LINUX Unplugged - Episode 113: Kernel of Truth | LUP 113

Episode Date: October 7, 2015

Performance tips for keeping your Linux install running like new, some basic tricks & some advanced tips. Why Microsoft’s new Surface Book might be able to run Linux & we reflect on the larger issues behind the recent public exits from the Linux Kernel development team & more!

It is really fun. There was a very fun and sort of rewarding feeling to be sitting in a gravel parking lot that I just kind of found somewhere, not connected to anything, and broadcasting and doing a show. Totally free. Yeah. It's like, no wires, no connection. I plop down and I'm streaming on the internet. And, you know, one of the funniest things when that happened is that's when Anthony found us and came up and joined us for Linux Unplugged.

That was awesome. It was like totally random and awesome. And I didn't even realize at the time it was part of a vlog that he was doing. So like he had started like watching us on the rover as we came into town. And so he was doing his overall vlog update to his YouTube channel. And so the visit was part of the update. So it was like a show within a show happening, and I didn't even know it. Until the end.

How about that? This is Linux Unplugged, episode 113 for October 6th, 2015. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's once again broadcasting from the JB1 studio. My name is Chris. And my name is Wes. Hey, Wes. It's good to be back with you, sir. Pleasure to have you. You and Noah did a great job last week. Fantastic. It was actually a really good collaborative production by the whole crew.

Producer Rottencorps and the producers helped out a lot. You were great. Noah was fantastic. He sure was. I heard he was the Segway master. Yep. Oh yeah, you might learn a trick or two from him. Yeah, the Segway master. I love it. Although when you combine Google Glasses with the Segway, that's a pretty nerdy image. Yep.

Half robot, half Noah. That's a strong brand. So thank you to Noah for sitting in for the show. And I actually invited him to make it. I invited him if he could make it. He said he's pretty busy today, but he might be able to stop by later in the show. Hey, that'd be fun. Might join us in the Mumba Room.

So we'll just see. You know, on today's episode, we've got a few things we're going to dig into. Number one, it's Microsoft Day. Happy Microsoft Day, everybody. Did you enjoy that? Was that good for you? Yeah. They actually had a pretty respectable showing. They

unveiled the Surface Book. Now, we're going to look at it and see if it's possible it could run Linux and what that would mean. And you might be surprised at the answer about that. Then later on in the show, we're going to talk about keeping Linux performing well over the long time. I'm talking about desktops. I went away on the road trip, as you guys know. And when I got back, my tried and true, my favorite workstation, the one that never disappoints, is not running very good. And we're going to talk about ways to maybe speed up your Linux system if it starts to slow down over time and maybe hopefully get some input from the Mumble Room. And then last but not least, we're going to talk about some updates from the Linux development community.

So before we dive into all of that stuff, let's bring in the Mumble Room. Time-appropriate greetings, Virtual Lug. Hey, Pat. Time-appropriate greetings, VirtualLug. Hey, Pat. Time-appropriate greetings. Hello, you guys. It's good to hear you without dropping about 75% of my packets. That's nice. Now I know I actually have a good connection.

So, yeah, that's cool. That's cool. All right, so I wanted to start with something that came out yesterday. It's just sort of a warm-up to the show today and perhaps maybe something we all should consider a possibility of a world without Linux. Well, sort of. This is the Linux Foundation's attempt to kind of make us stop and think, what would the world be like if Linux hadn't come along? And they just released episode one. Hey, what's the name of that Michael Jackson song?

Oh, how does it go? Da-na, da-na-na-na. Tch-tch-pah. Right? You know the one. Huh? Da-da-da-da-da. Hee. Something like that.

Oh, yeah, shoot. What is it? Um, let me look it up. He goes to the library. Obviously. That's how you look things up. There's no internet. Got it! Billie Jean!

Billie Jean! Now it's night time. It's not my lover. Woo! A world without Linux would mean a world without the internet. Hey, what year did that come out? I think you're going to need these. She picks up the keys.

A world without Linux is hard to imagine, thanks to hundreds of thousands of individuals and companies who support Linux. We don't have to. Learn more and help support Linux today. Hashtag world without Linux. Of course, there's a hashtag. Well, there has to be. So there you go.

It's not bad, right? That's not so bad. We're going to have a hashtag. Well, there has to be. So there you go. The Linux... It's not bad, right? That's not so bad. They're going to have another episode, Are We There Yet? And then they're going to have, I think, four episodes. What do you think, Wes? I think North Ranger and the IRC's got it down. The BST folks probably will not appreciate this. That said, I think it's good to point out, you know, while Linux may not be the only

free internet scale, you know, operating system that exists, it is widely deployed, and it gives us a lot of freedoms that we would not otherwise have. So I'm glad that they're doing this. Some of the points might be a little strong-armed, but it was a nice video. Yeah. Good production value. Yeah, it's okay.

Yeah, it was good production value. I know Poby is excited about this next update. I just wanted to talk about it real quick before we get into the main show. And it's the N1. It's a beautiful open- source email app for Linux. And it clocks in at a pretty hefty, I think like 20 megabytes or something like that. But it's here to kick Thunderbird 64. 64 megabytes. Thank you.

I thought it was 20. Wow. And does anybody know, Wes, do you have a guess why it clocks in at 64 megabytes? It's those static dependencies, I believe. It would be based on top of Chromium. It's like a HeruPad or Atom, right? The Chromium. Yes, and Node.js, I think, is bundled in there as well. You got to have Node.js for the events, right?

Yeah, naturally. So, I don't know. Do we hate this or are we okay with giant applications? Look, okay, what if we get a really great functional app that comes with Linux support out of the box? Don't we like that? You know, if it works really well, I'm mostly curious to see how personal deployments of the backend servers go.

That's what's going to make it or break it for me. Yeah, what do you think, Wimpy? Yeah, I agree. I'm actually, I've just received my activation key for it, so I'm actually creating it right now. Okay. But yes, I'm actually – I've just received my activation key for it, so I'm actually creating it right now. Okay. But, yes, I'm interested as well to know how the back-end integration is going to work long-term. So are we not –

Just don't give them your, like, primary email account and password because, you know, all that email is stored on there. Yeah. Right. So the sync engine is open source, right? So, I mean, people that email is stored on there. So the sync engine is open source, right? So, I mean, people could go poke around in there. Well, I guess if the server is closed up, I'm not sure what the code of the server, the license of the server is, but I assume the server

is open source too if you're installing it, right? Yes. Okay. So, alright. Do we not then hate the fact that this is a 64 megabyte application that you have to run just to check your email? No, I don't care. I don't care. The file size file size that's tiny really um if it means it's going to work and it means that when they do an update the thing isn't dependent upon some other random library on my system it all just works that's great yeah especially if that means it's easy to deploy to you know random machines

that you just need it to work oh right that's a That's a good point, too. Huh. All right. I think I'm going to give it up. And containers as well. You could, like, slap this in a container and you're done. You know, you don't have a truckload of dependencies that it needs. All right. I'm signing up for, I'm asking for an invite right now. Boom.

Oh, look, I can connect my GitHub account. Isn't that lovely? All right. I'll do that, too. I'm not sure why. You have to. Oh, okay. You have to do that and star it, and that speeds up your time together.

But I wouldn't hurry too much because it doesn't work. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Insider tips here. I did it anyways. Something went wrong. Please try to connect to your account again. Try again. Something went wrong. So, yeah. Okay. So we're starting to see more and more applications. So we're starting to see more and more applications.

Like I mentioned another one that I believe is also built similar to N1 is Herupad, which is the Markdown editor I use, which I not only love but now I consider to be an essential tool. rendering and you can apply your website's css file to that live rendering so you literally see what it looks like on your website as you're writing it you know the fonts and the way you you know the way the block quotes look and everything uh it's just it's such a fan but here's the downside i mean this is a pretty fast system of course i just launched it so it's probably going to launch pretty quick but i just clicked it i mean it's it's it's heavy i can tell it it's it's one of the slowest launching applications i have in my desktop and it's a damn text editor. Right. Yeah, I find that people have similar complaints with Atom. It does gnaw at me just a little bit.

Right. But I'll give N1 a shot. So, all right, cool, guys. Well, Wimpy, let me know how far you get in the process. Well, I'm a bit further along, but now it won't actually proceed through. So I'm at the point where it says choose your layout style, and there's a button that says looks good which doesn't do anything.

