LINUX Unplugged - 475: Brent's Bug Battle

Episode Date: September 12, 2022

Brent has been on a bug-finding marathon. We review what he's discovered and share some hard-learned lessons.

How's the packing going, Brent? You on track to make it tonight? I think actually the packing is the easy part. No, I'm not going to make it tonight. There's no way. With the Postal Up crash and all the things that I'm hoping to do, I am going to fail you. I think it's going to be a morning thing. I like that you're just scheduling in the post-show crash. Like, that's a good idea. That shows he's an experienced podcaster. Oh, yeah. I mean, you know how real that is right it's essential so i don't know so the plan originally was we do the show this is always how these planning sessions go is we're planning and it's like so yeah then you could just head out like after the show and then hit the road should be no big deal right and because i'm always this always happens to me too it's like oh yeah no problem yeah that's fine

and then you get to the day of and you're like, there's no effing way I'm leaving after the show. Even though I've been prepping all week, there's no way. I mean, one, it means you have to have everything packed, right? Yeah, right. Oh, I'm sorry, Brent. But you know what? What you got to do is set yourself like timed windows to pack and then you just, you know,

you take breaks, you'll get through it you'll make it or just don't bring anything you know just go go freestyle just throw caution to the wind i did give my car a car wash so there's that at least hey you'll come in style Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen. I'm talking like this today because it's a very exciting show.

Hello. Perhaps. We have some desktop woes that we're going to share with you that have struck recently, I will just say. And we have some thoughts on some new hardware that's going to get drafted for some space work. We have some bugs to file. There's a lot to do today, and then we're going to round it all out with some great boosts, some picks, and more. So before we get any further, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello, hello. Hey, Chris. Hey, Wes and Grant.

Time-appropriate greetings, everybody. Hello, hello. Thank you for joining us, and thank you, everybody, for watching over at Jupiter.Tube as we stream it live. And a good morning to our friends over at TailScale. TailScale is a mesh VPN protected by WireGuard's Noise Protocol. Noise. It's a

noise protocol. I just think that's so great. We love it. We use it every single day. I think it's going to change your game. I think it's up it's a noise protocol i just think that's so great we love it we use it every single day i think it's going to change your game i think it's up there with like rsync and ssh go check out tailscale tailscale.com get it for free on 20 devices and tell them the unplugged program sent you so we have kind of an interesting story to talk about this week it seems that nasa has selected sci-fi makers of risk 5 systems as maybe the potential go-to ecosystem for future space hardware. And of course, that's obviously going to be running Linux. And Sci-5s, they're like over the moon on this one.

They say that their devices are going to offer a 100x increase in computational capacity. Well, yeah, if you remember when we were talking with Tim, you know, he was mentioning where Linux was kind of running on this off-the-shelf hardware, but they had these pretty much ancient power PC processors that were all, you know, radiation-hardened, but those are getting pretty old, and we need something new. And so, yeah, right?

Kind of the customizability of the RISC-V platform, they can make something that's a huge speed improvement, but also still be, you know, meet all of the strenuous needs of interplanetary travel. There's a lot I like about this. First of all, I think this is just a great platform for them to pick. It's something that'll be around a long time, and it's an open platform, and it's going

to encourage driver development for Linux and all those things, which is really great. And it's one of the things that when an organization like NASA selects a hardware platform, it kind of just. It means we're going to see a base level of support for a very long time. Right. So that's that's really great. I think the other thing that's that's really kind of excellent about this is I would expect it's going to bring more developers into RISC-V. It's going to mean you're going to have more people that are learning how to write RISC-V applications and systems. Like I think, I don't know if the halo effect of this is the right term,

but I think just the effect, the second-order effects of NASA doing this and requiring software developed for it means that there's just going to be more of an ecosystem investment in RISC now. Seems like nice timing, too, just as they're sort of gaining confidence in deploying Linux in some of these environments, plus now deploying RISC-V. And we know Linux has been putting in, you know, there's been many developers

putting in some time to get Linux's RISC-V support up and going. I think you're right. That's only going to accelerate. Wouldn't it be interesting if the story of RISC-V is like this slow one? You know, you start seeing it in these rovers, helicopters, or whatever they might use it on moon buggies but uh wouldn't it be funny if it takes like 20 years i mean not funny

but wouldn't just figure it takes like 10 20 years of using risk 5 in this capacity starts as you know hard drive controllers and then it kind of works its way up and you know by now we're starting to see those single board computers but not very many of them and they're very specialized and it's just the slowest of the slow burns but it does actually seem to be going in the upwards direction it seems like it's kind of you know the hardware world cpus that it just takes time devices have you know they age in place for to some extent and then just to get the adoption to to meet the standards you know arms dominate in the world now but there were times we're just like oh that's that funny embedded cpu i mean don't do anything serious with that yeah maybe so you're right and i wonder if it isn't even a longer upper hill battle now because there is so much momentum

around x86 and arm and power pc there's so much already established momentum development ecosystem that for something to come along and truly get widespread adoption it takes some of that stuff aging out it takes some of that stuff just kind of fading away the developer talent leaving it's not like they have an incentive to switch to riskISC-V right away. So it would make sense that as these trends and these technologies become more entrenched over time, that something new coming along is going to have a much longer road before it really gets significant market share. It's going to be a while.

But this is a huge first step. I wonder if Tim will have any thoughts when we get down to JPL and talk to him about it. We'll have to bend his ear on this one. We are going to be there soon. We have not left the road for the road yet, but we do leave soon after next week's episode. So we're doing a double next Sunday over at jupiter.tube. We're recording two Linux unplugs,

so that way we have one recorded while we're on the road. Just give us a little drive time. Yeah, you know, if you're not always able to make it live, that's one not to miss. Yeah. And then after that, we're going to do the shows live from the road. September 18th.

I think what's lucky about next week is three of us are going to be in the studio together, I think. That's true, right, Wes? You're going to make it too? Mm-hmm. I sure will. Assuming you get all your stuff packed.

Hey, now. I think I can make it there in seven days. I think we can do that. But that also doesn't happen too often. You know, only, what, like a couple times a year so that that is a pretty special thing or at least it is for me so i would say uh if you want to catch one that's one to catch two to catch two to catch we've been looking forward to this the audience has helped make it possible with uh the splits to the boost to the show my tank is overfilled brent's gonna make it down even though now of course we have wildfires

of course in the area So he'll get a nice kind of smoked Brent flavor when he arrives. We lit up the fireworks to welcome him. Yeah, that's what we do. Smoke you welcome. Although we thought he's going to be on time so we let them off a little early and so that's all an embarrassing thing. But, yeah.

Then, so Brent gets here a couple of days from when we're recording. Then we're going to record some content. We'll do that double up. And then we're hitting the road for our West Coast tour. And we have deets at meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting. You never know.

