doing some, you know, light browsing, you can't have 28 tabs open or a hundred like I used to, but I think a few tens of tabs, you'd be fine. The other nice thing is if you're a slight tinkerer, you can get parts for this thing. Like crazy. Some people even put like modern motherboards in some of the X220 and X230 chassis, if that's your kind of crazy thing that may run the cost up a little bit, but i think you could get some of these for as low as like 75 if you already have a hard drive to throw in it and uh ssd all the way that's an interesting idea right you get get like a 75 hundred dollar thing pad and then replace the

disc replace the ram maybe even replace the screen i don't know how far you could take that and how much time people would want to dedicate to it. Well, I will say the screen on that laptop is fairly easily replaceable, but I have an X250 beside me here, which is probably a little bit more than you're like. But these days it might be around the $300 mark, actually, that you might be able to find used. mark actually that you might be able to find used and alex and i bought a screen for this thing because i as a photographer wanted an ips and uh i think it was like a hundred dollars at the time a few years ago and and the replacement was the easiest thing i've ever done on a laptop it was like take the bezel off just kind of clip it off throw the screen in there and then put it back on and you're done i think gaming's probably obviously eliminated in this area. No, no.

There are plenty of games like Pong will play just fine. Okay, all right. Maybe Race the Sun. I'm trying to think now. I think I may have played Portal at the time on that laptop. Really? I believe, but I may be mistaken so don't don't take that 100 accurate but perhaps i i think the x 220 and there's probably other think pads

out there that the audience i think that's probably going to be the number one recommendation is a think pad and i'm not opposed to that at all if if somebody has like a specific recommendation that would be my preference i was picturing when i was talking about this either something that would be built or rebuilt or be um something that'd be like all parts and then you assemble it yourself i feel like that's the only two ways it's either going to be something like a laptop or a used desktop like one of the things because i was checking around before i before i put the links in the notes and stuff. And I saw a couple of batches of Dell Optiplex-type desktops that were like a corporate deal that they were getting rid of. And they had like 45 of them. You buy the whole lot?

No, no, no. But I thought, okay, you know, they were like 280 bucks and they had an i5 in them. And they had eight gigs of RAM and they had a spinning rust drive. But thought you know for under 300 bucks shipped that's not a bad deal so it depends on like when you're buying too if you buy at the right time when a company is in the process of offloading you can get a good deal and when they're that cheap too it's like in a business sometimes it's nice to buy a couple of extra spare parts uh you know and then you have a couple of spare rigs for either frankensteining parts out of or just full up swapping, full on swapping when you need to. The more you talk, the more questions I have for you, Chris. I take it power is not an important

thing. Not for this one. I could see doing a, you know, a power specific build, most performance for the watts kind of thing. But now on this one, I'm thinking just price and longevity. Oh, oh longevity that's a good one okay right because if you're budget conscious and you're getting a machine now you're probably not going to be in a position to replace it in a year maybe even two you're talking lightning nodes right is that what we're getting to i'm curious like um how come you didn't mention the pie yet but it seems like it might fit in that world a little bit. Yeah, I think that's a good thing to clarify.

I feel like the Raspberry Pi is just on the other side of unusable. As a desktop, your only desktop, your main machine, I don't think it's fast enough. Not even with a SSD USB drive. I just don't think it's fast enough yet. And not for years either, you know, two, three years. Maybe the Pi 5, maybe with different storage, eMMC or something like that. And, you know, depending on who's getting this,

x86 has a big compatibility factor. That's very true. It's something I don't always think about. So I think x86 for this experiment, although I could see doing a separate one for ARM as well. Now, will whichever computer this is mysteriously get filled with JB stickers?

Maybe. That'd be fun. Let me throw a few on there. We got some old ones to get rid of. You know, throw a bunch of those on there. Yeah. All right. So send us your throw a bunch of those on there. Yeah. All right.

So send us your suggestions, linuxunplugged.com slash contact or you can boost in a link or a suggestion. We'd love to know what you think might be good enough

for day-to-day desktop Linux on a budget. Linode.com slash unplugged. Friends, Linode is where it's at, man. That's where we've been hosting everything for the last couple of years. And Linode iscom slash unplugged. Friends, Linode is where it's at, man. That's where we've been hosting everything for the last couple of years.

And Linode is a great combination of performance, price, support, industry, adoption. I mean, really, it's a great combination of all the things. I wouldn't really host anywhere else, to be honest with you. I mean, why would you host anywhere else? It's crazy. It's crazy out there. You look at these crazy hypervisors that are creating these specific esoteric technology stacks that they just want to lock you into and they have their own verbiage and their own training materials just to learn that

one platform's way of doing things. Who does that serve? It doesn't serve you and it doesn't serve your business. Linode has been in this for nearly 19 years and their mission has remained unchanged. They're just trying to make cloud computing accessible and affordable to just about anyone. So when you go to linode.com slash unplugged, you get $100. That's $100 you can try things with. Really kick the tires and see what it's capable of. And if you're listening to this while we're recording and you're down in the LAX area at scale, Linode is at booth 211. That's rightay the linux guy and gardner bryant