We have a layout style called looks good? That would probably be the one I'd choose. You've got list view or split view so I can select those and I can say what key bindings I want to use. That's impressive. Gmail, Apple Mail or Outlook

are your options. Looks good and that's me clicking the mouse and it not doing anything i managed to get uh my my install done before you lot all jumped on it so i was playing with it early in the morning and was like yeah this is good then i tweet it and it all breaks and they put a paywall invite thing in front of it so oh so poppy what jumped out at you the kind of you were impressed by when you say it's good uh so i like the ui it's quite clean it's very familiar if you're using if you're a gmail user it's very obvious what's going on you've got the folders down the left and the emails in the middle and then you get some detail about the contact on the right-hand side. It's quite pretty. I'm just very wary about the fact that their server can retain my email for 60 days,

even after I revoke their access to my email. So I'm a bit, that's twitchy. Yeah, that's concerning. Yeah. Okay, it's working now. Oh, so are you guys, there is like a couple of apps. There's like, Mailbox is one, but Google bought them. But Inbox is another. It's sort of similar for, it's like a couple of apps uh there's like a mailbox is one but google bought them um but uh inbox is another it's sort of similar for it's like a mobile it's a mobile app that does something

similar like it almost proxies the mail and then categorizes it for you it's becoming like a service that is a little creepy and so that is an area that see the problem with email right is that you get all your password reset emails very It's very personal, yeah. I mean, credit card companies are now starting to email statements there. All this kind of stuff that if somebody got compromised, and it seems like anybody can get compromised these days. So I'm using a Gash account to get it set up. It's actually running now. But I had to go into Google Mail and actually tell it to have access to all mail folders. You can't use the tick boxes to filter out what gets displayed in the mail client.

And basically, somebody said it looks like Google Mail. It does. It looks exactly like Gmail, just in a window, the way the folders are laid out. And I'm not actually a big fan of the Google Mail UI, so I'm just thinking, what's the USP here? Hmm. I guess... Well, it can connect to multiple different accounts. Right.

So it will look the same whether, like, if you like the Gmail paradigm for the way you view mail, this thing can connect to Yahoo, Outlook, and all the others, and you have that unified interface so it all looks consistent rather than having four different user interfaces for those four different accounts. Plus it can connect to your IMAP server as well. But I can do that, say, with Geary right now.

And the other one that I was talking about earlier is Zimbra have a desktop mail client zimbra desktop and that has integration with all the popular email services and it includes integration with you know your contacts and your calendars and that's built on web technologies as well so um that's a very competent email client i think think. I know producer Rotten Corpse would recommend Claw right now. I don't want to disparage it because a couple of things that I just inherently like about it is it looks like a pretty good product that's just available day one on Linux. But now looking at these screenshots, I can totally see what you guys are saying about Gmail.

I would think that is a screenshot from Gmail. It does look like it, yeah, especially with the little icon there. Yeah. So I do like, though, that it pulls in multiple services. I'm willing to check it out. I'm just not quite sure what it's going to give me. I think I know what it's going to give me over Thunderbird. Thunderbird just feels like a 90s product now.

I mean I love it still. It's my boo, and I love the fact that Enigmail is super easy to integrate with it. That's my favorite thing about it. Yes. But Geary and now N1 are knocking on the door, and the thing is, email is a monster for me. It is a demon that I have to slay a couple of times a week, and it is a take-no-prisoners event, and I want anything that makes me get through that as fast as possible and does a little triage, and anything that helps me triage is good and that's not really thunderbird thunderbirds strong suite and it's not strong suit and it's just i could i am definitely looking for a replacement the one thing i like more about

geary is it feels like it's faster to move through but it's important if you're doing a lot of emails yeah is this i the one thing i like about this is the label support and the starring and also it looks like a little bit of thread support. I love threading. It's helpful. And then you have contact information on the far right pane, which is useful for me too, especially because then sometimes I can put faces to listeners' names and stuff, and that's really nice for me. So that is something I achieved today through extensions. I would really like to have that. That is something I achieved today through extensions.

I would really like to have that. Email is a serious enough task for me that I'm willing to burn some drive space and CPU cycles on something that's a really good tool. Yeah, I'd love to be able to use this for my work exchange server. It'll just all depend on that back-end stuff. Yeah, well, they do support plug-ins, so somebody might be able to write an exchange plug-in. I think it supports exchange already. No. I'm just worried about the data retention issues. No way.

So if I can deploy it all locally, then I would be... Yeah, you can't have Exchange mail retention. Yes, exactly. You don't want retention for that. Core 5G might not be pleased. Yeah. But wow, it does have Exchange support. Jeez Louise.

Yeah, which is impressive. I'll have to check out this open sync business. It's been in development for nearly a year. Okay. So looking at the GitHub repository, the first commits were about 11 months ago. And, yeah, it is working now. So a little bit of a bumpy start with how it was, you know, getting the setup going. But now it's working.

Now I've found some of the options. It's quite nice. I use Geary myself at the moment i've been using that for a month or so and i think i'll give this a try um basically i've just got mailing lists and everything on this account so um i'll use it for that because that's where i get sort of volume of email that i have to filter and work through. So I'll give it a go, but it does look nice. I've got it in split view now, and that looks much better. That's much more usable.

I might follow up with you and see how it goes. Fascinated. Yeah. All right, good job. Thank you, N1. Nice stuff. They call it a beautiful open source email app. I don't know.

It does look like it. I don't know if it's beautiful. It does look pretty good, though. It looks kind of like a Mac app to me. Yes, it does look like a Mac app. I don't know. It does look like, I don't know if it's beautiful. It does look pretty good. It looks kind of like a Mac app to me. Yes, it does look like a Mac app. I don't know if that makes it beautiful. It's clear to read. Good. Yeah, the screenshots, it

does look pretty nice. It looks current anyway, which is something. If you guys listening at home want to check it out, we have a link in the show notes. I'll give a plug now that I'm back. There's probably going to be one more Rover log. And we have a link in the show notes i'll give a plug now that i'm back there's probably going to be one more rover log and uh the how we have them all posted now so far at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash rover and there's some electrical stuff we did in there you guys probably heard about last week the rover logs i'm just giving them a plug because they've people have been i think surprised

when they watch them that they've enjoyed them they like they thought i actually have been i've been surprised people enjoy them in fact, we've gotten some attention from YouTube over them as well. They were featured on the YouTube travel section, which is pretty cool. Turns out you're a pretty interesting guy, Chris. Well, I don't know about that, but the rover logs at least work out to be interesting, and so if you haven't checked them out, there's probably one more coming

at least, and then I'll decide where to go from that. And speaking of the rover, you know, one of the things that was awesome about the road trip was the rover's internet was provided by Ting. You can go to, right now, linux.ting.com to get our Linux Unplugged discount and support the show. Ting

is mobile that makes sense. It's my mobile service provider and we have the Netgear Zing on the road and I, you know, for the most part, the Netgear Zing, I really like it. Sometimes it was a little slow for me just on the UI, but I very often had to interact with it. The Zing seems like a really good product,

and I'm surprised that there's not more of them out there. And perhaps maybe that's just because of the networks that Ting's on. Ting has a CDMA and GSM network, and I was using the Zing on a CDMA network. And it's a really nice way to go because now that I'm not going to be on the road trip, this is not something I would use a ton. And that's what's really nice about the Ting model is in aggregate, it's going to save me a ton of money because you only pay for what you use and there's no contract. So it's $6 to have the Zing.

It's $6 for any line. And then you just pay for the usage on top of that. Well, say I go on a two-week road trip and I use a lot of data. Maybe that month I pay for that data, right? But for the rest of the year, I'm maybe not on a road trip. And it is incredibly cheap to have a MiFi device ready to go on the Ting CDMA network. Now, like I said, Ting does have two networks. You probably have a pretty good chance of having a compatible device. And if you do, when you go to linux.ting.com, they're going to give you a service credit that'll probably pay for more than your first month. They

also have an early termination relief program, which helps you get out of a contract if you're in one of those duopoly contracts right now, which, come on. Let's be honest. That contract thing is starting to feel like a dinosaur. You've got to get out of it if you're still in one. And Ting will help you save money. You can go to their savings calculator. And putting your actual usage in there before taxes is crazy how much they'll save. I've been like over $2,000 for two years, which is basically you could get a computer for that.

I think it's right now too with the new Nexus devices. Check this out, Wes. If you go to Linux.ting.com, they're going to take some money off these devices. So these devices are unlocked. You own these, right? There's no contract when you buy them. And I'm flipping through them right now. If you're watching the video version, I'm going to land down here on the new Nexus devices where I just saw them here. The Nexus 6P. You can get it directly from Ting

right there. Look at that. That's awesome. The Moto X Pure Edition $399 unlocked directly from Ting. LG Nexus 5X, $379. Unlocked, no contract, pay for what you use, $6 a month for the line. Comes ready to go, no problems. That is nice. That is really nice. I'm tempted. They finally added a frequent fingerprint sensor to the Nexus and a USB-C. Yeah. I'm looking to try that new standard out. Those are checkboxes that got ticked for me. So you can get that one, $379, when you go to linux.ting.com. And I think with this one, because that price is already so low, they're just going to give you a service credit.