Things can always change. So be sure you're following that. Even if you're already signed up, just keep an eye on things. We also have that Matrix room, West Coast Crew, bit.ly slash West Coast Crew. And we're going to have some special Linode swag because, of course, Linode is making this possible. They're once again partnering with us to make it doable from a financial standpoint and from an operational standpoint and from a logistics standpoint to go do these meetups and to go see the community, to help invest in that community. It's a real kind of like, you know, high level thing and they get it and they support it. And we're really grateful. So we'll have some special swag from them too, that we'll be giving out. And we'll also have

some geocaches that we'll be stashing along the way. I'd also like to say, if you're planning on joining us to one of the meetups, it is pretty important for us to know that you're attending. So if you can RSVP at the meetup page, that just helps us suss out some of the numbers and be able to let the events spaces, the restaurants know ahead of time so that we're not surprising them. So if you can make sure to RSVP, that'd be great.

Linode.com slash unplugged. Go there to get $100 in 60-day credit on a new account. And that's a great way to support the show. You know, you're getting yourself some really great experience. You're getting $100 to go play with, I think, the best cloud hosting platform out there. And it's a great way to support the show. You're supporting the show. How great is that?

And Linode is really the Linux Geeks cloud. They've got 11 data centers worldwide. They've been doing this for nearly 19 years. So they really know what Geeks Cloud. They've got 11 data centers worldwide. They've been doing this for nearly 19 years, so they really know what they're doing. They've had to build the best in-class experience to beat out and compete with everybody else who came along, not to mention the hyperscalers now, who seem to have unlimited budgets because, let's face it, their data center operations are funded by like a completely unrelated business. So just had the capacity but linode has had to survive on the merits of their business and their performance is incredible they have 11 data centers around the world

they have a ton of great services too stuff you can just one click deploy i was just looking recently because i was setting myself up a new Linode, and I noticed they just added the Unified Network Application, which is a control panel that simplifies network management. If you have Unified gear, you can throw it up on Linode. They've always, always been innovating. You know, every time I go there, there's like new stuff they've added. In fact, now they even have a better UI for displaying it all. I'm looking at it right now.

I've stopped doing the read, and now I'm just looking at the different rigs i want to deploy i love linode i think you will too the performance the the ease of just getting things up and running and uh you know some days i'm feeling like i just want a push button solution some days i want to build it up from the ground and linode lets me do whichever i prefer and if i ever make a mistake if i ever get stuck if i ever need help they've got got 24-7 support because the business, again, has had to actually survive on the merits of being a really good cloud provider. And so part of that is having, well, the best customer support. So go try them out. Super fast rigs and networking, 11 data centers around the world, a Linux culture that runs deep and 24-7 support. Plus, it's a great way to support the show.

So go get that $100. Linode.com slash unplugged. One more time, it's Linode.com slash unplugged. We got some baller boosts, the big supporters for the show this week. And just a reminder, we have a link in the show notes to an open issue to help us source a new baller boost and soundbite i should say and there's some really good ones in there so do keep them coming i i think what we have three or four people it's mostly brent yeah brent laid the seeds here and did a good job i figured i would like you know warm things up and leave a sort of template for those to follow and i've

been pretty happy with the extra submissions so i think keep them in. I'd like to see more people do it though, because right now this is feeling like one of those issues where like I bring up, hey, what color should this thing be? And everybody has an opinion on the color, but then I ask, okay, who's going to write the code to set that to be that color? And then like nobody steps up. It's like, oh, so nobody really cares.

I do. They have an opinion until the work comes to, yeah, right. I know you do. Yeah. So we'll have a link in the show notes and we'll get a new Baller Boost. But the meantime i do want to thank jade lion for their 111 111 sats they boosted in for my long podcasting 2.0 rant support last week thank you very much

for that jade um and i wanted to say you, something interesting happened in the last week. Fountain has made a new discovery mechanism. They've built a new discovery mechanism into the Fountain podcast player. And one of the tabs when you're looking for podcasts to find now is some of the most boosted shows on Fountain. They call it Hot on Fountain in there. And this exposes shows that are getting some big boosts and as a result we've had thousands of people find the show in the last week what people are doing is these boosts act as signal when people see a show that gets boosted a lot it's a good indication there's high quality there it's better than any kind of algorithm from google it's

real people sending real value to that podcaster. It's a real signal. So Fountain is now exposing that and showing you which ones are getting the boost. And what's incredible now is not only can you support the show by boosting and get a message onto the show, but you can also make it possible for other people to discover the show by putting us on these lists. So when we get a boost from Jade, that's 111,000 sats, that puts us up there on that list. That makes a difference to the show, not just in a monetary sense, but in a way that helps other people find the show. So thank you very much for that. And Fountain, keep on rocking it. Check out the Hot on Fountain

and their new lightning podcast section, helping really spread value for value and podcasting 2.0 and decentralized podcast financing. You know, Chris, I would imagine that's an unintended consequence. Like that's not something we could have really predicted when we kind of kicked all this off in January. And I totally think it makes sense. I hadn't thought about it, but it absolutely makes sense is I've discovered shows by, so what are the big things in Fountain, not to go on and on about it, because I think Podverse is really great too. But one of the great things in Fountain is that they have this clips section that is really well done. And I have added three weekly listens now to my podcast collection through this clips mechanism on here. And boy, isn't that something like how did this

not get thought of earlier it's a perfect thing for highlighting and sharing podcasts it totally is how often are you listening to one you're like that was a great little thing they summarized x or they explained that well i'd love to share that with someone who i might not be able to convince offhand to listen to the whole darn podcast or me like i don't know if i want to listen to the whole darn podcast but a lot of times people will clip some of the best moments in the show. And I'm like, that was good. And I go and I subscribe. And then the other thing that's in here is the individual clips can get boosts. So you can you can like a clip with 10 sats.

And so then you can start looking at the the most boosted clips. And so there's a lot of ways you can sort by. And it's a signal that works. I think it's fascinating. you can sort by and it's a signal that works. I think it's fascinating. It's better than I think than Google putting their hands on that algorithm and promoting things like NBC News as a podcast. Anyways, moving on. John A boosted in with 30,000 sats. We asked how far behind folks are. He says, wait, you mean people aren't listening and boosting the moment a new episode releases? 30,000 sats from John A. And here's what's incredible about that.

John A.'s first boost was last week. Second week, he's now a baller booster. So thank you, John, for the support. That is really great. And then, of course, a frequent baller booster comes into the show. And that is, of course, Optimus Gray coming in with a row of mcducks 22 222 sats thank you kindly he's on board with the golden dragon as the lup mascot so we have some uh we have second approval from an audience member i think that means it's official yes you

have the deal right there uh but golden dragon needs to make sure he gets a hype song he's he needs a hype song so i think that's that's understandable sure he gets a hype song. He needs a hype song. So I think that's understandable. Maybe he gets a licensed hype song. Maybe something that goes up on the soundboard for when he boosts in, something like that. So we'll have to work that out. But I think it's a great suggestion. Thank you, Optimus. And thank you for the support.

