LINUX Unplugged - 607: Ubuntu's Rusty Roadmap

Episode Date: March 23, 2025

Canonical's VP of Engineering for Ubuntu reveals why they're swapping coreutils for Rust-built tools. Then we break down the GNOME 48 release, and why this one is special.Sponsored By:Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices! 1Password Extended Access Management: 1Password Extended Access Management is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. River: River is the most trusted place in the U.S. for individuals and businesses to buy, sell, send, and receive Bitcoin. Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FMJon SeagerEngineering Ubuntu For The Next 20 Years — We should look deeply at the tools we ship with Ubuntu by default, selecting for tools that have resilience, performance and maintainability at their core.Carefully But Purposefully Oxidising Ubuntu — Starting with Ubuntu 25.10, my goal is to adopt some of these modern implementations as the default. My immediate goal is to make uutils’ coreutils implementation the default in Ubuntu 25.10, and subsequently in our next Long Term Support (LTS) release, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, if the conditions are right.GNOME 48 Release Notes — The GNOME project is excited to introduce GNOME 48, a fresh release shaped by six months of hard work from our amazing community. Named “Bengaluru”, this release pays tribute to the dedication of the GNOME Asia 2024 organizers.awesome-tuisPick: Ulauncher — Application launcher for Linux🐧Ulauncher on GitHubHotkey In Wayland · Ulauncher WikiBrowse Ulauncher ExtensionsGitmoji ExtensionTodoist task management Extensionmariob88/ulauncher-todoist-integrationTurn Off Screen ExtensionHome Assistant Extensionqcasey/ulauncher-homeassistantObsidian Extension

Brent's on the road this week and he's joining us from Spain. And so we assume you have learned the language and are speaking like a local at this point. Yeah, I've been working all weekend on a particular phrase and trying to get the different, I don't know, tips and tricks on how to pronounce this thing throughout the land here. Okay, lay it on us. Let's see how you're doing. Linux no eschufado es muy bueno. 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. Well coming up on the show today, Canonical's VP of Engineering for Ubuntu will reveal why they're considering swapping out the core utils for rust built tools. And then we're going to break down everything you really need to know about the new GNOME 48, which we'll be shipping in the next Fedora and Ubuntu before you even know it. And then we're going to round out the show with some great boosts, some picks, and a lot more. So before we get any further, I wanna say a hello and a big time appropriate greetings to our virtual lug.

Hello, Mumble Room. Hey, Mr. Wilson. Hello, everybody. Hello. Oh my God, my voice is still broken. No, we're glad to have you. It's nice to have all of you, actually, and also shout out to those of you up in the quiet listening. Our Mumble Room is live and running early on Sunday mornings.

You know, usually about 930, 945 Pacific time that Mumble Room is up and getting the live low latency opus stream right off the mixer. And you're always welcome to join us with a free software stack from top to bottom and hang out in our virtual log. And a big good morning to our friends at tailscale, tailscale.com slash unplugged. Go there and get it free for up to 100 devices and three user accounts. No credit card required. Support the show. Tailscale.com slash unplugged.

It is the easiest way to connect your devices and your services. Like your applications, you can put your individual containers on your tail net. You can put, you know, like me, I have code dot my secret domain dot my secret TLDR TLDR TLD. And when I go to that, I get VS code in the browser, regardless of where I'm at, because all my devices are on tailscale. It is a mesh network protected by what I got. And it's fast. One of the things I love about tailscale is it is smart enough to know if you're talking

to a device on the LAN or if you're talking to a device on the Internet. Now for the end user, there's no difference. It's like they're all on your LAN. But tail scale is smart enough to know if it's right there on the same subnet, just go right to the machine directly. Don't bother going out to the Internet. So when you're doing like file copies and things like that, it's blazing fast and it's super quick to get set up.

And if you're like me, you'll get it going. And 100 device is going to be fine for your home lab stuff. But then you're going to realize how much better it is if you could get work to start using this. So send them to tailscale.com slash unplug to thousands and thousands of companies are now using this to bridge the really complicated multi data center, multi VPS networks into one flat mesh network.

Even things like Pi KVM I put on my tail net so I can get my KVM wherever I'm at and get my server back up and running. Try it out for yourself. Individual plans and business plans free today at tailscale.com slash unplugged. And for 100 devices, go check it out. So I have been trying to sign a lot of documents recently and I've used sterling pdf for this but I'm putting the question out there right now right here what are you using on Linux to natively sign pdfs I just want to sign and date PDFs quickly. Like I had this eight page thing. I had to sign every single page.

How are you doing that? Boost it and tell me how you're doing it or go to linuxunplug.com slash contact because I just envy every time I look over at one of my Mac using friends and they just have the built in preview tool and it just has a signature function. It's very useful. I'm like, come on, come on useful I'm like come on come on. Let's get that on plasma. Let's get that or you know

I don't know like a flat pack that just boots up Mac OS with the interface to read your PDFs from a directory That's hilarious It's hilarious. That's too much Wes. That's too much no way But do let me know if you have a way to do this natively on Linux because I feel inadequate right now. Canonical has made quite a bit of news recently. They've been discussing swapping out some of the GNU core utils with Rust versions. And this is a big topic and there's probably a lot of reasons behind it.

So we thought the best thing to do would be to have John Seeger on the show. He's the VP of engineering for Ubuntu at Canonical and he's joining us right now. And so to really dig into this, John is joining us now and this is all coming within about the 20 year milestone of Ubuntu. So I think it's a perfect time to reflect on all of this and hear about it right from the horse's mouth. John, welcome to the unplugged program. Hey.

Hello. So you made two really great posts. First it was engineering Ubuntu for the next 20 years, which was interesting, right? You really touched on upgrading communication, focusing on automation, simplifying process, maybe even embracing new languages, which you expand on in your second post recently, which is carefully but purposefully oxidizing Ubuntu.

And in this post, you talk about starting with Ubuntu 25.10 and potentially maybe making them default in 2604 LTSTS if everything works out, some of the core utils that people are used to would get replaced with a Rust version. So something like LS or CP or MV would be swapped out with a Rust implementation of a similar tool. And I wondered if you wouldn't mind kind of talking about some of the rationale behind this idea and where it's at mind kind of talking about some of the rationale behind this idea and where it's at and kind of any of the coloring you think we might need.