So, quite literally, for $379, your first month, you wouldn't probably even have to pay for it, especially if you're Wi-Fi savvy when it comes to data usage. I mean, it's $25 service credit is going to last you that first month. That's how low Ting is. I mean, that's

actually a really sweet way to get that phone unlocked. Linux.Ting.com. Go over there, check them out. Just see what they offer. Try out their savings calculator. See if maybe it works for you. And a big thanks to Ting

for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. And thanks for the rover data. All right, so today I couldn't help it because I was back doing tech talk today in studio and I was immersed, immersed in Microsoft Day. And I just want to cover it really quickly on the Linux Unplugged show. The Surface Book, yeah, get it out of your system now,

they call it the Surface Book, was announced today. And be honest, Mumble Room, it's not a bad rig, is it? It actually looks like a pretty impressive piece of kit. Anybody disagree? No, it looks pretty good. So just for those of you that are not familiar with it it is a 13 inch laptop it has a high resolution like 246 or whatever is 214 ppi screen it's really high resolution screen uh it has i7 or i5 core processors it comes with an nvidia gpu with ddr5

so it's a pretty current nvidia gpu usb connectors. And the key feature about it is that it breaks off and it actually also becomes a tablet. When you break it off from a tablet, it still has pretty good battery life. It switches to Intel graphics on the fly. You snap it back together and now it's a full-fledged laptop. And Microsoft has developed this latching technology that actually electrifies the latch. So it's not like a spring-loaded latch. They created this tough wire that they call it, and when they add current to it, it seizes and it latches it,

and you're able to, from the hands-on demos, say, you can hold the laptop in the corner of the screen and bounce it, and it feels like a solid piece of connected machinery. And then you hit the release valve, and it discharges the tough wire, and it comes right out, and it disconnects from the base. Now, when it disconnects from the base, it goes to an integrated GPU. But otherwise, it remains a pretty nice machine. Now, here's the full specs.

It weighs in at three pounds, 13.5-inch PixelSense display with 3,000 by 2,000 resolution, which does work out to be a 267 PPI. It has a six-generation Intel Core i5 or i7 processor. That means you get the HD graphics, the 520 graphics, and then the discrete is the NVIDIA GeForce graphics. You can get it in 8 or 16 gigabytes of RAM, up to 1 terabyte of SSD, has 802.11ac BGN,

Bluetooth 4, obviously, two USB 3.0 ports and mini display out, 8 megapixel rear, 5 megapixel front, Windows Hello Face authentication, and up to 12 hours of battery life. Ships with Windows 10, obviously, price of $1499 base. You get it with an i7 and even 512 megabytes of storage.

Now, it is PCI Express storage, and that price very quickly shoots up to $2,700 in some of the configurations that we were trying. But in the demos they showed, it actually has pretty impressive performance. They showed live transitions in Premiere. They showed live edits in AutoCAD. And the thing can flip around and act as a tablet. It can break off and just be a standalone tablet.

But you can flip it around and have it on the keyboard and still have the GPU and discrete battery still and have it in tablet form factor. We started looking into the specs trying to figure out how likely this thing could run Linux. And PCMag had a hands-on at the Microsoft showing, and they were looking specifically at the

latching mechanism. And they talk about how the GPU is located in the base of the system, back where the keyboard is. And it's supposedly a pretty decent keyboard too. And they say the latching mechanism has a wide electrical connector. And they say, no doubt, a PCI-based interface to facilitate communication between the GPU and the rest of the system. So we were sort of speculating in the pre-show that if this is a truly a PCI interconnect between the top of the machine and this keyboard accessory, it is very possible that that keyboard and that trackpad are coming in over USB on that interconnect, and the battery obviously is

coming in over the PCI connector. Now, we don't know exactly what the solution would be for graphics, but it's very likely that this would work with Linux. Yeah, if it has enough standard compliance stuff that, you know, we can, with a little work, people can get drivers adapted for, that would be great. And I'm thinking worst case scenario, you would have to just use the discrete graphics or just the Intel graphics. If this was a reasonable approach, Wes, if you were in the market for a really high-end, quote-unquote, laptop,

and you wanted to run Linux? I would consider it. You know, I mean, it depends on how well the laptop part works. I do a lot of stuff on the command line, obviously. But it's really interesting to see Microsoft as a hardware vendor. If they do make stuff that Linux can run, then I wouldn't be opposed to it. You know, I don't need their included bundled OS. And let's say a work is buying.

Well, if a work's buying, yeah, I would definitely consider it. If it ran Linux with only a reasonable number of tweaks, then I would definitely consider it. So, yeah, say you worked in a workplace and they decided to start buying the Microsoft gear. I don't know. Poby, would you like this? Would you try this? Would this be something you'd be willing to run? try this would this be something you'd be willing to run well well my first reaction is when you when you suggest like you break down the connectors and how things interconnect that's all magic and

great but have you tried an nvidia prime or you know bumblebee based system how long have they been around and they're two gpus in one laptop without any wacky connector that pulls them apart and puts them back together again. And we can't even get that working properly, let alone something that dynamically appears and disappears off the PCI bus where there may or may not be data currently in flight. So then is this Microsoft successfully bringing a type of convergence to the market, in your opinion? No, I mean, we've seen this before. I mean, that device is not glaringly different than the Surface Pro. Asus Transformer.

Sure, or the Transformer. Prime or something like that. If you think about it, it's not that much. But really, if you think about it, it's not that much different, is it, than the Surface Pro? Well, the fact that they've put some of the brains inside the keyboard is a bit interesting and is a bit different. But I'm not interested if it's running Windows, to be honest. Right.

I don't need yet another Windows machine. Yeah. Okay. So anybody else in the Mumble room, would you be tempted if maybe work was buying or even for yourself, if you knew for fair certainty that in some way, in some form, Linux would work. Anybody want to bite? Sean, I'm looking at you. I'd bite, but only if I could get Linux running smoothly.

I won't have that Windows baloney on my system. What if it came down? See, here's why I'm wondering if this is doable, because I think people make bigger compromises today to run Linux on a MacBook often. You know, simple things like your Ethernet port doesn't work unless you boot the operating system with it connected, and that you have to figure out how to get your webcam to work every time you want it to start,

and that thermal controls have just recently been added. There's a lot of compromises. I know I always bring this up, but there's a lot of compromises people make for their hipster hardware. And Microsoft may have made a device here that may be easier to run Linux on than the MacBook Pro. We will have to see. It'll change things. I'm convinced.

I've got a five-year-old MacBook Pro here, and it still doesn't run Linux properly. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, exactly. The bar's not that high. Like, they could do it. This, to me, is the real test of Microsoft, by the way. One of the things that Satche set up on stage today is they don't want people to feel like they have to run Windows.

They want to want to run Windows. And we'll see if that's true with this Surface Pro, or Surface Book, sorry. If it requires Windows to make that magic work and it's not done at the hardware level, then I don't know how much I believe them in that statement. But if this is something that developers could buy and load any operating system they want on,

then I'm starting to believe them. I think this is a real good test because this is the first time they've ever made a laptop. Yeah, it's interesting. In the new Saatchi era. Yeah, as they say. And I do agree. I think the convergence comparisons are a little weak.

I've been seeing a lot of that online. It seems a little – it's not really convergence. It's just a fancy new connector, really. Yeah. Tell me it's convergence when you open up Windows File Explorer. Tell me how converged that is. Yes. It's not convergence.

All right. So any other thoughts, guys, on the Surface? I just wanted to touch on it because it's like the big topic today. Everybody's Microsoft blew it out of the park. Microsoft stock went up a whole bunch. It was a pretty good presentation. I've got to give the guy that. He at least had his own take on it.

So any last thoughts going once? Twice? All right. We'll leave that. If you guys want to read the specs, you can find the link in the show notes. I'll take a moment and mention DigitalOcean. I love me some DigitalOcean because they're a simple cloud hosting provider that's dedicated to making it really easy to get your own Linux rig up on a cloud server that's super fast. They've got tier one connections all connected to SSD drives.