If you would like to be a baller and boost into the show and get your message read in this section, please send us a baller boost with a new podcast app at newpodcastapps.com. And we want to transition into something that is hard to talk about on the show because it often sounds like we're being just critical and we're just kind of complaining about something. But that is not the case. We love this stuff, right?

But we're invested in it and we want to make sure that it's meeting the needs of users, that it's growing, that it's adapting for the future. All of those things that the projects we use are healthy. We got to talk. If you don't talk about problems. Yeah. How can that be the case?

So that's the lens in which we're going to look at today's segment. Well, today's segment has been on my mind for, I think, about a year and a half, maybe more. And again, it comes from an absolute place of love. And today we're talking about some struggles with plasma, KD's plasma. I've been a plasma user for, I think it's something like five years now. First started on Anturgos and moved on to Kubuntu. And gentlemen, you, I mean, there's some in the studio as well, some Plasma and where does it

fit in your lives? Oh yeah. We use it here in production. I use it for my main sort of recording OS. So there's a lot of, I don't always use it as my sit on the couch OS, but I definitely put it in places where I care if it breaks. Yeah. I think that laptop you're using there. I'm running Plasma as we're doing the show right now. This machine right here is Plasma that I'm sitting in front of. And then of course our OBS machine is Plasma. It's been a really good production work desktop. to your own needs. But what I've noticed, and I haven't quite been able to put my finger on it until just about this last week or so, what I've noticed for this last year and a half is some changes or maybe some rough edges that I've noticed in Kubuntu at first, especially around 2204. But also, you know, that caused me to go looking elsewhere

for some great plasma integrations. And I got to say, it's been a little rough road for me. So I wanted to explore, I think, the history of Kubuntu and the history of other spins like Fedora Spin and plasma where it's come from, you know, the mid-2000s to now. And I think there's been some major changes in how it's been integrated in various distributions. And we start to ask some big questions like, well, why, where's it headed? I think is really what I want to know, because I want it to stick around and be the best it can be.

So that's an interesting question. If I think back into the past, I can definitely, some distributions really stand out. Seuss had a really strong KDE desktop experience. I seem to recall Mandrake and Mandriva having a pretty good Plasma desktop or KDE desktop experience at the time. So I'm curious when you say, you know, you've seen a shift over time. I want to, maybe let's start there. What do you mean specifically? Well, I did a little research and back in 2007, which if some of you were heavy Linux users, you may remember this, but it seems that for the most important distributions, Red Hat and Fedora had GNOME,

Debian, Ubuntu also, but OpenSUSE, like you said, had KDE as a default desktop. Ubuntu also, but OpenSUSE, like you said, had KDE as a default desktop. Mandriva certainly did, PC Linux OS as well, and Slackware and Mepis as well. So that is round five, five or so for KDE as the top contenders with three or so going to GNOME. And these days, that's not quite the case. And these days, that's not quite the case. Some distributions have gone to desktop agnostic, I think I'll call it. So now you see OpenSUSE just kind of offering KDE or GNOME or KDE. They've got Cinnamon, Mate, or XFCE as their sort of choices. But then, you know, Ubuntu and Debian has the default. Well, I think Ubuntu is a special case. Debian offers choices, but sort of pre-selects a default as GNOME for you. But in the corporate arena these days, I think Gnome is really the contender. You know, Red Hat, RHEL, CentOS, they've all had Gnome as sort of the main thrust, and that makes sense. I mean, they put a lot of work into that development, right?

They're one of the main funders of development, would you say? You know, there was a time where Unity had made some serious inroads there, but, you know, after Canonical chose to switch back to GNOME, I think it's really taken the day. And even when Unity was strong there, GTK was still kind of the king. Exactly, yeah. That's the underlying theme, is GTK has done really well in that

space. Honestly, I know a few folks who use Linux, you know, at work, I bet they don't even know Plasma exists. Yeah. And of course, of course, we're talking, you know, a slice of the market. Obviously, Qt is extremely successful. It's huge in the enterprise. We're talking about desktop here. Yeah. Desktop specifically, I think, is pretty accurate. I think my question then that we're trying to answer is, are the spins and the flavors just kind of second-rate citizens?

And are they getting enough attention? Because my sort of anecdotal experience in the last several weeks, even months of trying to suss out this space, you know, trying Neon, for instance, which is promising. It offers, you know, the latest plasma on top of really stable Ubuntu base, which is kind of a nice combination. So trying that when I was at Alex's place for the last few months, trying Fedora's spin of KDE has been an interesting journey. And then just kind of retesting my own assumptions about what 2204 might offer me. I've sort of come into some struggles, actually, which I don't love. And I haven't heard that much from either of you. Have you tried sort of,

I think, Chris, you have neon in front of you. Is that correct? Yeah, you got it. You know, when I'm listening, what I'm hearing is you kind of started going from tried and true stable LTS plasma to more like modern rolling current plasma. And I wonder if what you're seeing is the difference between kind of these milestone releases. Carefully gated, kind of curated, right? Had some time to get that level of polish and those things ironed out before moving on. Yeah, although I do run Neon and I don't really run into any particular problems.

Although my NVIDIA driver is broken at the moment. Well, and I don't know. So those things do happen. I feel like my Neon experience is, I don't know if I'd call them problems, but things kind of change and go back, right? Or maybe there's a thing where you notice something crashes a little bit for a week, but then by the time you've updated again, it's gone.

Yeah. So those things show up, but they're not always static. Yeah, and none of them have been like deal breakers yet. There's that. They're more like curiosities, like, oh, that's different, right? Right. But I can still get to what I need to get to, so I'll continue on and I'll update in a couple of days.

You also touched on something there, Brent, that I think could almost be it's a show topic on its own. And that is, do these spins get the same level of attention that the main like distro version? You have Ubuntu proper, right? You've got Fedora Workstation and then you've Kubuntu, and you've got the Fedora KDE Spin. And just like we know the answer, we know that those spins have less users and less developers. And KDE is now often relegated to spin status or flavor status. And so I think that means it's often not getting a complete like all of distro implementation focus and that's not to take anything away from the kubuntu team or any of the other distro distro makers who are making the plasma version of that distro but i do think there might be something to your underlying observation in that over time the main spin of all these these distros really is, for the most part, their gnome spin,

with some exceptions. And maybe that has altered the implementation to be less perfect. I don't know, though. I really don't know. I mean, it sort of necessarily does, right? I mean, KD feels a little bit now like it's mainly a community project from what I've been able to research. And I'm happy to be wrong about that if someone has some inside information. I think they proudly are a community project. I think that's, you know. Oh, I don't mean to take away from that. I think as a community project, it does some amazing, amazing, amazing things.