are there too you can go say hello to the linode crew at booth 211 at scale if you're at scale right now though i got a little bit of fomo i got a little bit of fomo if you're down there i i i go say hi go say chris says hi you know you agree a little bit of fomo for not being at scale right now oh yeah you know i have never been and i feel like that's a shocker we need to make that happen maybe next year the only thing better than going to scale is getting 100 bucks so go to leno.com slash unplug get that 100 bucks support the show and go try it out they're 30 to 50 percent cheaper than the hyperscalers out there that want to lock you into their crazy platforms they got the best support 11 data centers around

the world they're great try them out linode.com slash unplugged well this week we're looking at an article that i think um gets our ponderings happening quite a lot. The author calls themselves T-Darb, or Brad Tont for the normals. He describes himself as a user experience designer with over 12 years of professional experience with a strong emphasis on creating intuitive interfaces with a focus on accessibility, performance, and minimalism. I also noticed, Chris, he does mention the Ottawa Senators in his bio. So that gets my Ottawa Canadians kind of...

Interesting. I did not notice that. Camaraderie going on there. So I already have a big heart for T-Darb. And the title of the post that we're looking at, The Linux Desktop is Hard to Love. This one hits a little close to home, you know, just right there in the title. It's a hard desktop to love. It implies it takes a little bit of work

to be in this relationship with the Linux desktop, right? It's just kind of, I can't completely disagree because behind the scenes, I know, and we talked a little bit on the show, I can't completely disagree because behind the scenes, I know we talked a little bit on the show. I think you've been having some strugs with your high resolution monitor settings and stuff like that. You're kind of, you're getting that experience that I've had where you've got a couple of monitors hooked up to a desktop rig with an NVIDIA card, and it's just a crap shoot when you wake that thing up from sleep. Yeah. You know, I think one advantage that I have running these ancient, well-supported machines is that I never run into some of this hardware stuff.

Right. And so now I have the great fortune of using a computer that has all sorts of different types of stuff connected to it. And it turns out that's kind of problematic. And you're right. It has been an eye-opener for me because I thought we were further along than this in a sense. And that really makes me a little bit sad, actually. So it feels challenging. And that title, man, did that ever cause me to pause and reflect a little bit and I think come to some sobering reality, perhaps.

So the author starts with what Linux gets right. Complete user control. The ability to drastically change your desktop UI between GNOME and KDE and XSCE and all the others. Overall, pretty welcoming communities, especially in the right areas. And generally, pretty good documentation, really. Especially if you're sticking to your Ubuntus and your Fedoras and stuff like that. And the author adds, quote, these things make Linux a solid experience overall, but not a great one. Like that stuff, he says, doesn't make up for the rough edges where it falls down a little bit.

As for what it gets wrong, I think that's exactly what we want to chew on today. Seems like there's a little bit more than we might want to admit to. So he starts with the overall OS cohesion. He describes it as Linux lacking a consistency throughout the entire design. And I think, Chris, you might agree that sort of makes sense considering all of the choices. It's like if you have all these choices for which desktop UI you're going to choose, I think that presents a cohesion challenge. Wouldn't you agree? Yeah, I think so, especially when you look at things like you've got Electron and you've got GTK and you've got Qt and you've got all these other things. But this is a problem that isn't unique to Linux.

I think it started in a worse spot on Linux, but I think all of the other OSs, Mac and Windows specifically, I think they have been drifting towards this for a decade. And I think it's getting pretty hodgepodge everywhere. Can you give an example? I haven't been on those other two platforms in quite a while, so I'm curious what you've seen recently. Well, Slack, for example. Slack doesn't look like any native toolkit on any desktop. Windows, Mac, or Linux, right? That's true.

And Slack is used by millions of people, right? Same with Discord. Telegram. None of them use the native control elements of the platform, and yet you'll find them on all of the apps. VS Code is another great example, right? Super popular. Doesn't that seem kind of crazy, especially in the VS Code example like they have a native desktop that they could sort of aim for but no yeah these are things

that i i complained about for years on coda radio it just just groused and groused and groused and here we are now nothing ever changed it seems but that's curious to me because you know you're describing uh particular applications. But I think on the Linux side here, we're talking about the whole operating system, really. And that feels a little bit more problematic. Yeah, I do think it is a little bit deeper on Linux. Because you'll even notice this if you use FreeBSD for a little bit. FreeBSD, even at the command line, feels more cohesive.

It feels like the tools, because they are, are all made by the same people in the same team. And you get a little bit more cohesion from the bottom all the way up. Linux lacks that. Even if you live every day in a complete GTK or Qt environment, when you drop to the command line, those different free software apps are made by different individuals with different design choices and and different philosophies on how to build applications and different things that they think are important to document and different flags and different ways of implementing those flags and all of that stuff is kind of inconsistent in linux but feels more in my opinion

more organic more like real life like that's how things are in the real world too. You interface with lots of vendors, different products. Everything's a little bit different. Every surface has a different texture. Everything has a different sound, right? That kind of fragmentation is just sort of organic in the evolved world. You know, he also continues making a point about distro packages and snaps and flat packs and all the various

options there and how from a user perspective it's just not as smooth as it might be on something like the mac for instance yeah he says it's kind of overwhelming for the average computer user you know what brent i am surprised that the multiple package format debate has become something that normal folks that are looking at Linux from the outside have attached to. I didn't think it would register. It just seemed like an internal debate. But at the end of the day, your software gets installed. And however your software manager is doing that, is this an implementation detail? And I didn't expect it to be something that surfaced up to people who are evaluating Linux from the outside.