And for like $5 a month, you won't believe how much you're going to get. So you'll get a start $5 a month. $5 right here. That's less than a5 a month, you won't believe how much you're going to get. So you'll get, start, $5 a month. $5, right here. That's less than a hamburger a month. You can get 512 megabytes of RAM, a 20 gigabyte SSD, one CPU, and a terabyte of transfer. But if you use our promo code D01plugged,

D01plugged, that's one word lowercase, then you're going to get a $10 credit. You can try the $5 rig out, two months for free. There's so much you can do with that. And their pricing plans are really straightforward. They step right up very simply. They have a whole bunch of distros you can try the $5 rig out. Two months for free. There's so much you can do with that. And their pricing plans are really straightforward. They step right up very simply. They have a whole bunch of distros you can choose from.

Maybe it's a good opportunity to play with CoreOS or FreeBSD. It hurts me a little bit to say it, Wes, but they do have FreeBSD. Alan's gotten to you. Well, you gotta respect how they do it, too. Like, they work with the projects to make sure that it's, like, totally legit, and you're getting updates from the projects, and they're coordinating. And then, like,

they roll out a ton of documentation that's really well written and edited and it's just like it's a full package deal and ironically you know it's their commitment to using things like full heart you know kvm virtualization that let them do this kind of thing oh yeah oh for sure for sure and they just launched a new data center up in canada too so if you want to store some uh data up in toronto they have 1, one of the many data centers. They have them in New York, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Singapore, London, Germany, and now one in Toronto. And you can deploy up there. They have one-click application

deployments too. It's very, very nice. So just remember, DO1 plugged. Also, if you want to just build something around the DigitalOcean infrastructure, they have a really nice API that makes it very easy to develop your own app, to do deployments. And because they have hourly pricing, really, if you want to just be a boss, like if you, like, say you're launching something

or maybe you've got a project and it's day one, for very, very, very little, just like cents on the dollar, you can run a DigitalOcean server hourly. Just scale up as you need it, using their API, shut her down when you don't. And it's serious on-demand infrastructure.

It's really cool. so just use our promo code D1plug to support the show there's lots of different ways from own cloud sync, bit torrent sync sync thing, x2go there's a lot of ways people in our community Minecraft, mumble our virtual lug is running off a DigitalOcean droplet right now

D1plug is how you can get started and a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the unplugged program okay I can get started. And a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Okay. I can't believe I'm about to say this because I feel like I'm a freaking Windows user all of a sudden. It's a little embarrassing. Not to be derogatory to those of you listening using Windows. I shouldn't have said that.

But I got back from my road trip and I sat – I mean I'm not even joking when I say this is – I love this machine so much that when I sat down on it for the first time I got back from the road trip, I got a little excited. Like, oh, I get to use this computer again. I've missed it. Does anybody – if you have a computer like that, you know what I'm talking about. It's your bae, your boo. Is that what the kids say? Okay.

You're very hip. Thank you. Thank you. I try. I try to be very, very hip. It's my thing. And the value of this is negative. So I sit down to use this computer, and something bad happened.

Something real bad happened. Producer Matt was clipping shows for Unfilter like crazy, and the Dropbox folder sitting on my home drive grew to unbelievable sizes and filled up my home drive. Ouch. XFS partition, I thought, no big deal. I went in, unchecked some selective sync stuff, deleted a few dozen ISOs that had been sitting in my download folder for a while.

Good to go. You know, just those little things you forget about from time to time. And I get back and I'm now 70% free on my home drive. It's ridiculous. Plenty of space. Yeah. However, however, the machine is running like dog crap. Like it's taking applications very noticeable load times.

I can hear the drive crunching like crazy. My flash video is like all hyper sped up. It's all weird all of a sudden. Like the machine is just hurting. And I've never really had this problem with Linux. But, you know, I noticed that the Linux Foundation has launched a Linux performance tuning course, LFS 4.26, for the low, low price of $2,500. Pocket change, really.

I thought, I bet, I bet here on Linux Unplugged we could come up with a few performance tips for absolutely free that are maybe not as good as the $2,500 ones, but maybe between you and I and the virtual lug, we can come up with a couple of tips to just kind of keep your Linux rig running at top performance over its lifetime. I'm not saying this is like registry cleaning kind of tools

and crap like that, but, you know, just ideas maybe to just sort of... Tricks people have picked up along the way. Yeah, yeah. And so I don't know if you guys in the Mumble Room, if you want to think of a couple, and if you're in the chat room and you have one and you can join the Mumble Room, feel free to jump in the Mumble Room and make your suggestion.

But I'm going to start with the elephant in the room, the one we're all going to probably talk about. That's the swap file. That seems like the easy one to go to. Now, all of us have plenty of RAM, I'm sure. Maybe, maybe not. But I guess if you have to swap, the number one thing that I'm feeling right now is I think my swap partition is on the same drive as my home drive. I think I made that mistake when I set it up. I'm going to just say right here and right now, if you've got an old SSD you want to burn through really bad or something like that, if you can, try to put your swap files on a separate disk. I actually – I know a lot of you probably listening just completely disable swap. And if anybody wants to make that argument

in the mumble room, you're welcome to. For me, I'm not comfortable yet. I don't know if it's just because I used to, I just, to me, it seems crazy. What if I need to debug a crash? I don't know. I don't know how this works without my swap file. So I just have to put, I just mentioned out there,

if you need a swap file, try to put it on a separate disk. I think that's one of the things that I am for some reason feeling the pain of right now. You can also mess with your swappiness, but I'll leave that to... So, like Heaven's in the chatroom says,

I set my swappiness value to 1, which, depending on your swappiness value, is how likely your system's going to go to use it. IamMakana in the chatroom says that he hasn't used a swap file for a few years now. I know that's really super common. Yeah, it is definitely. Yeah. Do you have you ran a system without a swap file?

Yeah, I think some of mine do. It's kind of hit or miss depending on when I set them up and how I was feeling that day. But what would be like the deciding factor for you? You know, if it's if it's something where I'm running a more defined set of software, I'm not worried about crashes. I kind of know what performance that I'm expecting. Then it's fine. Yeah.

And you have plenty of RAM. Yeah. And if I have plenty of RAM, then it's not a a big deal um you know some systems you can always you can always throw some on there yeah uh mumble room anybody in there going uh swap free forever no no on some machines i'm already swapped for a year now why is that wimpy uh if it's um not a laptop and i don't need it for suspending and hibernating. Okay. Then I just use ZRAM instead for swap.

Maybe I should kill my swap file. Popey, you sounded pretty adamant that you always have a swap file. Yeah, I never don't have a swap file. Never not. Now, is that for sleep reasons? Are you always on laptops, or is there another reason? Because disk space is cheap, and there's no reason not to have one. That's kind of been my approach.

But now I'm wondering if maybe I'm paying for it by having it on the same drive as my home folder. Well, only if it's using it. It's only a problem if it's swapping. That's why it's not a problem. If you're not using it, why do you care? Gamal in the chat room says, what is swap? So think of swap as like a space on your disk that's been allocated for the operating system to store stuff that doesn't necessarily need to be in RAM. So that way the stuff that needs to be in RAM has space.

Extra slow, really horrible RAM. Yeah. When your system is going to swap, you're usually in a bad state. So I might consider just because, you know, I could turn it off. I could swap off and just see how it goes. Maybe you have some homework for next week. Yeah, I'm actually going to write that down. Yeah, go ahead. You said

that you were running on XFS. Yes. Is that right? Yeah. And you've just deleted and purged a load of stuff. Have you checked the defragmentation status of the volume? No, I haven't really. I actually just did it this morning,

so I could definitely do it. Check the defrag level, like on a good old Windows box. Yeah, and XFS has got online defragmenting, so the fragmentation factor that it reports is between 0 and 100%, and the closer to 0, the better. So if your fragmentation factor that it reports is between 0 and 100%,

and the closer to 0, the better. So if your fragmentation factor is up in the 70s, 80s, then time to defrag the volume, and the utilities exist to do that. So you've got XFS underscore DB, which is for debugging, but that's the tool that you can use to expose the fragmentation factor. And then there's XFS FSR, which is the file system reorganizer, and that can actually do the defragmenting for you. I see. And I found that ArchWiki actually has a really nice write-up on it.

Yep. Naturally. And there's also XFS BMAP, and you can use that to defragment individual files. So if you've got a large ISO, for example, that has been downloaded whilst there was fragmentation. Or something. I mean, I used to use it because I had large data files from crash recorders from aircraft. And I'd get loads and loads of those. And you'd find that individually those were then fragmented. And I could defragment those and speed up the analysis time.