It does some amazing, amazing, amazing things. But I think because it's not the default of some of these, you know, larger enterprise entities, it maybe doesn't always get the maybe the funding for the kind of work that we would all love to see it get, even though it's still a super impressive piece of software. I think I come at this from like the most loving place possible, which is like, I just, I want this thing to keep being as successful as it has been. And I hope that my observations are only a shift in my own perspective. You know, you mentioned very astutely that maybe I'm just looking at sort of more leading edge KD. And so I'm finding, of course, as I do, finding more rough edges in the software. I hope that's the case, is that I'm the one who has changed and KD is not at all changing and just continuing to do its wonderful thing. I hope that's the answer because that would make me quite happy. But I just have some worries, I guess is the way to put it. You know, it's hard to say. I'd like to get into some of the specifics of what you run into.

Maybe we can kick that around a little bit. For myself, I have definitely struggled with Plasma implementations when I have different monitors, different resolutions, and different refresh rates. And I struggle with that with GNOME as well. It's just an area where, for me i'm always hitting bugs in linux with and i wish that experience was better but on the whole i feel like things are collectively just getting better overall then there's all these edge cases like well are you using an nvidia card are you on wayland are you

on x11 are you on an intel machine or an am Are you on Wayland? Are you on X11? Are you on an Intel machine or an AMD machine? And then things get a little weird, but I want to know like specifically what problems you had. Yeah. And I think my data isn't necessarily empirical and I should have taken a more scientific approach. However, you know, we've had discussions for back and forth for a few months now about the kinds of problems I've run into. And I think some of this was pretty clear when I was at Alex's place. He has some pretty new hardware. I think it was a 3080 or something he's running over there that had some video issues, especially with Wayland.

It ended up being nearly unusable, and I had to switch to X11, still had some issues there. So I think that is partly explained know, partly explained by some hardware for sure. And like you mentioned, I was constantly having monitor issues. He has multiple relatively state-of-the-art monitors and relatively state-of- the-art GPUs as well. And so I don't think it's, you know, I can't point the finger only at, you know, the display manager or anything like that. I think hardware still does play a huge factor there. So it's not fair to point the finger only at one of the things in the pipeline here. So kudos to you for checking me on that. Well, no, no. I mean, it's all like the end user experience, right? I mean, everyone runs into these problems. So video, monitor issues, anything in particular? on Alex's system over at his office where I would adjust the chair quite frequently. So that was a slightly annoying one.

But you know what is interesting, which is sort of moving away from the hardware a little bit and more some of the Plasma-specific features, something I got into before that trip, so before headed to Alex's, here on my local computers that I've been running Kubuntu on for quite a while is, KDE Plasma has this wonderful concept of something called activities, which is almost like, but don't call it this, it's almost like virtual desktops, but it just is a bit more powerful and more sort of context specific. I think it's worth reading into because it's a great idea, but I tried it for a few weeks and found a few bugs in it to the point where it was a little clumsy to use. And I thought, okay, well, I'm going to try neon at Alex's place and we'll try it there again. And it was even more problematic in the sense that it's almost like it was this great feature that got implemented years and years ago that worked great. But then it just hasn't. It's one of those features that's a little hidden and not everybody uses it. And so I feel like maybe there's a little bit of entropy there. And I think that adds to my like, oh, well, how can we fix this, you know? And I think submitting bugs is certainly a way to do that. And yep, I can do that. And yep, I have done that. We'll come up with a list in a little bit, but I admittedly haven't submitted bugs for every single issue that I ran into. Cause sometimes it was like two,

three, four things piling on top of each other in the, you know, the span of trying to get work done in an hour sort of thing. So it started getting a little worrisome, I suppose. But in the studio, Chris, it sounds like you don't run into any of this. So I don't know. Is it just me? as well. He's wondering how much of some of this might be Brent becoming more technically knowledgeable and experienced. You know, like the more you sort of learn what's going on under the covers, the more you take deeper looks at things, the more cracks you discover. And he also here calls out that it's not, you know, this is mostly just saying, Brent, you've learned a lot and we all see it. Oh, thanks. And I think that's a possibility. Like I'm evolving and that's fine. and i and i think that's a possibility like i'm evolving and that's fine that's fine i wonder and i i didn't want this to be my answer but i can't help but feel like maybe this is part of it is those of us who have been schlepping for linux for a really long time are maybe willing to forgive a lot of things and like also when things

break i tend to just move forward and like work around it like i don't stop and i barely even acknowledge the breakage other than maybe like oh this goddamn thing oh shit and then i'll just move right on um and it's not i uh what am i trying to say you know what i'm trying to say west it's like this mentality of i think we're calloused in a way yeah like we're just we're used to that thing we know we're getting this stuff for free we don't expect there's not that i mean some people maybe there is but you know you might get upset about these things especially if you've paid an exorbitant amount for software but we just got it gratis and you know you appreciate how much and you kind of know what's happening on the back end, I think, yeah, I'm fairly willing if it's not a totally derailing issue, I'm fairly willing to just say like, all right, well, I appreciate that. I could have made that mistake or, you know, maybe you're trying to improve this, but it's no longer working for me.

Or it's like you've seen how the sausage is made so many times that you know how long of a shot it is that some of these fringe issues issues are ever going to get taken care of like it's that's not really going to get fixed until the entire stack is replaced and how often some of the stuff that looks shallow on the surface is actually due to like very deep complicated interactions between different subsystems and you're like oh i thought that was just a simple toggle and it's like well no these things have long histories and we got to maintain compatibility and it's going to take mountains of work to fix that and i you know sometimes and i don't like this answer because i think you always everything These things have long histories and we got to maintain compatibility and it's going to take mountains of work to fix that. And I, you know,

sometimes, and I don't like this answer because I think you always, everything has to be evaluated on its own. But sometimes I think to myself, some of these compromises, like when I wake my machine up upstairs and my monitors just totally all screwed up and one of them is flickering, like, like it's having a seizure in my,

the other one, and all my windows are rotated and completely messed up in the wrong spot. And, you know, I do get frustrated. And I think it's still a better option than running Windows. I still trust this system more than I'll ever trust Windows or the Mac. And I don't deal with some of the other things on these proprietary systems that drive me crazy like i might get a 99 accuracy hit on the mac when i wake it up with multiple monitors and where all the screens are and everything like that it might be like 98 99 accurate almost every time but man is it a nightmare

to deal with mac os updates and does it just waste an entire two hours sometimes for some unconceivable reason doing some update that I don't even know what it's actually doing? And what a hot mess are all the different self-implemented updaters on Mac OS and all these little things about the OS that I never have to deal with on a Linux box. And it's stuff that slows me down and takes my time. It's like, I went on a website this morning. I was looking up some of the smoke conditions around here, and I got this big pop-up that says, we value your time. And they had all these questions for me. And I'm like, you lying bastard. If you valued my time, you wouldn't be putting this pop-up in front of my face and stopping me, right? That's is like that we value your time your your answer your call will be answered in

15 minutes like that's windows right that where linux is like there's there's no there's no call waiting there's no there's no hold you just get on you get you get your answer you get the job done and so i weigh those things higher than i weigh the niggling issues that I run into from time to time. And generally, they're never issues that prevent me from working. Right. Whereas like the deal with Mac OS updates and it's silly, long update process, that'll stop you from working. You can't work while the machine's doing that. Where I can choose a Linux distro that does updates very quick and very efficiently. And there's also so many more, you know, knobs as well as insight. Like I have a lot more faith that there will be like a bug

report that I'll be able to see at least that can document or I could contribute to acknowledge this issue. Great point. You can go look at the source code. And to some extent, I feel kind of like a guest in a hotel on some of those other desktops you know i expect to be catered to because i don't have any options whereas with linux it's it's like your own tool it's your own house and you know sometimes you're pretty upset because well you really didn't paint that wall very well or whatever over there you know but but you can then customize it if you need to or like you could compile your own build a plasma if you really wanted to.