Yeah, so the first post I made about three days after taking on the appointment kind of officially, internally at Canonical. Congratulations. Thank you. My new role seems to be looking after the desktop team, the foundations team, and the server team. And one of the things I would really like to reinvigorate about Ubuntu is this idea that it's

based on this very stable, very dependable community project that is Debian, but that we have a bit more freedom to kind of ship later things, maybe take a few more risks. Like Ubuntu was always about taking the very latest and greatest of open source we could find and shipping it in a way that perhaps Debian didn't want to, or maybe shouldn't. And what happened is Ubuntu became very successful. And I think over time, those interim releases

that kind of come between the LTSs got maybe a little bit less bold. It was a little bit more sort of turning the handle. And I would like to bring back a bit of a bit more experimentation and think about what are what are the things we want to introduce, what are the practices, who are the sorts of people we want to bring along for the next 20 years of Ubuntu, noting the extraordinary success that we as a community have enjoyed over the past 20 years. So CoreUtils is an interesting change to me because it is a very foundational part of the distribution. It's

part of the Debian Essentials sort of package set. And something we use all the time and basically never talk about. Right. It's in all your scripts. It's LS, it's CP. It's a whole bunch of stuff. And there's this wonderful project under the name of Uutils, who are writing modern implementations of core utils and find utils and diff utils. And my understanding, having spoken to the lead developer, is it started out kind of as a hobby project

to learn a bit of Rust, but has gained quite a lot of momentum. And one of the things that really struck me about the project is, right from the very start, they've been measuring themselves against the GNU test suite and they're not doing it in spite of the GNU core utilities they actually work with the GNU folks at times and when they discover interesting behaviors or undocumented behaviors they collaborate with them to either submit fixes or clarify documentation but fundamentally it is a complete re-implementation. Mostly, not huge numbers of changes.

They can't be, right? They're supposed to be 100% compatible. There are places where it's a little faster. There are places where you get nice little features like an interactive progress bar on the copy command, for example. There's an example of that in the FosDem talk that I linked in my post.

And so this is an experiment. It's an experiment to see if we can integrate a really interesting new project at the heart of the distribution, which has a really active community around it who are interested in memory safety and resilience and kind of see how that goes. So, John, when I heard about this, my first thought was this must be a calculation for the long term, right? Your next, say, 2604, which is going to get supported for more than a decade.

Is this about making this a more sustainable long-term support distribution? Is that sort of the high-level goal here? It's one of the considerations, yes, but it's also about our ability to grow the contributor base to Ubuntu. We grew really steadily, in my understanding, I wasn't a part of the project back then, but the community grew really steadily for years. But in the last five to six years,

we have not seen the levels of contribution perhaps we were used to, and it certainly hasn't been growing the way we would like. And I don't have hard facts here, but coming to the next distribution development as more of a kind of cloud oriented developer, my feeling is that a lot of the tooling feels its age a little bit. If you compare to the craft tooling for building things like snaps and charms, you compare

to the tooling for building flatbacks, you compare to the contribution process for NICs. We've also seen Silverblue and the UBlue project, right, coming along trying to introduce more of those workflows too. Right. And they have absolutely nailed it, in my opinion, right? Coming along, trying to introduce more of those workflows too. Right, and they have absolutely nailed it, in my opinion, right? Like this, okay, you've learned all these skills for building Docker files, what if you could use those exact same skills

to build your OS? And so part of the deal with this Rust core utility thing is I want to attract developers, you know, the next generation developers who are interested in becoming Ubuntu developers, Ubuntu maintainers. And so that's absolutely part of it. Am I right in picking up here that there's both the specifics of what you're swapping out and why, but then it kind of sounded like too, it was maybe an exercise in your new role of seeing what it is like to try to be able to swap out things kind of regardless of how this goes to be able to go

through the workflow and see how the community and contributors respond. Yeah, exactly. And I want to say I'm absolutely committed to making this change in 2510. So on the day that the archive opens in 2510, this change will have happened. The default core util's implementation for 2510 is going to be the util's thing from the start. But that said, I don't want to be reckless about it. We will do our absolute best at Canonical with our community. And we're also going to work very closely with the upstream

to resolve bugs. But I'm not going to ultimately stand on principle and jeopardize the stability and reliability of Ubuntu. If this doesn't work out, we would, of course, roll it back. But I'm pretty hopeful that it's going to from what I've seen so far. Well, that brings up then, what are you looking for to be able to slot it into a future LTS?

So I guess the first thing is we will change it in the archive and see what breaks. You know, we're going to have a big rebuild going on. It'll be interesting to see which of our scripts break. I have personally run into one interesting bug, which is the CP and move and LS commands don't currently respect the kind of dash capital Z command flag for respecting SE Linux contexts. We have a plan already with the upstream on how we will help them get that implemented. And there's a few other things.

So it's really about in those first few weeks, understanding where the Delta is. And from there, the other one is locales. So currently things like the support command, if you use a different locale other than the kind of C locales, it won't respect it. So if you're in France and you use a French locale and you sort, it won't respect your locale.

So again, we clearly have to fix that before we ship it. So those are really the two big ones that I know about at the moment. We'll see. I've been running it on my machine for the last three, four weeks and so have a bunch of my colleagues. And from what I can tell, apart from the ESI Linux thing, pretty good so far. Is this where Oxidizer comes in to let you test and swap between the different versions? Yeah, so Oxidizer is, I just want to stress, not a canonical project. Oxidizer is a utility I wrote

to satisfy my own curiosity. So it's a blatant abuse in some regards of the way Debian switches packages out and the kind of Unix file systemarchy, that kind of thing. All it really does is it installs the new coreutils package. It runs which against each of the binaries coreutils provides and essentially backs up the old one and then symlinks over the top of it with the new one. It's a bit of a hack, but I wanted to see rather than something like the alternative system, I wanted to see what would happen to my system if really the only implementation that it could find was the utils one, right? Sure. Do you think that might ship in 2510 for users to be able to test? No in 2510

It's gonna be it's gonna be the utils thing. It's gonna be the rust Yeah, so you'll be able to install ganook or utils still right? It may be that they are the commands are prefixed or something like that But by default people in 2510 are going to get the new one when you type LS You'll be getting the rust you utils LS command Wow I mean that I gotta be honest makes me want to try out 2510 just right there So it's doing something John. Maybe we should okay. So there's core util in the in oxidizer right now There's what for experiments core utils. Yeah find you tells diff utils and then also

Pseudo dash RS maybe you could touch on why or how you picked these the set Yeah, so call you tells I was initially what kind of piqued my interest and that seems like one of the most mature I'm not planning right now. We're not planning right now and making find you tells what if you tells default for 2510 I am seriously considering and I've been meeting with the maintainers of sudoRS, that's another consideration. So there's a good chance, it's not for sure, but there's a good chance that sudoRS will be the default sudo implementation in 2510 if we can work out a plan with the upstream maintainers on how we implement a couple of little missing features that we would like to make sure are present.