But yet we see it come up over and over and freaking over again. I am personally exhausted by the package manager and package debate and all of that. I am exhausted by it. And yet if you go on YouTube right now and you search for like Linux package manager, there's probably a couple hundred videos that were made in the last couple of months about the topic, right? We, it's brought up right here in this blog post.

There's too many formats, but I don't, I don't believe it. I just can't because like nobody complains that there's too many different shift knobs from all the different car manufacturers. Nobody complains that there's too many gas station brands. Like at the end of the day, you're still getting gas in your car.

You're still shifting. Like, what does it matter as an end user if it was a Snap, a Flatpak, or a Deb, or an RPM? I mean, it has some ramifications, but it honestly just seems like something that only the computer gigs would care about. But I don't know. Maybe that's the type of person who's evaluating Linux right now. So perhaps it is an issue. I think one of the things about these modern package management ideas, Flatpak, Snaps, et cetera, is it's kind of early days for them.

It's only very recently that it feels like something like Flatpaks have been stable enough to be the main way to deliver software to a distribution. And we visited that just last week with Silverblue. And you said you had mostly a really great and smooth experience. So I wonder if a lot of that, you know, users latching on to the various package methods is just born out of that transition. Yeah, it's a problem for today, but one that it feels like there's just no way this isn't solved in 10 years. But who knows? Who knows? But from a new user's perspective, I just don't quite buy it yet. That's a big problem. Assuming they're using graphical tools, all that is sort of not even obvious to them what's happening in the back end, unless you're really paying attention. in the back end unless you're really paying attention there's another area in here that he gets to kind of touches on cohesion kind of touches on ui design and i think it really is a symptom of fragmented desktop environments he criticizes both bluetooth bluetooth setup

printing adding printers managing printers he's like it's bad still it's really bad not in my opinion so bad if you stick with Plasma or Gnome. They manage this stuff pretty well. But I'm curious what you think. What's your impressions of adding things like printers or Bluetooth devices to a Linux device? Has this been a big problem recently for you? these very like Linux specific issues. Bluetooth itself has its whole host of issues that I don't think we'll touch on today. But that for me in my personal experience has been fairly smooth. And I'd be curious to hear your experience, Chris. Yeah, I mean, mostly I kind of have phased

a lot of Bluetooth out because it was kind of crappy for years. And I just sort of over the years just said, all right, I'll either go wired or RF. But I asked Wes because he works all day with Bluetooth headphones. He does meetings. He listens to music. He streams podcasts from his Linux desktop.

I think he got those well-known Sony noise-canceling earbuds. So I asked him before he left for a special assignment, and he said that he does think it used to be a bigger issue and that really Apple deserves credit here for having Bluetooth pretty much figured out on their own devices. So that kind of adds pressure. Like they set the goalposts there. But over the years, things have gotten better. And then when you combine the underlying Bluetooth improvements with Pipewire, Wes says that he feels like things have gotten significantly better. The situation

has improved a lot. There's some trade-offs. The Mac experience is absolutely good, but honestly, the Linux experience has gotten great and it gives you more control. He also likes the fact that he has the option to mess with codecs and such, so he can kind of dial in how it sounds in his headphones, which you can't do on the Mac side. That's actually kind of nice. You did ask me as well about printers, and I got to say it's the total opposite story there for me. I have successfully installed many printers on, you know, family and friends and my own systems. And it never has been a smooth process. Not once. that hint at possible solutions or for instance like brother printers have pretty great support except you need an application from them which is a terminal you know command line based tool that works sometimes most of the time but it's like an 80% kind of thing and they can be super finicky

so I kind of cringe every time I need to install a printer, to be honest. And I try to get away from it for that very reason. So I could feel someone in an office situation that might be a totally different story. It's fair to say, if you buy your printer with Linux compatibility in mind, you shop with Linux compatibility in mind, when you get it home and plug it in, it's going to be fine. It's going to just work, even if it's a network printer. He specifically criticizes network printers. If it's a Linux compatible printer, i.e. there's a driver for it and all that stuff, it's going to be just fine. For years now, I've just auto-detected my wife's desk jet that she bought, what I need to print occasionally. And I just, at that point, I open up a print wizard, and it just auto-detects the printer, and I add it to my system, and I print.

And it's been about as simple as it gets for a long time. You got to buy for compatibility. You got to buy for compatibility. Just like you do with the Mac. You got to buy for compatibility with the Mac too. It's no, I mean, maybe there's more options, but not really. Not when it comes to printers. And so is it a compromise?

Yeah, I think this is where he's got us a little bit. It is a compromise. Same with scanners. I'd be buying for compatibility. You know, again, is that a compromise? Sure. But it's one I'm willing to make to have a computing environment that works the way I need it to. Just like if I was a Mac user, I'd be willing to buy a Mac compatible printer.