Oh, interesting. Made that much of a difference, huh? Wow. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Significant. It can take your system from being sloppy and slow to being like you've just installed it. Now, Rotten, you wanted to make a special mention of Badabo.

Badabo? Yeah. I don't know how to say it either, but I would say like Baobab or something. Yeah. I don't know. Now, what does this do? It's a disk usage analyzer. Oh, yes, of course. Yes.

Yes, that's a good one. Also, Wes wanted to give a plug for NCDU. Yes, that's just one of those tools in my toolkit that I turn to pretty much all the time. Nice and fast, right there in the terminal. Curses interface. Love Curses interfaces. Yeah, that's also a good one. So I guess one of the things that – so I'm taking notes.

I'm going to do the defrag, obviously. I'm going to turn swap off. What are you guys' thoughts on, Wes, the tool that you mentioned to store your browser profile in RAM? Tell me about that. Oh, yeah. Profile Sync Daemon. There's also anything Sync Daemon. I'm not using them currently, but I've used them in the past, and it just kind of transparently handles moving all your browser

profiles kind of stuff that can be resource-intensive to grab from the disk, or to frequently update on the disk, and it keeps them in RAM. So this is a daemon that designs, so I'm reading from the wiki here, designed to manage user-specified directories, referred to as sync targets from here on out in TempFS, and

periodically sync them back to the physical disk. This is accomplished via a SIM linking step and an innovative use of rsync to maintain a synchronization between TempFS copies and the media-bound backups. Additionally, and there's a typo, with features such as crash recovery. So, oh, ASD features, okay. So if I'm understanding, Wes, this is a system sync daemon that syncs between my disk and a RAM disk, and then the applications end up using symlinks, which point to files in a RAM disk. Exactly.

And then it manages copies on the disk periodically so that if your system goes down, you won't lose everything. That's pretty cool. That is, that would, I mean, a big part of what I do is I'm sitting here doing show prep or I'm, or I'm showing a website on air. It'd be really nice to have my web browser performing really well. And one of the things that seems to have taken the biggest hit is my web browser. Yeah. Right. And so, you know, especially if that's, that's the kind of workflow you, have you ever used it? Yeah. I've used it in the past. I was using Firefox exclusively. It was, it worked pretty well, though.

I was happy with it. So there's two of them. Anything Sync Daemon. I'll have a link to that in the show notes. And then what was the other one? Profile Sync Daemon, which is made just – I think anything is an extension or outgrowth of Profile Sync Daemon. Okay. That one's just for browser profiles.

Ah. That might be a little safer. Yes. But this can be useful, too, if you have other applications that you would like, you know, certain things to be in RAM. Yes. But this can be useful, too, if you have other applications that you would like, you know, certain things to be in RAM. I've played with not using this, but, you know, played with having all your root system in RAM. People do that.

This is kind of fun. This might turn into an ongoing series of me trying to run more and more crap out of RAM. All right. So any other tips before I ask? I'm going to ask the doozy of the question. Anybody else in the Mumble room have any other performance tips they do on their rig to keep things running fast? Anybody still do pre-linking, anything like that? Well, Chris, you said that you were running your home directory on SSD.

And what I'm concerned with is if you're running swap on there, wouldn't that be actually doing way more writes to the system than it should? Yeah, I can't remember. Even if you're using it. Yeah, I can't remember how often. I mean, I only now have the sense that maybe I'm swapping. In the general, in the past, I don't really ever have the sense I'm actually using the swap file. So that is a good question. I don't know how frequently it's being updated. Maybe another good reason is swap off.

I only have SSDs in the machine. And then I have a RAID 0 of drives I use for editing or Steam. I mean, to be clear, you should also know that most people, if you have a significant amount of RAM, you won't really touch swap unless you're doing high computations and stuff or a bunch of virtual machines. It's not a ton of RAM. I think it's like 16 gigs. It's not like a ton, which is kind of crazy. That's a ton in consumer level, really. Is it though, now?

Yeah, like a ton. The average consumer starting thing is like 2 to 4. Still. No, you can buy an XPS 13 with 4 gigs. No! They haven't gotten better about that yet? You can get 6 and 8 and stuff

very commonly for about $350 to $450. I couldn't even imagine less than 8. That's a decent price. How are you going to run multiple VMs with less than 8? How are you going to do that? Come on, get out of here. You optimize. Actually, I think...

I actually could see it working, especially with a lean Linux desktop. It's definitely doable. And containers will help you there. I could could see it working, especially with a lean Linux desktop. I mean, it's definitely doable. And containers will help you there. Yeah. I could honestly see getting by with less RAM, especially if you're using it on the server side. I'm half joking, but at the same time, I really am kind of disappointed that they're not selling it with more RAM these days. Because I really would like to.

I mean, I would like to have like 32. Yeah, exactly. When you go to 500 or more, you get into like the, like, 32. Yeah, exactly. When you go to 500 or more, you get into, like, the 8 gig RAMs. Yeah, okay. I guess for me, I feel like, boy, if I could afford it, I'd be up to 32 on most of my machines. Now, okay, anybody have a thought? Because this is a suggestion that's come into the show a few times. I've never actually – I almost pulled the trigger on it once, but I never have actually switched out my IO scheduler. Now, for those of you that don't know,

you can get different schedulers in the Linux kernel, it just depends on which one it's built with, that support different types of disk input and output operations, you could say. So there's the CFQ scheduler, the completely fair queuing scheduler, there's the NNOP scheduler and deadline, and then there's the one that probably is the one that people know what I'm talking about, the BFQ scheduler, the budget fair scheduler. And it's available in some Linux branches right now. And a lot of people

say the BFQ scheduler is significantly faster if you have SSD drives. I don't actually know if this is really worth the switch. Okay, heavens, Heavens, you can post the correction in the chat room, but this is my rough, I'm giving you a layman's understanding of how the BFQ scheduler

affects disk I.O. operations. So essentially, there is requests that come into the kernel, and the kernel has to handle a lot of things, you know, get something off a disk, feed something to somebody else, talk to the network, and the BFQ scheduler can give, say, preference, if you have an SSD drive, to the disk I. And the BFQ scheduler can give, say, preference if you have an SSD drive to the disk IO scheduler versus the network controller, things like that, right? So

BFQ is perhaps maybe another way to put it is more biased towards the disk scheduler, in a sense. And so if I'm getting it, if I'm understanding correctly, you say you have BFQ as your overall queue scheduler, then your disk performance can be much higher. Instead of waiting to go to the disk, it more often goes to the disk. Now, this is just based on what I've read, reading on people that have tried it and said their performance is way better. Right, and people are typically looking for responsiveness on the desktop. Yeah, and so, for example, a great example is, you know, if you have a bunch of GDK dependencies in the background that are loading,

instead of just sitting around there waiting for those GDK dependencies to finish, BFQ might go check in with the disk scheduler and see what it needs and take care of that for a minute and have the data ready. Something like that is really layman's understanding, but that seems to be the end result, which you see as a user, is things open up much faster. You can run multiple applications. You can launch multiple applications at the same time in the launch

while the disk is already being heavily accessed. It seems to be the general takeaway from BFQ. Anybody in the Mumble room ever played with anything like this? Rotten? Yeah, I do. Maybe, yeah? I do on not-so-powerful equipment. I don't bother on more modern systems. So you do notice a difference?

So, for example, on the Raspberry Pi, I definitely notice a difference by changing the combination of file systems and I.O. schedulers. notice a difference by changing the combination of file systems and ios schedulers and on older much much older hardware sort of pentium 4m type devices um even retrofitted with ssds you can see a measurable improvement in um disk performance by changing in what ways does that performance sort of show itself um well the most obvious one is that you can see that the boot speed is dramatically decreased that's a good time so that's probably launching of simultaneous files and things like that just as generally faster but where you really notice it is if you're extracting a large archive in one process and browsing the web in the other you don't get that stop start pausing you know and and stuttering as you you know launching tabs and switching between tabs it

all happens far more fluidly i like that usually i believe it accosts to the decompression throughput but but that's fine if you use your desktop. Yeah, exactly. Right, right, right, right, right. And it's interesting because in a server workload, that might not be what you want. No, probably not. But on a desktop workload, that is what you want. And like I say, I only do this on the older hardware where there's clearly measurable benefit. On the newer hardware, the differences are so small, it's not worth the time to tweak it. Interesting.