I don't think you do, but you could, right? Or you could just stop updating. You could stick to a stable branch if you wanted to. I think we, I don't know, you guys may know, but I used to work with a PHP developer who did just that. He would get like whatever the previous LTS was, and he would only use that and only use the software from that repo. And he refused to use anything newer because of the problems you're having and brent that was almost a decade ago it was like it's always kind of been the case and i think that's where the distros still play a role and you've just happened to choose a desktop environment that maybe some of the major distros aren't focusing on that are doing

the polishing now i really don't want to take anything away from plasma because i think in some ways it's great that we have something like Plasma out there that isn't tied to any particular distro, that isn't being led around by Red Hat or something like that. That's a good thing. That's also an advantage. Yeah, absolutely. You have been trying to effect change, right? You have submitted bugs for some of the things. And that isn't something you have to do, but it is an option we have with free software that we don't necessarily have with the commercial stuff.

Well, and actually what's been great about that process. And it first started a few months ago when we were participating in the Ubuntu beta testing, or at least I did some listeners may have as well, hopefully. And, uh, I did find some bugs doing upgrades between LTS versions. And it was actually really refreshing to be like, hey, I found this thing. And I think no one else has found it or other people have. But I can share some extra information about it on, you know, my particular steps. And that was a refreshing perspective into the way that open source functions. And I, what's been really neat is watching, you know, you automatically get tagged and track those conversations via email

or whatever it is. And it's been fascinating to watch the discussions and the progress on some of these bugs throughout the months, both in a, I think in a good and bad way, I hesitate to use those words, but like some of the bugs are deemed, you know, oh yeah, this is very serious. It needs to be fixed before the release. And it gets all the attention and it gets solved, you know, sometimes within a few hours or a few days. But then some bugs that seem at least to me from, you know, let's say a slightly technically proficient end user, some bugs that seem super serious to me have gone months and months and months and months without any attention. Well, some people are paying attention, but without a fix, I'll say. So one in particular was,

um, Kibuntu had a bug where you couldn't enter like their KDESU function. So where you type in your pseudo password to, you know, bring up a, to change some repos or something in the GUI, for instance. Yeah, that does seem like a bad one. Yeah, it would present a dialogue to you to, you know, put in your password, which is all good, but it would never, ever accept any of your passwords, either the pseudo password or your, you know, your known good password as the acceptable answer would just never, ever let you in basically. And it was just changed some fairly, you know, important functions. So you'd had to find ways around it. So, you know, I'm,

I guess, seasoned enough that I knew ways around it, but it seemed like a pretty big issue to me. And I was like, oh, this definitely needs some attention. Like this is very serious. that seemed like a pretty big issue to me. And I was like, oh, this definitely needs some attention. Like this is very serious. And a potential fix to be tested was only sent out, I think, last week, which really surprised me because we found these back in March. I think it was, and I'm not the only one to have found this bug. So it's been really fascinating to watch sort of the internals of the teams that are working on these things as well. So if anyone's interested in getting to learn the Linux desktop environment on a different level, I very highly recommend, you know, go find some bugs and submit some,

or at least go look at some bug reports. It's an amazing thing. I'm getting excited. I'm getting so excited for you, Brent. This is such an exciting period you're going through right now. This is good. Well, have you been through this it sounds like oh sure yeah you're gonna get a whole you're gonna get a whole new understanding of how

free software is put together and i think this is i think this is a super valuable understanding um watching this process what you talked about there watching how the team works seeing what things they go after kind of see who some of the superstars are. How do you balance all the competing demands and bugs and issues and new features maybe? Yeah. Yeah. Well, what's been even more interesting is from our website project where now I'm, I've been sort of playing the person of the, you know, triaging bugs that we get in and priorities and stuff like that.

Now I'm seeing because of our own open source project with, you know, a bunch of listeners putting in their time and effort when they can on their specialty to make our website an amazing thing. Now I have the perspective of, you know, that other chair and that other hat of trying to organize all these competing priorities and stuff. It has been a really fascinating time for me personally. And I think that's what I wanted to share here today is like, there's a lot of different ways of having perspective on the software that we're using. And that's kind of a beautiful thing in this open source environment. I want to also take your point to the audience, maybe have them boost in with their thoughts. Is Plasma maybe getting a second rate implementation because it's on these spins and flavors and not the primary distro focus so often?

And again, not to take anything away from like Kubuntu teams or Fedora spin team because we all use it. We love that project. We are so thankful for anything. We just wish they had more developers. And I'm wondering, are we off? Just somehow does the free software model

and the development model for free software, does it kind of avoid this problem since it's all upstream development? Let us know your thoughts. Boost it in or go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact. Bitwarden.com slash Linux. Go get started with a free trial of Teams or for an individual right now by going to bitwarden.com slash Linux. Bitwarden is the easiest way for yourself, an individual, a team, an

open source project to share and sync sensitive data. It's fully customizable. There's all kinds of things that you can tweak and you can set, especially for those of you in the enterprise environment. And of course, we love that Bitwarden is open source, trusted by millions in the community. It's of course what Wes and I use every single day

for managing our passwords. You can manage your two-factor authentication there and have it all in one spot. And it just syncs beautifully across the desktop and across mobile devices. And one of the very first things I install now when I set up a new Linux box is the Bitwarden Flatpak. Then I can get logged into all my services and my sites and I can use secure individual unique passwords for all of

them. You know, I just kept thinking to myself, how much more could Bitwarden do in 2022? How much more could they really do? They've done so much. They've added so many features, especially on mobile for both Android and iOS this year. And for the enterprise, cross-domain identity management was huge. They just got to that. This week, they're announcing FastMail alias generation. So if you're a FastMail user, FastMail has been added to the list of available options for generating an email address along Firefox Relay and on Addy and simple login. So now you can have a unique username, a unique password, and a unique email address for every site and service you use. That is

ultimate security and Bitwarden just manages all of it for you. They just do it all for you. They generate it, they autofill it, they sync it, and they do it securely. And it's all open source. And if you're a Fastmail user, this just got real for they do it securely, and it's all open source. And if you're a FastMail user, this just got real for you. I mean, how great is this? If you're an existing Bitwarden user, you just get this. I love this, and I hear from you guys out there all the time how much you love FastMail, so I'm super psyched for all of you.