So again, you may well, when you type sudo in 2510, if the plan goes well, you will be getting this nice new equivalent. And that's another project where they test very rigorously and they're in constant communication with the kind of OG sudo developer, right? It's not a, it's very much collaborative, right? Which is really nice to see.

Okay, so we've kind of touched on some of the meta reasons around why we might want to do this, but especially talking about sudo makes me think, well, security and some of the specifics around rewrites in Rust might also be pretty relevant. I guess the important thing to highlight here is with both of these projects, with core-utils and with CDRS, there will be bugs.

Sure as night follows day, in software, we will find bugs. We're very committed to fixing those bugs, working with the maintainers and making sure the maintainers have the resources they need to do that. The su-rs implementation has had a formal security audit of which they have posted the results and it was very positive. And there is a, you know, while it's not impossible to write unsafe code in Rust, the compiler makes you work much harder to do the wrong thing. And this is, again, back to the kind of community building aspect. If a new developer or a young inexperienced developer wants to be part of this, it's while learning that Borrow Checker can be hard,

it also means you're much less likely to accidentally do something that could be very fatal. And so it will allow, I think, a community of people to contribute with confidence and allow us to ship it with confidence knowing that that guardrail is in place. Right, you kind of have built-in help for the review and as you touch on, maybe it allows folks to be a little more ambitious in what their contributions can be. Yeah, I hope so. That's not to say, you know, SUDU and the original GUNDU core users are very stable. They've got a very great track record for security. This is not a reaction. It's just an experiment to see what we can achieve.

John, I want to talk about a couple of the criticisms in a moment, but just to kind of clarify, will Canonical be contributing back upstream to projects like sudo rs and these other projects that get incorporated into Ubuntu? Yeah, so we, yeah, we'll certainly be submitting patches where we can. We may also contribute some funding in some cases

for certain things if we've got particular features or things that we want to land. So we're, this isn't just we're gonna absorb their work and wave at them from, you know, wish them well. I'm speaking with both of them, both projects, frequently over the last couple of weeks, and we're working on kind of an agreement about how we might do this in a way

that makes them comfortable and confident, and doesn't, what I didn't want to do was ship something, surprise them, and then be like, oh my God, we weren't ready. What are you doing kind of thing. So it's a bit of a team effort. It seems like it could have some potential to really make these tools better,

and make the adoption by other distributions or other operating systems even more likely. I mean, this could be better for everybody, which gets me to probably what I've seen is the top concern, and it echoes some previous debates of Yor, and that is that, you know, this is essentially a perceived change to the established GNU slash Linux ecosystem and the GNU core utilities. It's the way we've always done things, John, and replacing them with Rust alternatives is seen by some as sort of a shift to kind of change away from a GNU slash Linux identity and maybe less GPL software. I think that's like the number one bit of pushback I've seen.

I'm sure you've processed that I'm sure you guys have thought a lot about that. So I'd like to hear just what you're thinking there Yeah, so I think firstly I absolutely recognize the importance of canoe and the GPL License throughout kind of open source history and in fact canonical in general licenses is software GPL and a GPL Depending on what the code is where like we we absolutely believe that. This change is not motivated by license and it absolutely shouldn't be seen as indicative of a broader move away from GNU utilities. We're not making some statement that

we're no longer going to use GNU things. This is, in many ways, is a surface level as it looks. I've heard some people have concerns about, okay, well, what happens if, you know, Canonical were to somehow commercialize core utils, where it's very much not the plan, like I say, we may make some contributions, but I don't see the benefit for anybody in doing that, let alone Canonical. And I also think people have expressed some discomfort, I suppose,

in something that is MIT license being so core in the distribution they use. And to that I would answer, in reality, as the distributors, as the creators of Ubuntu, we didn't create this software. We have found a project we think is interesting. Their beliefs and their motives appear to align very well with our own project. And we're willing to give them a shot. Like, I'm excited to do it. But at the end of the day, if that community turns out not to have motives

that are aligned with the goals of Ubuntu, or we believe it not to be in the best interest of our users, we'll stop shipping it. You know, it's not like we are the authors of core utols in the first place, right? Like, we were still only shipping the GNU stuff. We may have contributed in places, but we're certainly not a core contributor to that toolset, right? That makes sense. And so ultimately, it comes down to, do you trust canonical to

make the choice about what runs on your machine? And if you don't, I mean, you probably shouldn't run Ubuntu, right? Like I would, that hopefully goes without saying. Yeah. You know, I really hope people can see past that. It's not, this is not a politically motivated move. This is a, an interesting technical experiment that I hope will stimulate some activity from some corners of the limits ecosystem that we perhaps have yet to interact with so much.

Now on the subject of portability, I think this is the other thing I've seen is, you know, pretty portable right now. These tools work on just about everything, including low end ARM, seen is, you know, pretty portable right now. These tools work on just about everything, including low-end ARM, IoT devices, older hardware, maybe stuff that isn't supported by the latest Linux, but still you can get older Ubuntu's working on. Right, with Rust comes LLVM,

and then maybe there's some platforms or other specifics that aren't well supported, at least in theory. We've seen this come up with the Rust and the Linux kernel debate as well, right? So I guess on architecture support, in general, when Canon seen this come up with the Rust and the Linux kernel debate as well, right? So I guess on architecture support in general, when Canonical commits to an architecture, we commit to an architecture. So there is absolutely no way this change will persist

if suddenly the experience with core utils is subpar on AMHF or on PowerPC64 or S390X or any of the other slightly less well-known architectures that we support. So that would be a deal breaker for me. If this can't be the default in a stable, reliable, and performant manner on all of the architectures, then it shouldn't be the default on any of them. And that's what we're about to find out, right?

I don't have a mainframe in my house, so it's been hard for me to test that so far. But, you know, maybe we'll draw community members in that are motivated to help test that. I mean, that could be a pleasant result. Exactly. And we do a bunch of work with IBM every year to make sure that this works. And I would imagine we'll be doing the same here. One of the concerns I've heard is that the UUtils project ships a kind of single unified binary at user bin core utils, which you kind of sim link to a little bit like Busybox, right? So you would sim link user bin

LS to user bin core yourselves and it would pick that up and invoke it. So you end up with this one kind of big binary. I don't foresee that being an issue even on kind of low performance hardware. I've run it on an original Raspberry Pi, like the OJV one Raspberry Pi, and it was fine. People have different use cases, though. I'm sure things will get shaken out in the wash and we'll address that when we come to it. So, I mean, full disclosure, I'm all here for it,

but you're moving quick with this now. Yeah. You know, in a way, this is a big change, but then on top of that, you know, there's discussion about moving from IRC and mailing lists to Matrix and Discourse. Like there's a lot of changes beyond just this happening. This comes back to how the community and Ubuntu,

the project has become a little fragmented, sort of naturally, right? Like in the time that Ubuntu has been around, a lot has changed on the internet. And I want to make the process of contributing as enjoyable and as understandable and as relatable as possible. And so, you know, having three different places

where you have to check for instant messages and two different discussion forums and a mailing list, it's complicated, right? And the same story is true of packaging. There are four or five different routes to packaging a dev that, you know, you might upload or have someone sponsor for you into Ubuntu. And I want very much to collapse that down.