A lot of people in our community and people who just need to get things done have recently, especially with the M1 stuff, moved to Macs full time. And I know you've been playing with one recently. Is it the same experience these days as it used to be? Like, are you feeling like, like printing, for instance, there's cups under the hood on both systems, but does the Mac just do something

that's a little bit better, for instance? I don't know. I can't really speak to that. I haven't used a lot in those situations, but it feels about the same. You know, you need to print. Oh, okay. Well, I don't have a printer added yet. Let me add it right now. And you go through a wizard and auto detects the same. You know, you need to print. Oh, okay. Well,

I don't have a printer added yet. Let me add it right now. And you go through a wizard and auto detects the dang thing and then you're done. It's like almost the exact same process. It's just a matter of if, is there a driver? I think where the Mac maybe, although this is just me guessing, has a leg up is there's probably more vendor direct software that you can install on your machine, but I hate all that stuff. That stuff's all garbage. I mean, that touches on one advantage that the Mac has, which is a dedicated set of hardware. When you think of Linux and how many pieces of hardware Linux desktop supports, it's actually quite a feat of engineering if you think about those ancient devices

that I was talking about earlier, the X220s, et cetera, right up to the modern stuff we're buying these days. And it's even more impressive when you think about ARM and RISC and PowerPC and just all the architectures that Linux supports as well. It's even more impressive. I think it's important to pause there and to really extend gratitude for that. It's sort of an amazing feat of engineering when you really, really think about it. And Mac OS falls apart real quick on a Hackintosh,

on non-Mac hardware. I did that for about a week one time. I don't know how long you lasted. Oh, I had to do it for a couple of years, for at least a year, you know, for a while, back in the battle days of live streaming years ago, years and years and years ago you know it's just so taped together it's so built on a whole like card of house assumptions mac os it really i can't it's a it's a good os until it's outside its comfort zone and then it just falls apart the thing is is that's not something most users ever really have to experience. And Linux does such a remarkable job considering the range of hardware it supports and the drivers that it has to be able to support.

You know, he's right in the sense that you're going to get 100% hardware compatibility when you get a Mac or if you get a Surface with Windows. But I actually feel like we're doing pretty good as far as Linux first hardware choices go these days. Feels like 2022 is a better year than it ever has been. One thing I'm noting that is lacking from this conversation, both his article and our conversation here, is nobody's mentioned Windows anywhere in this. That seems like a data point to me. I think in part it's because he's looking at it from an enthusiast standpoint who's probably moved on from Windows, maybe. I don't really know.

Could be that, you know, that developer market, they tend to either buy Linux or Macs unless their work requires them to use Windows. There is that aspect of it. Maybe you're right. Maybe Windows gets some of these things better. My sense is that not really, though. Sort of the same struggles. Maybe a wider range of printers that are just going to work. But also you're going to have a wider range of crap software that gets installed.

It's like the worst of all worlds, perhaps. But also you're going to have a wider range of crap software that gets installed. It's like the worst of all worlds, perhaps. You know, Chris, one reason I was on the Mac for like, I don't know, five years or something. Now this is slightly outdated information. But one of the reasons I did move away from it was I always felt as though I was running up against that wall of what the Apple folks expect you to be doing with your computer versus what you actually want to be doing. And it seems totally fine if you stay within that realm of, hey, here's what we think you should be doing. And we've really thought out the design of how that flow works. But as soon as you try to do something a little different or start tinkering or something, I feel like it's

a real struggle. Or at least the system gets a little bit in your way maybe it's different these days i mean some developers love the mac uh and i acknowledge that my information here is quite outdated i'd be curious uh to dive back in and give it a shot for a little bit but has that been your experience recently yeah i feel like that characterization is is mostly is mostly accurate it's it's a sandbox and you're expected to play within that sandbox. And my conspiracy bacon is it's going to get even worse, not better. Because if you look at where Apple's going with the Apple Silicon, they're really building in a lot of purpose-specific coprocessors, things that are physical chips on their SOC that do one thing. And they do that one thing really, really fast to offload it off of the general CPU. And it requires like a whole set of software stack support and all that kind of stuff. So it's kind of something

that Apple can be uniquely good at is they can ship, you know, a new coprocessor in an SOC, and at the same time they can ship an update to the OS that enables support for that SOC. And it's neat, and there's going to obviously be advantages. But what it also does is it boxes you in. It means that when you go outside of one of those specific coprocessors, you're just going to be on the general CPU. And in a way, that's going to also kind of create this environment of, well, the Mac is really good at some things, but there's other things where the Mac kind of lags behind at, and

it's not so good at. And we're going to see that kind of shake out over the next couple of years, but I think that will add to the sort of sandbox feeling of the Mac platform, where over on the x86 side, you're going to absolutely get coprocessors, and you're going to get things like that, but it won't have that sandbox feeling. You know, you can take advantage of it or you can't. You don't. You know, there's lots of ways you can solve that problem on the PC platform. And do you think that's the cost of rapid evolution and innovation? Is this kind of narrow view, narrow perspective and sort of ignoring all this other stuff for now?