Bitwarden just keeps getting better. If you haven't switched yet, if a friend a family member or maybe your workplace your school place you know if you see some practices that maybe bitwarden could help with you know what i'm talking about passwords under the keyboard we've all seen it give them bitwarden.com slash linux it's just a great way to support the show and get them on the straight and narrow to good password management which is probably the number one thing they could do online to protect themselves. So go to bitwarden.com slash linux. Go try it out. The easiest way to sync, store, and share sensitive data. bitwarden.com slash linux. Tater boosts in this week with 2,049 cents. I'm curious, what did you come up with on the photo front?

I'm in the exact same boat. I have been testing out Synology photos lately, but it really just doesn't cut it. The wife is especially unhappy with the lack of AI features that allow her to search for things like dog or Disney's Animal Kingdom. features that allow her to search for things like dog or Disney's Animal Kingdom. I've been using Photosync on iOS to at least get my pictures onto my unraid NAS, albeit unorganized. You know, Tater, we got a lot of feedback about that. So what we're going to do is a kind of roundup of some of the stuff that was sent in in the pics. And then we'll give you a little more information about it. We're going to try some stuff ourselves and then give you our official final definitive setups for Photosync.

But yeah, a lot of people had recommended NextCloud or they'd recommended Photoprism. And I did get a few people that said Synology Photos actually worked well for them. So for those of you that do have a Synology, there's something to consider. Well, we've got a double boost from Tater with 2,048 sats. Started off with a question there, but this one I think is a little pro tip. You mentioned the struggles of getting sats into Lightning wallets like Fountain, and I thought I'd share my recent discovery. No, it's not private like RoboSats, but I like it anyway. It's the Fountain. And I thought I'd share my recent discovery. No, it's not private like RoboSats, but I like it anyway.

It's the Cash app. I've been a user for years now, and I recently found out that their Bitcoin wallet in the app supports Lightning. So sending Sats to Fountain was a piece of cake. Cash app's actually a great tip. And, like right now, they got a boost in there. You get 5% back in bitcoin on any food you buy in the cash app so you could you know buy yourself dinner and then uh boost those stats in

you know i'm constantly having to buy food for some reason i know it gets old doesn't it okay well next up is a boost from our beloved elray hey elray or is it elry elry you're right elray elry i've just been saying Elray this whole time, so... See, I got it. I'm blaming Brent. But a solid contributor to our new website. Boost in and let us know. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Elray boosts in with a row of ducks.

Working in the offensive security field, I think I mostly agree with Chris's sentiment. A lot of antivirus software sucks. But there are a few AV or endpoint protection products that are actually really awesome. At least for Windows. They're working on making Linux better. All right. Here's a specific example.

If I see CrowdStrike or a box with an updated Windows Defender, I know I have to change my attack pattern to try and not get caught while I'm on that machine. All right, that actually is, you know, I remember that. When you see a piece of software, you're like, oh, all right, this is going to be a little harder than I expected. That probably is the highest praise you could get for something like that. He kind of sums it up with, you know, AV isn't the best, but it's catching low-hanging fruit,

which is pretty important for non-technical users. Sure. Sure, that makes sense. Along these same lines, Entropic Ninja boosts in with an elite number of sets. Just listening to the discussion about malware and how Mac have integrated it at the OS level. To Cruz's point about how scanning can tax a system, it made me think about all those coprocessors on Apple's silicon. Perhaps there might be some specific antivirus coprocessors introduced in the near future? be the total Apple move is to pretend like your platform was immune from malware forever, right? And oh yeah, it's not us. Then when you start to have a malware problem, you build it in at the system level, the protection

and build in coprocessors after that and be like, what? Well, yeah, we have malware, but it doesn't impact the performance of your system. That is, that is exactly what they're going to do, right? Oh boy. Yeah. And you'll, you know, you got gotta pay for those fancy coprocessors. You get a coprocessor, I get a coprocessor. It just all adds to the price.

Neff boosted in with 2016 sets. Coming in hot with the boost! You always get me with that one. It's our favorite! 2016 was when we first heard the phrase, the year of the Linux desktop, which coincides with when Canonical was at the peak of its convergence hype train.

Do you remember that? Ubuntu made the switch to the first LTS with SystemD and had an ongoing phone and smart TV project. Mandryo also finally got popular. Gnome Shell finally reached usable. And Steam proved the test of time, lasting the four-year test, and showed the community Valve was in the long run with the Steam Machine and SteamOS 1.0. My last bit of history boosts, by the way. Nev, I loved your history boosts.

What a wild year the 2016 was. I'm going to miss the history boosts. I want more history boosts. Yeah, keep those coming. That was really fascinating. Steam 1.0 2016 seems like both, like Steam for Linux just happened yesterday. And I also feel like it was a decade ago. about uh steam on linux is that i heard it from michael larble and somebody else that i won't name six months to nine months before it came to linux but i didn't know when i just knew they were

working on it and i'd seen like some really solid evidence like i didn't know if it was shipping but i knew they had a client i had had seen screenshots. I had seen source code. I knew it was real. I just never knew if we were going to get a product. I didn't know when or anything like that. So to me, so much of my experience about Steam coming to Linux was like the anticipation of when and trying to do that math and keep my mouth shut, but then also drop hints on air. So it feels like it was a real time. 2016 was a solid year for Linux. That's all I know.

Eric Party boosted in with 15,000 stats. B-O-O-S-T. Chris, I think this one's for you on some documentation. They write, readme.md, Chris, and todo.md saves my bacon when I write Ansible, Terraform, Pulumi, FutureNix. Ooh, I like that. Comments are great. Good commit messages are also great. But a readme.md with how does this all work again? Notes that gets the overall gist is invaluable.

Yeah, that is good advice. Readme.mds and to do.mds always really invaluable. But hold on, we got to back up. What is Pulumi? The next Nix. Is this like an ansible meets nix meets something else oh a little sneaky oh i think those are separate those are separate items i believe it's palumi which is an existing thing and then i think future nix maybe to imply that eric will be trying out nix soon well eric that's how i interested it okay thank you for the sage advice i'll advice. I will take that to heart.

I will write future Chris read-me's. And I'll put in there, like, you really actually need to read this. I'll put it in the title so I know it's from me and not some jerk. Be kind to yourself, Chris. It's kind of like the difference between having a reference where you need the specific detail,

which is where those comments are, like, oh, don't forget, you don't need to do it this way or it'll break. And then the readme is that high level thing where you're just like, what's the intention from the user, the human view? And then you can get into the specifics later. That's good to know. All right, thank you, Eric.