I want the process to be A, very understandable, B, to have as many kind of modern, nice kind of ergonomic tools to use, and C, be as enjoyable as possible. Like my own personal journey in contributing to Linux distribution. So it's been in Arch Linux and in NixOS mostly. And one of the things that got me so excited about NixOS

was how simple it was to become a NixOS contributor. There are benefits and drawbacks to one huge repository that has thousands of packages, but one of the benefits is it's a huge pile of text files that anyone can fork and edit and get feedback on. And so while we're not gonna go there with Ubuntu as such, what I would like to do is try and think about what that journey looks like for a new contributor and for an existing

contributor and make it as enjoyable and as efficient as possible. And so getting the communications channels agreed and sorted feels to me like a really important thing to do upfront. If you don't know where to go to get help, you're always going to stumble, right? And so next cycle, in addition to these changes, one of the things I'm going to do is have our Ubuntu focused technical authors at Canonical focus on what I'm calling the Ubuntu project documentation. So this is centralizing all of the documentation about the MIR process, the stable release updates process, what it means to do a proposed migration, what it means to do a phased upgrade, what it, do you know what I mean? Like all of these things that the community knows collectively in its conscience, that perhaps the documentation for has been kind of

scattered around a bit in the past. And we're gonna have a really concentrated effort to get that into a really nice, modern, searchable, kind of indexed, professional looking page where people can really understand how they might play into this project. Okay, well, that's a lot to look forward to. I do want to note, you mentioned NixOS, and if folks are curious,

you know, I was playing around with Oxidizer myself. Of course. And you've got some great docs, speaking of, here, about how you can, you know, download a precompiled binary, probably the easiest way, or, you know or you can compile it with Cargo, because it is itself written in Rust, which is neat and we can talk about it if you want. But I will say I was playing around

with the upcoming 2504 nightly build, and I'll also say it runs really nice just with Nix, because I see you've got a flake in there. Nice. Yeah, so I did that because I have been an excess user for some time I'm using Ubuntu everywhere on my machines at the moment But I one of the features I really like about NYX is the kind of development shells And so when I was developing oxidizer

I was using a NYX development shell to get you know pin the version of rust and get clippy and all those kind of things Oh, yeah, that's great. Yeah. Yeah Makes sense. Well, so John is there anything else you want to touch on or some aspects that you feel like needed a little more air or attention? I don't think so. I am super excited about this whole this whole thing, right? Like it's a huge honor, I suppose, to be given this opportunity. And what I would say is that things are going to change.

And with with all change will come a little discomfort for some folks, but I am really confident that we can make an impact and kind of I listened to this conference talk years ago from a very famous security researcher called Haroon Meir and the title of the talk was what got us here won't get us there. And I to me that that sentence is really kind of key and how I think about how do we make Ubuntu how do we continue Ubuntu success for the next 20 years. And I'd like to think really kind of key and how I think about how do we make Ubuntu, how do we continue Ubuntu success for the next 20 years?

And I'd like to think really carefully about that and work with the community to kind of realize it. I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, John, it's actually pretty exciting to hear and I'd absolutely be down to have you on when 2510 ships, you know, maybe after, maybe not the first day, but you know, whatever you have time afterwards and we can kind of discuss how it's going

and how it's been received. Yeah, let's absolutely do it. And by then, I hope there'll be a little bit more details on how the core utility stuff is going, maybe some developments on Sudo RS. I've also had a really interesting conversation with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghosty, his new terminal emulator,

and what part that might play into in the future. So yeah, some exciting stuff in the works. All right, well, I look forward to chatting soon. Thanks for coming on, John. Thank you very much. One password dot com slash unplugged. That's the number one password dot com. Lowercase unplugged. Go there and check this out. What a little peace of mind.

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ones. You go to onepassword.com slash unplugged. That's all lowercase. It's number one password dot com slash unplugged. Support the show and check it out. That's onepassword.com slash unplugged. Well last Wednesday we saw GNOME 48 come to us, and this one is going to be a big one. It's going to be in Fedora and also Ubuntu, and I think you boys have some favorite features in this particular release.

This is an impressive one. I mean, it's been a while since we've really stopped and talked about an individual GNOME release, but this one, I think, really merits it. And I have been low-key individual GNOME release, but this one I think really merits it. And I have been low key using GNOME 47 since it came out on my homework station. Yeah, you've become a secret GNOME user on the sneaky side. After about two years of Plasma everywhere, right?

It's been about two years at least. But this has been really nice. And then to see 48 come out, it really completes this pattern of GNOME sometimes takes a step back as far as we're concerned, like with the text editor changes, but then you give them a release or two

and they've taken two or three steps forward. And a lot of it is stuff that, I don't think this is hyperbole at all, with GNOME 48 comes together and it is now just out of the box stock, more polished, more consistent, easier to use, more intuitive than anything that may be Mac OS 6 and 7. I mean it's remarkably how much better it is than the commercial platforms and yet maybe it doesn't have like every gosh darn like tool that I I want from plasma

But when you bring it out, here's just here's it. Here's I'll make my case simple things. Let's start with simple things notification stacking by group now is So much better when you're somebody who gets a lot of messages inbound or something like this now They'll all stack under an L. Yes, I love this. But the thing that we have been waiting for, for five years, has landed in GNOME 48. And it's gonna make it a better experience on those of you that have an Intel video card

or maybe like me, you know, you've got a graphics card from way back in the day where they're actually affordable. Well, now we have dynamic triple buffering, smoother animations, fewer skipped frames, perceived improved performance, and also with this reduced CPU and memory usage. And this has been this the yeoman's work of Daniel from Canonical for so long as they have iterated on this and made changes. from Canonical for so long as they have iterated on this and made changes. And there's perceivable improvements like 5X faster load for Windows, 10 times faster scrolling in like a thumbnail heavy folder.

I mean, real actual visible improvements in performance. Yeah, it's quite nice either on my Intel ThinkPad here or in a virtual machine with a virtual setup. And it's neat because previously, right, Canonical had been shipping this, but it wasn't upstream, or hadn't been shipped in an upstream release. So it was fun.