Yeah, I think, too, it's probably just an area where they can compete where other manufacturers can't, really. Like, Intel could add a coprocessor for ProRes decoding or H.264 accelerated decoding, but how many applications would get updated to support it? One or two, right? Maybe. Maybe. But on the Apple side, they could update the entire stack.

The flip side of that is they own that entire stack. If they don't make the app or they don't add the feature you want, you don't get it. And there's nobody in the market that can create it. It's just the way it is. I think after reading this article and really pondering the facts, I think the big question that comes to me, and I'm curious about what you think, is what do we do about it? Like, what's the next step? What are we hoping, you know, do we want this to change? Is this just the way it is?

Is there something we can do to help things out? What do we want from it? I've been trying to think about that too. And I know one thing, obviously, that we can do as users is we can file bug reports and we can get involved in the conversation and we can say, hey, this is my hardware stack and this is the problem I'm running into. So we can absolutely do a lot more of that. But I also think over time in Linux, it's been so amazing as these problems have gotten solved. We're about a year away from all of the issues you're having right now with your nvidia card from probably being

solved right i think a big part of it is you're dealing with a really cranky driver stack there if you had maybe all intel graphics are all amd graphics in that pc you probably wouldn't be having these multi-monitor refresh rate issues that you're having with those weird artifacts and whatnot and in a year or so the n NVIDIA driver will be open source. And I have seen a lot of remarkable things happen in desktop Linux, you know? Wi-Fi was a huge thing. When we got Wi-Fi sorted out,

that was a game changer. That used to be such a pain, like an incredible pain and a showstopper for some. And when we got that solved, it felt like, wow, we've really reached a milestone here. This is big. Right.

But when I remember when we found out that the NVIDIA driver was going to get open sourced and it was coming and it was going to be about a year's worth of work. I remember thinking right then and there, like this is like the last really big desktop problem that remains to be solved. big desktop problem that remains to be solved. Because once you solve this, a lot of the little issues that you're experiencing and other people are experiencing just start to go away. It'll take a little bit of time, but we're so close. And so ultimately, you know, you look at it and you think maybe the kernel team strategy has been rock solid all along. You know, they just held the course. They didn't compromise. And the end result is we're going to get open source drivers. And you look out there and I think,

really, the last thing standing that would really make this one whole sweet package would be ZFS. It's so true. It's so true. Yeah. The author didn't even touch on file systems, right? No, but man, that's a whole other bag of tricks. Yeah, yeah.

It'd be great to see. And maybe one day, you know, I mean, if we're seeing NVIDIA doing about face, maybe Oracle could do it. Is this a new, like, mid-year prediction? Is that what's coming out? It's a summer prediction, Brent. It's a summer prediction indeed. Get it in and lock it in right now. I'll link to the article. I think it is worth a read. It's worth considering this stuff as

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my Bitwarden has gotten better and better. The username generator is fantastic. I don't know how I never thought of this, but it's just absolutely brilliant. Why not have a unique password and username for every site and service you use? And their mobile app is really great. On iOS, the Face ID integration is just fantastic. If I want to get on a website or log into an app, it just scans my face I'm in. On Android, they've got quick account switching right there at the keyboard where you're entering the password. Of course, they support all the bio authentication over there as well. And there is a large community always available to help if you ever get stuck. Plus, they've got support as well. And then there's a lot of other nice features baked in as you start

using Bitwarden that you discover and you think, what was I doing before this? What was I doing? Animal. That's what I was doing. And you probably know somebody out there who's not using Bitwarden. Maybe it's your team or your company. Maybe it's the project you're working with. They could probably use a little Bitward, you know what I'm saying, a little upgrade to their security. So go try Bitwarden right now at bitwarden.com slash Linux or send that link to a friend, a family member, or someone at work that needs to do this. It's probably like the number one thing you could do online to increase your security is use a really great password. Use a unique username for every website, every service you use online.

And you can do that while supporting the show and getting the best password manager in the business. So go to bitwarden.com slash Linux to grab that and support the show. Try it for free for yourself or a team at bitwarden.com slash Linux. We got some more great feedback this week, so thank you for everyone who sent some in. I had a hard time, you know, choosing some for this episode just to keep it small.

But those others will follow next time. David wrote in about Silverblue. I think we got quite a bit of feedback on Silverblue, right, Chris? Oh, we sure did, Brentley. From all kinds of means and methods. It means either we did good things or we did bad things. David writes in about Ansible, using Ansible, because I mentioned, hey, it'd be lovely to have some declarative configuration in there. David writes, hey guys, I really appreciated the Silverblue segment you did. One thing that I wanted to highlight is that it's possible to build a silver blue workstation up with Ansible, just like you declaratively build it up on Nix. This is the solution that I've

adopted and my daily driver has never been this solid and I can reproduce it at a moment's notice. I gotta say, that is a very obvious way of doing it. I passed over that when I mentioned it on last episode and I'm happy to be corrected because I think this is a wonderful way to accomplish that. So thank you, David. It's like peanut butter and jelly. Joe writes in with Chrome on Silverblue and Toolboxes. Love the episode on Silverblue and good tip on updating Flatpak to allow for Chrome. I've been experimenting with Toolbox to just install RPM downloads.