And thank you for that healthy boost of 15,000 sats. The Musou, the Musou boosteded in with 5,000 sets. Talking about Unity got me thinking about the one thing I miss, the menu bar. I love Gano, but the move away from the menu bar saddens me. As a keyboard-heavy user, the menu bar allowed me to quickly access functions that did not have a keyboard shortcut assigned. A simple Alt plus key and another key later, I could use a function. In my opinion, the hamburger menus are not the answer.

Sure, I could probably use KDE, but for various reasons, I prefer GNOME and the GTK ecosystem. I do not like the hamburger menu still. The overflow menu, as it's called now. And Apple's all in on it. The Home Assistant project is redesigned. Still the, the overflow menu as it's called now and, um, Apple's all in on it. The home assistant project is redesigned their automations UI and home assistant. And they've helpfully added many things to the overflow menu. It just feels like the ultimate UI lazy button.

Ah, well, we couldn't figure out where to put these things. So one giant menu you know what's unfortunate is uh our website has one yeah sure of course of course this everything's so handy everything it does everything does everything has the hamburger menu now and uh i just can't even with it and i i think part of it is because you can't put everything on the toolbar or whatever right for this stuff you got it but there's still functions they want to add i feel that one i'm just always struck whenever i go and use like old school windows you know and

like the the alt plus key is everywhere i mean you could just keyboard drive so many of those apps that way and it's it's actually quite nice that's my one good thing of Windows for the years. Okay, I'll stop until 2023. I do agree. And consistently, too, like the Windows keyboard shortcuts I learned years ago, I think for the most part are still valid, right? Most Plasma apps, too. It's really the GNOME stuff.

All right, Gene being boosted with 15,000 sats. He has two thoughts on open sourcing soundbites. Number one, be sure to use get else what's a get else guys pardon hey guys uh hey brent you're a github guy now you're a big github guy now brent hey brent brent what's a get elf what's a get elf brent what is that i i think it's like sort of like the paperclip guy in in? I think it's sort of like the paperclip guy. Huh? It's sort of like that paperclip guy.

Clippy. Yeah, that's the one. It's just like whenever you need help, you just hit the button and it comes out and tries to help you. It's a little Linus Torvalds, but it looks like an elf. You're right. I should be using that. That's a great tip, Gene Bean. Thank you. I should be using that. Okay, so reading between the lines here, it's LFS, and that's large file support, which is a sort of add-on to Git because

it's not really designed to support giant binary files necessarily. So there's ways to integrate those in a little better handling into the mix. Oh, links. You just use a link. You just link it. But can I get this Linus Elf thing? Because that sounds great. Number two, You just link it. But can I get this Linus Elf thing? Because that sounds great. Number two, you should be careful about the copyright side of things. Yes, that's true.

It's a balance. It's been a balance between the fun of it all and the copyright of it all. So I feel like we need to find the right balance. So far, we've been leaning heavily on the fun side. Gene Bean had a few extra boosts. I love it. Gene Bean's a great supporter of the show and uh i read some of those in the pre-show alex gates the podcasting 2.0 consultant boosted with 15 000 we got some 15 000 that is great you know what you all are you're all back home ballers but

i'm not gonna play it okay one more time for y'all. Because I'm a back home baller. If I want something, I just holler. But that's it. That's it. Never again. But we had some solid 15,000 boosters. I felt like they deserved it. Alex says that we're working on podcasting 2.0 playlists that anyone can make and share and then shows up as an RSS feed.

What? That's a great idea. Freaking love it. You know, I would love to do like all of our episodes where we talk about like managing and owning your own data, right? Just like a whole like self-sovereign data series. I mean, tags could just be playlists in that way, right? You just blew my mind.

Keep us posted, Alex. Please do. Thor 502 boosted in. I think we screwed up with the 2048 stats just a heads up guys wooden who boosted in last week is another way to say odin yeah you know the all father it's woe din my dad didn't hang upside down in yagasal how do you say that itrazil itrazil For nine days and nine nights to be referred to as lumber.

As funny as that might be to you. Sorry, Thor. I'm glad Thor has a podcasting 2.0 app. You know, Thor's going to new podcast apps. He's got himself a podcasting 2.0 app. You know, if he doesn't want to switch apps, he's sticking with Breeze or Boost CLI. Maybe he's using Albi.

I don't know what thor is doing let us know thor what's worked for you that's pretty hip that's that's what i hear i wouldn't have thought but you know i i suppose i suppose it makes sense when you think about it from like a math standpoint he knows about new podcast apps.com he knows about that thank you everybody who did boost in we also we got 11 000 sats from uh forged foe but he didn't have a message but we also wanted to thank patrick for sending a row of ducks into the show as well as everybody else who boosted in we read all of your messages and we're just kind of selectively picking the ones that really float our boat to put in the show some make into the pre-show then of course

those baller boosts make it to the top of the show and all of them help keep podcasting independent thank you everybody guys we got an overpacked pick segment we got a pop and picks segment over here we wanted to kind of run through some of the ideas that were sent in for getting your photos off of your mobile device and onto your own system so you can back them up and display them number one with a bullet photosync came in which is an app for iOS and Android. Thornbill, amongst others, sent them in to let us know, hey, you got to try these out. And this is definitely one

that you'll be hearing more about from us, I think, in the future. Photosync lets you transfer your photos and your videos from your machine, cross-platform, and it supports all kinds of back-end network services. So pretty much anything you're doing, WebDAV, SMB, DropBizzle.

I don't know what you're using, but it supports it. It's ridiculous. So that was sent in by a lot of folks. iDrive also was sent in. Another one of the kind of the same dealios, multi-computer cloud backup. Get it off your device. The pricing is there. It's kind of expensive, but people were using it,

so I thought I would mention it. Hey, photos are important. SyncThing was mentioned, was boosted in by iBookie. He said, I have a server with PhotoPrism and SyncThing. SyncThing copies the photos from the phone to the server, and PhotoPrism imports and displays them from the SyncThing directory. I like that a lot. Sync Thing is not available for iOS.

I have had good luck in the past using it to sync my photos on Android, though. Folder Sync was also sent in. Purple Dog using Breeze sent that in with a row of ducks. It says I'm using Folder Sync on Android and then Photo Prism as the progressive web app. What I'm really missing, though, is the ability to share an album. So Folder Sync is an Android option. Photo Sync is an iOS and Android option. And Photo Prism is the app that a lot of people are using to display them, but not everybody. There's a lot here and we got a lot of emails about this. Here's what I'd like to know. We'd like some hands-on experience examples.