I was playing both in the Fedora 42 beta and a nightly build of the upcoming Ubuntu release. And they're just, they're now just both so smooth, so fast, kind of regardless of where you're using it. Yeah. The other thing that I initially sort of thought, oh, I'm never going to use that probably because I don't want to know what it would tell me. But I was talking to my wife and she actually thought

this new feature was really useful. It's digital well-being is now being introduced to GNOME. So we see this on our phones and, you know, screen time tracking. You can set screen limits for daily limits, break reminders so that way maybe get up, move, take an eye break. And it comes with little bar graphs to tell you how much you've been using your computer.

It's not super detailed, you don't get per app or anything, but yeah, it's nice to see and it seems like, you know, that probably especially in the Wayland world, it makes sense for GNOME to implement these kinds of things that are in like the best place to do so stack-wise. And especially some of those like, okay, like the total time and all that,

but I like having integrated break reminders, especially maybe for like a work machine. You can just build it in, it's there in the background, you get up, you take your breaks, you come back, get more stuff done. I definitely get lost in tasks sometimes. I might try it. There's also, depending on your machine,

it has to be supported. I'd imagine a lot of ThinkPads are gonna work with this. It's nice to see an option now to limit battery charge to 80% built into the UI. Yes, yes, definitely. I'm already using this on Plasma and it's been something I've been looking forward to. And I think all three of us use it on our pixels now

on Graphene OS. True. They've recently added this. The idea is that you just extend your battery life. These lithium ion batteries really don't benefit from being held at 100% charge. And if you're primarily using it at a desk and keeping your laptop plugged in,

this can help extend the battery life. And it won't work on everything as far as I know. And there are other obvious, there are obviously other ways to do this. Like we already doing it on plasma. Of course you can do it with other utilities. But it's great now to just have it built in right here at checkbox. In a straightforward way that users have access to.

We also have some new apps in GNOME 48. There's a new minimalist audio playback tool and this is exactly what I wanted. This is where I think the minimalist approach really works. It opens up any audio file that's supported. it displays a waveform, and it has a play button with adjustable playback speed. So it's great for listening to a downloaded podcast or a clip or an audio file. It doesn't play, it's not a library tool,

it's not meant to do a bunch of sophisticated stuff, it just is a quick, simple UI that looks good and is very actually useful to use to play audio files, single audio files. I get both perspectives here, right? On one hand, you're like, okay, this tool is never gonna do it a lot. Why do we need it?

There's like a whole bunch of, you know, there's a thousand options in the archive for better or more sophisticated or earlier tools. But on the flip side, yeah, right? If you can just have a reasonable scope and execute well and just be there, then it becomes a platform feature that you can just kind of expect and like,

right, shouldn't I be able to just look at this file on my hard drive real quick without needing to be like a professional? Yeah, I don't need to load Audacity or VLC just to listen to this quick thing. We also saw initial support for HDR land. I haven't been able to test that yet. No, me either, but I'm curious.

This is, okay, earlier I said, you know, sometimes we see GNOME take a step back. You know, they remove a feature, everybody reacts. And then if you give them two releases, they take two or three steps forward. And I think this is the case with the text editor. I was initially critical of replacing G-Edit with a new, brand-new text editor.

G-Edit has been great for a long time. It's one of those I've been able to run for a week with a machine that just had all my notes and it never failed me and it was really simple and it was fast. So this is what you do instead of keeping tabs, I see. Yeah, that is true actually. They updated it with a rebuilt text editor

that had less capabilities, but a nicer interface and a little bit more up to date on GNOME design language. But with GNOME 48, they have added features back in that were missing, and they've done it in a way that is honestly a better implementation. So they took it away for a bit, but now they're giveth, they take it and now they giveth, and they giveth probably in a better way than it was originally. I think when you really dig into it, GNOME has a lot to offer if you haven't looked at it in the last couple of years.

It is surprisingly refined now. It does not have every whistle and every bell that my Plasma desktops have. But if you build a Linux system, I think around the idea of using the GNOME desktop, like Mac users, you know, buy Macs and they have a limited set of Macs they can buy. And Apple has built Mac OS to work in those scenarios. I think GNOME is a great desktop environment, especially for single and laptop screens.

Like at home I have I don't know it's like a 34 inch ultra wide or whatever it is it's not a crazy big one but it's decently wide and it is just a dream to use with GNOME 47 but when I try to go to my workstation where I have you know four or five monitors at different refresh rates and different rotations, plasma is a lot stronger there. But if I were to redo my work workstation and I were to put a ultra wide screen in there, maybe one other monitor,

and really focus around the GNOME workflow, I feel like I could land on something that could be really, really, really special, like could last me a decade. It's very, it's very well done, especially if they keep making these small improvements with each release, improving the performance, improving the features, but making it easier to use.

You have to, I think, be a little more selective in your hardware and screen choices, in my opinion, when you're, if you're gonna really build a system around GNOME, but if you're building one anyways and you can make some of those decisions, it is really great. It is really first class, in my opinion. I think when you get a little more into the weeds like I tend to and you need more specific things like this application always opens

on this monitor at this size, on this virtual desktop. That's where Plasma is really going to be more of your jam, which is typically where I'm at. But some systems I really enjoy. It's this sounds weird. And please let me know if anyone out there has ever felt this way. But when I use Gnome still to this day, even though all of the great work that's in Plasma, especially with 64 that just came out,

it's like the noise floor is a little bit lower in GOME. It's just a little bit lower noise floor and for some reason I'm a little more focused on the work at hand often. It's not always a problem on Plasma but there is some sort of difference to my attention level between GNOME and Plasma and I genuinely am not sure what that is And I'd be really curious if anybody else has experienced that. So I know you and I were both playing around with Genome OS, which is their development OS for testing. It's a way to get your hand on this right away. Definitely should not be used in production.

Did a little digging there and yeah, it's not ready for production. It's literally not safe to run in production. But it is a great way to try out the latest builds of Genome. What did you think, Wes, kicking the tires, giving giving a look now that you've been in the plasma land for so long. What were your impressions? Yeah, I've been keeping up in just trying new releases with Kenoma, but I have not been daily driving it now for, I don't know, a year or two.

So it was kind of nice to spend it in, you know, the better part of a week. Uh, I tried Kenoma, I tried a fedora 42 beta. I tried one too. Yeah, there'sora 42 Beta, I tried Ubuntu. Yeah, there's a lot to like, and there's checking up with it after a while, you can appreciate the work that they have been doing. So these days in Genome, there's a weather app that gets you hourly weather updates.

That wasn't there the last time I used it, and I think it fits in that class of platform-type features that you would expect, especially on something like a Mac. And if you're coming, if your primary computing experience maybe is more phone-oriented, that's also something you might expect. I have to say, I also really appreciate just the support

for different world clocks now in that menu as well, because we have friends all around the world, and so it's really nice to put four or five time zones in. Friends, co-hosts, you know, whatever. Yeah. There's also some fun nerdy here stuff, I think, in Gnome 48, like global shortcuts. This has been something oft-missed in Wayland.