I tested it out using Chrome. It's a bit slower to start than Flatpak, but it definitely works, he says. That may be useful. Cheers. Toolbox is a great, great tool. We linked to DistroBox in last week's episode where you can get Toolbox-like capabilities on any Linux desktop environment. But what I love about it is somebody who's trying out apps all the time because I can trash a toolbox environment, like all kinds of crazy dependencies, all kinds of crazy libraries, whatever, and then just blow it away.

And my system goes about just like everything's totes fine. And the cool thing they're doing, the clever thing they're doing in the background is they're doing some mount magic so it looks like you're on your local file system, but you're totally isolated in a protected system. I feel like we're living in a really great time there's so many options to get stuff done it's amazing jordan also wrote in hey chris i heard you had trouble

with tailscale on silver blue i use it on all of my rpm os tree based systems by just adding their yum repository to my system you can add any RPM repository to your system and get updates and such that way. Works great. I got that tip a few times, and I wasn't sure at the time we were recorded, so I didn't say anything, but I thought maybe it was possible that space would get overwritten when I did an update, so I didn't want to say it on air, but then I heard about 100 times afterwards. It's totally fine.

So basically what he's saying is I could just add a Tailscale repo to my Silverblue install and then just install it with RPMOS tree. No bigs. That would be pretty straightforward. Yeah, but I think you touched on something there. Like we're looking at quite a different paradigm and it seems like you paused a little bit and said, well, is the old way of doing things going to work just as I expect here? So I think that's a question worth asking. And apparently the answer is yes. At least for tail scale. All right. I think you got to take this next one. I think you know what's going on with this next one. Brent wrote in and it reads, Brent and I

had a chance to chat a bit when you guys were all in town at the last rally meetup. I'd like to offer to take Brent out to dinner and show him around town a bit while he's here again. Wow. What about I'm just stuck up here in Seattle. Nobody's getting me dinner. No, that's great. That is really great. Are you going to do it? Oh, yeah. So Brent and I had a good time. I mean, anytime I meet someone named Brent out in the wild, which doesn't surprisingly happen that often, Chris, I would imagine you meet quite a few Chris. But every Brent I've met has been handsome and really kind and gentle and just an upstanding citizen. So Brent, I'll take you up on your offer for sure. Boy, not us Chris's. We are a bad batch. The whole batch of us. I tell you what.

No, there sure are a lot. Most places I've ever worked at, there's been a minimum of five Chris's. Oh, my goodness. Uncle Nicky writes in, and he says, hey, guys, I don't know if you're aware of this, but the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition has quietly been pulled from Dell's online store. I'm looking for a good laptop for my PhD work, and because of all the great reviews of the XPS 13 dev edition over the years, I decided this is the way to go. But lo and behold, when I went to Dell's website, the XPS 13 developer edition is listed as no longer available. Oh, he says, I hope this is

just a case of them removing the product listing before introducing new hardware. Hmm. You know, I am not sure exactly what is going on here. I haven't heard anything from our contacts at Dell, but I did notice a change in their language. I've noticed that they're now saying the Dell XPS 13 has been certified for Ubuntu as in like just the Dell XPS 13, the main one, just the regular one you buy. They're just saying now certified for

Ubuntu. I don't know if maybe that's the change, but I actually would be a little bit sad if they were no longer making a Linux specific Dell XPS. I think that'd be a loss. But I wonder if there's an advantage there, you know, is it just, and I haven't looked into this and it's worth doing once we get off air here, but is it just going be a drop down on the regular xps that you can just choose ubuntu for instance that would be maybe an acceptable compromise i would think although maybe it comes with a little bit less you know linux happy pr yeah it'd be unfortunate if it's like no you just get it with windows but just it's fine it's fine yeah that, you just get it with Windows, but... Just wipe it. It's fine. It's fine. Yeah, that would be a shame. I agree completely.

And now it is time for Le Boost. Nev writes in with our first boost, 1,853 sats. He says, 1853 is the year Isaac Stevens, the first governor of Washington, was elected into office. Now you know. I love the reasons for the boost, was elected into office. Now you know. I love the reasons for the boost. I have to regret to inform you that I will be stopping my core subscription because I just don't really have a lot going on currently.

But I do have a wallet of over 50K sats. Feels wrong to just give them all at once when I could boost in historical facts instead. So please advise. That's wonderful. You know what? Nav, you keep boosting and we like hearing from you. I'd like feedback. I always appreciate the thing about the boosts.

I always appreciate when they get us talking about something we didn't plan on talking about. The other thing about the boosts is they help keep our compass aligned towards the audience. They make the audience the number one customer for the show, for the network. And so keep it coming. I'll let you decide on how to do it, but keep it coming. Sir Lurks a lot wrote in. You know, that's a memorable time when Sir Lurks a lot boosts in.

Two days ago, 1,337 sats. Nice. B-O-O-S-T. They write, I know you're looking for good warmup songsO-S-T. upon Crazy Frog. How, oh how, could I forget about Crazy Frog? That video went so viral back in the day, and the Crazy Frog version has great build-ups at different points, and it makes perhaps a good contender for the warm-up music. I'm not doing Crazy Frog! I'm not doing Crazy Frog! I did play it, and I thought, you know, it does have good energy. It does get your, you know, your toes tapping, but it would be such an earworm for the audience.