We want to take in a lot of the feedback, kind of have the audience give us their reports on using things like Photosync and Foldersync and Photoprism. Yeah, what worked well, what let you down in a critical moment. Yeah, what went wrong, how did you recover, those kinds of stories. You can boost them in or go to linuxunplugged.com contact we want to try to collate as much of that so we can kind of get some meta observations that we can use to inform our commentary and then we want to come back to you guys and tell you what apps we picked for our photo solutions and what worked what didn't work and if we can give as much step-by-step instruction as we can on a podcast so that's kind of where we want to take this segment ultimately and just kind of going to be driven by how much input we get from you guys. We have some,

we've gotten some good stuff. I'd like a little bit more in terms of actual hands-on usage and some horror stories. And also if you ended up going back to Google Photos, tell us what went wrong and why and that kind of stuff. All that would be really valuable because that's all experience that we can then use to inform our commentary and relate to the audience because we'd like to create a definitive take control of your photos. Get away from Google Photos episode that people can get referred to because we got to do it. We got we got to do it. I mean, if not us, who?

Who? Who? It's just time. I think it's time. We waited too long and now we got to double down on it. So let us know how it's worked, how it hasn't worked, the good and the bad. And of course, don't forget next Sunday is our last live stream in the studio before we hit the road. Brent's going to be here.

We should think about food. Oh, I think we must feast. Yeah, we're going to have to feast. We're going to be putting on quite the show. Maybe we just live stream all day. I don't know's gonna be weird you know i mean you're gonna be up here in seattle we're gonna be gone we're gonna be having a great time you know i'm already you're gonna be stuck here at the studio you know it's gonna be weird but i'll have full control of this no no no, no, no. We finally fired your soundboard guy.

You're cut off. It's been a lot better. Been noticing a lot less rust sound bites. That's why. That soundboard guy brought the rust clip and that was it. And that's all he ever did. I don't know what kind of hire that was. He's worth the salary.

Let me tell you. I don't know about that. But we'd love to see you next week. We do it at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern over at jupiter.tube. That is our self-hosted PeerTube instance. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. And don't miss Linux Action News.

We covered some underwater Linux data centers that are going live in our backyard here in the Pacific Northwest and everything else going on in the world of Linux and free software. There's a whole other companion to this show. It's tight, concise, just the information you need. LinuxActionNews.com. Links to what we talked about today, that's at LinuxUnplugged.com slash 475. And of course, at the new website, too, over at JupyterBroadcasting.com. Go check that sucker out.

It's a doozy. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program. I think we're going to see you right back here next Sunday. I think we should spread the love just a little bit. You did try out Gnome after having some plasma frustrations. Ooh, that could be a good title. Plasma frustrations. And so we said, all right. Okay, Brent.

Okay then, Brent. All right, Brent. Go try out Gnome. See how that goes for you, Brent. How did it go for you, Brent? Yeah, I think we decided that, was it last Sunday when we were thinking about this episode? And we thought, okay, well, it's only fair to go try the dark side. You know, I haven't actually, here's something.

I've never actually spent much time in GNOME because I've been so happy with Plasma. So I only have like at most hours in GNOME before this. chris you put it to me and you i know i know uh but chris you put it to me and you said well give it a shot for like a week and see what happens and i did and it was enlightening so far unfortunately it wasn't i was expecting it to be a polished wonderful experience now i did choose fedora's GNOME implementation because I figured, okay, at the time on my main laptop here, I've got Fedora's implementation of KDE. So I thought, okay, well let's change the fewest things possible and just switch to, you know, the GNOME desktop environment. All right. That makes sense. Slightly more scientific maybe

than my previous experiences trying to change only one variable. And I ran into a lot of problems, a ton of problems, many, many, many, many bugs that helpfully the GNOME bug reporter helped me file a whole bunch of them. But one of the ones that was worrying was the kernel core had 15 occurrences of problems, system failures, it called it, that were just kept getting collected and collected. I had some random abrupt black screens that would just happen in the middle of, you know, I'm in the middle of working on the website and all of a sudden, you know, I've written this whole like reply to someone or a new issue and it's like paragraphs long and all of a sudden my system

just like vanished before my eyes and i couldn't do anything to you know i couldn't use the keyboard to get to a terminal i couldn't even put it to sleep or anything to try to like that sounds like mutter or wayland is crashing on you yeah it was wayland and i had some extra issues with Wayland, which I've experienced on other Wayland systems, which is poor video playback. But you were primarily X11 before, right? On your Plasma days? Yeah. So this is also a little bit new Wayland territory for me as well, but I've been disappointed to be honest. That's kind of what I was getting at in the show is what I think makes this tricky is if you look back over the last five six years of linux you've you've gone through so many transitions that like it's hard to say where in the stack you're actually bumping problems that

maybe on an older system you know you didn't although i gotta tell you like if i ever if i ever had what you're going through happen to me more than once, I would not use any of these systems. Like, that would be it. I don't got time for that. I know. And that's how I started feeling this week was like, I almost put up my hands and just said, you know, it's only Thursday. I didn't even make it to Sunday again. And I can't do this anymore.

I wonder how this is going to go on the dev one. Well, I'm interested. Could this be hardware? Could some of this be hardware? Like potentially. So one of the main systems I'm using here is an X250. And okay, Alex and I like Frankenstein, this thing, but it's been pretty stable. And then my workstation as well was what I was using GNOME on because I didn't quite want to wipe this. I was really hesitant to do that, especially with the travels coming up. And so I ran it on a completely different system and so, yeah, it could

be hardware. They're both old-ish. They don't have that much cat hair in them, but it could be. You know, that's a possibility. I was just wondering if you'd like the, I mean, not that Pop's totally made for that, but, you know, in a system that's sort of a little more integrated and not coupled together, it might be something up your alley. You mean the Pop Gnome experience?

Yeah, I was thinking he might like the Pop Gnome or the Ubuntu Gnome experience. Because the thing about Fedora is it's a real upstream experience, right? So you're getting basically factory GNOME. factory gnome and i like that because then i know i add these 17 extensions and everything's fine but you don't have you know literally six years or so of playing around with various extensions to know which one's just to go to right that to me is just built-in knowledge now um where something like you should publish a feed of the extensions you're currently using i wish that's where something like pop and ubuntu you know they've done a little curation in that experience. Well, that's what's really fascinating to me is I feel like, at least for me personally, when I jump on a plasma machine, I don't really need to add anything. It's got

most of the things I want, but... It's got more than any desktop environment has. It's got everything. Fair enough. And sometimes that's a downside. And also, I'm aware that I have, you know, five years worth of experience with it. So, of course, I'm going to lean towards preferring the thing that's familiar, right? That I have in mind as well. But, you know, you have sort of convinced me that you've been happier with GNOME more now than ever. Yeah. Yeah, I have. Yeah.

That's sort of why I leaned towards using the Fedora implementation was that you seem really happy with it. Yeah, I did. That I did. Yeah, I wonder if you saw my setup, what you'd think of it. You might soon. Yeah, you will. Yeah, I'm curious what you're going to throw on the dev one for me. Yeah. Oh, we have a little something to start with, don't we? Uh-oh. I just had that USB here today.

This should be entertaining. So I think we have a whole episode dedicated to these shenanigans. Is that how it's going?