The consequence of not letting every program be a keylogger is global shortcuts generally work, and we have to kind of solve it in different ways. So it's nice to see that. Also, I think for machines that have like hybrid graphics, there's some performance improvements there. Like maybe you've got like a integrated and discrete and before maybe you know wasn't doing a great job of copying all the buffers and frames where they needed to go so that's better if you don't or

can't go the single display lifestyle. Also on the path to things like HDR support I noticed that there's now a GDCTL, which is a cool little GNOME display control. And you know, there's all kinds of stuff that had sort of evolved for some of these things in the X world. And now it's kind of hit or miss depending on what Wayland implementation you're using, when and why.

And so it's just neat, cause I can see what monitors are there. You can adjust stuff like how much luminance, how bright the monitor is. And you can probably what monitors are there. You can adjust stuff like how much luminance, how bright the monitor is, and you can probably enable HDR stuff maybe this way. But it's shown in a cool little Unicode tree layout that makes it very clear. So I don't know, small, but big if you want to do weird stuff

with your Linux desktop or have fine control or automate or script things. Oh yeah, and also maybe small, but appreciated in terms of, I really like how far you can get with vanilla, you know, maybe let's say under five extensions, usually like one or two for me, but like let's say under five

just to be more reasonable about it and maybe include Chris or have a chance of including Chris in this. So having a new font, I really like that. So long Cantorale. Yeah, yeah. It served us well. It's not a huge change, but it's nice to see.

Yeah, I think it just, for me, especially with the improved text editing and stuff, it means I'm not opining for swapping in a bunch of custom stuff to have a decent coding experience anymore. And that's one more, one fewer change I don't have to make if I just wanted to get up and go in with the Linux system. The default experience, especially for, you know, friends and family that don't need all the bells and whistles that you get through extensions or that you get through just features built into Plasma.

I know I'm hitting this point, but I have to say I think it's a better experience than you can get from the store. If you give the machine that runs Linux with GNOME 48, they get a system that updates incrementally and it's always updating and it's always getting a little bit better. And I mean that at the whole OS level. Think about the Mac OS experience today compared to a lean, mean GNOME 48 Fedora system, for example, or Ubuntu. You get a Mac, first of all, you're gonna get slammed about signing into iCloud and all of this kind of stuff. And then it's gonna be syncing in the background.

They don't even know what syncs and doesn't sync. But then as you go to use the Mac over time, you end up with a bunch of applications, all of which have their own individual self-updaters, all of which prompt at their own individual times. Doesn't matter what you're doing. Then you'll also discover if you fired up after a few days of not using it, the system just consumes a ton of resources, syncing your photos, scanning faces, indexing the hard drive, uploading or downloading changes from iCloud, all of which it does without any of your permission,

all of which consumes resources and power and it slows down the system. And then God forbid you wanna have a screenshot app because you're gonna have to reauthorize that thing every 30 days. And they made UAC look like it was an experiment because they've turned up the Vista experience to an 11 on recent Mac OS.

And now you're getting hit in the face with every little thing for permissions to everything. And sometimes you gotta go on the system thing and go into the settings and go into like the privacy area and like add something there. And who even knows why they have users doing that? They simply just don't want you doing it. And it is not a good, consistent, and it is experience,

and it is user hostile. Where GNOME 48 is this lean, mean, fast performance system that continuously updates in small increments versus Mac OS, which has the smack in the face, big updates. Oh, and by the way, you got to update all your third party apps and 90% of them are going to charge you something to update them. And if you don't, they're just simply not going to work or you're not going to be able to run the new version anymore,

which won't support the thing you need. And that's the story on Mac OS these days. That's the reality of it. Yeah, there's either lean, mean systems. Sure, they can get 18 hours of battery life, but that's your experience during that 18 hours. Who wants it? This, it's an aggravation you do not need.

And none of that exists because all the software on the system is centrally updated by the package manager or by Flatpak, and all of that is just is handled by GNOME software, mostly in the background. So the end user doesn't even have to think about it. Then major updates come along, but they're not like swapping out the sound system, right? That happens once a decade in Linux.

We make a once in a decade transition to a new display server. We make a once in a decade transition to a new display server. We make a once in a decade transition to rust tooling. Right. These things happen and then we incrementally adopt them. Not in Mac OS, not in Windows. It's smacky in the face with tons of changes all at once. And you better just take it. And if you don't, we're going to nag you constantly for years to update your system.

And that's the experience. None of that. It's serene. It's peaceful. You're focused on your work and your updates, like security improvements and new features, they come in slow

and they come in incrementally and they come in at your pace in one place. The system isn't updating to some sort of, you know, cloud service that they need because they can't sell any more devices and now they need a new way to grift off their users so that way the stock price goes up cloud service. It's whatever you choose to use. And maybe it's nothing. Maybe you just want everything local. That is fine. It's not going to force you to log into a cloud service when you first started up.

We didn't even mention any AI features in our review. Right. I mean it really is, it's dramatic. It reminds me now of, it's not quite the right analogy, but you know how I always strive for a car analogy. It makes me think about these cars that all have the capacitive touch surfaces and it's all screens and no stocks and end users keep saying, hey man I just want a few buttons and dials back. I just want to keep it simple like like it doesn't all have to be analog, but I would like some buttons and dials back. I would like a few controls and I just need somebody that makes a decent balance

choice, and sometimes maybe they air a little bit too far on the capacitive touch, but bring it back. And that's where GNOME is. Is there recognizing where the user's at? They have a vision and they strive for that vision, but they walk it back in certain areas to meet the users where they're actually at. And I think long term, when you look at the trajectory since GNOME 13 and GNOME 12, where this real identity has emerged, they sometimes, they err on the side of vision, but then they find a compromise spot.

And what's come out of this is one of the absolute first in class desktop experiences for any desktop, commercial or free software. It's not necessarily for everybody, but man is it really good. And I just think that's gonna make the next Distros, the next Fedoras, the next Ubuntu's, Arches and everything else that ship these desktops.

They're just going to be really some of the best releases. Well, are you thinking about stack in sats? Maybe you want to boost the show just to have fun with the boost. There's a lot of ways online to get into Bitcoin, and I don't think you want to use most of them. That's really the big problem Bitcoin has is there's just a lot of crap out there. And there's a lot of crap coins too. So the way you solve for this is you tune out the noise

and you focus on a Bitcoin only company. They got one stack, they got one thing they do, they're not screwing around with meme coins, they're not playing around with, you know, technological blockchain projects. You don't get emails about the latest airdrop. No, you do not. And that's River. And if you go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash River,

that is our affiliate ID. They make it easy to get started with Bitcoin in three simple steps, and they are on the Lightning Network too, so then you can send it over to a podcasting 2.0 app and boost, or you can move it around however you like. They have a lot of really great features too. They have free auto-stacking, so then you can just sort around however you like. They have a lot of really great features too. They have free auto stacking.