That was sort of my takeaway. It seemed like from the reviews I was reading, it was in some cases. So a couple of them that seemed pretty obvious were simultaneous application launching. Like everything just remained very fluid. They all didn't, nothing really stuttered. It was all very smooth. But outside of that, I didn't see huge differences, and it seemed like a lot of work for a minor return. So that's

why I was kind of putting it out there, wondering if people have actually experimented with it, because every now and then when I... I guess what brought it up again is I remember watching that demo, and then today, using this machine, thinking, oh, these applications are launching so slow. And I launched Telegram, which is not a huge app and like everything seizes on the machine that was loading and stops loading for a second, like even the terminal window. And I thought, this is performing horrible.

And I started thinking, I remember the BFQ scheduler was much better about prioritizing these kinds of things on the desktop. So I did a little reading into it, read a few reviews, and it's, I don't know. It's something to try anyway. It seems possible and worth trying, but I'm a little skeptical since nobody's really building it in.

I would imagine by now if it really made that much of a difference, some distro would be. I think one does. I think one distro out there based on Arch does ship with it built in. But, yeah. Sabion also does the BFQ or BFS. That was the one I was thinking of, yeah. Sabian.

And have you noticed any difference when you play with it, or have you played with it? I have played with it. I haven't really noticed, well, from my personal attempts, I haven't really noticed much of a huge increase, because you really notice much of a difference when I'm compiling and doing a whole bunch of stuff, and it's really stressing my rig.

Sabian is built from Gentoo, right? Not Arch, if I recall. Yes, Gentoo. And I think one of the reasons I was drawn to try it from a while ago was because it uses BFQ, and I don't remember really noticing any difference now that I think about it. But out of the box, they're trying to make it as performant as possible, and it's an interesting take on it.

So I don't know. We'll see where it goes. There are some branches of the Linux kernel out there that have it already, too. If you have any suggestions, linuxactionshow.reddit.com and look for Lucky Episode 113 of Linux Unplugged and leave a comment in there and I'll try it if it's reasonable and quick.

I don't want to rebuild my kernel necessarily. Well, that's what's nice about the I.O. scheduler. You can change that on the fly. Yeah, that was actually one of the neat things about one of the demos I was watching is he would literally switch them and you could watch it. You could watch the difference. I think he was using Fedora.

And that was pretty remarkable. So, alright. You know, another way you could maybe make your system run a little better is probably just learn more about it. Go over to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Linux Academy is the sponsor of the Linux Unplugged program. And man, do they have some really cool stuff coming up. So on October

15th, they have a really big live show they're going to do. And they've been working on this thing. I have the notes here, but I can't tell you yet because it's a big secret. But they've been working on it for a year. And there's a lot of updates coming. Not only that, but they just rolled out a new HTML5 player with a new CDN backend. So all of that great content

works even better now. And, you know, one of the things about Linux Academy that really stands out is they allow you to choose from seven-plus distributions. The courseware, the virtual machines, they match that. The other thing, though, is instructor help is available with that stuff. The self-paced courses can still have actual instructor help. That's awesome. They have new lab features that are launching later this month.

A new practice exam phase one system will be launching this week. And a new community feature we're going to hear more about very soon. There's a lot of really good stuff coming out. Also, they have the new Linux Foundation Certified System Administrators course and the Linux Foundation Certified Engineer course.

Have to definitely check that out. And they're also proud to announce they're an OpenStack corporate partner now. So they're officially an OpenStack training partner. You can check that out. And they're also proud to announce they're an OpenStack corporate partner now. So they're officially an OpenStack training partner. You can check that out too at Linux Academy. Go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged and learn about the whole stack around Linux. Everything from small nuggets, just deep dive into a single topic like using TAR to backup your system or rsync to the really big stuff. That's scenario-based training where you get real hands-on.

Go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged to get our discount and you can take the tour. It's a really great service and it's built by people that are crazy passionate about Linux. I love that about them. And they're working so hard. linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Oh! And they just rolled out a new dashboard. Hey, fancy that. Yeah. Got a

whole new look. Check that out as well if you're already a member. linuxacademy.com slash unplugged and a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. You guys are awesome. So I don't really know how to cover this next story. In fact, it's so, I'm dreading it so much that Wes and I were trying to figure out how to handle this on the show because it's really not our area of expertise and there is very valid points on all sides. But some important things happened this week, and I just want to touch on them.

And I want to keep the conversation as light as possible, but I also don't want to ignore it. I think that would be, in its own way, sort of disrespectful. So this week, Matthew Garrett and another kernel contributor, her name is Sarah Sharp. Yes, thank you. Both decided to step away from the Linux kernel community, in a sense. And both cite essentially the tone, the language, and the overall interacting with people on the Linux kernel mailing list. Mostly you could sum up as it's accused of being a toxic environment. And this keeps coming up as a theme over and over again.

And it may give us some insight into some of the changes that happened earlier this year, perhaps, when it comes to the code of conduct that was submitted to the Linux kernel. And I'm trying to wrap my head around why we keep running into this. And I simply wonder, now this might sound maybe too simplistic, but I definitely noticed just on this road trip that I just went on. And I think I was telling you about this at lunch too. Like there is a difference in culture from Washington to Grand Forks. Like everywhere I went, each location, people talked differently. Different expectations. They behaved differently. Like I was telling you about the guy at the whiskey store who gave us the you know the the squinty eye then

you go to another town and it's like they're pouring you free drinks and they're embracing you you get like everywhere has its own culture and its own way of doing things and you take that and you blow it up on a global scale and then we're all working together but then the other thing that seems to be completely counter to an organic open environment is you have people that are coming at it from the corporate standpoint where this is their job and they're here to do a job. And then you have people that are doing it because it's their life's work and their life's passion and they would be doing it whether they're getting paid or not. And you have two completely different types of work mindsets coming together to work on something. And the two different groups completely behave differently. Not to mention a lot of these people may have never met each other face to face.

Right, right. And then you have people that, you know, handle different types of language completely differently trying to work together. And I just look at this and think, how is it possible to have any project at this scale and not have this happen? I'm not trying to justify the actions, but I'm wondering, is it, are we, are we, are we capable at this stage of our ability to communicate online to really solve this problem? Is, is online communications just still too primitive to truly solve this problem? Could it be if Linus, is it possible if, if Linus just spoke a little more nicely and treated new people with really, you know, with a really more gentle touch?

Would that really change things? What do you think, Wes? Is it possible? You know, I'm not sure. And it's tough to try to draw the line between, you know, making improvements versus different styles. You know, I think Linus has touched on that on the mailing list before. You know, different people have different expectations and take things different ways, which is entirely valid.

But that said, it does, you know, it gives me pause that, you know, both of these people are clearly very talented technically, you know, and they've contributed a lot to the kernel. And so it is, yeah, it's at least interesting that they choose to leave. Obviously, we're lucky that we still get to enjoy what they do in other open source projects. But as a Linux user, I'd like to have an environment where people are excited to join and are not turned away. Right. Yeah, that is definitely,

you don't want to have a reputation for being hard to join. iMacon did bring up, in the chat room, did bring up a good point, though. There is the issue of, you know, do we do we want you know is this something where you need to step away and and this is of course a personal choice but or or should there should there be a stand-up of people who want to change and represent that change within the kernel community i don't know if people just leave then there's not representation right does that just leave the people you know who are interacting in the style that a subset of people don't enjoy?

Yeah. This is a challenging one because it's, unfortunately, a topic that it's really, it's a bad image to have. It's a really bad image to have. Right. And it's really at the core of Linux. Anybody in the Mumble room have a thought on if this problem is something we're anywhere close to solving? Because I feel like we're so far out from

having an answer here. I think one of the first questions you asked was you alluded to the fact that this keeps happening and that things aren't changing. And there's a good reason for that. The same people work in that team. If if if you don't change anything then nothing is going to change it is as simple as that if the and if the people who are at the top and who control the style of communication that happens in that team and have other people looking up to them and take guidance on how to act if those those people don't change, then nothing will change, and this will carry on.

And you'll be left with only those people who have a very strong stomach and a very thick skin and who can cope with the kind of beatings that Linus gives out, and you won't be able to have the other talent from the people who don't have a thick skin and and aren't willing to put up with that crap and so you're you're you're limiting the contributions that you can possibly get not because of someone's technical ability but because of their willingness to put up with the crap that they have to in that group. I just – so your argument, which is a good one, sort of assumes the foregone conclusion that something must change, that the way it's being done now is wrong.

And I don't necessarily disagree but I guess the thing I don't like about that is that begins to walk a path that leads to Linus. like about that is that begins to walk a path that leads to Linus. And I don't really want there to be this sort of Linus must go sentiment building because that seems like that could be destructive. But he's not a god. He's he's a guy who is an unpleasant person. He said that himself. Yeah, he said that in his conference. He said, I'm not a nice person to deal with. You know, that's a kind of it's one of those phrases that people use that people say, oh, well, I take it like it is and take me for what I am. No, I know. That's the way I am and I say what I like and, you know, that's it. Well, OK.