I think people would hate it. So, but Axl F does have a lot of what makes Crazy Frog good. It's just so 1984. You know, it's so it's so so classic i think it needs a bit more cowbell to be honest yeah it could you know what i agree brent a lot of things could use more cowbell though they're just not hearing us guess what lurks lot comes in with a double boost whoa whoa whoa whoa with 53,280 sats. Because I'm a backhaul baller. If I want something, I just haul up. A couple of gallons for Brent's gas tank. My first computer was a Commodore 64. Nice.

You know, you could use the poke command directly to set values into a memory address specifically. 53,280 is the memory address used to set the border color on the screen. And since Brent will be crossing borders, that is the inspiration for the SAT numerology. Wow. That is wonderfully geeky. I really, really appreciate that. Lurks a lot. Jeez, that's great.

Totally nailed it. I don't know how many liters that is for my tank, but I really appreciate it. And also, as a little tidbit, Commodore 64 was my first computer, too. Thanks, Dad. Aww. Well, as it turns out, Sir Lurks-a-Lot did a triple boost. Triple boost unlocked. 1,337 sats.

Fleet boost. 1,337 sats. Fleet boost! Can you use the Nix package manager on top of SteamOS such that all your custom apps are done via Nix? Then when you update SteamOS, you can quickly redeploy all your apps via Nix configuration. I'm still new to the whole NixOS concept myself, so I'm not sure if Home Manager might work here,

but I would appreciate if this worthy question could get answered by someone more Nix-experienced. We could try this. I was already wondering this myself, Lurks. Yeah, we'll try to get the Nix Package Manager, not NixOS, but the Nix Package Manager running on top of the SteamOS image. I think it could work if I can keep it all contained in my home directory. I think that could do it. I'm really curious for this update. And are you going to rope Wes into doing this with you? I think.

I feel like I should. And get into some trouble together. Rose Deer boosted in two days ago with 3,333 sets. Boost! Now, this is a feature request. Please remove the matrix registration info for the JB server, because it recommends currently to create an account, which we're not allowing.

We should make a GitHub thing about that. I'm taking full responsibility for this one, because wonderfully, several months ago, I wrote a ticket about this very thing. Hey, we need to change that. And then we got very, very, very, very distracted by the new Hugo website that we're building. And the community has been amazing there. And I've been so overwhelmed with just keeping up with all the activity that even though

I may have assigned myself to that ticket, I haven't actually done it in far too long. So that is completely my responsibility. And I apologize. I will get right on it. But that new site is coming along. It's very impressive. Yeah, it is. Ibuki wrote in two days ago, 2,100 sats. Coming in hot with the boost. I love that one. You get me every time with it. I know. It is the best. You should make other lotteries for similar initiatives and make the tickets have a price like 10,000 sats, say, just like a regular lottery. It could be another way of sustaining JP. They're talking about the JPL lottery, which is up right now at linuxunplugged.com.

JPL, no sats required, but you do need to be in the area or be able to get yourself in the area. That's kind of required. We do have limited slots and we'll be running a lottery on that to give away those spots. Yeah, I don't know. I could definitely see one day us trying to do like a fundraiser for some initiative or some show we want to

launch or some other open source project. I don't even know how we would ever do that. You know? That feels like we give it some special thought. We may have our first prize which is your custom built old perhaps old, the used machine. Here, you can have my used crap. All right, well, Raro writes in 15 hours ago.

I don't think that's how you say it. With a row of ducks. I'm a duck. D-U-K, duck. Loaded with talent. 2,222 sats. Silver blue sounds like a good option to manage my family devices.

I'll see if it can cut down on my quote support tickets. Thanks for the show. I agree. I had the same thought afterwards. I was like, this could be the desktop environment I deploy for family. You know, I did hear some feedback about that when I was doing research, that it was a perfect friends and family distro for those

who want to support them a little less. It's not that we don't want to support you. It's just that, you know, we're busy. Yeah, right. Bronze Wing boosted in 9,001 sats. It's over 9,000! I would like to introduce you to the over 9,000 boost. If you don't know, shame on you if you don't know, it's a reference to Dragon Ball Z. Specifically the scene where, oh, I'm going to show my not knowingness in this one. Here we go. You ready? I wish you were reading this one. I'm right there with you.

No, I don't. I don't. I don't know anything about Dragon Ball Z. I apologize, Bronze Wig. Please write in with all your corrections. I will read every one of them. They continue. Specifically the scene where the Gaida checks Goku's power level and yells,

It's over 9,000! It's over 9,000! If you YouTube that scene, there are quite a few funny lines that would be funny to hear on the podcast when a 9001 boost come in. Also, funny side fact, Oprah was trolled back in the day by someone and she said over 9000 on the air without fact checking anything. Well, that's special. I love that. That's great. Thank you, Bronson Wing.