So then you can just sort of average out the volatility by just auto stacking when price goes up and the price goes down. They allow you to set up account beneficiaries should something happen to you. They automatically have tax and performance reporting that they generate for you. They have target price orders.

So you can set a price and say, when it gets to that, you just automatically buy and zero fees for withdrawing. And then a feature that I know Wes loves and I can't wait till they bring to business accounts is 3.8% Bitcoin interest on your cash that you hold there. Yeah, that's pretty great. And that cash is FDIC insured. Yep. Have a bank account but it lets you turn interest to Sats. Why not? So we really like River, we use it,

and if you wanna play around with this, or even if you wanna start sacking sats for yourself, I think it's the way to go. Jupiterbroadcasting.com slash River. Well, every week we get boosts into the show from all over the world, and we wanted to say a thank you this week, and have one of your hosts

be on the other side of the world to say thanks by reading some of them. This week's baller booster, the dude abides 42,000 satoshis. The dude comes in and says hey, hope this makes it into today's boost pool. The answer to the ultimate question. The dude comes in and says, hey, hope this makes it into today's boost pool. I have nothing specific to note, but just wanted to say thanks for the company. Well thank you, the dude abides. I just watched the Big Lebowski for the first time on my trip back from Planet Nix. What? Yep. Yep. Wow.

I enjoyed it quite a bit. Had never seen it, and I thought, well, an airplane flight is the best time to watch it. And so now I get the reference to Dude-a-Bites. And I appreciate the support. Thank you for being our baller booster. You are a top supporter for episode four. Nope.

Wow. 607. It all blurs together, I guess. Well, there is Derivation Dengus, and he comes in with 21,000 sats. I hoard that which your kind covet. He says, I really enjoyed the eBPF episode and wouldn't mind more like it.

I would love to do a Tui challenge as well. Oh boy, all right, I'm gonna start writing these down. You better. All right, that's a one plus one for the Tui challenge. Wait, why aren't you using a TUI to record that? Because we're not doing the challenge yet. Oh, right. Not yet.

He says there's so many good TUI applications written in... rest these days. I was worried you were about to say go away. Another variant could be the no mouse challenge. Geez, you guys. That's good. The idea is you have one week to design

your perfect keyboard driven tiling desktop window manager setup. And then the following week, you have to use it on your main PC. Points are awarded based on keyboard friendliness and terminal to E-Apps. Hey, do you remember how we beat those system 76 folks at laser tag and they promised us some really nice keyboards

in exchange for beating them. I think that would be a perfect match for them. Oh yeah, don't they have like a, don't they have like a kind of a tiling focused desktop too? They do. Hmm, I'm gonna appreciate something there I guess. I do like that. He says, if you break down and use a mouse though,

say three times over the course of the week, the punishment is you have to adjust your.bashrc to pipe all terminal output through low cat for a month. A month! Oof! That's pretty great. Brutal. That's pretty great. Tony, I'm just gonna throw the mouse away. Oh, man.

Electrogystion, Boozin, with 10,000 cents. It's over 9000! I just wanted to take a minute to tell my favorite podcasters about my favorite version of Linux. Project Bluefin is awesome. It's all the best parts of Linux and none of the suck. Rock on. Love that.

Project Bluefin does seem like it's really carving out a very special place in the Linux space, bringing something unique and helping people leverage a I guess cloud first I hate that word but I think it is the right word a cloud first workflow to build their own private distribution of hey hey I think it's cloud native oh yeah that is it right I just for some reason can't bring myself to say it oh and our electrical magician friend here was boosting from podverse great hey nice to. Thank you for the boost. User 47's here with a row of ducks, that's 2,222 cents. I'm excited for the Tooie Challenge, potential episode name, some variation of a Hawk Tooie joke, oh man.

My Hawk meme coin is love! All right, putting down a number two, so that's now two, I guess plus two for the Tooie Challenge, I feel like this is happening, boys. Ha ha ha ha. This is happening. Well, adversaries sent in 10,000 Satoshis. Put some macaroni and cheese on there, too.

I tried learning Nix in the past but got distracted. Gonna try again, though, and use it with my coding projects. Hey, you know, one way to always get started is just to use it on the distro you already have. You don't have to switch to NixOS to enjoy Nix. And feel free to hop into the Nix Nerds room if you want some help. Yeah, totally.

Shy Fox boosts in with 10,000 cents. Oh my God, this drawer is filled with Froot Lopes. Oh gosh, it's another plus one for the TUI challenge. My dream would be to have a mainframe terminal inspired station running only TUI or CLI apps. Oh man, and wouldn't it be awesome if you could have like old retro terminals around the house to interface with it?

Yes, it would. Okay, see Shy Fox is helping us out though, because they include a link to a GitHub awesome TUI's page with a whole bunch of other links to TUI projects that we should probably go look through. I think I knew about this but forgot, so I really appreciate this. This really great timing.

Yeah, here's a Tui for pod man containers. Great, great, all righty, see? See, we're done. I have a question for the audience here. How many people are doing the full-time Tui thing as is? Like is this challenge just not gonna be a challenge for you? If you do that, I wanna know about it. Oh.

You teach me a few things Yeah, let us hear about it. Let's hear it good buddy Alright, so that's a total of plus three now for the TUI challenge. Thank you shy Fox Magnolia mayhem's here with a wonderful 11,000 700 sats where they are doing a lot with Mayo these days well if I were line is for a day I do what slackware did and I'd rev to 7.1. For no reason but to make people just ask questions. That's nice. I think that's what he does anyways though. Also I loved the architecture of Blackberry's QNX OS,

which was an Android compatible Unix microkernel OS. I used it on their tablet and their BB passport. I just have to start working on a microkernel with Linux for one-to-one binary support. It shouldn't be that hard, since Linux is already kind of a hybrid OS, but that base kernel is already stupidly bloated. Also, it just tickles the tisms for me if it goes the right way. You know, I think, although I'm not positive, but I think my Volkswagen GTI is still using QNX for the infotainment system. Oh yeah, sure.

Yeah, and I think it's still just as good and responsive as some of the stuff in cars that are new, brand new cars. You know, okay, this might be heresy, but mayhem's got me thinking with this whole version number stuff, right? Like, why don't we get more nerdy and go, instead of semver, we go complex numbers. And then see, got the real part, you know,

for the major versions and the complex, and the imaginary part for the minor versions. We could just do hex. Oh, yeah. Mix that in. Also another plus one. All right, we're up to four now for the TUI challenge, boys, and another plus one for regular deep dives.