That's fair enough. But stay the fuck away from me because you're not a pleasant person to be around i do follow that i don't see why you have to be around these people and unfortunately some of these people have to because it's their job i i just i the uh the only of course the counter argument would be the very success of linux itself right and so i the when when the line of logic is that linus is the problem then then I say, well, then what was everything we've accomplished so far? He has been not necessarily the person who developed it, but you do have to wonder if we would really have the world's best kernel right now if he wasn't extremely critical. And I'm not trying to justify it.

I'm just throwing that as if that's a possibility. It's sort of like Apple is a nicer, softer company without Steve Jobs, but they have also lost something without him. Correlation is not causation. You can't just say that because Linus wears glasses, everyone who wears glasses must be a really good kernel hacker. You can't necessarily say that Linus has a particular style of – No, no, I've only started hacking on the kernel since I started wearing glasses. I haven't had a style kernel since I started wearing glasses. Just because that's what he's like and Linux has been successful doesn't mean it is successful because that's what he's like.

Right. I agree. That isn't a direct correlation. No, I agree with you. I agree with you. I just think it still is a dangerous line of thinking, but maybe it is time. Okay, let's put it to you. If you're working in an office and someone was talking to you the way that Linus talked to Sarah, would you just shrug that off? If it happened repeatedly and your main line of work was to interact with that person, would you let that stand?

I'd put it to you that most people would take that person to one side and say, hey i think you're being unreasonable i think you're you're acting like a dick i think you're the way you're acting in front of our peers because this is public it's not like these two people are sat in a room right and they have a tete-a-tete in the room this is like wider than people sitting in a meeting room this is public on a mailing list everyone is seeing him tearing strips off people that's unreasonable and in a business place he would be reprimanded why are the linux foundation not doing something about this well i you know i've read the quotes i'm not i can't really think of one that is particularly offensive um people have gone through no i mean people have gone through and collected the quotes that they believe are in question here. Right, but you're not on the receiving end of them.

No, I'm just saying none of them are all that particularly – so the worst one I could find – and now this is just through my reading this morning. But the worst quote I found was something that implied sucking Microsoft off that was thrown at Matthew Garrett. It wasn't thrown at Sarah. It was thrown at Matthew Garrett. That seems to be the worst I could find on on the colonel mailing list and it's okay that's crude but uh you know i don't know i i the the sometimes from the outside the story looks a lot worse to be honest with you poppy to answer your question i i have worked environments where people yell and scream like that and it's not wonderful it's not great um but uh sometimes it just is how those people work unfortunately and i don't like it but uh it's sort

of uh it's sort of posted everywhere when you walk in the door what happens i mean everybody it's not like it's a secret like you said all that stuff is in public so right but at a place like that you can you know you can act and effect change. Whether you feel it's unreasonable or not, the person who's the recipient of that can effect some kind of change by approaching management or approaching the other person's management or the HR department or whatever the process is in that company. There are processes is the point. Yeah. It's very difficult when there is one Linux. I would be surprised if there isn't change. I mean, they already have submitted the code of conduct, then the new updated one that Craig submitted. Which doesn't actually identify anything that you're not supposed to do in any way. But the problem is there's only one person at the top of this tree, and that's Linux.

You can't say, oh, well, screw this. I'll go to that other Linux down the road like you would quit a job and go to a different job. If your job is to contribute to Linux, chances are if it's high enough up the food chain, you're going to interact with the LKML at some point. So it's difficult because there is only one. There can only be one. So, Heavens, you wanted to jump in about Linus being blunt and harsh. What are your thoughts? Well, he's been this way for quite a long while,

and this problem hasn't popped up until recently, mainly with her, just because everyone else can deal with it and she can't. Maybe she should just step down so she's not dealing directly with it. But doesn't that assume that other people haven't burnt out and left and just didn't say anything? Well, possibly. Or engaged with other communities. What was that, Wimpy? Or didn't get started in the first place.

Maybe their BSD? Go ahead, Heavens. Ideally, of course, it would be a slightly nicer place to be, but the Linux kernel, yes, I do believe he should be very blunt and straightforward to be as... Really, that's your solution? That if you don't like it, you should find another project? Clearly technical as possible.

Well, the problem that she was talking about in her blog post was not about the fact that any technical mistakes that she made was insulting to her. She said that she wanted – that if she made a technical mistake, that she wanted them to call her out on it and that she didn't have a problem with technical insults. It was the personal insults that they were throwing at her.

I don't know what they were. I couldn't find any myself, but I didn't look that hard. But the point is that if there are personal insults, then what is it necessary to actually insult the person who's providing the code if they're genuinely trying to provide good code, rather than saying, here's where you screwed up. This is garbage code. Here's how to fix it, or here's a new suggestion or something. And when that happens, they usually say, okay, yeah, you're right, I'll take care of it. But if it goes to a personal level, why would you stay? He's way too busy as a person.

One, he's also wanting to retire. No, no, no, you're associating this to Linus. It's not necessary. Yeah, I guess a lot of the other maintainers are where some of this may be. She was talking about the community as a whole. She did not specify Linus or anyone at all. Right. Right. And I think I think that kind of when it obviously when it crosses line into personal, that's where it gets unfortunate. And it should that there's no excuse for that, really.

That's just being mean. It's just that is straight up just being mean. North Ranger, I want to give you a chance to jump in. Yeah, I mean, Rotten Corpse makes a great point about when you cross that line into a personal insult. And I'm kind of torn because I want to see people like Sarah, people like Matthew, if they are being personally insulted, to call out those bulliers. to call out those bulliers, but on the flip side, I don't know that they can do that because of potential backlash

they might have for being tattletales or whatever you might want to call it. It just, I guess, going back to the core point, it frustrates me because here we are in episode 113, and I feel like every two months we have a story where maybe it's not that frequent, but it feels

like we've done plenty of these stories about people getting hurt upset and uh it seems like this just keeps keeps happening um on in the blog post sarah did say that things are changing and things are making improvements she just doesn't want to deal with it having to be involved with it anymore regardless of that there is being there are changes being made she just doesn't want to be there in the in the midst of them changing i think it's i think it's fair too to say that uh it's very unfortunate if this is something that singles out and happens to women uh but we have seen it happen we've seen it happen to blonde white men i mean supposedly lenart pottering had his life threatened over system d um So this has been an issue where it just goes too far over and over and over again. We're a passionate community.

Yeah, I don't know quite how to make reason out of it. It does seem to be a problem that doesn't just be unique to Linux kernel mailing list either, although I think you could make an argument that that's an area where perhaps conduct needs to be above bar as much as possible because it's under so much scrutiny and it represents a core part of the platform. It's business critical now. Yeah. And as I said, there's only one. The business critical thing actually adds more importance to making sure everything is right. I think the idea that the way that they handle the technical aspects of it

is perfectly fine, even if they're yelling at each other. Because if someone does something that is worthy of being yelled at, they should be yelled at, because that's the only thing that's effective. Even though they're people being paid for it and it's their job, they aren't being paid by the Linux Foundation for most of these people. It's worth making the distinction, too, that what some people consider being yelled at, other people do not consider yelling,

too, because there are cultural differences and there's very large cultural differences in some cases. The main thing is, though, these people are saying they're being paid to work on it so they don't have a choice, but the people who are yelling at them aren't paying them.

So how can they convey the message of the severity of their mistake when they have no actual control except for this is not coming in? That's all they can do. So if they maybe in certain cases be severe or not, it depends on if the technical aspect of it merits it or not. So in my opinion, if the technical thing happens and you get yelled at because the code is terrible, well, then the code is terrible. Whatever. Fix it. So here's the thing. As long as it doesn't go personal. As Noah would say, here's the thing.

As Noah would say, here's the thing. And this is sort of my big takeaway is if you have something that's open and you want contributions and you want quality contributions, it's probably worth the project's time and effort to make contributions feel or make contributors feel as welcome and invited as possible because that only is going to make your project better. And so I think it is in the best interest of open source projects health to have a good community. And part of that is how you interact with that community. So now the Linux kernel isn't really suffering from this particular problem, they can afford to be rather aggressive. But there are a lot of projects out there, some many of which we have talked about today, that could use contributions. And for them, it's in their best interest to work with the community. Now, what I would hate to see is a bunch of middle management PMO types come in and try to tell all these projects how to work with their community. But that is a topic for a future show. If anybody has any closing thoughts, I'll hear it.