That's fantastic. We also have a couple of thank you boosts that came in. 1,000 sats from Neural P, 33 sats from Texas Comrade, and an announcement. We'll be raising the sat limit to 1,000 sats to get your message read on the show just to keep the boost segment at an appropriate length, at a manageable length. But we'll be reading all of them, and we may occasionally promote a sub-1000 sap boost if there's a great message in there. If you'd like to send us a boost, support the show, keep the podcast independent,

and take advantage of a free peer-to-peer open source value network, go grab a new podcast app at newpodcastapps.com. There's a whole lot of open source and free software happening right there too. Like one of our favorites, Podverse, which will be embedded into our new website, is a totally GPL podcast player that even has a F-Droid app store entry, an iOS version, a web version. Podverse is just absolutely fantastic. Fountain FM as well. Very good. And on iOS, if you like CarPlay, Castomatic can't be beat. And then if you just want to do it by the command

line, boost CLI to get your geek cred up, because we'll call that out as well. Newpodcastapps.com for all of that. And with that, we do have ourselves some picks, Brentley. So everybody from time to time probably wants to take advantage of a little bit of cheap cloud storage, right? A Google Drive, your DropBizzles, you know what I'm saying? DropBizzles is my favorite. It just can't be avoided, Brent. These are massive companies, their services are wide reaching, and they can be a great way to send files to people. So that's where our app pick comes in today. It's called Cryptomator and it's the old kind of crypto, the one that involves

file encryption, you know, the way it should, the way the term should be used. Oh, that one. I forgot about that one. With Cryptomator, it will create encrypted volumes or archives on cloud storage for you. So you can place your files in there and then it will encrypt it locally before it uploads it to cloud storage. You get what I'm saying here? So it's a way to take advantage of cheap public cloud storage, but have your files encrypted locally on your client before they're put there. And then it gives you a UI to manage all of that. And then to make it even easier, you guys, it's available as a flat pack on Flathub as well. But in the example here, they have it attached to OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, and NextCloud. And then it's just

managing the security for the encryption on all of those. That is so great and very impressive. I have recently, so this is a bonus pick. I've recently been using Rclone, which accomplishes a very similar thing. No fancy UI. Well, there's a UI, but it's not quite as fancy as what you were just describing. And it works great. But this sounds like maybe a little bit of an upgrade there, or maybe a simpler implementation, perhaps. I think both those are great, great choices.

Yeah, I think it probably is a little bit simpler. It has a pretty clean, minimal UI. Uses AES 256-bit encryption. I think it's just a little bit simpler. It has a pretty clean, minimal UI. Uses AES 256-bit encryption. I think it's just really nice and simple. It is available for other platforms, too. I'm just looking at their website right now. It is GDPR compliant as well. And they have an independent security audit that's been conducted on it, too, that they have the results publicly available.

That is something. Man, you've got my, like, curiosity ears tingling. That is something. Man, you've got my curiosity ears tingling. So thank you. We'll have a link in the show notes or you can go to cryptomator.org or just search for Cryptomator on Flathub. That's all over there. Well, I think that's it.

We'll be back live on our regular Sunday time with the next episode. This is just sort of a last minute special. So that way I could treat the kids to a nice weekend at the beach. So I appreciate you rearranging your schedule at the last minute there, Brantley. Well, you're welcome.

Good show. You're welcome. It's good having you here. Appreciate you. And you know what? Wes will be back. He'll be back. So if you're a big Wes fan and you missed him, don't worry.

He'll be returning. And, you know, otherwise, that's it. We're just about done here. So I'll just give you the last bits of information you need to know. You can go to LinuxActionNews.com to get a little more show. We cover the news there. And there's always a lot going on. It's kind of like a companion to this here episode.

And then we'll be back to our regular live schedule on Sundays at jupiter.tube at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. And then links to what we talked about today? Well, you can find those over at linuxunplugged.com slash 469. And I'd like to take a moment and thank our members, unpluggedcore.com. Our members give us the ability to say no to the craziest kind of sponsors that want to give us big special deals. Quote, unquote, this last email we got.

You wouldn't believe the things they want us to sell. It was so bad. And our members let us say no. We get to say no and wait until the right company comes along. Unpluggedcore.com if you'd like to join that and get the show ad-free. Thanks so much for joining us. We'll see you right back here next Sunday. අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි How you doing over there, Brent? Yeah, I was thinking, I actually think it's responsible of us to just apologize slightly to listeners for maybe having lowered down the slight intelligence and style quotients this week.

I know Wes isn't here, so we're trying to keep up his end of things. Right, without Wes, our style goes down a notch because he's always here with like a really good looking hat, maybe a scarf in the winter. That's it. Those shoes, those shoes he wears. Always, always smart shoes. Always smart shoes. The scarf helps with audio quality.

You know, it absorbs sound. Yeah. So I apologize if that feels like it's missing this week. Yeah. It's weird. Right. And then like, who am I going to go grill with after this? Myself?

Do you have the sous vide set up yet? He usually takes care of that, right? No, that's weird, right? And then, like, who am I going to go grill with after this? Myself? Do you have the sous vide set up yet? He usually takes care of that, right? No, that's his job. Oh, no. He didn't set it up last week for you? I think all I'm going to have is chips.