He says, overall, you got 16 points on the BSD challenge. Ha ha ha. Very nice. Thank you very much for the boost. Appreciate it, Mayhem. You're always great to hear from. Also I'll get hybrid too, because he's another guy that's always great to hear from. Hybrid sarcasm's here with 10,000 saps.

I got answers and I want some questions. That's pretty funny. Next caller. The musical section in the member's bootleg is always just a chef's kiss. Here's appreciation for one of the many reasons to be a JB party member. Thank you for that shout out. We have, we've been having a little bit of fun in the members stream and if you haven't gotten a subscription yet and you want to, you might check it out, linuxownplug.com slash membership. We make a lot of content for the members, a whole lot of show in there.

We're clocking in about an hour 42 for the members version of the show right now. It's not dead air. It's not dead air. Look at hybrid pain us to advertise our members feed. He really is a champ. I really appreciate that Thank you everybody for the boost. That's all of them above the 2000 sat cutoff. And of course, thank you to our sat streamers You came in like champs 35 of you streaming those sats as you listen to the podcast you stack 56,243 sats when we combine that with our total senders. All right, I'm I'm not feeling too bad though. I mean we had a pretty good week last week. It's a total of a hundred eighty two thousand pretty good week last week. It's a total of 182,942 sats that of course is split between the three of us, editor Drew, a little bit goes to the podcast index and a little bit goes to the podcast developer that you boosted and we

appreciate everybody was at least boosting and sending some support our way or as a member because it matters more than ever right now and if you want to participate it's pretty simple You could use something like River, jupiterbroadcasting.com slash River, or the Strike app, or Bitcoin well. Those are like my three places to get Sats. And then you send them over to a podcasting 2.0 app and you start boosting away.

And it will read your message in a future show. And it means a lot to us to support the show directly. We're an independent show. You know, we're not trying to pump the advertisers by going to YouTube and doing video live streams, and we're not going the dynamic ad insertion route other than for jokes from time to time. We're trying to do it the right way

and keep you our most important and biggest customer. So thank you, everybody who participates either as a member or as a booster. It really means a lot. So one of the things that I've decided to do on Gnome is embrace U Launcher. And we haven't talked about U Launcher in ages on this show. So I thought it was worth a check-in because it's interesting in the Wayland world now how this all works.

Now Gnome has been making specific strides on making the launcher when you hit the meta key faster. So you really could just get by using that and it would be just fine for launching and finding stuff. The reason why I'm not a huge fan of it is it zooms out the desktop and it changes the whole UI and it's a big visual change. Yeah, versus just like a separate launcher that stacks right on top.

And that's really the only reason I decided to start looking into U Launcher again. And I'm really pleased to see with the direction this has gone in. I'll have a guide linked in the show notes right now, although this may be changing in 48, but right now there is a little bit of a workaround to get it to actually fire off in Wayland. You asked me basically have to go set up a custom hotkey.

Pretty simple. It's like two, three steps. You launcher is GPL three, which is great to see, but what really made it stick for me, surprise, surprise, is it has extension support. And there's a few that are just handy to have. If you are in work chats, it is useful to have emojis. So I can hit control space, which brings up U Launcher instantly. And then if I hit GM, that goes into emoji mode and I can type the name of any emoji like fire or whatever, and then it will immediately copy it to my clipboard and I can go right back because I don't even have to alt tab. I'm right back in the chat. I'm in and I can just hit paste.

Also, I've fallen back on using to do list. It has brilliant integration, several different extensions for to do list. So you can manage and add your tasks right from your launcher as you think of it. Another small thing, I add an extension, just turns off my screen. I start typing the words turn. By the time I get to turn,

there is an option to turn off my screen. I hit enter, my screen sleeps. That's pretty nice. And I've really found the Obsidian extension very handy. And additionally, the Home Assistant extension very handy. I type HA and then turn off living room lamp. And it connects to my Home Assistant instance and turns off my lights right from my desktop launcher.

Brilliant. Yeah, it's nice. So you didn't consider just running K-Runner on Kano? You know, I love K-Runner, but for me, it sometimes fires up a little too slow. Like let's try it right here. Ready? So I'll do it right now.

Okay. That was pretty fast actually every now and then I get like, I don't know, like maybe the process has just been like, you know, nice to, I don't know what's happened, um, but it just takes it's chunky before it comes up where you're not having that problem with you. Launcher. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No.

And then you add these extensions and it's just really handy. And it's not that GNOME has to have it. But if you like me, don't like the whole zoom out, zoom in thing every time you hit the Medicaid to launch an application. It is pretty nice. And then you have these extensions. It's part of great. And it's nice to check in with an app that I used way back in the day. And it's still going, still proceeding.

The community is still building extensions today. Tons of LLM plugins like like if you have a local llama instance or open AI or Claude stuff too, so you can, or perplexity, a couple of extensions so you can just ask perplexity a question in the launcher and then it comes back with the results. Nice. Yeah, so there's a lot of stuff to play around with

if you are so inclined. It looks like, at least from the couple of extensions I peeked at, they're written in Python, so that should be pretty approachable too, if someone wants to write their own. Okay. Yeah, that does sound right. It checks out the poll things probably mostly Python, to be honest with you. That's okay. That's fine by us.

It's not a big deal, Wes. Stop getting angry. No, I'm a snake fan. All right, we want to know what you think about John's proposed changes for the next Ubuntu, especially shipping the Rust utilities. And if you are concerned about it for some reason that we didn't touch on, we'd like to hear that feedback. Or if you support what they're doing, go try it out. Yeah, I'm really curious to know what our community in particular thinks of these changes. Also, I'm looking for your tips to natively sign and date PDFs on Linux with

a desktop application. If possible, Please boost that in as well. And you're always welcome to join us on a Sunday. We do the show at 10 a.m. Pacific, which is like what noon Eastern? I don't know. We have it at jupitrabroadcasting.com slash calendar. I think 1 p.m. Right. OK, that sounds right. See you next week. Same bad time. Same bad station.

Either way, links to what we talked about today are over at linuxunplugged.com slash six zero seven. You'll also find information about our mumble, our matrix, which are always going, as well as our membership page. Of course, you can find our back catalog and a bunch of great shows over at jupiterbroadcasting.com. The launch has a phone and we want you to call it now. Yeah, details in the launch you can call in and leave us your voicemails and we're gonna have a special phone line for our members that I'll be announcing soon as well. Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged Program and we'll see you back here next Tuesday as in Sunday! I'm going to go to bed. you