But go ahead, Ron. I'll give you the closing word. Yeah, I just wanted to play devil's advocate here in the sense of like way you just said about how they need to be more opening to people. But there are certain cases where there's some people that you don't want to submit code to because it takes more time to weed through their code

to see if it's actually useful or not. There have been people who have been banned from their mailing list because they were submitting code that was complete garbage just so that they could get their own... For garbage just so that they could get their own for a couple reasons they could get their name in the kernel or certain things like that and in certain cases they were

actively breaking user land and everything which is like a cardinal sin of kernel so they were basically doing, they have to set an environment that is a weird hybrid of community and hostility. So it's a situation where I don't think anyone could really iron it out.

It's going to be hard to find the balance. That's what I was saying. It's going to be an ongoing problem, too. But I do hope it tends towards making people feel more welcome and getting more contributors, because that's going to make the projects better and get new ideas in there, too. So why don't we kind of end it on a positive note right there.

Episode Lucky 113 in the bag. If you have any comments or thoughts on anything we talked about today, linuxactionshow.reddit.com Find Lucky 113 or go over to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash contact and choose Linux unplugged from the

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there is additional exclusives just for the patrons and once you become a patron you get access to everything we ever posted there that's exclusive to them Wes thank you sir for joining

us always a pleasure you ever have anything you want to plug you can find me at atwespain on Twitter. I love it. I'll be working on some tutorials for posting in the subreddit soon here. Nice tease. Nice tease. All right, everybody. Well, thank you

for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. Join us live over at jblive.tv for episode 114 next Tuesday. Go to jupyterbroadcasting.com slash calendar for the robots to convert that for you automatically. And we'll see you back here next week. If I'm being honest, my strong desire was actually to just reload my machine with the latest Androgross ISO that I already had written to a USB thumb drive. I'd be like, new install.

I'm like, no, no. I can recover it. I can recover it. I can rebuild it. I can make it stronger and better than before. I've seen some people on the Arch forums who just have it set up every night. They just reinstall. Really? Yeah, well, you know, you just pull them, especially if you already have, like, maybe you cache the packages

locally. You know, you have some chef or Ansible and just build it all up again. It's ready to go in the morning. Antigros is good. I'm telling you. I'm loving the latest Antigros build. Loving their installer. Option for long-term kernel support is brilliant when you're doing a desktop Arch machine and one checkbox Steam installation.

It's also my default for installing Arch now. I don't use their installer, but it's such a nice live CD to boot into. And then you just install Arch in a shroof on your drive. Every now and then I swear I get a bad ISO or something, and the installer is just totally wonky. Then I just jump either between the daily build or the latest stable release. And whichever one fails me, I just switch. Switch, and one of them is going to work. Yeah.

And I have to say, I just recently reloaded a machine that we had set aside for Windows 10 testing that I was like, no more. Gone with you. And I just was like, I'm going to do Anagross again. And I got their latest build. And the fact is, is this machine, now that I think about it, I'm giving it to somebody that's going to be using it that won't be doing updates very often. And having that LTS kernel, I feel a lot better about giving them an Arch system all of a sudden, even though for me, I don't do it. Right, right.

But for someone in a little different use case. Yeah, that's a little more peace of mind installing. And of course, anybody installing Arch could do that. But for some reason, when I was setting up this machine for them, it didn't cross my mind. I tell you, if I had done the Arch installation myself, I probably would have just neglected to think of that. Yep.

So I was pretty appreciative of that. Just had the option as the default. It really makes Arch super approachable. Yeah. You don't have to have, you know, carefully designed your system for a day beforehand. You can just install it and away you go. Yeah, and the default GNOME desktop

is the one I generally go with. It's pretty nice. I change it up pretty quickly, but it's easy enough to do that. Yeah. So, yes. go with is pretty nice. I change it up pretty quickly, but it's easy enough to do that. Yeah. Yes. In fact, I think probably the only time I'll ever install Arch Vanilla,

standard old Arch, is on a server. Right. If I'm, for some reason, deciding that server should be running Arch. But I don't know how much I'm going to do that. I'm on the fence on that still. I do it for a few machines that i use daily but anything beyond that i wouldn't depends on how willing you are and how much time you have and so i think it

also depends on what's the server doing right exactly so is the server is the server hosting web pages over nginx and apache or apache and uh and it has a, or is it a Plex machine with Dropbox and BitTorrent Sync? Yes, exactly. And I'm more inclined to say Ubuntu is a good solution, or CentOS is a good solution for the first one. Yes. And Arch is a better solution for the Plex media server type thing, because then you have the AUR,

and you could just right off the top of my head, I mean, the advantage there is in the AUR, you've got the Plex and the Plex Pass version. You can also get like the Git versions or whatever, like the beta builds and stuff. Yeah, you can track the nightlies or whatever you need. Yeah. And so it's a very minimal update. And if you, so we have two servers that run Arch that host Plex, one here at the studio and one at my house. Nice.

And both of them are just really minimal installs with Plex and a couple other things. Yep. And then it just keeps the updates fairly small. And so I think now we're at like two to three months in between updates. But it really hasn't been an issue yet. Yes. You know, that's what I've been doing for the one that runs MB at my house. And there are ways to, you know, you can update frequently if you need to,

or you can take snapshots if, you know, SUSE style, if you're worried about, you know, if you need it to be a little more production-y. And, you know, the evergreen releases from OpenSUSE are a good LTS, but I think maybe for me the Leap stuff might be even better. Hey, so what do you think about this? User in the chatroom says, how do you manage your.files in Anagro? So I'm looking for the best way to do it. And then when he says manage, I'm thinking maybe keeping them consistent across his machines. Is that what you think he's talking about when he says manage?

Yeah, you know, it could be consistent, it could be versioned, it could be backed up. So I used to try to do this over Dropbox, and that burned me so bad that I never bothered again. And actually, the way it kind of burned me was one machine got updated to a new version of KDE

and then the other machine stuff synced over and it was just a mess. And I was like, of course that was going to happen to me. I was just kind of trying it and that didn't go well. Have you ever used anything Wes to get or anything like that to keep your.files? Yeah, you know, and it depends, again, like so many things, on how involved you want to be, how often you need to touch it, how, you know,

magically behind the scenes it works. But yes, I have mine. I use GNU Sto to create symlinks for my configuration files in both Etsy and my.files. GNU Sto, huh? Hold on now. Hold on now, Zoo. Hold on. That sounds app pick material. I've got to take a look. Tell me about GNU Sto.

That just got me excited. It's a symlink manager. G-N-U-O. Oh, okay. S-T-O-W. Oh, okay. And I'm slightly, all of a sudden, I'm slightly less excited. Yeah, okay, yeah. I learned to use it for a particular project several years ago. That's why it's in my toolkit. Okay.

But it lets you set up, it lets you easily set up sort of like you would see inside of like an RPM package where you have a tree that gets mirrored out to the real file system. And so it makes it really easy to keep your configuration files. Okay. You know, so usually when I set things up or if I'm converting a server, you can just move a file to your storage location. And then Sto will automatically, if you set it up, create a symlink. So you can edit your files just like they actually lived in Etsy.

Yeah. But they can all be under one folder. Yeah. And then that way, whenever you have changes, you can make a new branch on Git. And then so you're backing up that one folder? Yes, exactly. So that's just a Git repo with all my configurations. And you're syncing that across your machines?

Yeah. Well, and then you can have different branches if you have different configuration files that need to be in a different syntax. That's sounding to get a little complicated, though. Yeah, and so it depends. Most of my machines are similar enough that I can just sync them. I can just pull down the repo. You could have an easy little script that would keep it in sync if you'd like.

Ooh. It really depends on how, you know, how different your configurations need to be per machine. So user links in the chat room, an actual specific how-to on how to use Sto to kind of do exactly what we're talking about, how to manage your.files. So I will throw a link to that in the show notes.

So here it is, using GNU Sto to manage your dot files. This might be exactly what you need. And this will work well if your idea of a file manager is the terminal. So it's not for everyone, but I've had some good use cases. I like that. It seems to me like kind of an intermediate step. If you're not ready to go full Ansible or Chef, this seems like an immediate. You know what's funny about that statement, though, is the command line.

I laugh at the command line being my file manager until I really need to get something done or I don't have any damn time to fool around. And then all of a sudden, you're damn right, the command line is my file manager. That's all I'll use. Move is move, and it'll always work. And LS responds immediately. I don't have to wait for Nautilus to enumerate icons or whatever. Yes, there's no preview files. No, I just want the file list.

I want to know who owns this file right now. Yes, I love it.